Man hopes to brew up success for villagers

Missionary imports coffee beans from Venezuela and distributes them locally.

By Nathan Gill

Published on Thu., April 19th, 2007

Tom Wheat scoops and bags fragrant coffee beans from a cooling vat as the temperature gauge on the antique gas-fired roaster hits 400 degrees and the beans inside crackle and snap like popcorn.

Wheat, 58, a KU graduate, has no time to stop and smell the coffee as he toils over a hot roaster in a friend’s Lawrence garage. He has more beans to roast and deliveries to make. His business is the antithesis of corporate coffee — part religious mission, part environmental cause, part Christian concern for poor coffee farmers, and ultimately a reliable source of high quality, shade-grown, fresh roasted coffee he personally buys in Venezuela, imports and roasts, then delivers to Lawrence coffeehouses and other outlets.

Though Wheat runs a business, he says he’s not trying to make money for himself and that he’s on a mission from God.

The mission

Wheat founded New Mission, Inc., a Lawrence-based non-profit company with one employee, himself, after visiting Venezuela on a mission trip in 1992. The Lawrence Lions Club and Trinity Episcopal Church sponsored the trip with the goal of giving used eyeglasses to the poor and the church ordained Wheat a missionary before he left Lawrence. He left with one mission and returned with an entirely new one that included coffee and Christ.

“Our whole point is that we help the people who do the work so that they can eat for 12 months of the year,” Wheat said.

The new mission began when a Venezuelan bishop he met took him to Teresén, a village in Venezuela, to visit its small Christian community. Wheat ate dinner with a local family who sat guests, including the bishop, at one table and reserved another for the family. The family sat Wheat at their table.

“It was as if they were reserving a place for some person and I happened to be there,” Wheat said.

A few days later the bishop took Wheat to a run-down coffee plantation nearby and asked him to find a way to make money from the land for the community. Wheat said yes.

“I’m obligated to fulfill my promise,” Wheat said. “I will or I will die, whichever happens first.”

It’s been 15 years and about 20 trips to Venezuela since Wheat made his promise.

The growers

About 2,800 miles separate Wheat from the people he buys his beans from, but that hasn’t stopped him from forming a personal connection with them.

“I’m their family, and they’re my family,” Wheat said.

Richard Bean, a friend who visited Wheat in Venezuela in 2004, attested to Wheat’s personal relationship with his growers.

“They’re some of the sweetest people I’ve ever been around,” Bean said. “They treat him as one of their own.”

Bean, who has known Wheat for about 10 years, got the chance to see what life was like for the coffee farmers. “I realized how much hand labor picking coffee is,” he said.

Wheat agreed. “Many of the people who do the coffee work live right among the crops,” he said. “They often live in houses made of sticks and mud with a tin roof.”

Although most of the people of Teresén have access to basic education, clean water and some medical care, he said a family’s furniture might include a few chairs with rebar frames and woven plastic seats and that only a few people owned cars, mostly battered American vehicles from the 1970s or 1980s. He said a farm family’s primary tools were their hands.

Andrew Roberts, shift manager at The Community Mercantile, which sells Wheat’s coffee, visited Teresén in 1997 and toured a building where farmers stored and packaged coffee beans. The technology used was not state-of-the-art, although “I’m pretty sure they had electricity,” recalled Roberts, 24, a KU alumnus in environmental studies who had Wheat as his youth counselor at Trinity Episcopal Church.

Wheat said that the people of Teresén did not consider themselves impoverished because they shared what they had. He said that if a mango tree dropped its fruit the tree’s owner would gather the fruit and share it with neighbors.

“I saw very generous and kind and loving people meeting the needs of the neediest in very simple means,” Wheat said of the people in Teresén. “They were living like they did in the Book of Acts. They were living like people talk on Sunday mornings.”

The teacher

Wheat learned to roast coffee from a master roaster in Teresén named Luisa Alfaro, whom he met through a priest. He said Alfaro was a legendary roaster whose primitive equipment included firewood, a black pot propped up with rocks and a keen, almost magical knowledge of coffee.

“She watches and smells and listens,” Wheat said about Alfaro’s roasting techniques.

