The world's cleanest cup of coffee

How 44,000 pounds of java crossed the Atlantic by wind power

by Maria Gallucci

The bustling port in northern Honduras has all the trappings of our daily lives. Colorful box containers are stacked like Lego pieces, brimming with inexpensive T-shirts, palm oil, and car parts. White boxes bearing the blue Chiquita logo contain a bounty of bananas. Trucks and forklifts belch fumes and kick up dust as giant freighters fill up with cargo bound for the United States and Mexico.

Sergio Romero isn’t here for any of this.

On a scorching morning in early February, he climbs into a van and slips on an orange mesh vest and blue hard hat. The vehicle winds its way through the port, past towering cranes and containers, until it reaches the place where the concrete lot ends, giving way to the flat blue bay.

That's where he finds the Avontuur, a vessel built long before cargo ships and steel boxes came to dominate the global economy, and many decades before Romero was born. This ship is unlike any other in Puerto Cortés.

With its two masts and canvas sails, the Avontuur reached Honduras by harnessing the wind, not burning the sludgy bunker fuel that is the mainstay of most cargo ships. A sparse crew of sunbaked sailors guided the 97-year-old schooner from Europe through the Caribbean Sea, collecting and delivering small cargo along the way.

Romero, a coffee farmer in southwestern Honduras, hops out of the van and strides toward the Avontuur, where stevedores and port officials are looking on with curiosity. What was once a common way to move cargo is now a strange blast from the past. Everyone snaps a selfie.

Romero sighs with relief. After days of delays, the ship has finally arrived.

Sergio Romero, a Honduran coffee grower, on loading day.

Port workers unload 290 bags of coffee in Puerto Cortés.

Workers swing open the doors of a red container, revealing 290 bags of coffee piled from floor to ceiling. The coffee hails from Romero’s cooperative in the mountain town of Corquín. Soon these bags will sit in the belly of the Avontuur on their way to roasters in Bremen, Germany, more than 5,000 nautical miles away.

Romero has come to bid his beans farewell.

This 44,000-pound load of coffee already has the hallmarks of a top-notch crop: certified organic and fair trade. Now it can boast one of the lowest carbon footprints of any java on the planet.

“Joining this project was like contributing our own little grain of sand to help mitigate climate change,” Romero says. “Man can’t live without nature. So we can’t keep destroying it.”

Timbercoast, which owns and operates the Avontuur, is one of a tiny but growing group of sail cargo companies aspiring to transform shipping by bringing old technologies into the modern era.

Cornelius Bockermann, a German captain who has worked for maritime companies in Nigeria and Australia, bought the aging vessel in 2014. With the help of hundreds of volunteers, he transformed the Avontuur — whose name means “adventure” in Dutch — into a modern commercial ship.

He drew his inspiration in part from Fair Transport, a Dutch company that helped pioneer the sustainable shipping movement some 15 years ago. That company’s Tres Hombres schooner is making a coffee run of its own this spring from Colombia to the Netherlands. Similar, smaller projects are cropping up in Costa Rica, Greece, the U.S., and beyond.

“There has to be a new way of shipping,” explains Klaus Kriening, a member of the Avontuur’s crew and a master blacksmith, on the sweltering February morning in Honduras.

The German sailor, rumpled and sporting a salt-and-pepper beard, watches from the deck as a crane lowers palettes of coffee bags into the vessel’s cargo hold. A new group of sailors climbs aboard, mingling with the permanent crew and exploring their new home. It feels a bit like the first day of summer camp.