The Blendization of Premium Coffee

When I started roasting coffee about six years ago, one of the things that drew me to this passion was the wonder of single origin coffees.  I began my exploration, as most coffee lovers do, by learning about the main growing regions of the world (Central and South America, Africa and Indonesia), and then, through experimenting with the broad range of coffees offered by the homeroasting suppliers, I dug deeper to learn about coffees from individual countries and the regions within each of these. And there I found an endless journey through flavors and aromas and stories and processing methods that is what motivates my love of coffee today.

To give you a sense of how massive this universe of coffees can be, have a look at today’s offering list from one of the importers I use – featuring 339 different coffees.  Click on the little symbols next to some of these to learn more about where these were grown and their flavor profiles.

When these coffees make their way to roasters, they have one of two destinies.  Some will be used for blends (such as our Indo Limbo French Roast or Espresso Nirvana), while others will be sold as unblended “single origin” coffees.  Our current offerings from Brazil, Ethiopia, Guatemala and Sumatra are examples of these.

In looking around at where coffee is sold, you’ll see that most of what is out there for mass consumption (grocery stores, café chains, donut shops, restaurants, gas stations, etc.) are blends.  These are coffee products where the maker wants you to get used to a brand identity (Sunrise Blend, Dark Magic, Winter Warmer) and be confident that you will always be getting the same product wherever or whenever you buy it. (You are not, by the way, getting the same product.  Blends are one of the dirty little secrets of the coffee world, with large-scale roasters gaming the international markets to find low cost “blender” coffees, then enhancing these with better coffees and roasting styles that give these products their identities.)

Single origin coffees are the realm of smaller roasters.  We buy these great coffees in relatively small quantities, roast and sell them until they are gone, and then move on to another set of offerings.  We take chances to do this.  In a world of blends, the typical consumer doesn’t know much about growing regions, much less about the differences between Ethiopian coffees from the Harrar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe growing regions.

In large grocery chains, you’ll encounter just a few coffees designated by a country of origin (typically Sumatra, Columbia and Brazil), but rarely if ever will you see information about regions within a country or specific farms.  Single origin coffees are more easily found in health food stores, independent cafés, farmers markets or roaster websites. 

I think single origin coffees are a good thing.  They promote knowledge of the sources of coffee, enhance the range of flavors available to the consumer and encourage farmers to grow better coffee.  I wish we as an industry had more ways to sell them, and that more roasters and retailers would make the extra effort to offer them.

Unfortunately, I fear that trends are moving in the opposite direction.  When we travel – and when I go to any store that sells coffee – I look at menus and retail offerings to see what is available.  In doing this, I have always appreciated the commitment of small cafés and roasters to single origin coffees.  These require more consumer education and more dialog with customers about the nuances of specific coffees and how they are different than what someone may have drank the day before.  But this year, for the first time, I have seen significant numbers of small coffee businesses moving away from single origin coffees and into menus comprised of only blends. 

My guess is that these changes are the result of business decisions about what works and what doesn’t work for each of these companies.  Many coffee drinkers care mainly about getting a good, consistent cup at whatever roast level they prefer supplied in a way that is convenient to where they live or work.  To understand and appreciate single origin coffees requires more commitment on the part of all concerned – roasters and retailers need to spend more time on education, and consumers need to spend more time savoring their coffee so that they see a reason to seek out these special beans.

We will keep offering both families of coffee, as our customers break down pretty evenly into blend lovers (Espresso Nirvana, Road Trip! and Indo Limbo French Roast) and those who surf our single origin offerings from Brazil, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Sumatra and others.

To each, his or her own.

Fair Trade Demystified

Hi Folks,

A Happy New Year to you all!

It is a happy coincidence that the new year arrives on a Friday this time around, so my article is reaching you all as you enjoy your very first cuppa of the new year. Perhaps some of you have a new years resolution to drink more coffee than last year, and for those of you planning on drinking a LOT more coffee, you may find a vast panacea of health benefits (according to the Wall Street Journal here).

So, in support of curing all things that may now or in the future ail you, I will be roasting this weekend on Sunday (January 3), then delivering and shipping on Monday. Please send your orders by 10:00 Saturday night to be included in this round, though we'll have some extras on hand if you don't get this until after that. Coffees for this week are detailed on the website.

Hey, if you haven't seen Starbucks' holiday greeting, have a look. Its very inspirational, and I thank them for it.

Today, I'll continue my series on social issues in coffee production, here taking on the complicated task of trying to demystify fair trade coffee.

