As a nimble and independently owned importer, we recognize that a roaster’s selections can only be made in advance with real-time information. Our green buying team is passionate about working actively with producers at origin throughout the year and sharing their knowledge and experiences with roasters like you.
Back in February, a collection of staff, roasters, and baristas went for an educational excursion.
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.
We have designed our purchase planning tools with you in mind to make buying coffee with us smoother than ever.
Hibiscus, rose, dried tart cherry, rooibos tea: These are tasting notes for coffee, but not the way you might think. They’re actually the words we’ve used to describe our fresh-crop lots of completely traceable, meticulously processed, and fully pasteurized cascara, which we’re thrilled to offer in limited quantities for the second year in a row!
When we look at a beautiful harvest, or when we taste a brilliant cup, we tend to want to romanticize it: We imagine rolling hills and bright blue skies, the smell of fresh coffee blossoms, the sway of the shade trees. What we don’t think of are the countless steps that the producer went through to create that dreamy flavor experience, and the dozens of decisions that have to be made before, during, and at the end of the season in order to sustain or even improve the final product.
Nothing stays the same in coffee for very long, and producers are always seeking new and improved ways to differentiate themselves, moderate their coffee’s flavor profiles, and offer exciting and interesting flavors to roasters and consumers all over the world. Sometimes a little experimentation and ingenuity can go a long way without having to re-invent the wheel, which is why we’re interested in the increasing popularity of anaerobic-environment fermentation.
The Oxcart Coffee – Cafe Imports Latin America office officially opened in San José, Costa Rica earlier this year, before the busiest part of the harvest season in that producing country. It was intended as a full-service export-import office where our green-coffee sourcing team in Costa Rica (green-coffee buyer Luis Arocha and green-buyer’s associate Francine Ramirez, along with Adriana Abarca in logistics and Eduardo Ramirez in sensory analysis) could receive, catalog, roast, cup offer samples, and contract and pay for coffees from the local producers with whom we’ve been working the past many years—but it very quickly became much more than that.
Coffee people are naturally curious, and we are no different at Cafe Imports: We love learning new things about this amazing plant, seed, and beverage, and we’re passionate about sharing any information we have on our Education page and through other free, accessible resources-like the brand-new Coffee Processing video series, which debuted last week on the Cafe Imports YouTube channel!
While Costa Rica accounts for just about 1 percent of the world’s total coffee volume, it has a huge place in our hearts (and our offerings sheet) at Cafe Imports. In this year’s harvest report, we’ll take a trip around the country’s growing regions with Oxcart Coffee: Cafe Imports Latin America, visiting some of our longest-term producer partners to find out how the 2018/19 cycle performed, and to get a sneak peek at what fantastic new-crop top lots will be arriving in our international warehouses shortly.
The Open Door program was developed in 2017 to allow our customers to visit our Central American office and lab in San José, Costa Rica. Most Fridays from March through May, guests have the opportunity to walk in to our office and join our Costa Rica–based green-coffee buyer, Luis (“Lucho”) Arocha and sales representative Omar Herrera, to cup coffees and hear about the development work with which we have been involved in Costa Rica. Our producing partners regularly join us for these cuppings, offering unique opportunities for calibration and real-time feedback.
What does it mean to be “engaged” at origin? What does it mean to develop real, genuine relationships in business? What is the true impact of immersion into the culture of a coffee and the people who grow, harvest, process, and mill it? As curious coffee people, and as importers who try to be conscious of the size of our footprint in more ways than one, we ask ourselves these questions all the time.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answers vary from place to place, from one situation to another: Some producers operate best with little to no interaction from their buyers, while others find a more personal connection to be deeply meaningful—and everything in between.
When it comes to the producers of our microlots from Costa Rica, which is the better option—Face Time, or face-to-face time? Read more about how we strike the balance of being engaged while not being overbearing, and to create healthy, longstanding partnerships in Costa Rica, one of our cornerstone origins.
It’s a new year, a new crop, and a whole new selection of opportunities to shrink the distance between your roaster’s hopper and coffee’s source. We at Cafe Imports would like nothing more than to have you join us on our travels into the field (literally) as we seek, study, cup, and source the world’s finest specialty coffees. Throughout the year, we gladly invite our roaster partners along on visits to the producers, mills, and exporters with whom we work year in and year out, to develop personal connections and long-standing relationships, and, of course, to bring home the most delicious coffees we can find.
The Earth made another trip around the sun, and we at Cafe Imports made another trip around the world—visiting partners, sourcing lots, making introductions, managing logistics, and rounding out another year of bringing you the finest specialty coffees. As we get ready to stow our passports for a little holiday break, and before we jet off into the next adventure, we’d like to take a moment to wrap up our year at origin as well as offer a glimpse of what’s to come.
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 […]
Enjoy this video profiling the family behind the wonderful coffee of Las Lajas Micromill in Costa Rica.
