Sweet Maria's Coffee

On my visit to Burundi this year, I sat with Dan Brose of Migoti Coffee. Dan and his partner Poncien built this station some years ago, and it all didn’t go exactly as planned. With some bumps along the way, this main station in Mutambu district is becoming a hub, with a new station starting in Kimono and another planned for next year.

But what I really appreciate is Dan’s deep experience in Burundi, and how his background in chemical engineering and other work informs the Migoti approach to coffee. And though I find Dan eloquent and with vast experience, the words you see him repeat over and over are teamwork, partnership and community. Taking a look at Migoti’s instagram and you will scroll a long time before you find a picture of Dan. The emphasis is on the work, on the group effort, and the goal of building a sustainable business that builds up the local community. With Migoti these are not a heap of buzzwords … they are how they operate. It’s a real pleasure to speak with Dan at the main station, and you will hear birds, people picking coffee in the background, and later the rush of water as they start the flow through the coffee washing channels. This is not a slick recording in any sense! In fact there are zero edits after the first minute. I encourage you to stay with this conversation because I feel the best stuff comes at the end! 

-Tom

You can see all our podcast episodes listed on our Coffee Library page.

This recording is a 28 minute unedited recording of a morning in Moshi, Tanzania May 25 2023. It’s the kind of “waking up” recordings I often do when traveling, both as personal note taking, but sometimes the material I turn into podcasts. This time, I thought I would also upload it to youtube, with images and video clips. So on youtube there’s some added visual information, but it’s not synced to the recording. Images and vocal do not match. But of course they are all from the same trip to Tanzania. Here is the You tube link to hear / view this with images.

This is the second part of of a podcast recording, focusing on tourism coffee and coffee marketing. I read from the article Tourism: Globalization and the Commodification of Culture about Disneyfication, and McDonaldization, read a text from a Starbucks bag about coffee travel adventures through an Indiana Jones / colonial adventurer lens, listen to Dangerous Grounds tv show promo reel that infuses coffee travel with xenophobia, and connect it to the current way roasters talk about coffee buying more as a social mission than something they do so they have a product to sell. The latest approach includes incredible claims like “Kevin [coffee buyer] discovered that small scale poor farmers produced some of the most complex and incredible coffees in the world, yet they had no experience of what was happening to their work thousands of miles away or its tremendous value and appreciation by specialty coffee drinkers.” Poor coffee farmers! Here comes Kevin to save you!

So what’s the answer? I don’t have one but it would hurt to kick it down a notch, and just try to learn when you travel. Would it?

I've been a little obsessed lately with reading about tourism and travel narritives, and seeing how these line up with my work as a coffee buyer. What I find is that ideas that interest me in coffee are not really discussed in the coffee trade, and I am not sure who is interested in these things. Trigger warning: if the term "culture studies" or "the other" set you off, don't listen to this podcast. (joke, but not really I guess). This first episode doesnt really get into things much. Hopefully you can listen to part 2 as well.  -T

It’s been nearly 4 years since visiting Kenya, and I am excited to be back. When I travel for coffee I tend to make audio recordings over morning coffee, and sometimes I edit these into podcasts later. Kenya trips that focus on cupping can be intense. It’s a marathon of tasting, and very intense coffee at that. I talk a bit about the approach I think Kenya requires in terms of coffee sourcing, and later about the grades of Kenya coffee outside of specialty types. Traveling often leads me to thoughts about the history of coffee production and trade, and with Kenya the specific history of colonialism here. And I end with a song! A 45 single I found in a stack near Nairobi by Fadhili William & The Black Shadows, Hakuna Mwingine. And that’s a summary of this 30 minute podcast recorded mostly in Kenya, in February 2023.

It’s Sunday morning in Shakiso town but it’s not peaceful and quiet by any definition. I am talking about coffee in the area, but I’m competing against the decibels of the Orthodox church and their loudspeaker. I am not sure if this is very “listenable”.

It sounds ok to me, but I am used to these morning prayers and just tune them out. It might not be so easy in a recording. Anyway, it’s here for you to listen to … or not! 

