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" Originally published in the December 2011 issue No one would describe Todd Carmichael as a calm man. A successful man, sure. His coffee company, La Colombe Torrefaction, does $25 million in business a year. Along with their chain of caf\u00E9s, Carmichael and his partner, J. P. Iberti, provide coffee for some of the best restaurants in the country: Le Bernardin in New York, Next in Chicago, L&amp;#039;Hermitage in L. A. Carmichael&amp;#039;s a proud coffee nerd \u2014 the kind of guy who points out when a particular blend gives him goosebumps. Put him in front of a camera and he sounds like the Jeff Corwin of coffee: This is what we&amp;#039;re looking for. This is perfect. Perfect! Sustainably grown \u2014 look up here. Look up here! Do you see this fruit!? Do you see how laden that is!? As La Colombe&amp;#039;s main sourcer, he&amp;#039;s charged with finding the best coffee in the world, wherever it grows. That means regular trips to Rwanda, to Colombia, to Ethiopia \u2014 places a six-three forty-eight-year-old bald white man tends to draw unwanted attention. But Carmichael seems to crave danger and the threat of physical harm the way most people crave their morning joe. He ran his first ultramarathon at twenty. Soon after, he sailed across the Atlantic \u2014 alone. Since 2008 he&amp;#039;s held the world record for the fastest unsupported trek to the South Pole (thirty-nine days, seven hours, and forty-nine minutes: a figure he&amp;#039;s tattooed in a visible spot just below the sleeve of his T-shirt). And after a failed attempt last year to become the first person to cross 156-mile-long Death Valley unaided, he&amp;#039;s training to try it again. This time, though, he thinks he&amp;#039;s solved a major problem. The wheels of his updated rickshaw \u2014 which he affectionately calls &amp;quot;the pig&amp;quot; and uses to carry nearly five hundred pounds of food, water, and gear \u2014 will have Kevlar-embedded rubber tires, the same ones they use on bush planes, and pivoting axles to avoid bottoming out on the uneven desert floor.  Carmichael compares his motivation to a dog finally catching a squirrel. Once you accomplish a goal that seemed impossible, you need to find another. Otherwise, you&amp;#039;ll just get depressed. But there&amp;#039;s something else, too. No matter what room he enters, he wants to be the guy with the best story. He&amp;#039;ll deny it, at first, pretending not to like the limelight. But, as Iberti will tell you, if you give Carmichael an audience, he won&amp;#039;t turn it down. He drops hints of his feats here and there, crumbs to be followed, the conversational equivalent of a person who comes to a party with a badger under his sweater, then acts surprised when you ask him about it.  Still, when you listen to the things he&amp;#039;s done, it&amp;#039;s hard to begrudge the man his pride. While Carmichael uses his resources to indulge a manic need for accomplishment, they have another, more tangible and benevolent purpose: charity. His expeditions in Antarctica raised more than $250,000 for Orangutan Foundation International. And just this summer he signed a deal with Leonardo DiCaprio&amp;#039;s charity to install a thousand water wells in east Africa. Whether you love him or find him obnoxious, the man is dedicated to doing good. Even if it means falling on his face a few times and pissing a few people off in the process. When Carmichael tells you his latest idea \u2014 the biggest, craziest idea of them all \u2014 a large part of you wants to call bullshit on it. But then his eyes grow big, his words fighting for priority out of his mouth as he describes every possible angle and conclusion and solution and challenge. No, this is not a calm man. This is a neurotic, crazy, inspired, overcaffeinated man. But he&amp;#039;s also something else: a man used to catching his squirrel. So when Carmichael tells you that he wants to fix Haiti with coffee, you might want to listen. To understand how Carmichael plans to do this, you first need to understand why he went to Haiti in the first place. He wanted the impossible \u2014 pure Haitian coffee beans. Three hundred years ago, Haiti was among the top coffee-producing countries in the world. Its economy was virtually run on the stuff. But when Haiti declared its independence from France in 1804, coffee production, along with the rest of the country&amp;#039;s industries, came nearly to a halt. It eventually returned, but then came the 1991 military coup d&amp;#039;\u00E9tat. The U. S. and the UN issued trade embargoes and many coffee growers responded the only way they could \u2014 they set their fields on fire; if they couldn&amp;#039;t export beans, at least they could sell charcoal locally. Haitian beans became the holy grail of the coffee world. Which is, of course, why Carmichael decided they were essential to La Colombe&amp;#039;s newest blend.  