Podcast! Pure Happiness Coffee
Today, we’re happy to share Forgotten Forest’s recent feature on Pure Happiness Coffee, a podcast about specialty coffee, community, and culture. Listen now on:
On the podcast, founder of Forgotten Forest Domenico Celli Borrero gives deep insights into the origins of Forgotten Forest, from his Puerto Rican heritage to studying the economic situation of Puerto Rico in his thesis to the on-the-ground farm consulting and volunteer organizing post-Maria that led to his first coffee project, Puentes Naturals. Domenico explains how all these factors joined to form Forgotten Forest, bringing together his socially-forward work with a business model dedicated to elevating the condition of Puerto Rican farmers by bringing Puerto Rican specialty coffee to the world stage like never before. Doing so, as his research showed, can help inspire more folks to pursue value-added agricultural projects that, all together, could have the potential to help rescue the agricultural potential of Puerto Rico, and, most importantly, provide a better life for Puerto Rican farmers.
We became interested in Pure Happiness Coffee after meeting Brent Cox, Pure Happiness Coffee’s founder, at a cupping at Dayglow Coffee in Brooklyn, NY (where we later had an event, thanks to Brent!). Brent is a writer, poet, and artist who had just finished his PhD in Poetry and was exploring coffee “as an aesthetic medium.” Pure Happiness, he explained, was committed to elevating the voices of producers in specialty coffee. What this meant in practice was that in addition to writing extensively about coffee on his instagram, he had begun organizing events all over New York City with coffee producers, with the intention of bringing consumers into closer contact with specialty coffee growers in a way they usually are not. Already he had held events with Colombian coffee producers Cafe Tio Conejo, Unblended, and Felipe Trujullo/Ventola Coffee at some of the best shops in New York City like Drip coffee makers, Dayglow, Principles GI, Loveless, and more. Quite unusually, a lot of his events were oriented around collaborative poetry writing, with the purpose of fostering community between coffee growers, enthusiasts, cafes, baristas, and more. This conversation led to many collaborations between Forgotten Forest and Pure Happiness, as our stories of bringing Puerto Rican coffee into the specialty world and his interest in elevating producers were a natural fit. But that’s a story for another day!
The podcast gives our audience and other listeners an opportunity to hear more about just how Forgotten Forest came to be, and the social commitments that underlie our project of value-added Puerto Rican specialty coffee. Domenico shares how, like many Puerto Ricans, while he did not grow up on the island, his family spent every summer traveling to the island to visit his abuelos, where, every morning, and late into the night, he would discuss philosophical ideas including deep thinking about the history of Puerto Rico. These trips sewed the seeds of a dream to one day come back to the island. That dream became even more powerful as he began to recognize the differences between his family in the US and his family who live in Puerto Rico. As he grew older, he noticed that there were many economic and political issues that meant his Puerto Rican family had less opportunities than his family stateside.
Noticing these differences eventually led Domenico to more deeply study how the political relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States shaped so much of the island’s agricultural and economic identity. And he found that these issues manifested very strongly in the coffee world. Like many Puerto Ricans, Domenico grew up with a strong sense of pride about Puerto Rico’s coffee heritage. And yet, surprisingly, his studies taught him that, in fact, today most coffee consumed in Puerto Rico is imported, with the government and a subsidiary of Coca Cola working together to capitalize on a duopolistic system that allows only these actors to import and sell blended coffee as Puerto Rican coffee on the island. The result is that it is economically disincentivized to actually grow and consume 100% Puerto Rican coffee in Puerto Rico, despite our heritage and pride around it.
To change this, Domenico set out to create a new infrastructure for specialty coffee in Puerto Rico. That is the project of Forgotten Forest, and it has required enormous work at all levels of the coffee world in Puerto Rico, from working with a network of farmers, to growing our own coffee, to learning and applying advanced processing techniques like they do in other gowing regions, to roasting coffee. In order to really move the needle, a beloved phrase often repeated by our partner and friend Francisco Arroyo (grower of our Anturious coffees), it would inevitably require a renewed attention to every level of the supply chain. It would require a whole new story.
As Domenico explains, this story orbits around Forgotten Forest’s discovery of Typica 401, a hearty early variety of coffee from Yemen planted on the island in the 17th century that we found wildly growing in the hills of Adjuntas at our friend’s farm, Israel Gonzales’s Sandra Farms. To help stimulate a new horizon for Puerto Rican coffee, Domenico, with help from the Peter Alfond foundation, created a social program to harvest seedlings of Typica 401, bring them to maturity in our demonstration nursery, and distribute them to partner farmers for cultivation. And that project is underway! Because coffee takes 4-5 years to produce cherry, those trees will see their first small crops beginning in 2025, with a larger yielded expected in 2026.
From there, it has been the continued project of Forgotten Forest to bring our coffee to the highest realms of the specialty coffee world, and that’s why we’ve been cupping with roasters all over the United States and beyond, and getting our coffee as far afield as Korea, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and beyond. It’s a slow process, but we’re expecting great things for the future. And we’re already thrilled with everything we’ve accomplished so far, from cupping with acclaimed roaster Black & White, to presenting our coffee with Abner Roldan of Cafe Comunion at Drip Coffee Collective in Chicago, to sharing coffee at NYC’s amazing Multimodal, to working with all of our wonderful partners in Puerto Rico like Cafe Regina, Ocean Lab Brewery, Blac Flamingo, Filtrado, and so many more, including our friends at La Destileria for our new Experimental Barrel Aged Coffee!
This podcast is a great place to learn a little more deeply about this ongoing story and everything that underlies the work here at Forgotten Forest. Thanks Pure Happiness for having us on!