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Wonder what the average day for a coffee farmer in Honduras is? Our partner Andrea Rubí, who grew up on her family's Fincas Ruland farms and now manages their specialty farm, Finca Ruland 2, transports us to the farm to share a day with us.[caption id="attachment_19337" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Andrea pictured with her mother, Suyapa and sisters Angie and Brenda[/caption]5:00 amWhen a new coffee harvest begins at Fincas Ruland, our obligations start very early morning, since the coffee pickers begin to arrive at the farms at 6:00 am. My day begins with a good cup of coffee because the harvest in Honduras takes much of our winter; they are very cold mornings. The good thing about living on the farm is that I'm never late for work! My mother, together with my sisters, will have already distributed the work of the day, and each one knows the area to cover. Usually I take care of the coffees on Finca Ruland 2, our specialty farm.6:00 amAt this hour there is a group of coffee pickers ready to be taken to Finca Ruland 2. It takes us 30 minutes to get to Finca Ruland 2, and the weather changes completely on the way up, since we go from being 950 meters above sea level where we meet at Finca Ruland 1 to 1400 meters above sea level on Finca Ruland 2. Once we arrive, the coffee pickers get ready with their baskets to start their day and head to the area where the coffee of the day will be hand picked. We are always reminding them of the importance of picking the ripe fruit, and being careful with coffee plants. At this time of the morning, the mountain of Santa Barbara is still covered in mist, you can still hear the singing of the birds, and a cold breeze that runs across our faces. 8:00 amUsually after making sure that everything and everyone is settled, I return to Finca Ruland 1 for breakfast and then continue with the work of the day. Finca Ruland 1 is the oldest farm where we have built all the infrastructure to process our coffee, after having my breakfast there is a full staff on our de-pulping machines, washing coffee, and managing coffee being dried on raised beds.9:00 am – MiddayDuring this time of the day, you will always find me in these areas above supervising the process of coffee, and once de-pulped, in the areas of fermentation, washing tanks, and drying. There is always a lot to do. It's at this stage where mistakes can be made and spoil the coffee harvested from the previous day, or it is where we can grow those magical flavors behind our coffees. We try to give leadership and decision-making input to our workers to examine the criteria they have when a situation arises. This is also how they learn from coffee and not only come and do the work, but because they know the importance to manage times, temperatures, and separate coffees by picked dates and varieties. 12:00 pmIt's our lunch break and I go home to eat something. There's not always time to sit down and grab a meal—there are days when a large volume of coffee is handled since there are two farms producing at the same time, so when we're caught up in so much work, one of us prepares food at home and takes it to wherever we are, or we enter the house for something quick and get back out.1:00 pm – 2:00 pmAlthough I am in charge of Finca Ruland 2 and the coffee process. I am always available to help my mother and my sisters with what comes from Finca Ruland 1. My mother has always liked to walk along the trails of the farm, closely supervising the coffee plantation that’s being hand-picked and always motivating the pickers. It is worth mentioning that our house is built in the middle of Finca Ruland 1, therefore we are surrounded by coffee! Living on the farm makes us more committed to people, because we look closely at their needs and daily concerns, It makes us see the reality that hits us as a country, and allows us to keep on top of everything. We become an octopus, as in full hands on, as my mother says: we are everywhere. 2:00 pmI prepare to return to Finca Ruland 2. My mother and my sisters are getting ready because at this time there are usually coffee pickers ready to measure how much coffee they’ve picked during the day in Finca Ruland 1 and we are in charge of receiving the coffee picked daily.Sometimes one of my sisters or a trusted collaborator comes with me to Finca Ruland 2. When I arrive, the coffee plantation is still being picked, which gives me time to take pictures of them or the farm, I supervise what they have done during the day, I talk with the supervisor of the farm, and we square up jobs or ideas for the next day. 4:00 pmThe pickers start to bring the coffee they’ve picked throughout the day for it to be measured. With their help, we measure and load the truck. Once we're ready, we head back to Finca Ruland 1, where we unload the coffee and it is put in the hoppers of the de-pulping machine to leave this coffee in the fermentation tanks to work on next day. 6:00 pmAt this time, since Finca Ruland 1 grows conventional coffee, therefore has more coffee volume, there are still pickers who take advantage of the last remaining rays of sunlight to continue picking, and we have to wait for them to receive the coffee. This coffee is taken to a coffee de-pulper in a village 15 minutes from the house, as our own wet mill is usually busy processing the specialty coffee from Finca Ruland 2. While some collaborators are waiting for the Finca Ruland 2 coffee to be ejected, others are loading the trucks with the Finca Ruland 1 coffee for it to be taken to pulp out.We don’t have a specific clock-out time since there are days that we have finished at 8:00 pm, and there are some other days that it's 10:00 pm and we are still at the wet mills. Usually work ends for us when the work area is clean and ready for the next day. The world of coffee can be very exhausting during the harvest—not only physically but also mentally. It takes long and heavy work days, which are made up for by the great work team that Fincas Ruland have which one way or another motivates us and helps us with our duties and underscore our commitment to offering excellent coffees for our customers.

