TABLE OF CONTENTS
Videos: "Beans Of Light", Parts One & Dos
“Gratitude,” she said to him one morning out of the blue.
“Gratitude?” he asked, perplexed. “Gratitude what?”
“That’s the name.”
Sergio and Gloria had quite literally run away with the circus. Leaving their home in Mexico, they worked as trapeze artists in Oakland, California, for a spell, eventually moving on to Buenos Aires with the intention of opening up a circus school. Plans changed, as they do, and somewhere along the way, coffee happened.
Boy, are we ever grateful that it did.
Magic Market
(The word “magic” appears several times from this point on, for good reason.)
Vee and I had a really great idea one day. After a sustained, steady stream of tacos, street meats and sea treats, we were a little on the saturé side of things and in dire need of some fresh fruits and vegetables. A little while back, upon our arrival in beautiful La Paz, Google Mapster Vee had zeroed in on a local farmer’s market not too far away that we had yet to visit. Hungry for plants, we decided that it was high time, promptly put on our backpacks, grabbed some sacks, and headed straight for vitamins. And, as it turns out, more than we could have possibly known.
Just off the Malecón de La Paz, the Mercado Orgánico & Artesanal is a colourful corridor of kiosks running the length of a full city block where craftspeople and vendors from all around set up shop twice a week to lovingly sell their wares. And I mean lovingly. From local honey, magical pulque and grrr-rilled chorizo sandwiches to beautiful handmade abalone shell earrings that now regularly dangle from m’lady’s lobes, the street here is bursting with artisanal tesoros from La Paz and beyond. But the real reason to visit is the people who sell them.
This brings us to a humble little coffee stand that you’re likely to find set up at the very edge of it all.
Good Thing We Stopped
After loading up on fresh produce and some solid meandering, we were on our way out in search of vitamin Beer, but we decided to make one last stop. A striking young man with unequivocally good vibes and the dictionary definition of a winning smile stood behind a table laden with small bags of coffee, a big banner behind him announcing “Gratitude”. We felt naturally drawn in, indeed almost as if nudged from behind. He offered us a little tasty taste of some gotta-try brew he had going for passersby and we struck up a conversation.
Within minutes, while sipping the wowzer, choco-forward beans that it turns out he roasted himself at his shop, not only was the door opened for us unto the wonderful world of Mexican coffee we never knew, but our heads were abuzz with unfamiliar words and terms of the java kind like micro lot*, honey process*, Sarchimor* and then some. After he quickly and enthusiastically vulgarized anaerobic coffee fermentation* for us, Vee and I silently agreed that we were in the presence of someone who truly knows their shit. Like well-beyond-10,000-hours knows it. And more importantly, he absolutely loves it.
*See glossary below
We had sampled some other great Mexican specialty coffees during our stay in La Paz, but all roads ended up leading back to Sergio. A couple of days before shoving off to Mazatlán, Vee and I stopped by for a final bag of Chiapas Dark – in all of its chocolatey-sweet-lime glory – and an always-energizing chat. We had yet to visit Sergio at his headquarters and we wanted to sit down with him and talk a little shop (a Hungry Herald first) before we left. If he was cool with that, of course. His response was to invite us for a morning roast the very next day.
A Flying Start
Standing at the counter of the utterly charming, cosy, bright and thriving La Paz coffee shop and roastery that is Gratitude Coffee Makers, a fresh batch of Veracruz blend cheerfully crackle-dancing away beside him and filling the air with its heavenliness, Sergio Hernández beams when we ask him how it all started. He loves being asked this question; it brings him back to how something so beautiful began, a memory that even further widens that winning smile.
Funny enough, it had “nothing to do with coffee”, he tells us. Instead, it started with him hurtling through the air and catching his airborne peers as a lead flying trapeze instructor in sunny California. Again, he and his wife had literally run away with the circus. The usual coffee roaster backstory. In fact, Sergio’s interest in coffee was as lukewarm as it gets on that fateful day when one of the people he was coaching asked him if he likes drinking it. “Not really, but yeah, why not.” A hilariously tepid response, given what the future held.
Robocoffee
It turns out the person asking the question was Linsey Fan, founder of RoastLog, a company that develops software for coffee roasting operations. One day, he brewed up a cup for Sergio at his home, an experience that sounds more as if Inspector Gadget were the barista. He broke out alien pour-over equipment, ground the beans and weighed them, then asked Alexa to join in to time the infusion. The result?
“What did you put in this coffee?” Sergio asked, socks blown off.
“Nothing, just coffee,” was the response. From beans that he roasted himself in his garage, no less. He showed Sergio the little Huky 500 roaster, loaded him up with information and data, introduced him to the software, and then asked what he thought about it all.
