Living in a Coffee Growing Land

In my two decades in El Salvador, I have always been on the hunt for great coffee. I should clarify ... great coffee at a great price. You can go to any high end coffee shop and pay $12/lb for their good stuff. But I am not fond of paying retail! I have been given bags of coffee from family and their friends. I have gotten coffee at various co-ops such as the one in Ahuachapan and bought coffee directly from small fincas. I have even traded cigars for coffee from a finca owner.

Fatima guarding the Chaparra.

Most of the coffee here for local consumption is lightly roasted “clara” and a favoured bean is the Pacamara which produces a mild coffee with low acid.

I generally prefer a stronger coffee so I lean towards the Bourbon Arabica bean, first developed by the French on the Island of Bourbon. I like a cerezo process where the ripe red beans are dried in the sun as opposed to being run through machines with lots of water which strips the fruit from the green beans. Cerezo is more time consuming but oddly cheaper and produces a more intense flavour.

Bags of washed and cerezo beans.

The best coffee I have had have been from friends who own fincas at a high altitude – 1,800 m above sea level. One of the big coffee companies here, Quality Grains, owns a chain of cafes and they sell an excellent gourmet dark roast at $7/lb wholesale.

The mechanical stripper.

I am heading to Canada soon and wanted to bring about 35 lbs of coffee with me. My friend’s stock is a bit low due to the low yield from last year so I decided to try my luck with the beans at the Santa Tecla Roastery. My friend uses this place to process, roast and bag his coffee and I know they always have Bourbon Arabica and Pacamara coffee for sale.

The machine to separate the chaff.

I went in shortly after 9 am and spoke with the owner and made a deal to get 40 lbs of Bourbon Arabica roasted extra dark (but short of Italian roast). This required 50 lbs of beans and they had some from San Vicente grown at around 1,500 m.  This would normally produce 42 lbs of roasted beans (weight is loss as moisture comes out) but with a dark roast, it would be closer to 40 lbs. Their normal price for clara cerezo is $2.80 a pound but they gave me that same price for my volume purchase even though they would get less weight due to the darker roast.

Before being run through the hand screen. You can see some of the dried cherries.

The cerezo dried coffee cherries were run through a mechanical stripper and then a couple of cleaners to remove the chaff – one mechanical and one a hand screen. This isn’t always 100% so a few dried husks got into the roaster.

The Roaster

The gas furnace was turned on and the 200 year old German roaster started to warm up. They ran another load first and the beans came out light brown with very little smoke and I think a “pop” as the beans cracked only once.

Starting to smoke

My load went in and Roberto, the master roaster who has been there for about 20 years, said it should take about 25 minutes. It starts off slow but near the end, the beans get dark very fast. He kept pulling out samples as the machine started smoking and I kept telling him to hold off for a bit longer. We started seeing some almost burnt beans coming out and some large clouds of smoke so he dumped the load into the cooling well. At this point, you could hear a lot of secondary cracks as the coffee was turned in the hopper. I think it came out close to a Vienna roast – dark brown and some shine on the beans.

Cooling in the spin hopper

When the beans had cooled down, I had my choice of grinders and bags. The main grinder they have was converted from a corn grinder. It works very quickly but the final product is fairly course and not very uniform. I elected to have them put through a finer grounder and the 25 lbs took about 20 minutes to grind. I also chose to have the coffee packed into gold mylar plastic which cost 20 cents more a bag so the coffee worked out to be $3/lb or $120 for 40 lbs. I also asked for a big burlap sack which they gave me at the discounted price of $3. 

Roberto, the master roaster, bagging my coffee.

I shared fresh Cuban cigars with the owner and a guy named Ricardo who was helping out. Ricardo helped move coffee around and also tried to sell me a coffee finca – I think his main line of business. A coffee farmer came in and gave him some home distilled Chaparro (aguardiente?) in a 600 ml water bottle. He offered me a taste and when I said I liked it, he gave it to me to say thanks for the cigar.

