Francisco Javier Valle Garcia begins roasting at 6 a.m. every morning at Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland, Oregon. He’s only 23, yet he’s been roasting for nearly a decade. In his native Nicaragua, coffee is the chief export, and Garcia’s family has grown and harvested it for generations near Jinotega, the principle city in Nicaragua’s North Central Valley.
Garcia met Stumptown founder Duane Sorenson in 2003 while Garcia was a manager at Uca Sopexcca, a Nicaraguan coffee cooperative supported by 650 farmers. “Everyone wants to work with Duane. He’s one of the most famous people in the coffee world,” says Garcia. So it wasn’t a surprise that Garcia accepted when he was invited by Sorenson to participate in an informal worker exchange program in Portland for several months.
Sorenson, like Garcia, has spent most of his life in the coffee business. He dropped out of college in the early nineties to apprentice at a small roasting company in Seattle. Several years later, while on a coffee-buying trip to Latin America as the lead roaster for a San Diego company, Sorenson had an epiphany when he learned that farmers were paid low dollar for superior coffees, which were later blended with inferior ones.
“It got my wheels turning to create the perfect scenario,” says Sorenson. “I wanted to isolate rare coffees and work with producers to improve them.”
Sorenson moved to Portland and founded Stumptown Coffee Roasters in 1999 from a tiny storefront, four miles from the city center. When the cafe and roastery debuted that November, he worked the counter by day and roasted coffee at night.
Today, Stumptown Coffee enjoys a cult-like following in Portland and now Seattle, where two cafes have recently opened. It employs 113 people at its seven cafes and two roasting facilities while Sorenson spends months of each year with coffee growers in places like Rwanda, Ethiopia, Yemen, Honduras and Nicaragua, searching for the world’s most unique varieties of coffee to bring back to his Portland and Seattle cafes.
“I take more trips than I can count,” he says.
At Stumptown’s second location in Portland’s Belmont neighborhood, a chalkboard menu displays more than 30 varieties of coffee available by the pound. Unlike the supermarket coffee aisle, they’re not categorized by roast. Instead, coffees are itemized and priced according to the farm or cooperative from where they’re sourced. Selections like Finca el Puente from Honduras and Finca Salaca Villalobos from Costa Rica are available by the pound or half-pound, with prices ranging from $13 to $82 per pound. At Stumptown’s Ace Hotel location, four innovative machines called “Clovers” brew coffee by the cup—the time and temperature adjusted for each type of bean. With so much variety, local aficionados have begun applying the language of wine tasting to coffee, adopting words like structure, mouthfeel, balance and acidity.
When Sorenson travels to find unique coffee varietals, he buys directly from the people that grow the beans. This practice, called Direct Trade, is similar to the unique connection that Portland chefs have long had with local farmers. However, in this case, the commodity cannot be locally sourced. On the condition that growers deliver superior coffee, Sorenson happily pays prices far higher than what farmers are accustomed to receiving. According to Matt Lounsbury, Stumptown’s Director of Operations, this enables farmers to make investments in their businesses and their communities.
“For us, the emphasis is the coffee,” says Lounsbury, “but for farmers, an extra dollar per pound can be life-changing.”
“When I learned about the ethics of Stumptown, that was the cherry on top,” says Clara Seasholtz, now the director of the company’s offshoot, Bikes to Rwanda. She won’t soon forget the first time she tried Stumptown Coffee: “It wasn’t just burnt brown water. It had such flavor and identity; it didn’t need any cream or sugar,” says Seasholtz.
While talking to coffee growers in Rwanda in 2006, Sorenson asked them what they needed to make their jobs easier. “We need bicycles,” they replied.
When he returned to Portland, Sorenson started brainstorming with members of the bicycle and coffee communities. In a few months, Sorenson and his partners founded Bikes To Rwanda [www.bikestorwanda.com] and recruited Seasholtz, a bicycle enthusiast and experienced non-profit professional, to oversee it. “You almost never hear about projects that start with a question asked by the benefactor. It was so simple,” she says.
A year later, Bikes To Rwanda has raised more than $30,000 and has shipped 400 bicycles to Rwandan farmers along with tools and spare parts. The bikes, which cost $120, are not free; farmers make a $20 down payment and then pay off the rest with coffee beans. (The amount is within the means of most Rwandan farmers, says Seasholtz, though it does take them an average of two years to settle up.) Seasholtz visited Rwanda in September to oversee the construction of a bike shop, and her organization plans to build up to five more shops at other Rwandan cooperatives in 2008.