What's it like to oversee a busy coffee company's lifeblood—the roasting of the actual beans? Amaris Gutierrez-Ray is Joe Coffee's Roasting Operations Manager, a job that calls upon everything from paperwork to palate to, of course, heavy lifting. Here's what a typical roasting day looks like for Amaris. 8:00am I start roasting coffee Mondays and Wednesdays beginning at 6:00am, but my Thursday shift is a small luxury in my week: it starts at 11am, so I can get in both a little extra sleep and also a morning yoga class before heading to our roasting space at the Pulley Collective in Red Hook. I have a beautifully easy downhill bike ride from where I live in Sunset Park to the yoga studio in South Slope, and after class I can coast down another hill straight to the Liberty Warehouse pier on the water in the sunshine. As I ride I think about the comment my yoga teacher made on how yoga, as a metaphor for life, involves directly engaging with facing or feeling discomfort, and that rings very true today as I take off my helmet and walk into the waterfront warehouse where we roast. On hot days, we maximize cooling by keeping our front doors and back bay open, and employ a strategic frenzy of fans to bring in breezes off the water. But that’s all we have in terms of climate control so summertime is one giant opportunity to learn from ourselves and engage with discomfort. 11:00am On a normal Thursday I jump straight into setting up our production cupping, but today is Production Roaster Roberta Duarte’s birthday so I sneakily sidle up to Jake Kirkpatrick, Production Operations Manager, to confirm he’s ordered birthday pizza, which we present to her with a not-very-stable candle. We work in a somewhat isolated part of Brooklyn, with the nearest lunch option being the Fairway across the mini-peninsula, so the whole team is pumped to have pizza today. Mid-day here is the beginning of our Thursday symphony: many moving parts weaving in and out, with Jake and Lee Harrison, our Director of Roasting, at hand in case tempo dies down and they can help step it up. The production closers haven’t started yet, but most of the team is here already and is packing retail on the two weigh-and-fill machines, and just getting started filling up 5lb bags with a massive automated bulk bagging machine. Greg, our Shipping and Receiving Lead, is knee-deep in packing the mail orders, and Roberta and Liam Berkowitz, our other production roaster, overlap for an hour during shift change on the Loring and start to fill 25lb bins of our Waverly espresso for stores and line them up so they’re ready to pack into vans later for tomorrow’s deliveries. After pizza shenanigans, I check in with the roasters because the logistics company we use didn’t bring our full delivery of green coffee yesterday from Continental Terminals, a special climate-controlled coffee warehouse in NJ. We have a light day today, not quite 3,000lbs ordered, so after checking our inventory and comparing with what we need, I let Ed Kaufmann, our Director of Sourcing, know we have enough Nicaragua Placeres to fulfill today’s orders for The Daily house blend, but we’ll need that other pallet and a half tomorrow so we can get through Monday. 12:00pm Production cupping is next, and with 23 samples on the table we have a lot to taste. We’re searching for ways to tweak the Daily's components to get more sweetness in the cup, so we have four samples each of experimental batches of the Guatemala El Morito and the Nicaragua Placeres. After lining up the table cheese-board style (least to most acidic), I weigh out 12.5 grams of each and set them aside, set two kettles to boil, and while the water starts to heat up I catch up with Lee to make sure we haven’t overlooked any daily to-do items. This past week we sampled a new coffee for cold brew kegs and bottles and we also need to make sure we all know the timeline of roasting and shipping samples to this year’s Good Food Awards. When Andrew Oberholzer, our Head Roaster, has finished his opening shift roasting on the Probat, he helps me grind individual samples and hit them with boiling water. After doing a couple passes to taste, Liam takes a quick break from roasting to join us, and we analyze our roast data to find out where we attained the targets we were hoping for and identify where we can improve. We update a couple profiles after discussing the cup qualities in the Daily samples, I clear the table, and then the roasting half of my day begins. 2:00pm Each roaster has a “home” machine, and mine is Pulley's vintage German Probat, although I can also operate the modern, energy-efficient Loring. I weigh out 40 green pounds of each coffee, pour into the well that vacuums the coffee up into the hopper above the roasting chamber, and then when the machine is at the right charging temperature, I pull the hatch and the coffee is released into the drum. This little ritual gets repeated many times over a few hours, and then finally once orders are fulfilled with some elbow room, I set the Probat to cool down. 6:00pm While it’s cooling, I clear the chaff, sweep the area, scoot the last coffee bins down to the production area so the closing PAs can weigh the surplus, and then do a full count of every last bag of green we have (including empties) so I can send our order for next week’s green coffee delivery to Ed. If I have any time left over before the machine finishes cooling down -- and I nearly always do in summertime because of the heat -- I can look ahead to next week and catch up with email. I make sure the samples we need for our QC session at HQ next Tuesday have made their way to Chelsea, I start reviewing and organizing the data from our tasting sessions so I can write this week’s QC report, I chip away at reading some coffee-related articles, I plan out some topics to discuss for our Roaster Staff meeting in a week and a half, and make sure the dishwasher is started so the cupping bowls will be clean for whoever roasts at Pulley tomorrow. Meanwhile, production assistants are playing some wind-down music, loading the vans strategically based on tomorrow's projected delivery route, and sweeping up the production floor. 7:00pm Before I know it the Probat is beeping at me to say it’s finally cooled down. Liam is wrapping up, too, we have a little end-of-day catch up, and then I spend a minute outside putting my helmet and biking gloves on, sharing a sunset moment with Lady Liberty out there in the fading light.