Jaltemba Times

      We, (Vicky and I), were heading back to Rincon de Guayabitos from Tepic.Just after we passed by Compostela, and just beyond the cutoff to Compostela, there is a coffee processing plant. For some time I had been planning to stop and see what was going on, and where did they get the beans to process. While I do not consider myself to be a coffee expert, I do take pride in preparing a good cup of coffee. In our back road travels, I try and buy good Arabica coffee beans from the highlands of Nayarit. I carefully roast the beans in my imported roaster, and grind them in my imported coffee grinder, and let the bottled water drip through my imported filters in my imported drip coffee machine at my favorite temperature.
 

 

      I make it a point to serve this fresh coffee to the guests at our small Bed and Breakfast operation and I always have a thermos to serve when we take folks on back road trips.
 

 

      I have to go back about a year or so to have this story make sense. As you may know, the coffee industry has been having a rough time of it for several years. The Mexican coffee industry has really suffered. Coffee has not even been harvested in many areas. I read about a man from Washington state, Jim Kosalos, who had made a success of one area, El Malinal This was an area high in the mountains, not far from Tepic, which had been settled and planted to coffee by German immigrants over a hundred years ago. He and associates imported an expert from Brasil and educated the coffee growers how good coffee tasted and how to grow, harvest, and process it so that they could sell all of their crops at fair prices. Since that time I had wanted to visit El Malinal, and last week we did. More on that story soon. We were unable to buy any coffee there, since the season had just ended and all of their processed coffee had been sold. They told me that I might be able to buy some at a coffee processing plant in Compostela.

 

      So, the plot thickens. We stopped and entered the plant and noted that machinery was running and there were a lot of sacks of coffee . We saw one man sorting coffee beans and went over and asked where these beans came from. After a brief chat it turns out that this is the Jim Kosalos that I have wanted to meet for some time. I could see that he was busy but he was very gracious and spent some time with me and, as it turned out, was the foremost authority on coffee that I had ever met. He told me that all the coffee he had was being prepared for export. He showed me how coffee beans were sorted and classified. Then, we went to his tasting lab.
 

     He had a number of cups with a little coffee in them. You could see the grounds on the bottom. He handed me a spoon and invited me to taste .Demonstrating to me the correct way to taste and judge coffee, he some how inhaled air through his nose and tasted the room temperature coffee, slurped it around in his mouth and spat it out in a container.
 

 

      This came as a bit of a shock to my uneducated mind. Here I must go back to another time. Other than my years in the military and living a few years in the East, I am a California boy and lived for many years near Wine country. I love good wine. A similar shock came to me on my first visit to a professional wine tasting event. They would swirl the wine, sniff it sip some and swirl it around in the mouth (all o.k. so far), then to my horror, they spit it out in a container. Now, although not an expert , I do have some knowledge of wine. I have made many gallons of wine. I have grown my own grapes, my own fruit and carefully fermented and bottled these myself. I have even done the second fermentation into champagne. I have tasted, and in the case of poor quality, even thrown it out. But never in my life have I spit out perfectly good wine.
 

 

      Of course, the coffee and wine experts would probably shoot me at sunrise if they could, but never the less I must say that this situation is not fair to grapes or coffee beans. They struggle to grow and do the very best for you only to be spat out when they have achieved what is expected of them.
 

 

      Oh, well. (and Jim, please don't take offense to this, you know what you are doing ) However, when Jim asked me how I prepared my coffee and I told him, I had another shock. First, my grinder was a bladed variety and not at all satisfactory. He showed me the correct type of grinder, how grounds were prepared and mine were not right. He then explained that coffee filtered through paper picked up a paper taste. Better to pour just boiled water on the grounds, he told me. Wow! I left realizing that I didn't know so much after all. While I was doing all this, Vicky was relaxing in a hammock and enjoying a properly prepared cup of coffee.
 

 

      Jim went over to the machine that was pouring out finished coffee beans into sacks ready for export, filled up a plastic bag and gave it to me. He also gave me a bag of coffee grounds, which I can use to check for proper roasting color and grinding texture. We talked for a few moments, I thanked him for this new education and left feeling a little more humble about my position in the coffee world. He asked me to e mail him what I thought of his coffee.
 

 

      When we got back to my place Vicky, who is almost pure Indian from the Puebla area said "Why don't you prepare coffee like the Indians do". And then she went on and said she could have told me how to make good coffee and that "you gringos complicate your lives with all these contraptions". She said let me show you how to make coffee.
 

 

      She did make one compromise. She let me use my coffee roaster instead of using the metal tortilla cooker. (Up in the mountains we see them roasting the beans on an adobe fired stove). She put the beans on a metate, which is a receptacle carved from granite rock, and the small rock pestal and proceeded to pulverize the beans into grounds. She then tossed them into a pot of boiling water for several minutes. Turned off the flame and let the grounds settle. Then poured me the best cup of coffee I have ever tasted.
 

 

The Indians Won!!! (with the help of El Malinal and advice from Jim)
Thank you Vicky and Jim Kosalos.
 

 

[When Bob  republished the story later, he prefaced it with this:]

 

This is a story that I ran a year or two ago. It also ran in a couple of internet and coffee publications, and I like it. It does reflect on how we civilized folk kind of improve things that maybe shouldn't be improved at all. Here it is.