SCA Expo 2018 Flavor Station Recap: Do You Have Good Taste?

This year at SCA Expo, we wanted to have a little fun with flavor, while also gathering data about a (very) random sample of coffee professionals in order to continue asking ourselves about our competency as tasters, and how we can improve—both within our ranks at Cafe Imports, of course, but also how we can help others improve, especially the folks we work with all along the supply chain.

For the three days of SCA Expo 2018 in Seattle, we set up a Flavor Station at the Cafe Imports booth, with different things to taste each day. The idea was to offer show-goers an opportunity to stop for just a minute, taste something other than coffee for a change of pace, and maybe get a small sense of what we are doing when we taste coffee in the cupping lab—something a bit more nuanced and hopefully more constructive and practical than a simple “Loved it,” “Hated it.”

Perfect Strangers: A Sourcing Story

Every stranger might be the friend you haven’t met yet, and in coffee, the way we meet each other is sometimes simply a matter of pure chance and in unusual circumstances.

“Perfecting the Enemy of the Good” — A New Cupping Score Card by Ian Fretheim

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 […]

Stump the Roaster: Melbourne, Thursday 30 March 7-10pm

YOU are invited to an in-depth conversation about roasting at Cafe Imports Australia, Thursday 30 March, 7-10pm.  Free beer and food will be provided to foster top-notch focus during the evening’s sage-level stage banter! Our panel of guests include: Fay Kamanis of Padre CoffeeAaron Wood of Wood & Co Coffee RoastersPat Connolly of Veneziano CoffeeDamien […]

Happily announcing our Non-GMO Project Verification

Café Imports is proud to say that our coffees are now certified under the GMO verify project to be a non-GMO food. Like the Non GMO Project, we believe “That the integrity of our diverse genetic inheritance is essential to human and environmental health and ecological harmony.” We also oppose the fact that the easy […]

Peru Regional Select

A first arrival of the 2016 Peruvian harvest landed this week after great anticipation. Café Imports green buyer Piero Cristiani has been working relentlessly with Peru in recent years, visiting several times per harvest–strengthening relationships, focusing communication, and unlocking the great potential of these Andean coffees. We took a moment during early harvest in Cajamarca […]

ANNOUNCING: The Legendary Cupping Tour – Carolinas!

ANNOUNCING: The Legendary Cupping Tour – CarolinasThis June 28th – July 1st Café Imports is heading down to the Carolinas to taste some of our favorite fresh-crop coffees with you. RSVP: sales@cafeimports.com Tuesday, June 28th @ 2:00 PM: Charleston, SC KUDU COFFEE & CRAFT BEER 708 King St, Unit C, Charleston, SC 29403 Thursday, June 30th @ […]

The 2016 Legendary Coffee Producer Tour Lineup

Café Imports is committed to supporting the baristas who are at the front lines of our industry–the people who shake hands with customers and humbly serve a beautiful product which so many people worked so hard to prepare. After recent changes to the SCAA competition structure, we are proud to announce that, in place of the […]

A 2015 Visual CI Retrospective

Well, wouldn’t you know: It’s that time of year where America’s favorite VJ, Carson Daly, throws on the leather gloves & ear muffs to guide us through the cosmos in NYC’s Time Square. Cosmos, you ask? Well, that would be referring to our ever-revolving planet, soaring through space, as a symbolic reverse disco ball descends above a skyscraper, officially closing out 2015. We here at […]

Our favorite tagged photos of 2015

The interconnectivety social media has granted modern day coffee creatives absolutely flabbergasts us. We are delighted on a daily basis to open up our instagram and discover ourselves tagged in photos, making us proclaim things like:  “Zaaaam, that coffee made it all the way to Alaska! Coffee really connects the whole gall dang world doesnt […]

The Legendary Coffee Producer Tour

In 2010, we approached the SCAA with a proposal to bring the U.S. regional champion baristas to visit a coffee-producing country. This was a new idea–connecting some of the most passionate coffee professionals with the producers who grow the thing they work with every day. This proposal was the beginning of what is now known as […]

Origin Report: Ecuador 2015

Nestled between two coffee giants, Colombia and Peru, Ecuador is a small country with a lot of coffee potential: Fantastic elevation, good varieties, and lush farmland should put this Equator-straddling South American nation at the top of everyone’s origin lists, but this is one case in which size actually might matter. The relatively limited scope […]

CESMACH Women Producers

In 2011, Café Imports green buyer Piero Cristiani was sourcing in Mexico with our producer partners at CESMACH and saw that there were a considerable number of women producers dropping coffee off for processing. On the heels of our women’s producer program in Guatemala with CODECH, Piero presented the program to CESMACH, wherein coffee from […]

From the Source: YCFCU Konga — Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia

The YCFCU (Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union) was organized in 2002 in an effort to establish stability amidst fluctuating coffee prices. Recognized under the national labor union, the YCFCU represents 43,794 farmers over 6 districts including Yirgacheffe, Gedeb, Wanago, Dilla Zuria, Bule, and Kochere. Check for YCFCU coffees scheduled for arrival to our US warehouse now!

Regional Select: Mexico

For about five years, we have been trying hard to find the real coffee gems and top producers in Mexico’s vast countryside and varied regions. In a country which has historically produced more standard coffees, we felt that somewhere in the mix of 5 million bags existed great coffees that were just getting blended together, […]

From the Source: Ethiopia, the Origin of Origins

Full containers of fresh crop Ethiopian offerings have started to breach our warehouse doors!: current US Ethiopian offerings, current EU Ethiopian offerings, current AU Ethiopian offerings With much anticipation, we are excited to share with you some closer looks at where these containers started their journey. Please enjoy these slice-of-life “From the Source” video renditions from our […]

The Jamaican Coffee Farmers Association

Watch the video above for a full run-down of a program we’ve initiated with a young band of Jamaican coffee farmers called the “Jamaican Coffee Farmers Association” Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is mainly produced by the Wallenford, Mavis Bank, Moy Hall, and Old Tavern Estates. It is consistently the highest priced coffee in the world. […]

Introducing: Variety Select Project

In our usual course of walking around a coffee farm with a producer and talking about his or her coffee; the layout of the farm, the distance between trees, pruning, fertilizing, yield, varieties, life and things like that, we sometimes come across interesting items; like a 75 year old tree in Brazil, a small field […]