Coffee running through the fine grinders

When I got home, I took a small bit of coffee that was left over from the bagging process and ran it through my burr grinder to an espresso powder. I put it into my Aeropress and added the water. Very fresh coffee as it bloomed up very high. I pressed the coffee into a mug and had a sip. Very deep strong flavours with a balanced bitterness and acid. Delicious. Then I added some water to make an Americano and that was delicious too.

A rustic and charming spot in Santa Tecla

  The whole process took about 90 minutes and it was a lot of fun. They gave us coffee to drink and a couple of chairs under the shade of an enormous tree beside their roasting shed. I had the run of the place and they didn’t mind me taking pictures and poking around everywhere. 40 lbs of Bourbon Arabica, single origin, high altitude dark roast coffee and a free bottle of Chaparra.  A very pleasant way of spending a morning in Santa Tecla, 15 minutes from my house.
 

What 40 lbs of coffee look like

Pollo Campero to Canada!

Ah, the good stuff.

I think everyone in Latin America knows how delicious Pollo Campero is (although a friend of mine calls it Pollo Con Pello). This unique Guatemalan/Salvadoran treat uses a special brining and flouring process and excellent and tasty, locally raised chicken to produce a terrific product. I think it was good enough to recently put KFC in El Salvador out of business.

My son has visited me here several times and loves the chicken. He once drove from Toronto to Florida to eat Pollo Campero (which has numerous franchises in the US). But the chicken doesn’t taste the same there, probably because the chickens here are less aggressively farmed and may be fresher. In fact, the grocery stores in El Salvador routinely sell locally raised chicken (that is smaller, yellower and not frozen) for $1.50 a lb while the giant, white and pre-frozen US chicken is sold at $1.00 a lb. I once bought three pieces of each chicken for grilling in a “taste-off” and was amazed that the local sample had an intense chicken flavour while the US import tasted watery and bland in comparison.

"Sharing the flavour with my friends, with my family, with the whole world" ... except for Canada

This is another reason why people travelling from the San Salvador airport to the US still purchase special large bags full of Pollo Campero at the airport even though they can get the fresh cooked version locally. And this is being done legally.

What would happen if you tried to bring the deliciously fried Pollo Campero into Canada? I did try on one occasion when my son asked for some chicken. I went to the San Salvador airport which is mostly run by Taca, the local carrier (recently bought out by the Colombian based Avianca and is being slowly and painfully debranded), and has a very busy Pollo Campero outlet with way too few tables upstairs. At lunch time, there is always a huge line up for chicken but, somehow, by the time the chicken is served, a table magically opens up or you can always ask to share a table. So I purchased 12 pieces of chicken, ate one in the restaurant (steaming hot and delicious), ate two more on the airplane (cooled down but still delicious), and declared the chicken to the customs official. Bam – or Squawk rather – off to a secondary customs check. I opened my bag and showed the 9 remaining pieces of chicken, sealed in a Ziploc bag, to the very polite officer. He said that I could not enter with the chicken. I mentioned that it was commercially prepared and fully cooked but he said no way. He did say that I could eat the chicken rather than surrendering it ... but I already had 3 pieces of chicken and was full!

So I had to tell my son that there was no fried chicken for him and he would have cried himself to sleep if he wasn’t 24 years old at the time.

The Chinese get to eat it too.

Now what happens if you don’t declare your friend chicken? Consider the sad case of Mario Castillo. He was in El Salvador visiting his family and before his flight, he was in the shower when his mother secreted 15 pieces of fried chicken with a stated approximate value of $18.00. The chicken was discovered by the crack Canadian Border Services Agency Officer on the night of 25 January 2012.

The attempted illegal importation of fried chicken was considered by the Agriculture and Agri-Food Administrative Monetary Penalties Regulations as a contravention of section 40 of the Health of Animals Regulations and classified as a “serious violation” which resulted in an $800 fine for Mario.

