Haiti's incredible coffee

In early April, two weeks before she opened her latest restaurant, Talula's Garden, Aimee Olexy, crowned royalty of the region's culinary scene, met with her coffee supplier to choose beans she would serve at the end of each finely tuned meal.

He'd brought her usual favorites from Nicaragua, Brazil, and Africa. But a stranger in the cache caught her eye.

"What's in that little unmarked bag?" she asked.

The supplier didn't answer. Instead, he brewed a small batch and poured her a cup.

"I loved, loved, loved it," Olexy said. "It was like a coffee I dreamed of in the morning." Unlike so many that seduce you with aroma, then disappoint with a slap to the tongue, this coffee was true to its promise. "The smell matched the taste," she said, with hints of caramel and butterscotch and a toasty finish.

She ordered it - an entire shipping container's worth, about 33,000 pounds.

A month later, Nelson Robinson, 34, a Haitian coffee farmer, stood in the restaurant weeping grateful tears.

The coffee Olexy had fallen for, Haitian Blue Forest, came from Robinson's home in the destitute mountains of southeastern Haiti. The beans had been handpicked from semiwild vines that his great-grandfather and neighbors had planted from heirloom seeds linked to ancient Ethiopia.

Robinson told Olexy and her staff how, as a child, he had watched his father burn most of the family's coffee plantation. Although Haiti was once one of the world's major coffee exporters, politics and economics had conspired to kill off the trade. Precipitous drops in the price along with rising oil costs made the vines more valuable as a fuel source and the land more useful for growing peas.

After finishing college, Robinson had the chance to emigrate to Canada. Instead, he returned home to the family farm and worked with a coffee cooperative, Coopcab, representing 5,000 families.

They were barely getting by when, in January, a tall, odd American loped into the village - Todd Carmichael, cofounder of La Colombe, the Philadelphia-based roasting company.

Since he started the business 17 years ago, Carmichael has traveled around the "planet," as he prefers to say in his caffeinated disquisition, searching for worthy plants and deserving farmers. The 47-year-old coffee savant and world adventurer (he holds the world record for crossing Antarctica solo) says his motives are almost as pure as his product.