Daniel's World of Coffee

The Best Shoes For Traveling to Origin

In the last five years I have traveled to origin 30 times, to the best of my recollection. That's about 6 trips a year, spread over 12 or 13 countries, mostly in Latin America, but also in Africa and Asia.

On all but one of those trips, I have taken the same pair of shoes. Not the same brand, no... the exact same pair of shoes. These shoes set me back about 65 bucks, if I recall. I've worn them in Ethiopia, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Panama, Peru, El Salvador, the Philippines, etc.

The one time I didn't bring these shoes, it was purely by accident. It was my first trip to the Philippines, and I was apparently so excited by the prospect of white sand beaches that I forgot to pack sensible coffee farm shoes. Ironic because some of the roughest terrain I've encountered in my coffee travels was on that trip, in the tribal lands of Mindanao. I had to hike the whole slippery mess in thin-soled tennis shoes. My friends showed me infinite patience as I fumbled around helplessly in the muck and mire. (Hi Zee!)

Anyway, I come from Seattle originally, where people wear mountain-climbing gear to formal events. It's actually become a point of pride for me to wear snazzy city shoes whenever possible, just to stand out from the NorthFace and New Balance. But when you're hiking a real, functioning coffee farm at the peak of harvest, style somehow takes a back seat.

The shoes I have are from ECCO. I think they might have discontinued the exact model I have. They're somewhat similar to these, but low top and less space-age looking. I like the ones I have because if you dust them off and spit-shine 'em, they don't look too bad in a city setting. But the main reason I like them is because they are as tough as nails, but very comfortable. I've abused the ever-living hell out of these shoes and never once replaced the laces or even thought about them. I just toss them in my bag when I'm headed to origin and then inflict the pain.

Here's a mash-up video of my most recent trip to Ethiopia and a trip I made to Honduras in 2011. In the first part (grainy, sorry) I am stepping on a rural road between two farms, on my way up to the waterfall at Wondo Genet in Sidamo. I started filming because I was amazed at the thin crust that overlaid the two inches of powder-thin red dust that made up the road. It felt like walking on the moon, except it was about 100 degrees and the sun was BRUTAL. In the second part, as you can tell from the angle of my legs, I'm stumbling down a very steep, very muddy and slippery hillside in Honduras. Same shoes, two years and half a world apart.

So anyway, I don't work for ECCO and they aren't giving me any money. But if you are heading to a coffee farm soon (and if you're not.. why not???), maybe check out some of these shoes.

Here's my pair in all their dusty glory after I got back from my most recent trip last week:

Backstreet Boys in the Philippines

Cute kids; Backstreet Boys; Coffee stall in the Baguio Market; Arabica growing under cover of chayote vines; Rainstorms; Flooded river; Wild coffee plantation; Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; More cute kids.

Coffee Anteater, Coffee People Singing, Coffee Farm Giant Tree — Panama

Here is a video of a baby anteater, an evening impromptu concert by a brother and sister, and a huge ancient iga tree waving in the wind on Finca de Eleta coffee farm in Panama.

I always post about the coffee-related things I do in my job, on the road. I thought it would be nice to share some of the little slices of life that happen on the periphery; they are the simple details that make life beautiful.

Since my last post in December I have been traveling a lot, with much more actual coffee-related stuff to post on. Over the next week I hope to go through some of my notes, videos, and pictures and clean them up a bit to share here on the blog.

Advanced Roasting Fun

Here's a video I took this afternoon... a sunny August afternoon in Northern California. This is day two of a three day Advanced Roasting Techniques class I am teaching at Boot Coffee.

There are three groups going here, one on a 1 pound San Franciscan roaster (the red one), one on a 5 kilo Probat from 1948 (the black one), and one on a three barrel Gothot sample roaster (the silver one). Each team has a different task to complete, using green coffee from the stock of dozens of different coffees Boot Coffee has in its lab.

Tomorrow morning we are going to cup the results (27 coffees!) and have each team interpret and defend the results of their experiments.

Influence of Soil Type on Coffee Flavor (Video)

Stage one of a long project studying the influence of soil type and weather on coffee flavor profile: on-site in Puerto Rico.

Giuliano Makes Tortillas

Back in July, after teaching some roasting seminars in Guatemala City, I spent a morning in the nearby town of Antigua with some coffee friends. Peter Giuliano, one of the key leaders of the specialty coffee industry in the United States — and indeed the world — was with us, too.

