It's been a while

It's been a while since I've got round to posting – have been meaning to for ages, but now that I'm on a bus I haven't got much else to do. It's kind of difficult to remember what I've been up to the last three weeks but I'll give it a go. In fact I can't remember doing much at all the first week but Mario got back from his travels two weeks ago and since then things have been pretty hectic. He brought a bottle of $150 Guatemalan rum back with him which made me very happy indeed (Ron Zacapa XO for any fellow aficionados out there). As well as that he had a good stash of Panamanian coffee from his friends – I had already been spoiled by the coffee I've been drinking, but now even what we were drinking before tastes a bit nasty. It's an expensive habit too to like good coffee...

A couple of days after he got back we went to see a friend of his who has a plantation of ~4000 trees that he is trying to get certified as organic. That hasn't happened yet unfortunately – they just got turned down as they have insect traps which use ethanol and methanol which are apparently not organic. I'll leave a rant about why organic certification is stupid for another day though. The plantation is in a beautiful spot, on the shore of Lake Kivu in the far North and our friend is planning to build some lodges there so that people can come and visit the farm. There were some stupidly tame birds there – even more so than pigeons – they were coming to within about two metres of me. The coffee from this year is being entered into the cup of excellence (a tasting competition to find the best coffees from Rwanda) and has already made it into the top 30, which is good news. I'll hopefully be able to get hold of a few kilos too to bring back with me.

Can anyone work out what this is about?!

Having already won free beer, me and Mario have now set our sights on gaining free brochettes too. We found out the owner of our favourite hotel has a coffee plantation and that they want to start making their own brand of coffee. We visited last weekend – I'd only had 4 hours sleep as some English students have arrived in Butare and so of course I showed them the wide variety of nightlife on offer (2 clubs) and then ended waiting 40 minutes for Mario + the owner to turn up. I should really have learned by now not to turn up on time, but old habits die hard. Anyway, the place was a complete mess – the yield from ~2000 trees was about 5kg which tasted like soil. Smart Coffee Consulting has produced a report of the steps to take though and for a few hundred pounds it should be possible to massively increase the yield and get a return on investment within a couple of years at most. We took a bag of Jan's terra pretta along with us and ended up using it to create Rwanda's first terra pretta coffee tree:

It was quite strange visiting there as I've been looking forward to being back home the last few weeks, but seeing how crap the plantation was and how poor the farmers are, whilst knowing what we could to fix it really made me want to stay. We got our free brochettes (Mario told the waiter to give the bill to her boss) so all in all it was a good trade.

I've also been trying to help the students again, which still proves to be a challenge! No matter how many times I explain that you can't copy and paste from Wikipedia to create a literature review they nearly all carry on. After telling them three times and still being sent crud we told them that if we find anything copied we won't help them any more. I thought that would be a big disincentive, but seemingly not as 2/3 who have sent things since have been entirely copy and pasted. Oh well, not my loss! One of the students is trying to test the pyrethrum insecticide on a coffee pest. We want to start in the lab seeing what concentration kills them so I told him to go out and collect some. I told him how to mix the concentrate to different strengths but he wanted me to hold his hand so I went along to see his “pests”. Unfortunately he hadn't thought it a good idea to check what they looked like before embarking on capturing them and when I turned up he showed me a beautiful collection of ladybirds instead...

Finally got the last samples from my experiment ten days ago and then cupped (tasted) all 120 samples last week. We taste 5 cups for each coffee so there were 600 to taste in 3 days. There were certainly differences - some tasty beautiful and others tasted like soil, but the final results aren't quite as I expected... I need to do some more number crunching though to see if I can get something which looks good.

As SPREAD have pretty much no cash left I've been stalking Mario around in Kigali to see how the export of coffee works on an industrial scale. The majority of the coffee passes through one warehouse where about three thousand women work hand sorting it to remove defective beans. It's a pretty scary place to walk in to as a mzungu guy! Once coffee has been hand sorted Mario gets a sample and cups it to check the quality and then if it passes another sample is sent to California to for his company's lab there to check. If they agree it is good then they ship, and if not the contained Is rejected and the exported needs to find another seller (not going to happened) or hand sort all 20 tonnes again!