Yes. Just yes.
Ok then, time for literature.
Sergio began voraciously reading up on everything to do with coffee, eventually finding himself selling for RoastLog after he and his wife Gloria, the other pillar of Gratitude, moved to Buenos Aires. Unfortunately, the circus school didn’t end up happening, but a new passion was firmly taking hold, and the couple would soon find themselves on a path to creating something as exceptional as it was unforeseen.
When The Student Is Ready…
In 2018, Sergio went to Diogo Bianchi, head roaster at the 4 Seasons, Buenos Aires, in an effort to sell him some software. He never made that sale. Instead, he found a craft. No surprise to us, they hit it off from the get-go and Sergio started hanging out with the master roaster from Brazil, who graciously took him under his wing, letting him help in the roasting while he learned everything he possibly could.
It didn’t take long for the apprentice to become head roaster at Bianchi’s Arabicca Coffee Roasters, in charge of production and profile development, roasting beans from all over the world virtually non-stop, from 7 AM to 9 PM, Monday to Saturday. “I spent a lot of time with coffee,” Sergio tells us, a gleam of beans past flashing across his eyes. He still gives thanks to this very day for having had the opportunity.
Cold-Brewing Up A Storm
As Sergio evolved in his craft, he soon found himself wanting to create something that was truly his own. He began by experimenting with cold brew in the comfort of his home. Gloria, a trained sommelière with beer-brewing chops and considerable knowledge in these areas – plus a personal library to match, which came in very handy – acted as their official quality control as they trialled and errored, their digs essentially turning into a cold brew laboratory. Sunlight, oxygen, CO2, pH; all of these things took on new importance along the way. “Everything affects everything,” Sergio asserts.
After painstaking effort, applying different processes to a variety of beans whose profiles he had developed himself, Sergio nailed the recipe they were after, and then repeated it. This was the beginning of something great. They would start off by selling cold brew (and things would only grow from there). Now all they needed was a name.
🙏
The pandemic was breaking everyone’s beans, and Sergio and Gloria had been away from their family for a long while. Times were tough, yes, but they had their own place in Buenos Aires, they were both in great health, Gloria had recently given birth to their daughter, Mikaela, who was also super healthy and playful, and they were starting a business together, debt-free and in no need of financial aid. As a result of all this, there was something they were both consistently feeling. And one morning, Gloria said it out loud.
Back at the coffee shop, Sergio tells us how much he loves the name. The way he sees it, people start their day going straight to the coffee machine, and not only is that word right there in their kitchen, but they’re literally going to make themselves a cup of it.
“Yes! Let me brew some Gratitude coffee. I’m gonna start my day with gratitude,” Sergio says, making a drip motion with his finger over his head. Indeed, there are few better words to have percolating through one’s skull first thing. Gives a whole new meaning to “the best part of waking up”, we think.
Bertha La Bella & The Fine Tuning
The whole time we’re talking, there’s some serious roasting going on. When we arrived, Sergio and his assistant Jorge, a young man with downright angelic chi, were hard at work, ensconced in front of the roasting machine that stands in the centre of the coffee shop like a magic grandmother cooking up a storm and tying everything together. 100% Mexican-made and designed, this custom, 5-kilo Promor machine’s name is actually Bertha, and she not too long ago celebrated 1 year of roasting her gas-powered heart out for Gratitude, an event that was announced on Facebook like a living team member’s birthday.
Hunched in front of Bertha, Sergio isn’t only keeping a close eye on the beans as they swirl around in their drum, but he’s listening to them intently, checking and calibrating here and there like he’s tuning a Stradivarius. It’s a multi-sensory experience, he tells us, and you have to pay attention to when and how the beans crackle and pop, as well as their temperature, colour and smell. The fermentation level of the particular ones he’s roasting is also being taken into account. He is on the hunt for overall balance and knows exactly how to go about it.
At one point, Sergio says that he’s getting the smell he’s looking for and promptly empties out the beans, a torrent of dark, lightly smoking jewels tumbling into the rotating cooling basin below. A fresh waft of one of the world’s all-time greatest smells envelops us once again.
The precision involved is impressive, and on the subject of timing, the trapeze artist in him comes right out: “While catching, one second too early or one second too late and you don’t make it. And coffee is the same. Everything is timing. You just have to time it and keep the rhythm and let the bean tell you what to do.”
