Twyman’s 12-acre weekend refuge grew into a 140-acre farm providing full-time employment for 30 villagers. His hobby had become a raging passion. His coffee, he came to believe, was special. It had a character all its own, a distinctiveness that came from the soil, the microclimate, and the way he raised it—what the French call terroir. “In France, you have regional appellations, and within the appellations there are individual estates,” says Twyman. “I felt that Blue Mountain should be like an appellation. Within the region, estates should be able to sell their own coffee under their own labels.” The board, however, wouldn’t hear of it. “After the berries left my hands, I hadn’t the vaguest notion of what the board did to them. You can grow the finest coffee beans in the world and ruin their flavor in twenty-four hours.”
Twyman began to investigate the activities of the board with the same stubbornness and eye to detail he brought to growing his coffee. A loophole that allowed board-approved operations located in the Blue Mountains to sell all the coffee they processed as Blue Mountain even if it had actually been grown elsewhere in the country particularly galled him. That loophole was eventually closed. And after poring over the board’s financial statements, he concluded that Jamaican growers were receiving only a third of the proceeds of the board’s export revenues. “There was a fortune being made from Blue Mountain coffee,” says Twyman. But it wasn’t being made by the farmers. In a good year, he broke even. The thousands of smallholders who grew the bulk of Blue Mountain coffee could barely scratch out a living.
Twyman would not abandon his dream of selling his own estate-grown coffee. After repeatedly being turned down by the board, Twyman countered by initiating a one-man boycott. He refused to sell his coffee, period. But he stubbornly continued to farm, trucking beans to his house in Kingston, drying them on its flat roof, and warehousing them.
Twyman’s lonely war of attrition gathered speed when his son Mark returned home from England after earning a doctorate in chemistry, bringing his Oxonian diplomatic skills and capacity for hard work to the fray, lugging gunnysacks of coffee one day, sitting across from bureaucrats in air-conditioned offices the next, teaching school in his spare time. “I’m going to give Jamaica my best shot,” Mark wrote his friends. “Idealistic tomfoolery…Or inspired? I don’t know.” The board, finally acknowledging that things would have to change, agreed that Twyman’s appellation model was worthwhile and granted him a license to sell coffee.
Returning from work on July 9, 1997, Mark, 34 years old with an eight-months-pregnant wife, was ambushed by two gunmen. They shot him five times in the back and then fired once into his heart at point-blank range. Was it a coincidence that Mark was murdered on the very day his father received official permission to sell his own coffee?
Mark’s murder remains unsolved; it merited only a small paragraph in the Kingston paper. Family and friends scattered his ashes on the land where he had intended to build his house. Eulogizing Mark in the Times of London, his friend the journalist Tunku Varadarajan wrote, “We will, I hope, toast him in coffee, the drink for which he gave his life.”
Today, a half-dozen other Jamaican producers have licenses to sell their own coffee. Graham Dunkley, the newly appointed director general of the board, speaks of the “seismic change” in the Jamaican coffee industry. “I see my role as that of brand manager for Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee,” he says. He is also a consumer watchdog, prosecuting unscrupulous dealers who try to sell inferior beans under the Blue Mountain name.
Alex and Dorothy spend most of their evenings alone in their cramped cottage, roasting and packaging beans, which they sell directly on their Web site (oldtaverncoffee.com) and to a handful of North American wholesalers. Twyman, so voluble on other subjects, volunteers nothing about Mark’s death, though it’s hard not to feel his presence—photos of Mark’s son on the desk, a leatherbound copy of Mark’s Ph.D. dissertation on a bookshelf. As our coffee cups empty, I ask Twyman why he fought for so long and gave up so much. “I suppose I’m just bloody-minded,” he says, after a pause.
He gazes out the window like a man surveying his realm, but whatever he sees is in his mind’s eye. It’s almost dark, and the mist has reappeared, obliterating everything. With uncharacteristic softness, he says, “I wouldn’t do it again.”
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