The Aregash Lodge in Yirg Alem is an oasis! I always look forward to staying here on the way to the southern coffee growing areas of Yirga Cheffe, Kochore, Gedeb, and Shakiso. It’s owned by Gregorg and his family, since 2003. But last year it was attacked by a local mob and one of the main buildings burnt to the ground. (Nobody was hurt). It’s wonderful to be back, and beautiful as ever, but a bit uncanny. Things are not always as they seem in Ethiopia, certainly for an outsider.

It leads me to think about this social unrest, ethnic clashes, but also the way America is seen by my Ethiopian friends, equally unsafe and incomprehensible. I am not sure why, but talking about a place I barely know like Ethiopia (despite coming here for so many years) only makes me reflect back on my country, as I know it. I feel the same misunderstandings I probably carry about Ethiopia are parallel to the things I hear my travel companions say about the US. Then again, it seems they could be right … and I could be right too.

When can you say you know a place? In what way do you know it, and in what way is it unknowable? The tourist myth of “strange lands” redirects back to “home”. I am not sure I know either. What sucks about this recording is trying to speak on behalf of a place, behalf of a country. How can I? I try to assure Teshe that America is not as unsafe as it sounds. Everyone is not armed. But I hear of their friends held up at gunpoint in the US, and they say “yes, you can get robbed in Addis but nobody is going to shoot you! “ How can I respond? And this is a country emerging (hopefully) from civil war! I guess there’s good reason for my unclear thoughts and sentences in this recording. It’s hard to find clarity in this. I hope you disagree with some things I say in here because I already have my own quibbles with them. 

I really was on the fence about uploading this episode. One the one hand, this is stuff I have already said, about photography and coffee travel, about marketing, about representation. It feels like I am just hung up on this. Does anyone care?

On the other hand, the second part of this is about a conflict I got into in Shakiso for taking a photo with my phone. And I kinda spun out on it. I think of podcasts as a thing where people want to hear someone talk clearly and with great confidence. That’s not how I feel. But I am deciding to go ahead and post this long recording, because people can always just stop listening if they don’t like it. You decide! 

Intro: I end up thinking a lot about photography and coffee travel. Taking pictures is an important part of documenting my trip (and also tagging photo locations with the camera GPS). But for me, it is complicated by things I can’t ignore. I guess since I have a masters in photo from my time in Chicago, it makes sense I am going to be aware of what it means to take photos, who the audience is for them, who the subject is, and how they function in relation to commodifying a product. For me, critical thinking around photo practice can be challenging but I feel it pushes me to think differently, and be aware of what it means to make images.

This starts out with my thoughts about what it means to carry this big bulky camera around, but “Part 2” (at 25 min. in)  is about this conflict I got into down in Shakiso because I took a photo of a car that “I shouldn’t have taken”. It wasn’t that bad, I wasn’t going to go to jail or anything. But I found it made me spin out quite a bit, and it had an impact on those I was traveling with. It just made me think a lot.

I am aware the title Coffee Photograpy Power sounds a bit pretentious. It is probably! I feel it is about power though. so...

I am in the larger town of Jimma, I think the euphoria of returning to the dirt roads of Ethiopia wore off a bit. It was probably all the dust. Feeling a bit drained, but still happy to be back in Ethiopia, I reflect a bit on coffee travel. I have always had a problematic relationship with using coffee travel to sell coffee, to create marketing material. But in the end I feel coffee can be a pretty straightforward product, and that’s not bad at all. I was going to skip including this one honestly, but decided to keep it in the end.

I am in Agaro town in the Western coffee region near Jimma and Limmu. It feels like I am 70% in Ethiopia and 30% still back in Oakland. Despite jet lag, I talk about what I have learned so far about the competition for coffee cherry, and how the cooperatives are at a disadvantage when well-funded exporters open up coffee stations in the area. It’s not all bad. Coffee farmers are selling cherry at high prices, which helps offset local inflation. I also added on some thoughts about Covid in Ethiopia and some interesting comments I heard from my Ethiopian. 

This is part 1 of a series of recordings I made over morning coffee nearly every day on my December trip. They aren't perfect. They are monologues. They are a little embarrassing. But there are some good raw ideas in here, perhaps. I have 8-9 episodes if I can bear to post them all! It's a bit much.