Costa Rica 101 Trip: A Recap
Back in February, a collection of staff, roasters, and baristas went for an educational excursion.
Back in February, a collection of staff, roasters, and baristas went for an educational excursion.
A note from Founder and President Andrew Miller introducing our 2023 Progress Report.
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.
As we look forward to the new year in coffee 2023, we must first look back and address the challenging and rewarding year of 2022.
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.
Community is the foundation of our industry. To better connect with and support our coffee community, we’re excited to introduce the Legendary Coffee Exchange to the attendees at Wold of Coffee this year.
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.
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.
As many of you will be aware, the first quarter of 2021 has seen innumerable delays with items shipping from the EU into the UK. With Brexit came the increased demand of new rules and requirements for importing goods, which would be handled by a logistics and customs workforce that had been badly affected by the pandemic.
To our dearest friends, exporters, cuppers, mill managers, associations, cooperatives and most of all, to the farmers, producers and caficultores of the world — we miss you.
At this point, we’re all sick of updates and harvest reports that start with, “What a wild year this has been,” so we won’t make a whole production out of it: Simply put, coffee is never easy work, and these days that’s truer than almost ever before. This year has been a real test of the strength of our relationships, and while there have been a few setbacks, sadnesses, and disappointments, overall we have been shown the true power of commitments, partnerships, and of sticking together—as Cafe Imports founder and green-coffee buyer for Colombia Andrew Miller always says—through sickness and in health, in good times and bad.
Which is to say, yes, there is some bad news—but it’s not all bad, we promise. (Read on.)
We’d like to ask for a moment of your time to update you on our plans for the near future. After weighing all of the difficult choices that Brexit has put in front of our company, we have made the decision that beginning 4th January 2021, all of our unsold coffee inventory will be warehoused in Antwerp, Belgium. Aside from this transition, all of our services will remain the same, and our team will remain headquartered in Berlin.
Introducing the Cafe Imports Europe customer portal, a user-friendly account-management platform that we’ve designed just for you. Through this easy-to-use interface, you can do just about everything you need, from shopping for coffee to managing your inventory, requesting samples, viewing invoices, tracking orders, and more.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned these past few months, it’s that coffee will most definitely find a way.
Along with our producer partners, we’ve learned to adapt to Zoom to meetings rather than zoom from place to place on airplanes, and we’ve found other ways to stay in touch and even cup together (apart). In fact, we’ve been able to find a lot of joy from seeing friendly faces on our screens—especially when they have good news to share.
It turns out there has been one good thing that’s happened so far in 2020: Weather so perfect for the most recent harvest in Brazil that we can’t wait to tell you all about the coffee’s we’ll begin receiving shortly.