Jan\/Feb 2009<\/p>\n
Nicaraguan coffee growers are preserving ecosystems that nurture banana trees, sloths, and a new breed of tourists<\/p>\n
The mist was clearing, revealing forested hilltops that mark the edge of a protected national forest in Nicaragua’s northern highlands. With a trio of toucans in a tall tree looking down their long, green banana beaks at us, I walked with Flora Montenegro, a coffee farmer, as she inspected her crop. Montenegro is always smiling. Her black hair flows in a bushy ponytail from under her baseball cap. She is descended from the German settlers who first brought coffee to this region, and her blue eyes scanned the scene around us: coffee and more coffee, shade trees protecting it from the sun, and above us the verdant forest. I’ve been drinking coffee for years. I love the way a warming mug of the stuff marks my daily transition to wakefulness. But I knew there was more to my morning jolt than just caffeine. I had come to the mountains of Nicaragua to peer into coffee’s murky depths.<\/p>\n
I’m not alone. At its most precious, coffee is becoming like wine: attracting connoisseurs so obsessed with terroir that they adjust their travels accordingly, eager to experience the rustic–and incredibly warm–hospitality of small coffee farms. As I discovered, Central American growers are increasingly eager to accommodate.<\/p>\n
Read it on Sierra’s site…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jan\/Feb 2009 Nicaraguan coffee growers are preserving ecosystems that nurture banana trees, sloths, and a new breed of tourists The mist was clearing, revealing forested hilltops that mark the edge of a protected national forest in Nicaragua’s northern highlands. With … (more…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-magazines","category-sierra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dicum.com\/clips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}