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!
It’s been another season to celebrate forward momentum and growth in El Salvador, senior green-coffee buyer Piero Cristiani reports after the end of the recent harvest. After several years of struggle following an outbreak of coffee-leaf rust, this small but strong producing country is boasting a bigger yield and stellar cups of Pacas and Pacamara, the latter variety “a national treasure of El Salvador,” Piero says.
In March of 2019, we held the first-ever Best Cup cupping competition and live auction event in the small but mighty coffee-growing region of Chalatenango, El Salvador. This video tells the story of the Best Cup competition and our history working in Chalate, and hopefully inspires you to reserve your seat at the next auction event.
In the mood to take a deep dive into coffee varieties? We’ve got just the thing for you: The Cafe Imports Coffee Variety Glossary and Photo Gallery.
There must be something in the air in and around the town of San Agustín in Colombia’s Huila department, because this microregion and the coffee producers in it have put out consistently some of the best lots we’ve tasted from the country, year after year. This season, to honor the hard work of the 52 members of La Asociación de Los Naranjos, we held a micro-competition to highlight their quality and commitment.
Just last month, Cafe Imports editorial manager Ever Meister visited four cities in Australia as the featured speaker in the most recent outing of Toby’s Estate Coffee’s “Knowledge Talks” series. Rather than give a straightforward lecture, she opted to create more of a conversation with the audience about coffee traceability and marketing ethics—two of her very favorite things to talk about and puzzle through, as anyone in the Cafe Imports office will tell you. Click through to watch the full video of her presentation.
When specialty-coffee professionals say, “You gotta try this decaf,” you know you should either worry about them (“Decaf?? Are you…feeling ok?”) or maybe—just maybe—you should listen and give it a try. Well, we’ve been saying you gotta try our E.A. decafs for a while now, and you don’t need to worry about us at all: They really are that good. Like, 86 or 87 points good. Like sweet and tart fruit, lemon, apple, berry, and caramel flavors good. Well, we’ve got big news for decaf lovers and we don’t want you to sleep on it: While we’ve previously focused on Colombian coffees for this decaf process, we’re thrilled to now offer E.A. decafs from other regions as well!
We taste a lot of coffee every year, and we probably taste the most from Colombia in particular, so when something stops us in our tracks from that growing country we know there’s more to the story. That’s how we came to love coffees from Inzá, a valley town in the department of Cauca, practically pressed up against the Huila border.
In an effort to provide social and educational opportunities for the young family members of many of the coffee growers, pickers, and mill employees in the Carmo de Minas region, CarmoCoffees established a program called CriaCarmo, which offers a range of enrichment activities to at-risk and underprivileged youth in Carmo de Minas.
Best Cup is designed to highlight the great work and vast potential for high-end specialty coffee within a particular microregion, and Carmo de Minas is a perfect location for that kind of signal boosting: CarmoCoffees, a developer and exporter of specialty lots there, works with more than 2,000 small- and medium-size farms in Carmo de Minas and has been one of the most active supporters of farmers transitioning from a focus solely on volume to one that takes quality into account.
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.
At the end of each year, we take a look back over how well we have lived up to our mission, stayed true to our values, and kept up focus on the guiding principles that inspire and motivate us at Cafe Imports: Quality, Service, Education, and Progress. This year’s Progress Report is condensed into a single analysis of our engagement with our communities, our educational outreach, and our efforts toward the development of ever-better coffee quality. Click to read the full report.
We know that water is wet, but that fact alone isn’t enough to capture water’s immense power. That power is evident in coffee, not simply in the cup but also in the seeds themselves: Water activity (Aw) is the relative equilibrium that exists (or doesn’t exist) between the vapor pressure inside a food or a coffee seed as compared with the surrounding humidity or environment. In perishable foods, it is a significant measure for the sake of safety and the prevention of food-borne illness, but in coffee, it’s a significant measure…why, exactly? Click to find out.
How is a roaster or green-coffee buyer supposed to know what coffees are arriving when? With the first edition of the Cafe Imports Specialty-Coffee Harvest Chart, natch.
When it comes to highlights and harvest reports, Colombia has a very square advantage: The size, terroir, and geographical location of this coffee-producing force make sure that there is always news coming from some corner of the country, and its multiple harvest and shipping seasons make it a constant source of interest for us as well as for our customers.
There are hundreds of varieties with individual proper names planted all over the world, and many of them grow differently, look different, and certainly taste different from each other—but when you dig below the soil and research each plant’s roots, you’ll often find yourself tangled in a network of related, crossed, back-crossed, and derivative genetic lines that, well, often lead back to one or two or three main branches.
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.
A few times every year we pile into a chiva with 20 or 30 of our roaster friends from around the world, drive into the heart of a coffee-growing community, cup for days and days, and discover some of the most exquisite microlot coffees in the world by ranking the top 30 out of hundreds of submitted samples. Then we all wake up on the last day of a long week and top the whole thing off with a wild and wooly live auction, surrounded by dozens of coffee growers and their families in a sea of auction paddles, music, food, tears, and camaraderie…
Ethiopian coffees are near and dear to our hearts, so it’s only fitting that we at Cafe Imports should want to be near and dear to the heart of Ethiopian coffee: This year, we’re happy to announce the establishment of the Cafe Imports Ethiopia Sourcing Office in Addis Ababa, which will operate during and post-harvest and will serve as a hub for our cupping, purchasing, and developmental operations in East Africa.