Mario had the choice of paying $400 within 15 days but he stuck to his guns and bad legal advice and decided to have his day in court. On 2 November 2012, he went before the Canada Agricultural Review Tribunal whose stellar adjudicators decided to throw out the case on a technical issue of Mario not being given “a reasonable opportunity to justify the importation of a meat product found [in] their bags.”

So justice for Mario and perhaps his mother could stop feeling so guilty about using her son as a fried chicken mule.

But wait a minute, slow day in the Canada Border Services Agency legal department and they decided to appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal - the second highest court in Canada! I better not find out that there is outside counsel involved who are charging the Canadian Government (and taxpayers) a huge hourly rate for this!

 The Federal Court of Appeal held the hearing in Toronto on 30 September 2013 and delivered their decision on 20 November 2013. See http://decisions.fca-caf.gc.ca/site/fca-caf/decisions/en/item/64703/index.do .  In a nutshell, Justices Sharlow, Mainville and Near decided that the appeal should be allowed, that this was an absolute liability violation and it was immaterial that his mother had packed the chicken without his knowledge (akin to the dog ate my homework defense) and that the tribunal erred in law in deciding that Mario should have been provided with a reasonable opportunity to justify his importation of fried chicken. What does that mean? Back to the Canada Agricultural Review Tribunal. Thankfully, no costs were ordered.

From infraction (sorry, “serious infraction”) to a federal appeal in less than two years - not bad Canadian legal system! Now let’s start a crowd funding drive to raise money to take this to the Supreme Court of Canada. IF YOU LOVE FRIED CHICKEN, DO NOT LET US DOWN.

Hmm, never mind. This stupid blog is enough work as it is.

Elliot about to attack a heaping plate of Pollo Campero.

But my son living in Canada does love the chicken. So how do you get the fried chicken past the Canada Border Services Agency? What permits or certificates could you obtain to import fried chicken? Or to paraphrase the appeals court decision, how do you satisfy a CBSA Officer, on reasonable grounds, that the chicken was processed in such a way that would prevent disease from coming into Canada?

So I went onto the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada government website and hunted around. Obviously, not easy to find guidance on this and the regs were no help so I decided to send them a message:

I am a Canadian lawyer living in El Salvador. My son has visited me on several occasions and loves a local fried chicken brand called Pollo Campero. They are very large with several hundred locations in Latin America, the US and internationally in Spain and China. It is legal for travellers to bring the cooked chicken from El Salvador to the United States and this frequently occurs with a restaurant in the San Salvador international airport providing special packaging for carrying on the chicken. But it appears that it is illegal to bring the chicken to Canada and I experienced it when I flew back one time and declared it - I was told that I could eat the chicken on the spot but would have to surrender the remaining chicken for disposal. A recent Federal Court of Canada decision http://decisions.fca-caf.gc.ca/site/fca-caf/decisions/en/item/64703/index.do adjudicated on the case of an individual who was apprehended entering Canada with fried chicken. They refer to certain exemptions at Part IV of the Health of Animals Regulations but these provisions are quite vague. The case mentions "CBSA Officer was not satisfied on reasonable grounds that the chicken was processed in such a way that would prevent disease from coming into Canada." How can one satisfy a CBSA Officer that commercially prepared fried chicken was processed to prevent disease from coming into Canada?

I also wrote to Pollo Campero on FB: 

Sabes que esta legal a traer Pollo Campero a EEUU pero esta illegal a importar a Canada. Porque y puedes hacer algo? Mira este caso en el segundo mas importante tribunal en Canada

http://decisions.fca-caf.gc.ca/site/fca-caf/decisions/en/item/64703/index.do

I will follow up when I hear back ... if I hear back.

Wow, all this talk of fried chicken is making me hungry. Guess what I am going to have for dinner!  And anyone looking for a great franchising opportunity in Canada ... this is it!

