Meet the people behind ARGCAFEE and hear their story—from their humble beginnings to the impact they’ve had on the community through collective action and market access. Two new videos are out now.
One area that has been rightly ripping, in particular relative to historical norms, has been the introduction, interest in, and acceptance of new coffee varieties. When Castillo was introduced many people wanted to turn their noses up at it. In our lab, we were more accepting, as the results on the cupping table were impossible to deny. We regularly found it to perform well against Caturra, Typica, and the many other varieties that we blinded it against. When it won the Cup of Excellence, people were somehow shocked, going so far as to disbelieve the results.
And then, seemingly overnight, Castillos were broadly accepted. What happened?
Is Fresh and Fast Good?
Fresh is good – freshly baked bread or freshly roasted coffee.
Fast can be good, too. Coffee hanging out in port towns like Dar, Tanzania, when it’s 99ᵒF (37ᵒC) and 99% humidity for extended periods is not ideal. In coffee, though, fresh and fast together aren’t always good. There is a strange race nowadays for new crop coffees where offerings may arrive before they should even be shipped.
Ethiopian coffee has always been our favorite, but there has always been a weird reshuffle of the business every few years, usually due to a governmental change triggered by something behind the scenes. We wanted to figure out what was going on this time.
Interest in innovative post-harvest processing styles is building across the coffee supply chain. Producers and consumers are seeing benefits like unique flavor profiles that add value to coffee, help producers, processors, mills, farms, and coffees stand out from the crowd, and help diversify offerings.
Finca Juan Martin and Manos Juntas are two different projects, both striving to make coffee production more profitable for producers and consistently delicious for consumers, all under the Banexport umbrella. Banexport is our longstanding partner and friend, sourcing and exporting many of our Cauca, Huila, and Nariño offerings. Their commitment to quality, sustainability, and economic equality for producers is exemplified in their projects, particularly Finca Juan Martin and Manos Juntas.
When coffee is processed, the layers of skin, fruit, and parchment are broken down and removed, leaving behind the seeds we roast and brew. Those discarded layers once provided life and protection to the seeds, but don’t have to all go to waste. The skin of the coffee cherry can be dried and sold as a singular product called Cascara.
At Cafe Imports, we’ve noted a rise in questions about processing, many of which either center around deciphering terminology or what the growing hype about methodology in fermentation and processing means for producers/processors and the coffees they create.
As we all came together during the week of MICE, we were excited to welcome some new and old faces to CIA HQ for an evening of good chats, tacos, and wine, paired with a panel discussion focused on the topic of change and the current state of the coffee industry.
We have designed our purchase planning tools with you in mind to make buying coffee with us smoother than ever. By purchase planning, you can make decisions based on the most up-to-date information on current crop offerings with expert guidance from our sales reps working closely with our green buyers at origin.
We have designed our purchase planning tools with you in mind to make buying coffee with us smoother than ever.
We couldn’t be more excited to announce the addition of two new faces to Cafe Imports, representing our Education team.
We have designed our purchase planning tools with you in mind to make buying coffee with us smoother than ever.
We have designed our purchase planning tools with you in mind to make buying coffee with us smoother than ever.
We have designed our purchase planning tools with you in mind to make buying coffee with us smoother than ever.
For all of us that work in coffee, “Happy Near Year” directly translates to “Fresh-crop Ethiopia season” — a time to taste some of the most beautiful coffees of the year.
Purchase planning has real benefits for every coffee roaster. When it comes to Brazil, the benefits of planning ahead with us include giving you first access to a wider variety of fresh-crop lots, opportunity for greater possible creative sourcing outside our typical offerings, and the assurance of coverage throughout the year until the following harvest season.
In a normal February — which this is anything but — we would have staff in Nairobi with cupping spoons in hand, spending hours and hours cupping through fresh offer samples in order to put in the season’s buy plan for Kenya.
The mid-to-late 2000s saw the emergence of “direct trade” as coffee-sourcing concept that was designed to be something of an evolution of the certification programs that already existed in coffee at that time, specifically Fair Trade/Fairtrade. The benefits of those certifications seemed evident—organic certs provide environmental protection, Fair Trade provides financial protection—but lacked a component that was especially significant to specialty-coffee companies: cup quality.
