Updates from the Legendary Producer on a Hard Year

Aida Batlle is a fifth-generation farmer who transformed her family’s farm into a locus for cutting-edge coffee cultivation and processing techniques, raising the bar on specialty coffees everywhere. Winner of numerous Cup of Excellence awards, she is rightly a legend in the coffee world and a producer whose coffees we giddily anticipate each year. Beyond her stunning coffees, a little known fact is that Aida inspired us to serve cascara in our cafes. Cascara, meaning husk, is the dried outer layer of the coffee fruit. In all of our cafes, we serve cascara from her highest farm, Kilimanjaro, in our refreshing drink, Cascara Fizz.

2020 was such a tough year. The first order of business seems to be the simple question of how are you?

I’m okay, though it’s hard to be away—I’m stuck in Miami until I get the okay to travel back to El Salvador. But now is not the time.

What I am really wondering is, How are my customers doing? I wonder, Are we going to be able to sell all of the coffee? I know too many producers who have had to sell their coffee for commodity prices. You lose so much money when you do that. So I’m trying to keep a positive attitude and think that we’ll get through it. Luckily, it seems we’re having a really good harvest this year.

How has the pandemic affected your farms and employees?

As producers, we are the de facto safety net for workers. We had to act fast as Covid-19 became worse, and really, we have never stopped working since. Three days before shutdown, we were harvesting. When El Salvador shut down, so did public transportation for the next five or six months. Fortunately, we got food, PPE, and sanitizer to all of our employees and their families. With public transportation no longer an option, our employees weren’t able to go into town for supplies. So we stepped in.

The strange part about this is that while I would never equate people to plants, we were more prepared than I expected for this kind of disaster because we’ve been dealing with the uncertainty of roya [coffee leaf rust] for a long time. I had already faced the uncertainties of how I would pay the bank and keep employees paid. The unpredictability of how covid spread reminds me of roya, too, which hits some plants that seem perfectly healthy, but not others. Its path is mysterious, and Covid-19, to some degree, has been like this, too. Except that it’s everywhere, of course.

How have you all had to adapt coffee production to manage in the midst of Covid-19?

At each farm there is a manager and about 15 employees. At J. Hill, the mill where our coffee is processed, we work with an agronomist whose farm management program is great. So while we have had to do things like limit farm visits and keep people working in smaller clusters, we have solid teams in place. Of course, there are things outside our control, like delays in ships and containers going out.

There has been a reckoning on racial disparities in the US. Coffee is an international industry born out of exploitation of people of color and women. What are concrete steps the specialty coffee industry can take to do more? What would you like coffee drinkers in the US to consider when buying coffee?

It may seem basic, but farmers need to be paid fair wages. This means that consumers need to know how much work it takes to make a cup of coffee so they’re willing to support companies like yours, that pay higher prices for coffee. That’s the only way we can pay higher wages.

I’ve said it before, but breaking even while coffee farming doesn’t really happen. Take Tanzania, a coffee you released recently: my cost of production tripled because of roya (coffee leaf rust), and I was selling it for the same price. If it was a cafe, we would have closed down. But we’re dealing with plants, which are unpredictable. And we’re employing people to work with those plants and who depend on us.

Just to give you an idea, the year after I bought Finca Tanzania in 2011, roya hit. I went to the farm after it was pruned and I bawled. You could only see the shade trees. The coffee trees were just stumps. It’s better now. But back then, it was like a building was burning down and our job was to build that building again while paying employees.

This is all to say, the people who make coffee happen deserve fair pay.

In the midst of such challenges, have there been bright moments?

[Laughter...] That’s a tough one. I mean, if I had to choose out of this challenging time, it’s that people are coming together, especially in hospitality, doing things like starting GoFundMe campaigns to help baristas and others out.

Some people have asked me why I am not posting on social media more about what is going on, or what we’re doing to help our community of Santa Ana. To me, this is a time when people are at their lowest, asking for food. It’s not the time to post.

How do you get your team to be as quality-minded as you are?

One thing we have are regular tastings, and not just good coffee. We cup coffees made from poorly picked harvests as well as sorted and clean green coffee, so the people who are doing the picking get to taste the differences in the cups. They taste how unripe cherry makes coffee that is harsh, dry, with a touch of astringency. There’s no questioning, after such tastings, of why it matters to go the extra steps of picking only ripe cherry.

What do you have planned for the future?

We’re continuing to do what we alway do—playing with processing but farming the same varieties. But I still love to experiment. I’ll be doing three new experiments. They always start in a 5-gallon bucket.

Can we hear about them?

Oh, no. You’ll have to wait. I have to see if they work first.

What are you loving to drink right now? Is French press still your favorite method?

Right now, I’m drinking Kilimanjaro. And yes, French press is my method. In the morning, I want my coffee as soon as possible. I don’t want to have to do much for it. Maybe I could rethink the method for the third cup. But it’s French press first thing.

Aida Batlle in Conversation