If we were in the BBQ business instead of the coffee business, we would never try to sell Kentucky ribs to someone looking for Texas brisket. Just because both come from Southern states known for an obsession for smoked meat doesn’t mean they’re automatically interchangeable—a fact we generally know to be true in coffee, especially when comparing, say, Colombians and Brazils, or Kenyans with Ethiopians.
Cafe Imports is headed to the Gulf Cooperative Council! We will be teaming up with our partners at Nukhbat Al Marabih and Kafa Coffee to present educational coffee events and cuppings in three cities across the GCC.
It is inspiring to serve the global coffee community while also surrounded by such thriving local coffee scenes at each of our offices. For example, just one Paul Bunyan–size hop-skip-and-jump down the road from our North American headquarters in Minneapolis, you will find an oasis of roasting experts at Mill City Roasters.
Buying the best coffees means buying coffees better: At Cafe Imports, we believe in offering both our roaster customers and our producing partners the squarest deal for every quality of coffee, from the workhorse 80–83 point lots all the way up to the 90+ microlots. Our sourcing philosophy is designed to be a holistic way to meet all of these needs, and we have found an approach that helps us develop stronger relationships at origin, discover better coffees all the time, and offer the right prices to our partners all along the supply chain. Read more about what we call our “stratified” approach to sourcing coffees, and learn how you can fit these offerings and this principle into your green-coffee buying with us, too.
Stump the Roaster comes back to beautiful Stumptown for another enlightening evening of shop talk, caffeinated confessions, and candid Q&A. Join us at Buckman Coffee Factory for the fine food, drinks from Rogue Ales, and community.
After several years of development, we are pleased to release the first edition of our World Specialty-Coffee Maps. The individual country maps reflect Cafe Imports’ buying history and sourcing efforts, along with the insight of our partners in specialty-coffee-producing regions worldwide.
Perhaps it’s ironic to say that there are sleeper coffees, but in this season of flashy fruity cups, limited-release microlots, and big-name arrivals, it’s easy to overlook the quieter fresh-crop coffees that can be versatile and delicious while also being accessible—both in terms of their cup quality and characteristics, as well as their price.
Sugarcane Ethyl Acetate (E.A.) Decaffeination is a natural process that not only maintains astonishing integrity of green-coffee flavor, but also allows us to offer decaffeinated coffee that follows an integrated vertical supply chain, as the growing, processing, and even the full decaffeination process all happens at the source in Colombia.
On the heels of our first ever Legendary Coffee Tour in the U.S., our traveling Cupping event/coffee festivity is jumping across the pond!
Café Imports Europe is packing up their traveling cupping kit and headed to the United Kingdom at the end of this month! And if that’s not exciting enough, we are hitting the Alps (Munich, Zurich, and Vienna) on 31 July–3 August.
We are excited to introduce a new section to our webpage: “Purchase Planning.” This section can be accessed at cafeimports.com/purchase-planning, or under the “Purchasing Info” menu bar option on our homepage. While there is no real formula for how one company or another should approach purchasing coffee, we hope our Purchase Planning page will be a useful resource for roasters, not only to learn what tools and buying assistance Café Imports provides, but also which of those tools will best serve your company’s needs.
Join us at our European office on 17 June at 3pm for a chance to meet and cup with Luiz Paulo, one of the founders of Carmo Coffees—our longtime exporting partner in Carmo De Minas, Brazil. For more information leading up to the cupping and to R.S.V.P, visit our Facebook event page here.
Fresh-crop Kenya season is one of the most thrilling times of year for us, and not only because the coffees are always delicious and dynamic, but also because their arrival is the culmination of complex work behind-the-scenes—work as complex as the coffees themselves.
Join our European Cafe Imports team for a night of Stumping the Roaster! A focused conversation about roasting coffee, with an extraordinary panel of coffee professionals. The evenings events will talk place Thursday, May the 4th at 7pm at our European office facility: 58 Oranienstrasse, 10969 Berlin. Cafe Imports Europe’s Stuart Ritson will emcee the […]
We are pleased to be announcing our Spring 2017 “Legendary Coffee Tour“, hitting a cupping table near you this May! The Legendary Coffee Tour is a travelling coffee education event and celebration presented by our notorious team of Café Imports Sales Reps and Customer Service. In years past, Café Imports has hit the road with […]
Ever since we bought our first container of Costa Rican microlots in 2004, we have been nurturing and growing our relationships with producers there, only to see the projects, partnerships, and the coffees themselves blossom in ways we honestly just could not have imagined back then. Our operation is extensive in Costa Rica. At our […]
“From 2005-2016, every bean of coffee that reached the Café Imports warehouse doors was carbon neutral/carbon offset by planting trees. This new effort (with Trees, Water & People) in 2017, a charitable effort by the ownership of Café Imports, guarantees again that all of our coffee is carbon neutral by the time it arrives at […]
Cafe Imports Director of Sensory Analysis Ian Fretheim has been working on a new Cupping Score Card for some time now. After careful development and refinement, based on years of on-again/off-again brainstorming and months of application, Ian has arrived upon a new form that we are deeming the “Analytic Cupping Score Card” (Figure 1). Cafe […]