Dripping Some Knowledge
While the freshly roasted blend of Marsellesa, Garnica and Typica beans are cooling down, Sergio does not disappoint us on the geek-out front. He graciously takes us into the mechanics of roasting (while Vee and I are still trying to retain those names I just mentioned). Patiently answering our questions along the way, he introduces us to things like RoR – Rate of Rise – the speed at which the temperature of the bean in the drum rises, and how that dictates everything thereafter. He then guides us through the colourful and fragrant progression toward first crack, a hallowed moment in the roaster’s world signalled by – yup – a cracking sound. It’s an exothermic main event when the bean releases its pent-up energy and the roaster decides the level of their roast and where they want to go, flavour and complexity-wise. Put in Sergian terms, it’s “when all the magic happens.”
We talk coffee bean altitude, density, humidity. He literally draws us a picture at one point, sketching out a graph to illustrate a hypothetical situation where two beans grown at the same altitude but harvested at separate times require different heats due to their differing densities. Things then get nice and immediate when, with a look around the room, he tells us that the unusually humid weather at present is affecting the very roast we’re looking at, so he has to adjust accordingly.
And then there’s the human being. Coffee roasting is a highly subjective endeavour, and the person who’s doing it brings to the equation all their is-ness: their cumulative experiences, their mindset, their diet, how they breathe, and so on. “Everything matters,” Sergio reminds us. Coffee, like the roaster, is alive, and even those beans in the grinder that are about to be turned into your flat white are still very much in flux.
The Magic Makers
When it comes to the 100% Mexican, single-origin beans he roasts, Sergio bursts with pride and feels a great responsibility toward the producers who make it all possible. In fact, their names are emblazoned on every bag of Gratitude coffee sold, and he speaks of them with the utmost respect. One of them, Emmanuel Rincón from Finca La Esperanza, is an acclaimed coffee champion and something of a prodigy, his beans having been nominated the very best in Mexico. “This guy knows what he’s doing,” says Sergio with conviction. High praise.
Gratitude is a link in a beautiful chain that begins with the small, fair-trade producers they work with based in Chiapas, Veracruz and Puebla, Mexico’s prime coffee-growing states, along with Oaxaca. For Sergio, they are the true magic makers, and he feels it is incumbent upon him to do justice to their superior coffee through the roasting it deserves.
Gaining well-deserved attention amongst specialty roasters far and wide, Mexico boasts an impressive number of small-scale, family-run plantations guided by the very highest standards, and is also a global leader in certified organic and fair-trade coffee production. Sergio believes that it has all the bases covered, from the beans to the machines to the people in between, to be in the top 3 countries in the world, quality-wise, and one of his main goals as a roaster is to bring Mexican coffee, and Gratitude along with it, to ever higher levels. Fortunately for us, Sergio and Gloria ultimately chose to come back to Mexico and set up operations in Baja California Sur, a strategic point bursting with potential, perfect for spreading the good word about Mexican coffee not only to the rest of the country but to the rest of North America.
Bitchin’ Beans & Shiftin’ Gears
Near the end of our stay, the conversation naturally flows into one of Sergio’s other passions: surfing. A self-proclaimed adrenaline junky who digs rock climbing and fixie biking (no brakes), he likens the feeling he has at the end of a long roasting session to the high he gets after a full day out on the water looking to get tubed. “It doesn’t matter if I caught 11 waves or one or none, just being in the water is calming, is relaxing for me.” Wipeouts and all, he just feels good. Like with surfing, coffee roasting keeps him constantly in the moment and ultimately brings him that same feeling of fulfilment.
As a dad, Sergio has recently toned down his thrill-seeking tendencies, riding bikes with brakes like the rest of us, for instance. Wanting to share what he loves with his daughter – but without all the altitude – he built a rock-climbing wall in their home so that he and 4-year-old Mika can go for a little climb together whenever they feel like it. (And she no doubt has a blast whenever they do.) He used to be jealous of his “me” time, he tells us, but now his time is for his daughter, his wife, his family, and his business. “And I love it!” he exclaims, that smile at full capacity. As busy as he is though, he still finds time to hit the waves and get a little gnarly every now and then.
Bean Me Up!
While Sergio and Jorge generously share their time with us, customers steadily filter in and out, many of them clearly devoted regulars. One guy is even sporting some Gratitude merch, the same “Make Coffee Not War” T-shirt Sergio has on. Between clients, we talk about all kinds of things, from the wonders of yerba mate and the chemical friendship between caffeine and cannabinoids to coffee crema art gone wrong and how good Peruvian Chinese food is. We feel completely at home and in the presence of old friends, Sergio whipping up the occasional delight to sample – done with Spock-like precision, of course. He redefines the cortado for us, and later, over an incredible flat white (both made with coconut milk and crazy silky smooth), we have a little chat with Jorge on the sidewalk outside; in no time, we feel like we’ve known him our whole lives.
