I love coffee. Anyone who knows me well knows I LOVE coffee. When I was still working full-time, I used to bring individual bags of coffee back to my employees as gifts. I LOVE coffee.
Generally, I have it three times a day: a cup in the morning when I get up, a cup at 3:00 in the afternoon and a cup after dinner at around 10:00 PM. Here in Puerto Rico that means café con leche, the Puertorican version of a latte, where steamed milk is poured over steamed espresso. If it’s the weekend (and we are planning to go out) I will sometimes make café Cuba
no, which is steamed espresso warmed with melted sugar in a saucepan and served demitasse. I LOVE coffee.
Which is one of the reasons I LOVE Puerto Rico. We grow a LOT of coffee here. And not just good coffee. Some off the best coffee in the world!
So, you might ask: “If the coffee in Puerto Rico is so good and they grow so much of it—why is it so hard to buy Puertorican coffee outside of Puerto Rico?” And that’s a good question.
Puertoricans also LOVE coffee; so much so that demand outpaces supply more often than not; and even some of the largest producers have to import coffee to meet demand. But the biggest problem with supply is not the plants, or the weather, or even pernicious insects-- its labor.
Despite high unemployment on the island, it is very difficult to find pickers in Puerto Rico. A drive through coffee producing highlands will show acres upon acres of coffee plants that perhaps as high as 50%, may never be picked in time for cleaning, roasting and ultimately consumption.
The coffee crop here is worth tens of millions a year, and over the decades the government has entertained many ideas up to and including a guest worker program to attract pickers. Perhaps Puerto Rico will be the U.S. possession that shows the rest of the country how a responsible agricultural guest worker program can work? Who knows? I for one am willing to try though.
Did I happen to mention that I LOVE coffee?
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