After some hectic months with moving the roastery and opening our bar/shop, it felt really great too take a week off visiting the farmers doing the tremendous job providing us with flawless and superb green coffee. This time Nicaragua, Jinotega. 
The majority of my travel was spent on bumpy roads, visiting numerous of farms, cooperatives, wet mills and dry mills in the area. All were of varying scale and sophistication, and I was therefore able to appreciate some of the complexities faced at origin, evaluate the benefits and limitations of co-operatives, and experience first hand some of the challenges that exist in delivering quality.
You can read every book on the subject, but it is not until you actually taste the coffee cherry, feel the sticky mucilage that covers the bean, see the processing in action, smell the deliciously rich jasmine aroma from the flowering coffee plant, hear the farmers tell their story, that you can really start to appreciate the hard work and understand what is involved in getting a cup of superb coffee.