Lightworkers come in many forms and work in many ways, often quite unaware of the effect they have. After spending half the day at Gratitude and leaving with our frequencies clearly amped up several notches, Vee and I realized that some of them out there even work with beans. Unfortunately, Gloria couldn’t be there when we visited, but we briefly met her at the market the next day, and let’s just say that the picture was complete. Seriously, this team brews up pure light, along with one hell of a cup.
In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot’s protagonist famously laments that he has measured out his life with coffee spoons. Perhaps if he had measured it out with piping hot cups of organic, micro lot Sarchimor lovingly roasted by the good people at Gratitude, he would have had a little more pep in his step.
On our way out, Vee and I wanted to take some coffee with us so that we could continue brewing up thankyouccinos once we got to Mazatlán. Every bag at Gratitude (all made with recycled paper – did we mention the operation is as green as can be?) has a hand-written message on it that pleasantly surprises upon opening. Sergio grabbed one that had the word “descansa” on it, “rest”. As he sealed the full bag with his signature kung-fu-prayer-palm technique, he let us know that the bag had chosen us. Claudia, another cluster of good vibes back at the market, told us the exact same thing about her pulque.
A New Magitude
Walking on the street on our way back home, a couple of OG cold brews in our hands, Vee and I were wobbly. Not drunk wobbly of course, just really good wobbly. Yes, our heads were bubbling with things we had never heard before, and, truth be told, I was sitting on piles of coffee notes before starting on this post. But the more I thought about it, the less it became about the facts and figures.
No, we were wobbly from something else…
As a result of our experience that day, we’ll be placing a lot more focus on the extraordinary people we encounter along the road and the stories they have to share, those magic makers without whom there would be very little to write about. And for that, to the incredible team at Gratitude Coffee Makers, we are truly grateful, and all we can say is, naturally, THANK YOU.
¡Muchísimas gracias por toda la magia y, por supuesto, la gratitud!
Let’s all please have another cup.
Nota Bene : Location
Gratitude Coffee Makers has since relocated to brand-spankin’-new digs at Avenida Revolución de 1910 #1243 , near Sorstis Restaurant in the Zona Central.
(The hollow brick coffee bar gets a gold star. ⭐)
Thank you so much for reading! Be sure to click on over to Gratitude’s Facebook and Instagram pages to find out more, and be double-shot sure to swing by their coffee shop or the MOA if you just so happen to be in La Paz.
During our visit with Sergio, we had the good fortune of meeting another exceptional maker of waves in the local coffee scene who we just can’t not talk about. Stay tuned for our next post where we sit down with the talented young barista and entrepreneur behind Casanova Coffee House, another must-visit spot for some of the best-brewed beans you’ll find in La Paz (Gratitude included). See you soon!
Glossary
Honey Process: A production method where the skins and pulp of the coffee cherries are removed from the seeds (friendly reminder, them beans are seeds), but the sticky mucilage reminiscent of honey – hence the name – is left attached during drying. This process uses less water and yields a sweeter “bean”. Mmmm, mucilage.
Sarchimor: A resilient, hybrid bean produced as a F#&K YOU to the coffee plant’s arch nemesis, coffee leaf rust (“la roya” in Spanish). The result of crossing the Villa Sarchi and Timor varieties to produce one badass super plant, it’s one of Sergio’s favourite beans to roast and drink.
Micro lot: Definitions tend to vary so we hope we get this right: a specially selected, traceable, limited-quantity batch of a single coffee varietal grown, picked and processed separately from the other lots on a plantation. These exclusive coffees are valued and enjoyed for their unique flavour profiles.
Anaerobic fermentation: Controlled fermentation of coffee beans through the complete removal of oxygen from the equation, a process that encourages the formation of lactic acids, resulting in unusual and exciting cupping characteristics prized by specialty coffee makers, Sergio included.
For all other definitions, we invite you to please rock the GoogleTube:)
4 Comments
What a descriptive, educational, and interesting interview. As I sit here in my room in Montreal with my coffee in hand, your all enveloping words literally transported me to the Gratitude shop. I can almost inhale the roasting aroma. Michael you have an extraordinary gift that draws us into your stories. My gratitude to you for expanding my world to all your culinary travels.
Wow!! Thank you so very much, Louise!
Humbled by your words, delighted you enjoyed.🙏💜
Thank you Michael for your amazing article and videos. Hope you can come back to La Paz in the future to see our new roastery and espresso bar. Keep on brewing 😉
Thank you so much, Gloria, we are so happy you enjoyed; this was all such a pleasure for us to work on! Rest assured, next time we’re in La Paz, we’re headed straight to you guys!🙏💜