“It’s too early to measure the progress, but the momentum is exciting,” say Seasholtz, who expects Bikes to Rwanda to be self-sufficient in the coming year.
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Back in Portland one chilly evening in late October, nine Costa Rican growers took turns speaking to a crowd of about 150 coffee enthusiasts gathered at Stumptown’s downtown café for an event dubbed “Meet the Producers.” Stumptown and its partners paid for the farmers to visit Portland, and through interpreters, each farmer presented slides while explaining the finer points of coffee production at their respective farms, and how the Costa Rican coffee market is changing due to buyers like Stumptown. The growers also visited Stumptown cafes and roasting facilities.
“This is amazing for us to see the names of our farms on the menus in the cafes,” says Ricardo Barrantes of the Helsar de Zarcero cooperative in Costa Rica, whose coffee sells for $14 per pound at Stumptown cafes. “It’s very moving.”
Thanks to buyers like Stumptown, Costa Rican coffee farmers have recently begun to process smaller batches called micro-lots, wherein the highest quality beans are isolated and processed at the farm. Lounsbury says the process is no different from the wine country model where superior grapes from a given part of a vineyard express higher quality and make a better end product. Stumptown not only seeks coffee from a particular region or farm, it also works with farmers to locate the tiny swaths of soil where the most incredible beans grow, says Lounsbury. While a macro-lot of coffee could fill several shipping containers, a micro-lot could be as small as a 37-pound bag. Lounsbury estimates that 60 Costa Rican farms now operate on the micro-lot model. The number is always increasing.
“The farmers have long known where the best stuff is growing, but they’ve never been asked to separate it. We pay more money because it’s worth it,” says Lounsbury. “This is their good shit.”
All this attention to detail is paying off for Stumptown, which has been written up in the New York Times twice in the past year, expanding its cult-like following to coffee connoisseurs around the country—and the world.
“Stumptown is on the leading edge of a global coffee movement,” says Sarah Allen, publisher of the industry journal Barista Magazine. She says Stumptown is one of only four or five companies worldwide to attain such a high level of quality.
So why do only 100 cafes and restaurants (all of them in the Pacific Northwest) sell these superior beans?
“I spend a lot of my time turning people down,” says Lounsbury. “Portland is a Mecca for coffee shops, and when we meet people who want to open one and use our beans, we ask them if they’re aware of the minimum threshold.”
Simply put, the minimum threshold is this: baristas must undergo training with a Stumptown pro and the establishment has to use a high-quality espresso machine. “We put a lot of effort into our coffee, and that can go out the window in the last 20 seconds if the barista isn’t trained and the café doesn’t have good equipment,” says Lounsbury. To encourage cafés to fulfill the latter edict, Stumptown sells the Italian-made La Marzocco espresso machines at cost.
Adam McGovern, co-owner of Portland’s Coffeehouse Northwest, one of Portland’s top coffee shops, says he was happy to purchase a $10,000 espresso machine and a top quality grinder. His employees were given a day of training at a Stumptown cafe. (At Stumptown’s own cafes, baristas usually observe for six weeks before they’re allowed to operate the espresso machine.) McGovern says these measures were worth it to be able to use Stumptown beans. “There’s nothing similar to Stumptown. This is the best coffee in the world.”
It’s safe to say that this same level of quality control is what motivates the company to retain its employees. Many Stumptown baristas have been with the company for years, probably because all employees earn medical benefits (even if they work less than 40 hours a week) and are paid much higher than Oregon’s minimum wage of $7.80 per hour. These generous perks are also why, according to a Stumptown manager, the cafes receive “stacks of resumes.”
For Garcia and the Costa Rican farmers, visiting these Portland cafes is eye-opening. “It’s inspiring to taste the final product at Stumptown cafes,” one of the Costa Rican farmers says. “We [in Costa Rica] produce the best coffee in the world, but we don’t consume the best. After coming here, we’re inspired to drink the best coffee too.”
Mike Thelin is a Portland-based freelance writer and columnist. He writes about food and culture for Willamette Week, and is a contributing editor at Portland Spaces. When not trekking in the Canadian Rockies, working on organic farms in Portugal and studying Spanish in Madrid, Thelin calls nomad-Mecca Portland, Oregon home.
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