The Merc’s Roberts said he was amazed when he first tasted fresh coffee that Alfaro had brewed. He said Alfaro’s brewing method was not like getting up and making a cup of Folgers, but was more like a ritual.

“I think guru has a certain connotation to it, but that wouldn’t be far from the truth,” Roberts said about Alfaro. “She probably has some shamanistic medicine tricks she could do.”

Wheat said, “She has a little garden and she roasts some coffee. She sometimes chastises or encourages her grandchildren or neighbors. She prays for people and sits on the porch and bids you good day when you go past.”

The roaster

John Bowden, who owns the roaster and garage used by Wheat, said roasting was more a science than an art.

“There’s a lot involved,” Bowden said. “Time is a factor, as well as the size of the beans, the moisture content of the air, the roast time, the flame temperature….”

Bowden lets Wheat use his 1895 Royal No. 5 coffee roaster in exchange for fresh coffee and money to buy the natural gas that fuels the roaster. Bowden bought the roaster, similar to ones used to roast peanuts at county fairs, about 15 years ago from a coffee company in Louisville, Ky.

“They probably want that roaster back,” said Bowden, former owner of Café Nova at 745 New Hampshire St., now the location of Mirth Cafe. “It’s rare, it’s collectable, and they sold it to me too cheap.”

Bowden,who is now out of the coffee business, said Wheat roasted about 300 pounds of coffee per week.

Wheat lives in Iola, where he cares for his elderly mother, and drives his late father’s 1995 Buick LeSabre to Lawrence three times a week to roast, package and distribute coffee to buyers.

The coffee

Wheat sells three varieties of coffee beans: Corozál Estate, Caripe and Black Mountain. He said the varieties derived from the same genetic strain, Arabica borbón, and that the beans were not blended or mixed with other coffee crops. Wheat said that the distinct flavor of each variety came from the three different climate conditions in which they were grown.

The coffee beans grow on a mountain ridge near Teresén in northeastern Venezuela near the Atlantic coast. Wheat said Corozál was cultivated on the seaward side of the ridge, Black Mountain on the landward side and Caripe on the ridge’s summit. He said that each part of the ridge had a unique climate, and that subtle differences in sunlight, precipitation and soil type contributed to each crop’s distinct flavor.

“Soil is alive,” Wheat said. “It’s part of a community of things that live together.”

He said every morning warm, moist Atlantic air ascended the ridge and condensed into fog over the Caripe plants. “That top-dresses the plants with seawater mineral salts that then influence the flavor,” Wheat explained.

Katy Wade, a senior in Latin American studies and barista at Mirth Cafe, which serves Wheat’s coffee, said Caripe, a light-roast coffee, had a fruity, citrus flavor.

Wade said she liked that Wheat’s coffee was shade grown under jungle canopy. She said coffee grown in a cleared forest required fertilizers and that direct sunlight was bad for a coffee’s flavor.

“You can never go wrong with a light roast and you should only buy shade grown,” Wade said.

The need

Greg Renck, Mirth manager, said the café bought all its coffee, except decaf, from Wheat. He appreciates Wheat’s personal involvement with the coffee. “He sees it from when it goes into the ground to when it goes into people,” Renck said.

Wheat said his wholesale price for coffee was about $7 to $8 a pound. He said that by the time a pound of coffee was roasted, it had already cost him more than $4 to buy, import and package. At $7 a pound, the New Mission gets less than $3 in profits.

“Any less than that, someone is not being paid for their work,” said Wheat, who supports himself by working as a carpenter and audio technician. “I’m not getting paid for my work.”

Money doesn’t mean much to Wheat, who said Christian standards like balance and equality were part of New Mission’s business model. He is following his Christian ideals by converting good coffee into a living wage for the Venezuelan farmers who grow it.

“These are people who need to eat and they grow great coffee,” Wheat said.

But Wheat doesn’t think of them as poor, as he explained in Spanish: “Si hay dignidad, no hay pobreza,” which translates: If there is dignity, there is no poverty.

Kansan staff writer Nathan Gill can be contacted at ngill@kansan.com.

— Edited by Dianne Smith

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