What difference do cupping labs in origin make?

Nearly ten years ago, Paul Katzeff, Nick Hoskyns, Byron Corrales and Dr. Christoper Bacon created an initiative to build cupping labs for farmers in Nicaragua, to allow the producers to taste their coffees for defects and profile, which would provide them with a different sense of ownership and pride, increasing productivity and encouraging developmental and agricultural change and growth. Katzeff said his goal was to give the power to the farmers by taking them to the US to meet with roasters and cuppers here, and to introduce them to the cupping process. “Then I said, ‘I have the money, you tell me if you want to build the labs.’”

This morning’s panel was more or less a timeline and celebration of these four visionaries’ early achievements, rather than a workshop on how to establish similar labs elsewhere, though I hope there are seminars to that effect being developed for the Atlanta symposium.

Byron Corrales, the first to speak about the impact from the producers’ point of view, has coffee farming in his blood: he is a third-generation farmer who saw the impact of the cupping labs on his family farm firsthand.

Nick Hoskyns and Dr. Christopher Bacon provided their own insights into the project. Bacon, a researcher and lecturer on sustainability at UC Santa Cruz, discussed the success of the cupping labs and how they transformed the Nicaraguan coffee community. “We are talking about something that changed our lives and changed the lives of the people we’re working with,” he said. Hoskyns, the founder of the Ethical Trade and Investment Company, spoke about organizing co-ops and giving the producers the power. “With the new relationship coffees, the power of the importer and the exporter, whose used to wine and dine each other, has dissipated.”

Thanksgiving Coffee Roasters‘ Paul Katzeff, a legend among coffee professionals and a pioneer in his own right (he was awarded a lifetime achievement award last night; I’m sure we’ll have video of that up later today), spoke about the genesis of the Nicaragua program—the first in a three-part origin cupping-lab initiative.

“I’ve been working with this panel for eight years. I was giving a speech in Nicaragua about organic coffee. It wasn’t part of my speech, but I asked them how many of them had tasted their own coffee,” he said. “Nobody raised their hand. I asked again, I thought maybe they were being shy. But still nobody raised their hand. While the next person was speaking, I wrote a four-page, $400,000 proposal on yellow legal paper with no copies. A year later I got a call saying, ‘Guess what…’”

Katzeff said that the most important part in establishing this cupping relationship with the Nicaraguan farmers (and subsequently with producers in Rwanda and Uganda), was to let them make their own choices. “Allow the ‘go’ or ‘no go’ decision to be made by the people who are going to be doing all the work,” he said. “Have a plan, work on creating a timeline that everyone understands. Always remember that people gravitate toward complexity if given that opportunity.”