A Conversation with Cesar Marin, Our Biodynamic Farmer in Peru
Over the past week, we’ve had the pleasure of having Cesar Marin visit us from Peru. Cesar is the son of Dagoberto Marin, the biodynamic farmer we work with in Peru. Cesar spent the past week at our Viking Roasting Centre, meeting the entire team and learning about coffee cupping, roasting and brewing methods. He will also be spending about a week on Salt Spring Island to get a sense of what it’s like to work at our Ganges cafe. Upon meeting Cesar, we were instantly struck by his warmth, enthusiasm, and his desire to learn, and we knew that this would be a meaningful visit for everyone involved.
A bit of background on Cesar:
Although he has an educational background in Business and Foreign Trade, he always had a great appreciation for organic and biodynamic agricultural methods. Seeing his father’s passion for a biodynamic, wholly self-sustaining way of life, Cesar recognized how much patience and commitment it takes to continually improve the health of the soil, year after year (as his father does). Eventually, this recognition grew into a deep interest in the culture of drinking coffee, so he began doing cuppings with friends who have a roastery in Lima, and furthered his own coffee education through his network of barista friends. He even started conducting seminars to teach others how to cup, brew and store coffee properly. Cesar’s vision was to help educate his community, and to promote a holistic, organic way of producing coffee that’s untainted by chemicals. As he succintly states, “quality is always connected with ecology”.
We’ll be sharing more detail around Cesar’s visit, so stay tuned. Also, he will be at our Ganges Cafe on Salt Spring Island this coming Tuesday May 21, from 3-4PM for a meet and greet session. He’ll be preparing Peru coffee (from his family’s farm), and everyone is welcome.
For now, we’ll leave you with an interesting fact: Cesar is friends with Roberto Caldas, the current Peruvian Barista Champion (in fact, Roberto stayed at Cesar’s family farm for 2 weeks to learn about biodynamic agriculture). Roberto quickly realized that there was much more to this farm than just coffee, and feeling the energy that comes from biodynamic farming, he decided to order 70 lbs. of Cesar’s family’s coffee to use in his championship presentation.
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