Carmichael first arrived in Haiti in January. He came in via the Dominican Republic when flights to Port-au-Prince were canceled due to protests. The first day he ripped the oil pan off his truck when he nailed one of the many boulders that litter the winding mountain roads. He towed the truck back to town with a four-foot rope, got a new one, and set out once again. For days he searched the mountains, going village to village. He turned down roads barely the width of a well-fed donkey. When those roads got too narrow, he parked and continued on foot. One night, the main road to Thiotte, a small village where he was staying, was closed. So he did what he&amp;#039;s done before in these situations: He pulled the ten-liter water bladder from his pack to use as a pillow, spread out a small blue tarp, and slept under his truck. It&amp;#039;s one of the benefits of having spent a month on the ice in Antarctica. He can sleep anywhere.  What he can&amp;#039;t do is wait. Carmichael had been told to find a man named Robinson Nelson, who was supposedly promoting coffee in the area. But while everyone had heard of Nelson, no one could bring Carmichael to him. He must have asked fifty people if they knew Nelson before finally stumbling upon a local farmer named Pierre. And Pierre didn&amp;#039;t just know Nelson, he was willing to send his son to find him. The next evening, Carmichael stood in the town square, wearing a white T-shirt and designer jeans \u2014 his uniform on these trips, and, he insists, the result of a wife, singer Lauren Hart, who likes to shop for him \u2014 when a trim black man with a thin, manicured mustache approached. The man, in his early thirties, was dressed up, his long-sleeved blue oxford tucked taut into a pair of white chinos, his brown leather loafers polished to as much of a shine as a town with dirt roads allows. &amp;quot;I am Robinson Nelson,&amp;quot; he told Carmichael in halting French. And then he said what Carmichael had been waiting to hear: &amp;quot;I will take you to the coffee co-op.&amp;quot;  It was a ten-minute drive up a rutted, unmarked road before the jungle opened up to reveal a surprisingly formal building. This was the co-op, called Coopcab \u2014 two stories made mostly of smooth, cream-colored cement and decorated with stones. There were bars on the windows and a heavy iron door. Nelson slid it back. And that&amp;#039;s when Carmichael&amp;#039;s ears began to ring. Inside there were not just bags and bags of fresh, green beans but a concrete drying platform the size of half a football field. Forty women, who&amp;#039;d just finished sorting thousands of beans by hand, were on their way out the door after their shift. It wasn&amp;#039;t until the next day that Carmichael got to try the coffee. Nelson led him upstairs to a small room with a round table, about three feet across, set up for the cupping. With great care, the co-op chef brought over freshly roasted and ground beans. Carmichael took in the aroma. Boiling water was poured over the grounds, and he scooped off a little of the crust that formed on top and smelled again. Then he stuck in a small spoon and loudly slurped it, as if he were doing a line of cocaine with his mouth. The co-op directors waited, then Carmichael reeled away from the table, shaking his head in delight. It was some of the greatest coffee he&amp;#039;d ever tasted, complex and fruity, but ethereally smooth. &amp;quot;How much is it?&amp;quot; he asked. They wanted close to nine dollars a kilo, a steep price. But Carmichael was in love. He needed this coffee. He bought forty thousand kilos on the spot. Then, as his thoughts fully settled on the reality that he&amp;#039;d just spent more than $350,000 on coffee, he asked what would turn out to be a far more important question: &amp;quot;Why the hell doesn&amp;#039;t anybody else know about this?&amp;quot;  Most of Carmichael&amp;#039;s quests begin with the tangible and obvious. A mountain to climb or an ocean to cross. But the challenge the co-op board described to him is far different, one of economics rather than geography. It turns out that some people do know about their coffee. A few buyers for Japanese businessmen trek to the co-op, as Carmichael did, and pay large amounts for a small quantity of beans, which they then import to Tokyo. But the vast majority of their beans go to Dominican traders who cross into Haiti, cash in hand, pay pennies on the dollar, then mix the Haitian beans with cheap, inferior beans, which they sell for a huge profit on the international market. In the co-op&amp;#039;s boardroom, which looks like a church rec room, with linoleum floors and red plastic chairs, Carmichael&amp;#039;s thoughts begin to fester and bubble. He can&amp;#039;t buy all the beans the co-op produces. But what if he could help the co-op streamline its infrastructure so that it could harvest more beans, then serve as the co-op&amp;#039;s guide to the international market? The farmers would start making real money. And soon, perhaps their neighbors would replant their coffee fields. If it worked and spread, money would flow evenly and fairly into the hands of thousands of Haitians. Not charity, income. Like all of Carmichael&amp;#039;s ideas, he got to work on this one in a frenzy. He flew back to Philadelphia and met with Iberti \u2014 the calm, numbers-focused half of the partnership \u2014 in their windowless shared office on the second floor of La Colombe&amp;#039;s warehouse. Coffees in hand and cigarettes close by, the two began setting out a strategy. It soon became apparent that if the Haitians started farming more coffee, eventually they&amp;#039;d