Hi friends!
I am so happy to be writing this brief newsletter. My first trip to Nicaragua in this role at Aroma Nica has inspired me tremendously. Before travelling to Nicaragua, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. I have been looking at pictures and keeping up on farm happenings since I started working with this coffee as a barista in 2017.
This opportunity to fill the gaps in my perception of everything our coffee entails has connected me to a deeper understanding and a more well-rounded perspective.
In my work on this trip, I used a guiding light, a mission statement of framing the grower as an artist. As anyone who lives and breathes coffee knows, it is a delicate art, no matter where along the supply chain you operate. Coffee is a balance of precarious variables that paint a new landscape every single harvest.
There are challenges in this art, and each grower has unique circumstances that shape their life and work in coffee. In Ocotal, there is profound difficulty trying to find coffee pickers. In Las Sabanas, coffee has already been lost due to damaged roads that are too treacherous to traverse even on horseback. But overall, a doubling increase of input costs across the board, labour shortages, and a volatile time for the country have made it a complex era to be a coffee grower in Nicaragua.
The amount of resiliency and hope struck me over and over when I was visiting these coffee farms and meeting with our growers. Coffee farmers run on hard work, hope, and love. To see optimism in the face of all these challenges is powerful.
I am still taking some time to process everything, and I look forward to writing and sharing more of our experience on this trip in some future newsletters I am planning. There is so much to deep-dive into, and I feel that those topics deserve their own stage.
Spring is approaching, which means preparing for our 2023 harvest to arrive. But in the meantime, I will be working to tell the stories of our growers, their farms, and their coffee. We have so much to share, especially coffee, so stay connected with us via our Instagram, and of course, our inbox is always open to anyone with any interest at hola@aromanica.coffee. Always happy to answer any questions, send samples, and provide additional information.
Soon we will be creating a waitlist for our 2023 samples. It's a way to get harvest samples out promptly as soon as they arrive and to gauge some of your interest in this 2023 harvest.