Sculpting Coffee Tony Tedeschi

Sculpting Coffee

Photo by Coke Riera Oxigeno Magazine

Sculpting Coffee

Icame to recognize Matias as an artist, who began by creating his foundational brew, then continually sculpting and shaping variations on the theme.

By Tony Tedeschi

When Matias Zeledon died on September 10th the world lost the consummate artist among gourmet coffee growers. And I lost a dear friend. To Matias, creating his coffee was not simply the product of the business he founded some 20 years earlier, but the ultimate expression of his art. The concept of what constitutes art is far too limited if we think only in terms of painting and sculpture, music, literature, the generally accepted creative fields. I see art in a limitless landscape of endeavors, where creativity turns anything that crafts its own version of clay into its own innovative pottery.

This is a story about the art of sculpting coffee and one gifted artist’s mastery of his medium. It is based on a friendship of more than 20 years and notes taken over the course of multiple visits to Costa Rica as a freelance journalist writing for newspapers, magazines and websites. No matter what assignment took me to Costa Rica, I always found time for Matias. He was a man of culture, a wonderful raconteur, a delightful conversationalist, as well as an astute businessman, who built his company with a deep respect for its place within the ecological context of his country. “Down To Earth,” he called it, with every nuance implied by that appellation.

I met Matias in 1998, in his former incarnation as an adman. We’d been vectored together at the intersection of our professions. I was writing one of the special travel sections I did for each issue of Audubonmagazine; Matias was doing marketing for a former president of Costa Rica, who owned a small property with the potential to attract ecotourists, particularly bird-watchers. Audubon was pretty much the go-to magazine for bird-watchers. I was headed to Expotur, a travel trade show on the outskirts of Costa Rica’s capital of San José, a gathering to make multiple contacts for my special magazine sections. My hotel

accommodations and roundtrip airfare were being arranged by the PR agency for the Costa Rica Tourism Board. I got a call the day before my departure, advising me that the PR people could only secure me a place on the waitlist for my return travel. With images of spending hours, if not days, trying to get an airline seat home, I informed the PR contacts I would be canceling my trip. Two hours after that phone conversation, I got a call from the agency informing me to pick up roundtrip business class tickets when I got to the airline counter at Kennedy Airport the next day. I had no idea what had changed my situation.

When I arrived at the travel show, Matias introduced himself. He told me when he informed the former president that the writer from Audubon had canceled, the president would have none of that. He insisted upon having me visit his property, resulting in the PR agency doing a rapid oneeighty on my transportation requirements. Along with the former president, multiple tourism operators benefitted from the section I wrote for Audubon.

I have always admired people with a bias for action. Matias and I were dear friends ever since. Lure ofthe Family Business Matias’s family has worked in coffee since the1880s. Although he began college as an agriculture major at the University of Costa Rica, he broke away from the family tradition to study marketing at the State University of New York in Fredonia. But after a decade at this new career the pull of the family business drew him back.

“I guess I could be defined as a coffee farmer at heart, who spent 15 years on loan to the advertising industry,” he said. “I went back to my roots at age 40, looking to produce the best coffee on earth while caring for the environment as well. The Tarrazú Region

High in the mountains of Costa Rica’s central cordillera is the Tarrazú region, the country’s premiere coffee producing area. Among connoisseurs, it is one of the top three regions in the world for the production of coffee, along with Kona, Hawaii and Blue Mountain, Jamaica. Matias’s Down to Earth farm is located in the town of Providencia, in Dota, one of the region’s three counties. Dota occupies the highest part of the Tarrazú region, averaging 900 feet (300 meters) higher than the other two counties. Coffee beans grown at high altitude are designated “strictly hard bean,” recognized as ideal for gourmet coffee because their density holds aroma and flavor, which translates to uniquely citrus acidity and a complex combination of fruit and smooth chocolate notes. This coffee type represents the classic, clean, Central American cup. With such cachet going for it, Down to Earth utilizes both the name of its county and region, i.e. Dota Tarrazú, in its marketing.

“Dota in Tarrazú produces very distinctive coffee,” Matias wrote on his blog, “with aroma and flavor that make it unique. This creates a smoother, more balanced coffee than is even the norm in the rest of Tarrazú. But don’t get me wrong, we are happy to be part of Tarrazú. Among true connoisseurs, who know the virtues of the Dota coffee, our region, Tarrazú, is a

Ripe coffee cherries

recognized name, so there are benefits to market our coffee under the Dota Tarrazú umbrella.”

Aside from the gifts of terrain and climate, there is the hands-on aspect of the Tarrazú coffee farmers. More than 90% of the region’s coffee is produced on familyowned-and-operated farms. In absolute terms, there are 6,600 farms averaging 10 acres each. Of these, 6,000 are worked exclusively by the family members who own them. Hands on here is a matter of family pride, oaths taken to ancestors.