You could write an entire book and still not name all the important work Peter has done in the coffee industry. His company, Counter Culture Coffee, has helped revolutionize the way people grow, buy, roast, and drink coffee. He's also been a key leader at the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

But in addition to being a coffee guru, Peter's also just a fun guy to be around. He's willing to try anything, and his enthusiasm for life and for people is contagious. If you're having a hard time getting motivated on a Monday morning, check out Peter cheerfully learning how to make tortillas in Guatemala... and this was on a Saturday morning after a long week of work and travel. And he never lets dropping a few get him down.

By the way, the tortillas were delicious.

The Beautiful Blonde and Her Cup of Coffee

My sister got married in May. After the ceremony, my job was to drive the happy couple to a special location on Lake Washington to shoot some extra photos. From there we had to drive to the U-District in Seattle for the reception.

Rick, my brother in law (as a Brazilian, he's a man with coffee in his blood), said suddenly, "Do we have coffee at this reception?"

My sister and her husband realized that they might have another 3 or 4 hours of speeches, dinner, toasts, greeting, dancing, etc, before they would get a cup of coffee. This, of course, after hours of getting ready, taking photos, and the ceremony itself.

That was all the prompting I needed. I took them to Solstice on the Ave, where I used to study my Cervantes and my Lord Byron back in my college days. How many times do you see a beautiful 5'10" blonde woman in a flowing white wedding dress in the middle of a college café? That's my sister for you. It runs in the family, see...

So when the newlywed-mobile rolled up to the reception, we all got out holding our americanos (extra shot, natch), and Rick and Jane-o powered through the festivities with a smile.

I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area this week, where it's in the mid-90's (???), where I'm shooting some instructional videos; from Wednesday to Friday I'm teaching a course on roast profiling, cupping, and sensory evaluation. Anticipating, "Teacher can we have class outside today?" we're setting up an awning and folding chairs. A little delayed summertime, nice!

A Special Kind of Hotness

Part three of my videos in Panama, featuring the beautiful Tesse, the adorable Tiborcito, Daniel being way too excited to be crossing the Panama Canal, and a place that attracts bird-watchers and entomologists from all over the world.

Be sure to watch part one and part two.

Incidentally, I'm quite serious about organizing a trip to Ojo de Agua. We are looking at the week of January 3rd or January 10. I will of course post more about that if it's happening, but if you want to get at the top of the list, send me an email at [email protected].

Just to give you an idea of where all this is, I've included a map. The marker here is for the town of Volcán. Just to the northeast, you can see the large volcano. On the far side of the volcano is Finca Sofia (featured in the earlier videos, and quite close to the place shown in this video). Just north of that, shrouded in clouds in this Google Map view, is a vast protected forest land called Palo Seco. The farm lies right up against this protected zone, surrounded, in fact, on three sides by protected forest land.

View Larger Map

Getting High in Panama

Finca Sofia is the highest coffee farm in Panama. They are growing the world's most famous coffee varietal there, the beautiful geisha. Part two of my visit in this video.

If you missed part one, you can view it here.

"Norwegian Coffee ... Bad!"

Scandinavia is the epicenter of the world quality coffee movement. Last week I was in Stockholm drinking coffee and researching my Nordic roots. At the same time, on the other side of the great peninsula, the Nordic Barista Cup was taking place in Oslo.

I've never been to the Nordic Barista Cup, but it's very high on my list of coffee to-do's. Baristas and coffee professionals from Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland get together once a year and have all kinds of coffee events and parties. Teams from each nation dress up in matching jumpsuits like Olympic athletes, and snapshots from the various parties always show beautiful people having a lovely time.

This year, barista magazine had some top-notch blog coverage.

As for me, I had a lovely time island-hopping in Stockholm. I did some interesting work for Pernod-Ricard, the spirits company. Absolut — a very Swedish vodka, of course — is one of their brands, and that's what took us to Stockholm. But I wasn't doing any work on vodka, but actually on Kahlúa.

I did some very interesting blind tasting of various coffee liqueurs. They are most decidedly not all the same. Some have some extremely disagreeable chemical-rubber tastes underneath all that sugar. I hope to be able to share the outcome of the work I did there on the blog soon; but for now I have to keep it somewhat under wraps.

For you New Yorkers out there, I thought you might get a kick out of this picture. It's a collaboration Absolut did with Spike Lee (no joke).

I uploaded some more pics on my flickr page. Not much coffee related (except the awesome french press hotel coffee I got which made my day on Thursday), but there's some pretty rainbows.

Finally, I shot this video at dinner (amazing food at this restaurant). You can't see anything cause the light is too low. But you can hear what my Swedish friend, Frida, thinks of Norwegian coffee.