
Highlighting Carlos Guerra: Legendary Coffee Exchange Participant
Enjoy our interview with Roaster and Honduras Barista Champion Carlos Guerra, who won an Ikawa Pro 50 Sample Roaster through the Legendary Coffee Exchange at the 2023 SCA Expo.

Enjoy our interview with Roaster and Honduras Barista Champion Carlos Guerra, who won an Ikawa Pro 50 Sample Roaster through the Legendary Coffee Exchange at the 2023 SCA Expo.

If there’s one myth we’d like to bust in the coffee world, it’s the belief that coffee is “man’s work.” Millions of women grow, pick, deliver, sort, cup, and sell coffee—and that’s an abridged list. Women in coffee production face specific obstacles and challenges that are solely the result of gender bias: According to the World Bank, “Women in half of the countries in the world are unable to assert equal land or property rights despite legal protections,” and countless women in the producing world have the three full-time jobs of being the sole caretakers of farm, family, and homestead.

When you break down the work we do into three absolutely basic elements, what do you get? Trees, water, and people—right? After all, what is a coffee plant but a tree; water is necessary not only for growing and processing coffee but also brewing; and without people, well, need we say more? Considering the incredible significance of this natural trilogy, it makes perfect sense that we have partnered with an organization called Trees, Water & People in order to maintain our carbon-neutral status and to attempt to “leave no trace” as a business in a resource-thirsty global industry.

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.