I am back from the road, and the roasting schedule returns to normal. I’ll roast this weekend on Sunday (March 29), and deliver and ship on Monday the 30th. We’ll have some extras over the weekend from last week’s roasting if anyone needs coffee.
Please check the website (www.freeportcoffee.com) before you order, as we’ve run out of a few coffees. One that is out this week is the Sumatra, but happily, I found a source for some of the Lintong Triple Pick we had a few months ago, and this should be in stock for the following week.
It’s an interesting time of the year in the coffee world. Many of the “new crop” coffees will be arriving in the next month, and I feel a bit like a little kid standing on the curb on a summer’s day waiting for the soundtrack of the ice cream truck to come wafting through the neighborhood. Anticipation.
When these arrive, we’ll have lots of new coffees, and I’ll be announcing some tasting events so you all can check these out.
A big announcement this week is that our coffee is now available at Bow Street Market in Freeport. We’ve had requests from people living out that way and in Brunswick, so its great to now give you a convenient way of buying our coffee.
When we show people the roastery, a question that often comes up is “where do you get all this coffee?” I’d like to devote this week’s missive to explaining the process.
In the origin countries (Brazil, Sumatra, Ethiopia, etc.), specialty coffee is packaged in jute bags typically containing 60K (132 pounds) or 70K (154 pounds), depending on the country. The coffee shipped from major ports in increments of full shipping containers, each containing 40,000 pounds of coffee (260-300 bags). (As an aside, for really low grade coffees, they skip the bags and just dump the green coffee into the shipping containers.)
The coffee travels by ship, with the journey taking between 2-4 weeks, depending on the source, and the coffee arrives in the major US ports of New Orleans, New Jersey, Long Beach, Oakland or Seattle. Some of the coffee is warehoused in these locations in either private or importer warehouses, while other containers travel by train to importers located in the central part of the country.
As a roaster, I learn about the coffees available from the three importers I work with via “offer lists” that are published daily or weekly. These lists are organized by country, and they indicate the full pipeline of coffees being offered by a specific importer. I say “pipeline” because there are coffees on the list that have been purchased but that are still en route to the US, along with those warehoused in different parts of the country and committed to by roasters but not yet shipped.
Roasters purchase coffees from importers in increments of the 60K or 70K bags described above. By the way, I usually have plenty of these bags here, and they look great on the wall. If you are interested in one, stop by to see the selection, and I will sell you a bag of your choice in return for a $5 contribution to Bikes to Rwanda.
As of the morning I write this, the largest importer I use has 467 coffees on their offer list – and many of these are now en route from Africa and Central America (corresponding with the cycle of growing, picking and processing in these countries).
The link below shows theses crop cycles, if you are interested:
http://www.hollandcoffee.com/
I select coffees from the lists I’d like to consider for purchase, and the importers send small samples of these (thus contributing to the growing pile of baggies in the corner of our dining room). We roast these on a little sample roaster, “cup” them (usually with the discriminating palate of Jim from the Royal Bean) and then make decisions of which to buy.
I order typically from a single warehouse location, and there up to ten (60-70K) bags are loaded on shipping pallets, and several days later, a large truck maneuvers its way into our neighborhood and the coffee is ours.
The high point of the winter was the subsequent transport of individual bags of coffee to the roastery by sled through a long, luge-like trough running down the hill to the roastery. The life of a New England microroaster in a hard winter.
Enjoy the nice spring weather this weekend (edited now to say “Saturday” as the forecast has changed).
Kent