“You don’t just drink Tarrazú coffee,” Matias said, “you commune with generations, some still here, some long gone, who celebrated the soil they were given and the plant that would call out its riches.”

Seldom content with status quo, Matias began an effort to bring back the Villalobos varietal, an heirloom coffee unique to Costa Rica. Villalobos trees are highly productive, resistant to winds and poor soil, making them easy to cultivate in high elevations like the central mountains of Costa Rica.

“Villalobos was a lost treasure,” he wrote on his blog, “the product of about 80 aging trees we rescued in our La Piedra Estate. All our new growth after that was from our own Villalobos seeds. I am proud to perpetuate the quality that put Costa Rica on the world quality coffee map since the late 1800’ s. With our Villalobos nursery, we planted a 16-acre chapter of coffee history.” Roasting as an Artform

Suggest to any chef that his cuisine is something less than edible art and you may be fending off blows – perhaps physical as well verbal. After choosing the best location to grow your beans, roasting provides the nuance in the art of sculpting coffee.

Despite his family history, Matias, was new to taking on the challenge of roasting his coffee beans.

“In 2000, when I started growing my beans I did not do the roasting personally,” he explained. “I used to take it to a roaster and, even though I was there all the time and got involved in the process, the roasting was somebody else’s craft, not mine. After a few years at this, I decided that to master my product completely I had to roast it myself. Once I got into it, I felt I had found my true calling: shaping the flavor of coffee in 15 to 20 minutes of roasting. Despite how good the coffee grows and how much care you put into that process, if the roasting is not good, then the coffee quality that you’ve worked for is ruined, or at least diminished.”

The Science of Roasting

So, how can the roasting affect the coffee both positively or negatively?

“Roasting is the key factor in driving the bitter taste in coffee beans,” explains Dr. Thomas Hofmann, a German expert in food chemistry and molecular sensory science at the Technical University of Munich. “So the stronger you roast the coffee, the more harsh it tends to get. Prolonged roasting triggers a cascade of chemical reactions that lead to the formation of the most intense bitter compounds. The roasting process changes the chemistry of the coffee bean.”

Matias took the advice very seriously.

“The lighter roasts are the better cups of coffee, technically speaking,” he explained. “On the other hand, I tell people it doesn’t matter if you swim against that current, you like what you like. But if you have a chance, give the lighter roasts a chance. If the light roast might be too much of a change, the medium is the perfect point to start. Our coffee is reddish like tea because it is 100% pure, highlands, strictly hard bean coffee. The only reason coffee will turn black is if there are additives in it. So, even though it looks light and watered down, our coffee will give you a satisfying cup every time.”

Vectoring

Over the years, I have become more and more conscious of fellow aliens from my planet vectored together here on earth where we recognize each other in some sort of extradimensional space. The feeling of recognition is often gone in a whisper –sometimes barely remembered – but the relationship has been created or, more likely, reestablished. The girl who sat opposite me at a table on a lawn in Urbana, Illinois, at the only ice-cream social I’ve ever been to and generated the immediate sign of recognition, which created the relationship that has lasted a lifetime. The woman who sat down next to me at the bar on a press junket in Tobago, looked me in the eye with such warmth and told me I needed the music again, with no idea that as a teenager, I’d played guitar and wrote music for an early rock ‘n’ roll band, and her warmth launched a return to writing and performing original songs and eventually the creation of a musical play. The bestselling author whose introductory smile began a mentorship, then more than four decades of collaboration on books, newsletters, magazines; but it was the smile of recognition that established the connection. The painter who read my history in the muddy lines of the coffee residue in my cup, then she told me who I was, who I am, who I am destined to become.

And then there’s Matias, bless his soul.

Can one feel the pull toward connection with the connector a cup of coffee that is pure art? Was my connection with the adman just to establish the relationship, which would continue to pull us together via the warmth of a two-decades-long friendship.? As Matias’s daughter, Juliana, expressed so elegantly in her eulogy to her father, “To me, a cup of coffee doesn’t taste just like coffee. It tastes like home, it tastes like kindness, like greeting a stranger with a smile and exchanging stories.”

As someone who has been importing his coffee since he opened for business, I came to recognize Matias as an artist, who began by creating his foundational brew, then continually sculpting and shaping variations on the theme. You gotta know he’s back on the home planet scouting locations high in the central mountains to establish his coffee fields and show the angels what they were missing while he was away. I mean, come on, folks, Matias named his company “Down To Earth.”

I rest my case.

Dota/Tarrazú, Costa Rica