Starting the day with coffee from Haiti
Taking care of the coffee crop. Haitian Farmer One-of-a-Kind Sculpture ID# HT1516
As my family will attest, coffee starts my day. I need it – they need me to have it. The day just goes better if I’ve paddled out to the kitchen in my jammies and headed straightaway to the stove to make and subsequently drink a cuppa Joe. Yes, I still do this the old-fashioned way. No high-tech Keurig for me, though I do admit it has its appeal and my eye has strayed from time to time. I make my coffee in a French press. No muss, no fuss, I can do it in my sleep and in fact, that’s probably the way it happens most of the time. So the last time I was in Haiti, I left with a few vacuum-sealed packages of local Rebo Deluxe Coffee in my carry-on bag. Good souvenir, I thought with a fair amount of satisfaction. No chance of languishing in obscurity on some dark shelf. I would drink and enjoy it to the last drop.
And now, I am out, which of course made me think about getting some more. So where does one buy Haitian coffee in the US?
Once upon a time, Haitian coffee was plentiful worldwide. During the French Colonial period, Haiti was the second largest coffee producing country on the planet and it was in the top three until as late as 1949. Dictators and trade embargoes did the coffee planters no favors and in fact, coffee production nearly died out entirely by the late 1980’s. Verdant acres of coffee trees were abandoned on the mountainsides, left to grow wild or die trying.
Fast-forward to post-quake Haiti and there has been renewed interest in reviving coffee production as a means of re-building the agricultural sector. The Rebo company is in the process of expanding its export market, primarily to Haitians of the Diaspora, while at least a handful of importers are buying coffee from Haitian farmers and co-ops under Fair Trade/Direct Trade agreements for roasting and selling in the US and Canada. Haitian coffee is thus available to me, right here, right now – I can buy it online!
Ready to brew!
Thus, I shall order up. From www.kafepanou.com I will get a bag of Rebo “Gourmet,” which is an arabica typica varietal. From www.lacolombe.com I will get “Mare Blanche,” also arabica typica. And from www.williams-sonoma.com I COULD order “Lyon,” but it is cheaper to order it from La Colombe, since THEY sell it to Williams-Sonoma, OR just run up the street to W-S and pick it up myself, which I will do and at least save the shipping. “Lyon” is a blend of Peruvian, Brazilian, and Ethiopian, coffee beans along with Haitian blue forest semi-wild, heirloom beans. And a portion of my purchase of “Lyon” goes to the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, which is an environmental preservation organization, so isn’t that nice? I’m gonna stop writing now and go buy some coffee. Shall we have a tasting? Oh, I think so!
To be continued…
Contributed by Linda for Beyond Borders/It’s Cactus