i
t’s breakfast time at Finca El Peten, and a handful of guests are playing a friendly game of get-to-know-you over farmfresh eggs and fruit. Outside, low clouds drift over a serene offshoot of Lake Apanas, a massive lake that generates about one-fifth of Nicaragua’s electric power. Alumni who have joined the Emory trip include Alicia Philipp 75C, president of the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, who has been a mover in the nonprofit world for more than thirty-five years. Under her leadership, the Community Foundation has grown into the foremost grant-making organization in the Southeast. An Emory Medalist and one of the university’s 175 Makers of History named in honor of the 175th anniversary, Philipp is also spearheading another partnership with Social Enterprise @ Goizueta that eventually will create new “green” jobs in Atlanta by providing locally grown produce to businesses and organizations. This morning, though, she’s lacing up her hiking boots and getting ready to learn something about coffee. “I’m really interested in social enterprise and also in Central America,” she says. “I hope to live here in the next phase of my life.” Coincidentally, the two other Emory graduates who have joined the group—Bridget Booth 80C and Linda Jameson 02EMBA—have recently left behind successful business careers and are starting that next phase. Both are interested in exploring social development in disadvantaged communities, in the US and abroad. “I am in career transition, and I’m interested in the sort of work that Social Enterprise @ Goizueta is doing,” Jameson says. “I had met Peter through a business school connection, and when I learned about this trip I thought it would be a great way to check it out.” Thompson—whose sister, Kore Breault, is senior associate director of development for Goizueta—gives his guests an overview of his background with Comunidad Connect and Farmers to 40. A former social
from bean to brew:
Young coffee plants take about three years to fully begin to produce, and once mature, they need to flower three different times each season before their beans are ready for picking. Those not grown in shade require chemical fertilizers and pesticides in order to bear fruit.
28
h o w c o f f e e g et s i n to yo u r c u p
Coffee pickers are paid by the pounds of beans they deliver to the wet mill, and they work hard to pick mostly the bright red beans, which are the highest quality. Pickers can gather up to seventy-five pounds of coffee a day during the harvest season, which lasts about three to four months.
magazine w i n t e r 2 0 1 4
worker, Thompson first came to Nicaragua in 1998 and met his wife, Arelis, while visiting San Juan del Sur on the southern coast. Cofounding Comunidad Connect and buying Finca El Peten, he says, was “a chance to combine my passion for social work with stewardship of the environment and do something positive here. It was a way to develop
At El Peten’s wet mill, freshly picked beans are sorted, soaked, de-pulped, and then fermented for roughly twenty hours before they are loaded for transport to their next stop. By the time the beans are roasted and ready for brewing in the US, they will have lost some 80 percent of their original weight and volume.
At the dry mills scattered throughout Nicaragua, individual “lots” of coffee beans are received, weighed, inspected, and spread on the ground to dry in the sun for about a week—until they reach the optimal humidity of 13 percent. Machinery then cleans them before a monthlong period of bagged “repose.”
After the dry mill process is complete, coffee beans are green once again; these dried, light-green beans can be stored for months before being roasted. It is estimated that coffee beans pass through thirty pairs of human hands during eight different processes before being ground and brewed for your morning cup.