Monday night, Stumptown Coffee hosted a small shindig at its Red Hook, Brooklyn, roasting facility, in honor of two visitors from Kenya: Ngatia Kanyoge, a farmer who grows beans Stumptown sells, and Kamau Kuria, who, to oversimplify, facilitates the export of the beans.
The Carroll Gardens restaurant Prime Meats grilled up fat burgers for the crowd to load onto surely homemade buns, and there were bowls of potato salad and a lovely purple slaw, plus king-crab-like pretzels that the grill-masters said were the result of lessons from a German pretzel-maker who flew from Germany to impart his wisdom.
The guests of honor mingled, sipped beer from nicely iced kegs, and — if perhaps just to humor interested lookers-on — drank a little coffee.
"I can have a coffee and five minutes later go straight to sleep," said Mr. Kuria. We were both staring at the bunsen burner–style Vacpot on which Stumptown's Danielle had brewed us small cups of subtle coffee, using beans from Kenya's Gaturiri Factory, which Mr. Kanyoge manages.
Danielle offered that, while the machine was pretty cool, she found it eliminated some of the floral notes in the coffee. Her soft, fat ringlets bobbed slightly, and she blinked behind her glasses. I hadn't noticed any floral notes either. But then I was too busy marveling at how smooth and light and free of any bitterness my sips had been before the small cup was emptied.
I hoped to ask Mr. Kanyoge how many cups of coffee he drank a day, but I never got the chance. He launched into a warm but impassioned monologue about his farm, its practices, and the role of Stumptown. I admit there was a moment when I wished there were subtitles under his chin. I likely caught a fifth of what he was saying. Though I repeated after him, to be sure, that he said Stumptown bought 1/16 of his coffee yield — his very best beans — and the rest went to auction. The percentage of his income that came from that 1/16, versus the other 15/16, was lost in translation.
At the auction he has no face, he said, but the Stumptown buyer knew him, would walk the kilometers of his farm.
"He tells me to leave the green fruit," Mr. Kanyoge explained. There was something uncomfortable about a young American telling a 50-year-old farmer how to run his business, but perhaps that's naive. The beans — the fruit — are like clusters of grapes ripening at different speeds, many from green to red. The red fruit — the ripest fruit — makes for the best coffee. Perhaps when he sold entirely to the auction, all the fruit was picked at once, ripe or not? But now — did he say they pick four times, revisiting covered ground to get back to the now-red fruit?
"Before last year, I never imagined visiting another country," he went on. Before arriving in New York, he visited Portland and Seattle.
"Now, we are ... hearing each other. We are..." He smiled broadly and made a gesture of motion between the three of us standing there. We were communicating. We were enormously different people in the world, sharing, communicating, in communion. "Yes?" he smiled again.
Yes.
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