Greetings from Mykanos.

It’s been quite a while since you last heard from me, and I imagine some of you were counting your blessings not to have to even consider whether wasting time reading my ramblings would be worth it. For those more tolerant, or with more spare time, I can assure you that my tardiness is merely the result of being a bit busy.

For starters, I’m writing another book … a novel this time, fiction.

Fiction you might ask? Do you write fiction?

Well the fact is that I have been working in the corporate sector for more than three decades so, yes, I have plenty of experience in writing fiction. And regarding it as fiction makes it much easier for people to accept some of the episodes and instances that occur in the book. They would never believe such things actually occurred in real life.

For the moment I am leaving my two principals discussing matters over dinner at La Carbonara restaurant in Rome, after which Francisco will travel on to the Excelsior Vittoria hotel in Sorrento, while Octavio returns to his studies at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy.

This brief pause will allow me to fill you in what has been happening here in the bush.

We are just finishing La Traviesa, the small coffee harvest, which normally runs through April/May. This year it started a bit earlier, probably because of the rain, which ripens the coffee cherries quicker.

We have had a lot of rain courtesy of La Niña weather phenomenon. We can’t compete with the intensity and volume of rain suffered in many places, such as the eastern coast of Australia, but we have had quite enough and coffee trees have been lost in the resulting landslides. Fortunately they have been small on our farms but elsewhere in Colombia roads have been blocked, houses have been buried or destroyed and lives lost. Just up the mountain from us, at the entrance to the town of Risaralda, a house was swept down the hillside in the middle of the night with two sleeping people in it. One was the lady of the house and the other was her daughter’s boyfriend. He dropped by to see his girlfriend but she was out. The rain was so heavy mother suggested he stay the night. He agreed, with tragic results.

The heavy rain, apart from soaking the soil and making it sodden and unstable also highlighted holes in our tiled roof, which is more than a century old. For more than a week we had Ruben, Luis and Diego straightening, securing and replacing tiles, and where necessary the guadua (bamboo) supports, working right around and across the roof, but not before we had a major leak in the kitchen, one above my desk in my office, and another above the bed in the guest room, which was inhabited at the time. The leaks were intermittent and of varying volume; it all depended on the force of the rain and from which direction the wind was blowing.

Ruben is a builder with whom we have done much construction. He was involved in the original renovations and extensions here at Mykanos, and he and his assistants are currently involved in our latest project. I was hoping it would be ready to unveil by now, but not quite yet. Suffice to say we have extended and renovated what was once our outside kitchen / dining room / garage. Its roof was previously a secadora or coffee drying terrace. Now that terrace is twice the size and has become the floor of something completely different. At the moment Adriano is painting the downstairs walls.

Chatting with Luis, Ruben’s chief assistant, revealed that he has been living with his girlfriend for more than nine years and they have a two-year-old child. Nothing very notable one might think, except for the fact that Luis is 23, and his girlfriend is 22.

The cosecha was good. Smaller, but with coffee prices much higher we did quite well, which is just as well because, as you all know only too well, thanks to Covid disruption, travel and transport impediments, over reliance on the global supply chain and Just In Time assembly practices, and the war in Ukraine, everything is getting more expensive, from the energy we use to the food on the table.

This is particularly the case with fertilisers.

Like farmers everywhere we use fertiliser to feed the coffee and boost production. A year ago, a 50-kilo bag of fertiliser cost 75,000 Colombian pesos. Three weeks ago it was costing 185,000 per 50kgs, which last week had risen to 250,000, and is around 300,000 now. By the end of the year it is predicted there will be no fertiliser available for any price.

Thanks to the cosecha we were able to buy some semitrailer loads of fertiliser at various price points, and we have it stored for use this year and next. But in line with possible shortages in the future, and more importantly in line with our desire to move to nutrients for the coffee that are less linked to the petrochemical sector, we are working with an agronomist who is developing an organic fertiliser based on plantain trees, of which we have a lot. We believe in her vision and expertise and are trialling it at La Fé. We had already been experimenting with fertiliser extracted from seaweed (kelp I believe) but this one from plantain trees (which are a natural companion plant to coffee trees) emanates from closer to home. Neither of the organic fertilisers is cheap but they have a future, which petrochemicals do not.

And of course we are not the only ones seeking to evolve time honoured local practices.

We are recognising a new, younger and more sophisticated attitude towards drinking coffee blossoming here in Anserma. Often it is the work of those we once knew as ‘kids’, now returning from studying overseas and bringing back things they learnt to love in Europe, the U.S. and Australia. A number have opened small specialist coffee bars with trained baristas and an arsenal of technology and utensils. They are still very much a niche interest, as their good coffee is much more expensive than the ‘pasilla’ (second grade, not fit for export) everyone has grown up drinking, but the niche is growing slowly.

We are also seeing a gradually increasing number of new, younger, coffee growers. They are not inexperienced opportunists who have decided to get into coffee now that it has become trendy and more profitable, but the sons of cafeteros, life long coffee farmers, who have decided to retire and spend more time in their hammocks.

In many cases, none of the children of cafeteros want to live in the bush, preferring city life and careers, and the fathers have to sell their farms to reduce the demands on themselves and their partners of being agriculturists, especially if they are old and have younger wives. That is how we acquired some of our newer farms; to help older coffee growers in estate planning.

In some cases however, the sons or daughters, who have been living abroad, come back to take over, bringing new ideas picked up further afield.

A new friend, Juan David, is a good example. He had been living in London for 22 years, where he and his partner Maria Luisa had a restaurant in Elephant & Castle. Maria Luisa’s roast chicken won an award as the best Roast Chicken in South London. She tells me she based it on a recipe from the Dominican Republic. The Covid pandemic shut all restaurants in London and in 2020 they came back to Colombia, where Juan David’s father gave him half his farm. Father’s deal was that Juan David could have title to, and everything that came from, the half he gave to his son, on the understanding that Juan David would also run father’s half and give him the proceeds.

Not only does Juan David look after the two farms and raise and produce good coffee, he has, with his cousin, recently opened a gourmet coffee bar and ‘picnic’ restaurant in Anserma called Salsipuedes, which means ‘Get out if you can’. The food is good, the music is loud, there is plenty of space for dancing, and Juan David likes to preserve his English so is always good for a chat.

Also always good for a chat is our first visitor since December 2019. Kevin is a writer, journalist, communication specialist, good friend and Tottenham Hotspur supporter. He lives in London and has been a regular visitor for many years. He was the one sleeping in the guest room the night the roof leaked. Quite coincidentally, he was also that last visitor in 2019 and it was very good to see him again.

He was interested to see the changes since he was last here and was the first of our friends to see San Antonio, one of our four new farms.

Needless to say he seemed quite impressed. Adriano and I hope you will be too when you visit.

Love from him and me,

Barry