The Quest for the perfect cup of Coffee
Independent Java Drinker by Lucretia Voigt
For those who believe that coffee is the elixir of the gods, your long wait for the messiah is over. On

Saturday, he will impart his knowledge

at the Nantucket Atheneum Great Hall. As an added bonus, he is bringing coffee to share.

Dr. James Hayes-Bohanan is a coffee guru. When he wakes up in the morning, he grinds his coffee beans in an antique hand grinder. He brings the water to a rolling boil, turns the heat off and waits two minutes for it brew truly great coffee. Even though as a resident of Massachusetts he enjoys the cold, he cradles the French press in a towel to keep it warm.

For Hayes-Bohanan, enjoying a transcendent cup of coffee is akin to basking in the glow of a masterpiece. "My wife and I were viewing a video of a barista competition, and at the end I actually started to cry," he said with a sheepish timbre in his voice. "My wife was laughing at me. I said 'Look how much these people care about what they are doing, how devoted they are.' The DVD was produced by people I met

in Nicaragua who strongly support farmers. A good barista is someone who knows the company who produces the coffee they are brewing."

Hayes-Bohanan did not start out as a coffee activist. His journey began as an undergraduate when a friend talked him into taking a class being taught by a professor who had been to the Amazon. "I decided I wanted to go off and save the Amazon. I switched majors to environmental geography, minored in Latin American studies, took all the science classes, and went off to the Amazon and did my dissertation," he said.

He eventually had to return to the genteel world of stoplights and traffic jams. In 1997 he ventured to Bridgewater State College as an environmental geographer with a specialty in Latin America. "I teach a majority load of environmental geography classes. I occasionally get to teach a class on Latin America," he explained. "For my main freshmen environmental geography class, I use a textbook with an example of a pencil. It asks you to look at a pencil and think about what is in the pencil, where that comes from, the lead, the wood, and think about what that means. I would rather ask about a cup of coffee. What goes into making your cup of coffee? What came together to make this possible from the water, the coffee beans, the sugar, the Styrofoam? What is it that makes people in some other place send you these things? I focused on the human and natural resources, the difference between renewable and nonrenewable components. This kept growing so that it became the entire first two lectures of my class." Hayes-Bohanan is not one to merely scratch the surface of a topic.

Eventually Hayes-Bohanan's coffee lectures became an entire course. "Equal Exchange had come into my Latin America geography class to talk about their work. I thought that maybe they could help me find some coffee farmers in Latin America. They put me in touch with a co-op in Nicaragua that was just starting to do agro-ecotourism supported by Lutheran World Relief. It's rustic tourism with farm families and is mainly set up for church groups who have gotten involved in fair trade." The wheels of Hayes-Bohanan's ardent mind began to whirl in a coffee-induced frenzy and the Geography of Coffee was the consummation.

Hayes-Bohanan is co-director of the U.S./Brazil Consortium in Urban Development and teaches a study abroad program where students travel to Nicaragua. "We have a regular tour operator in Managua to do typical tourism stuff there, but then we go into Matagalpa and we just learn the whole Nicaragua side of the business, from the field to the way the co-ops are organized, through the way the coffee processing goes in the country. They export green beans. They don't roast them in their country," he explained.

Preaching the gospel of fair trade, Hayes-Bohanan focuses on educating people not only about coffee but about the people who produce the beans. He uses coffee to provide a context for "understanding natural resource conservation and exploitation, equity in international trade, the geographic displacement of environmental problems, and global patterns of colonization and post-colonial economic relationships," according to his Web site.

His devotion to coffee is matched by his enthusiasm for teaching. On Friday, November 9 he will bestow his coffee knowledge upon the culinary arts students at Nantucket High School. "I have talked to a couple of other high school groups. My understanding is that the culinary arts program at the high school in Nantucket is very important because it provides a way for kids to stay here by working at high-end restaurants. High schools that size usually wouldn't have [a culinary arts program]," he said with admiration. "I give a short version of fair trade, then bring a bunch of coffee makers and have [the students] making the coffee. I show them that you can tell a difference from coffee from different regions. I bring a bunch of coffees from Nicaragua and coffees from other parts of the world. I have them brew coffee at different grind levels, tap water versus filtered water."

True to his nature, Hayes-Bohanan has not stopped his research where the coffee bean begins. Last week he was at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. meeting with a biochemist from the Institute for Coffee Studies where the medical aspects of coffee are studied. "There are 450 compounds in coffee," he explained. "If you brew [coffee] at a low temperature, you don't get enough of them out. If you brew it too high, you get all the complexities but also the bitter oils. You get the same effect if you grind it too fine. For a fine grind, you brew at high temperatures in a very short amount of time. You brew at lower temperatures for a longer period of time with a coarse grind." And just in case you were wondering why that cup of coffee from the local coffee shop tastes better than the one you make at home, according to Hayes-Bohanan Mr. Coffee coffeemakers brew at 185 degrees, but to get the best coffee you need to brew it at 200 to 205 degrees.

You would think that Hayes-Bohanan was coming close to exhausting the stores of knowledge that exist surrounding coffee. Not so. "Just yesterday morning I learned that coffee is being produced in Rondonia in the western Amazon," he

said. "I'm still learning." I

- Dr. James Hayes-Bohanan will be at the Nantucket Atheneum, 1 India Street, on Saturday, Nov. 10 from 7-9 p.m. for a lecture and coffee tasting. Bring your favorite ceramic coffee mug because, according to Hayes- Bohanan, "Coffee tastes best when served in a ceramic mug, not Styrofoam." Event is free and open to the public. Styrofoam cups will be provided for those who forget their own mug.