A Semester Devoted to Coffee

BU Today

Most Starbucks baristas can’t say they have picked, roasted, and brewed their own cup of coffee. Julia Shaw has them beat. A passion for coffee brought Shaw (CAS’18) to Central and South America for nine months this year, where the urban sustainability major worked with a nonprofit that strives to improve the lives and livelihoods of coffee farmers.
Shaw’s java affair started last year with a job at Blue State Coffee, where her manager’s zeal for coffee inspired Shaw to treat it like more than just a job. “Her passion spread to me and I fell in love with it,” she says.
Like many serious coffee houses, Blue State sends a manager each year on what it calls an origin trip to taste the different coffees it’s considering selling. Shaw, who had recently enrolled in a Spanish-language program at the Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires (she is a Spanish minor and the courses would count towards her program), decided to design her own origin-esque trip before classes began. “I knew I wanted to see how coffee was produced,” she says. “A lot of people don’t even know that coffee starts out as a fruit. I wanted to go and fully immerse myself in that.”
After some digging, she signed on to volunteer with the Guatemala-based De La Gente (“Of the People”), a nonprofit that works with small farmers and cooperatives, helping them grow and sell coffee.
For one month, she lived with host families in Ciudad Vieja, about 15 minutes outside of Antigua, Guatemala, following the farmers as they ascended volcanoes to pick the coffee cherries (which contain the coffee beans) and carry the fruit down in a basket balanced on her head. The beans were picked out, processed and sorted, then roasted and packaged. Lower grade beans were sold in local markets, the rest ...

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