El Salvador and Central America have their first ever rock star barista in Alejandro Mendez. Could this represent an about turn in fortunes for coffee producing nations, so used to providing the best crop to an overseas market, usually, Europe, Japan and North America?
Alejandro Mendez, 2011 World Barista Champion
Elected by an international panel of judges over the four day spectacle of the 2011 World Barista Championships that took place during the Feria del Café in June in Bogota, Colombia, Mendez perhaps embodies the hopes of the long suffering coffee producer and consuming public in these countries.
Now, as they have one of their own in the upper echelons of barista lore, the more discerning coffee quaffing community can perhaps be more demanding of what they are served within their own countries.
It is this demand for only the best quality coffee that is ably combating the well-publicized climatic disasters, including incessant and heavy rains, which have been striking coffee producing areas not only worldwide but quite significantly in Colombia. The prolonged battering of the country by El Nino left the crop sodden and victim to plagues of insects leaving the industry in a damaging slump.
Fortuitously, times appear to be changing and with them the fortunes of the producer as Juan Pablo Echeverri of the Hacienda Venecia in the Colombian department of Caldas will testify:
“There is a running joke between coffee producers that we are not cultivadores but sufricultores...” making a play on words and clear reference to the seesaw nature of coffee cultivation “... nine years ago in 2002 coffee prices fell to almost US$0.50 per pound, last year they were at US$1.50 and today with exchange rates the price sits very close to US$3.00.”
Increasing Demand for Luxury Coffee Brands
So what has been keeping these prices so volatile and why are things looking up for the war weary coffee plantations of Colombia? According to Luis Fernando Samper of the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation, an umbrella group that represents all Colombian coffee growers “... there has been a relative shortage between supply and demand and now the industry is becoming more sustainable due to the high cost of quality coffee production balanced out with a worldwide trend and increasing demand for luxury brand coffees.”
It is believed, perhaps somewhat impartially in Colombia, that coffee produced here is most apt for the luxury market. But there’s no denying that a strategy is underway to differentiate quality Colombian coffee from the rest.
And this is where the barista like Mendez comes in. The editor of Café Cultura, a Guatemalan-owned coffee periodical, Francisco Palarea said: “For every cup of coffee that you drink, there’s the effort of 1000 people. The last person to handle your cup of coffee before passing it over to the consumer is the barista. Therefore the baristas possess a new level of knowledge regarding coffee quality and they have a great deal of responsibility.”
There is no doubting that the niche for high end coffee is growing, this is well documented in Palarea’s magazine and in Echeverri’s vernacular, and this niche is well represented at events such as the World Barista Championships.
Sourced through interviews taken in June with:
- Juan Pablo Echeverri of Hacienda Venecia
- Luis Fernando Samper of the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation
- Francisco Palarea of Revista Cafe Cultura
Richard McColl - I am a freelance writer from deepest darkest London but for the past 10 years or so I have been maintaining my extended "writing break" in ...