Hurricane Ida

It is now 48 hours after Hurricane Ida passed by Nicaragua and Honduras and managed to dump an enormous amount of rain on El Salvador. We knew that we were going to get some rain but no one had any idea of how much and this is probably why no alerts went out to vulnerable areas. This storm, at the tail end of a very quiet hurricane season, took us all by surprise.

On Saturday night we had driven out to the wedding of a friend’s daughter at their restaurant between Soyapango and Illopango. It had been raining off and on all for most of the day and there was a light drizzle on the way there. When we got there, it was raining very heavily and we debated whether to wait in the car until it had passed but after five minutes, it didn’t seem to be diminishing so we opened our umbrellas and managed to get in without getting too wet. We expected the rain to pass by but it kept raining and raining. People kept arriving and some didn’t have umbrellas and they were soaked from running the short distance from their parked cars. The music was playing quite loudly but I recall hearing the rain come down in some occasionally heavy bursts.

We left early at 11:00 and had to gingerly step to the car through water gushing down the street. MJ was driving since Fatima and I had had several drinks. The rain was continuing to come down very hard cutting down on visibility and when we got to the Carretera Panamericana there was a lot of flooding. MJ was kind of freaked out but Fatima and I have had a lot of experience driving through flooded streets after more than a decade in Havana. Fatima told her to drive down the middle of the road and I told her to keep a lot of space between us and the car in front in case we hit a deep pool and had to gun the engine through. A car can get through pretty deep water as long as the water doesn’t crest over the hood and flood the air intake and as long as you keep revving the engine so the water doesn’t go up the tailpipe.

We were making good progress and most vehicles were driving sensibly (except for the occasional idiot who was speeding and honking and passing cars). On the long hill up towards Soyapango on the opposite side of the highway, there was a lot of water coming down so cars and buses were having problems going upstream. We were heading down so it was a lot easier and no real problems until we hit the Molsa maiz plant. It is on the top of a big hill and there is a big, landscaped retaining wall about 40' high and a lot of it had come down and blocked 2-3 lanes of the road. What looked to be a small drainage pipe in the middle of the wall had become a huge hole and water was gushing through it. We were able to squeeze past the boulders and broken concrete and mounds of dirt to the other side. We drove slowly the rest of the way home and planned our route to stay on high ground. Still, you can’t avoid hills in San Salvador and there were many places where a the runoff turned roads into streams.

San Salvador and El Salvador is a country of volcanoes and valleys. The city itself is in the middle of several volcanoes and people live in the valleys, up the sides of some of the hills, and sometimes on top. Expansion is limited so some communities grow organically or planned developments are established in less than ideal areas. These would be at the bases of earth hills or near some of the streams and rivers that comprise some of the water runoffs in the city.

I think these pictures (from LA PRENSA/Salomón Vásquez) are of the

Rio Lempa that come down from San Vicente to the Costa del Sol.

Combine this with poor public announcements and tragedies like this will occur. I was watching TV on Saturday night and didn’t see any warnings of flash flooding. Mind you, in some of the poorer communities that were worst affected, they may not have had TV’s to watch.

Rio Lempa (I think) exiting into the Pacific at Costa del Sol

So far, over a hundred people have perished. Most of the deaths occurred in San Salvador and San Vicente which is east of the city. Flash flooding and mudslides took out several towns and communities, affecting both the very poor and very rich. Small huts and large weekend villas were destroyed.

Yesterday, the rains were lighter and the day was calm but for the police helicopters landing and taking off from behind our condo. And today is a beautiful sunny day.

This morning in San Salvador, beautiful and sunny

.
One of the girls working in our house lives in Illopango which is a municipality around the very large volcanic lake. Luckily she is on higher ground, like most people, and wasn’t affected except for a leaky roof. She did say that the rains flood the hills and it all pours into the lake and then the drainage stream floods out but the people living nearby know that is going to happen so they take precautions.

