Monmouth College + DoubleShot Coffee + El Chele

I met Norman Torres in Nicaragua while I was visiting the Nueva Segovia region of the country in 2023. I bought land in the central Matagalpa region a couple years prior, where my friend Luis was helping me manage a new coffee farm where we’d planted 580 baby coffee trees. While I waited for the plants to mature and bear their first crop, I made friends with a few young coffee producers who were taking over for their aging parents, and aspiring to develop direct relationships with specialty roasters like myself. Norman is the youngest of the bunch and often the butt of everyone’s joke. His farm is in the Jinotega region, tucked in between Matagalpa and Nueva Segovia. Norman is relatively fair-skinned, so they call him “Chele,” and that’s the name of his farm: El Chele. To be the odd man out, like Norman, is familiar to me. I never really fit in. And maybe none of us felt like we did when we were in school. I played football, but maybe I took it too seriously for a Division 3 Defensive