hit a bottleneck. So Carmichael decided to purchase a $90,000 mechanical dryer to augment the traditional man-rake-sun combination that normally dried the beans. He didn&amp;#039;t know where they would put it or how to power it, but they could figure that out later. Carmichael contacted people at the Clinton Global Initiative and convinced them to dedicate a person to expanding the partnership to other parts of the country. Then he set out to find buyers. La Colombe would take some every year, but they&amp;#039;d need to sell more. He met with Williams-Sonoma and West Elm, and got both to agree to sell the co-op&amp;#039;s Blue Pine Forest coffee in their stores. Then they started thinking of creative ways to find even more support. Carmichael worked on getting the co-op rain-forest certified, and he even talked to a guy about paying the farmers as a type of carbon credit. That way, the Haitians would also be paid for what they were already doing: not tearing down their jungles.  In June, Carmichael went back, his fourth trip in six months, to sign the final paperwork. His mood on the plane was jovial, like that of a man who&amp;#039;s been hiking for a hundred miles but knows he has only twenty left. And yet Carmichael should have known better. He&amp;#039;s been in that position before. In the dining room of the Thiotte Community House, he and the four members of the co-op board wait in silence for breakfast to be cleared. It is his second day of meetings, the second day of disaster. Carmichael addresses the group in En-glish, his voice tight with anger. &amp;quot;I came here expecting to make a deal,&amp;quot; he says to them. He reminds the men that they committed to a constant price six months ago, yet yesterday they tried to take advantage of him by raising it another 25 percent. Most of this is probably lost on the board, as three of them don&amp;#039;t speak English. Until now, all the negotiations were conducted in French. He did that out of respect, but after yesterday&amp;#039;s negotiations, he is done being respectful. He switches back to French and addresses the man seated directly across from him: &amp;quot;And you, sir,&amp;quot; he says gruffly. &amp;quot;Why are you even here?&amp;quot; This man, the co-op&amp;#039;s former president, has been ousted from his position. Yet he still sits in on the meetings \u2014 seems to run them, actually \u2014 despite the fact that another man, Felix, has been elected to replace him. Carmichael can&amp;#039;t begin to understand all of the village politics, but he knows that something is wrong. And he knows that he&amp;#039;s done dealing with it.  &amp;quot;I want to talk to the president,&amp;quot; Carmichael continues. He turns to Felix, who, up until then, has been silent. &amp;quot;Mr. President, what do you think?&amp;quot;  Before he can answer, the former president stands, sputtering and threatening to leave. Carmichael lights another cigarette. He adds to the mound of ashes on the saucer next to him, a delicate china that stands in stark opposition to the rest of the spare, concrete room.  Carmichael is a blan. And the Haitians have dealt with blans and their promises before. Most often they&amp;#039;ve been let down. So even though Carmichael won&amp;#039;t profit from helping them sell beans directly on the international market, they suspect his intentions. They don&amp;#039;t trust him.  Carmichael walks out of the room. There will be no deal today. Last year in Death Valley, the tires on Carmichael&amp;#039;s pig popped, making the task of pulling five hundred pounds of gear impossibly harder. Eight miles into his seven-hundred-mile trek in Antarctica, his ski bindings broke. He jury-rigged them, only to have them fall apart again, forcing him to continue on foot. In Haiti, the biggest impediment to his dreams turned out to be something he never expected. The farmers he is trying to help.  Perhaps the hardest part is that Carmichael knows he can&amp;#039;t do it alone. As dependent as the Haitians are on him, he is dependent upon them. And so he does what he hates most. He waits. Two weeks later the co-op calls. They will accept the price originally promised, and in the fall they will sell ten containers \u2014 330,000 pounds of coffee \u2014 directly on the international market via Carmichael. He gets La Colombe&amp;#039;s assured supply, but more important, that&amp;#039;s more than $1 million directly into the pockets of Haitian farmers, with the potential for much more.  Back in his office loft, the smell of the day&amp;#039;s roast all around him, Carmichael is ecstatic. The plan is working, he says. The Haitians are making money. It should take only a couple of years before the countryside is bursting with coffee.  His voice beams in a barrage of overcaffeinated sentences, almost as if he&amp;#039;d forgotten the negotiations and stress of the past six months. He&amp;#039;s always been a man of short memory and long ambition, preferring aspiration to reflection. The most important thing is catching the squirrel. Once he gets it, everything else fades away. The only thing that remains is the story.  PLUS: Read More About Todd Carmichael&amp;#039;s Haiti Trip &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/interviews/a12363/todd-carmichael-1211/>