Those less fortunate had their houses flooded or swept away. In the ultimate definition of losing "everything", some people not only lost their homes but the land beneath them. What do you do when the pretty little stream near your house turns into a raging river that takes away your house and everything you own and when you get back, there isn’t even any land to rebuild on? Well, you get a bit of help and get on with it.

The definition of losing "everything"

I have had some great responses from my Good Smoke Bad Smoke mini-campaign. Some people with the American Legion (who will be out in full force for the Veteran’s Day celebration in El Salvador this week) are interested in the idea and may get involved. So please send those funds to me and I’ll go out and buy a bunch of stoves and we’ll get them out to some of the affected areas.

On a final note, don't think that El Salvador is a disaster ridden third world country. Sure we have the occasional natural disaster (hurricanes and earthquakes) but this is a beautiful country full of resilient people. I hope no one is dissuaded from visiting this amazing country. So far I have Elliot, Rene, Nancy, Nad, Deb, Jeff and family coming down this winter. I hope everyone else thinking about it will come down too.

A New Life in El Salvador

A view of the city

After being a fan of numerous blogs, I've finally decided that I wasn't wasting enough time reading other people's writings and have decided to throw in my two cents. I am also interested in discussing what life is like in El Salvador for people interested in a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.
I think Mexico is pretty full up (especially for anyone interested in an ocean front property), Guatemala doesn't have the nicest beaches, Costa Rica is seeing the beginnings of a backlash against foreigners, Panama is very hot and humid, so I think El Salvador may be next in line. Very affordable property, great standard of living (especially after spending 13 years living in Cuba), all the comforts of home, very localized crime (unlike Guatemala City, for example), and great people.

The view from our apartment
So a bit about myself ... I am a Japanese born Korean, moved to Toronto when I was 3, went to school there and then moved to Havana in '95 for work, met a wonderful Salvadoran woman, started visiting El Salvador in '97, and decided to move here in September of 2007.
When I first came to SAL, things were smaller and quieter. Less rampant American commercialism and only Metrocentro and Gallerias (two big malls) were open and only one ATM in the entire country. Now we have BK's, McD's, Pizza Hut, and KFC everywhere ... along with Tony Roma's, Wendy's, Papa John's ... list goes on. Can't say it is the Yanks' fault since I think all of these franchises have been brought in by wealthy Salvadoran families/companies that want an easy way to make money (more on this later). Roads were good then (and even better now), prices quite a bit lower, crime was much better with fewer mara/gang deportees from the US living here (although still a lot of guns and matériel from the civil war being used inappropriately - like a grenade being thrown into a bank), and people had less money and were less familiar with the comsumer lifestyle of North America.

My son at Punta Roca
Visiting over the years, I have noticed more and more franchises, more big malls, and now thousands of ATMs everywhere. The middle class is growing - which bodes very well for this country - although poverty is still huge at 35%. The upper class is still making a lot of money and are more conspicuous in the Porsche Cayennes, Ferraris, and their helicopters. There are a lot more maquiladoras or maquilas (factories using cheap labour to manufacture or assemble for export) with many being in textiles.
How are things trending? A lot will depend on the election tomorrow. I am not for either party and can see the pros and cons of both. Regardless, this isn't my decision but one the Salvadoran people will make. I just hope it is fair with little violence.
So back to what I want to talk about in this blog. Can foreigners come here to find a new life? I read and occasionally contribute to the Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree Travel Forum http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/forum.jspa?forumID=12 and there seem to be various people who find themselves in this country - be it a long stay traveling through the region, or for work, with NGO's, church groups, or to retire. In my case, along with most of the expats I know living here, it came about due to a relationship with a Salvadoran, a few visits to this amazing country, and then the decision to move here full time. We have escaped the cold and the rat race of North America (and remember what Lily Tomlin used to say, even if you win the race, you're still a rat) and live in a country where many people leave from, risking danger to go illegally to the country which we easily left to make money for their family's survival. But we are fortunate to have savings or jobs that grant us a very good standard of living in a country with a low cost of living.
More on all these subjects later!