A few months ago, I wrote about the global coffee market, and how the fortunes of any coffee farmer are tied to the macro scale forces of supply and demand for an agricultural product (including weather, crop cycles, and the actions of major producer countries) and how this in turn drives pricing structures set on one of two large international commodity exchanges. The end result is that farmers and cooperatives that have relatively fixed costs of production can see the revenue side of their business swing wildly, at times at or below their costs. First and foremost, this jeopardizes the livelihood of farmers, their families and their communities; but it also makes those who grow coffee question the value of continuing to grow coffee. It may make more economic sense to move in the direction of alternate crops that offer more diversity or lower risk.

Enter the fair trade system.

What is Fair Trade?

Fair trade is the common name for a set of global trade standards administered by Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLO), which is both an umbrella organization of 24 regional certification groups and the operator of a large producer certification operation. In the US, certification is done through TransFair USA, a non-profit organization headquartered in Oakland, California. It is the logo of TransFair ("Fair Trade Certified") you see on coffee, tea, chocolate and other fair trade certified products available at your grocery store.

The goal of these standards is to ensure producers of certain agricultural products (in addition to coffee, tea and herbs, cocoa and chocolate, fresh fruit, sugar, rice, flowers, honey and vanilla) a fair price and a guarantee of a "social premium" that provides benefits to the community. Specific benefits to coffee farmers include:

> Farmer cooperatives receive a guaranteed minimum price of $1.35/pound, a rate that rises as the benchmark "c price" commodity benchmark increases beyond this level. An additional premium of $.20/pound is paid for coffee also certified as organic.
> Cooperatives also can receive pre-harvest credit, an important method of meeting costs growing, processing and transportation prior to being paid for the final product.
> Workers on Fair Trade farms enjoy freedom of association, safe working conditions, and living wages. Forced child labor is strictly prohibited. Since most good coffee is dependent on seasonal workers who hand pick the coffee cherries, this is an important set of guarantees that impacts a far wider range of people than just those categorized as "farmers"
> Importers try to make direct purchase arrangements with grower cooperatives; thus avoiding the markups of middlemen and helping to ensure more transparency in the flow of money.
> Because the mechanism for fair trade business agreements is the cooperative, these groups (or growers) make the decisions on how to channel fair trade premiums back into their communities. Projects with these funds can include, schools, hospitals, water quality or quality improvements in their coffee operations
> The fair trade certification system strictly prohibits the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), promotes integrated farm management systems that improve soil fertility, and limits the use of harmful agrochemicals in favor of environmentally sustainable farming methods that protect farmers' health and preserve valuable ecosystems for future generations. (Note that this does not confer organic certification, though some of these are requirements of that system.)

Issues:

The fair trade system is one of several common certification programs at play in the US coffee market, along with organic, shade grown, bird friendly and Rainforest Alliance certifications. Each of these measures growers compliance with a set of standards, then provides some measure of assurance to consumers that they have been met.

The subjects of these standards - fair treatment for growers and workers, natural production methods and forest and habitat protection - are extremely important in the world of coffee, as they sustain the people who grow it, the drive to improve coffee quality and the places in which it is grown. But, I think it is important to view all of these with a measure of balance and understand all sides of a certification like fair trade.

> A System: To receive a certification, a grower cooperative must pay fees to be certified (an additional business expense), and its members must comply with the requirements of the certification. At the end of the day, the price advantage of fair trade (or fair trade organic - "FTO") certifications must make these costs and requirements worthwhile.

> Formulas: There are established prices formulas set for the world under the fair trade system, and in the same way having a single commodity market price for coffee is more or less of an issue for individual regions of the world, the fair trade price structures can be out of balance with the local costs of production. Some have recently suggested that the fair trade rates are far too low, and that a minimum of $2.00/pound is what is needed to provide a truly sustainable income for coffee growers.

> What about non-certified coffees? The fair trade system allows consumers the confidence that certified products have met the standards of this program, but I fear in promoting this system, the impression has been created that everything that is NOT certified is therefore not fair. Though there are certainly plenty of unfair situations out there that would be made better under this system, there are also farmers receiving a more than fair price for their coffee, farmers who are not members of cooperatives (who therefore don't have a mechanism for participating in the fair trade system) and market forces (such as prevailing wages far above the legal minimums) that makes that part of the structure unnecessary.

> Is fair trade (or organic or bird friendly) coffee better coffee? In many cases, the presence of a certification improves conditions on a farm, improving the attention to quality production methods and motivating farmers to produce a better tasting product. But unfortunately, certification systems can also provide a way for low grade coffee that meets a set of business or production standards to come to market bearing a designation that implies quality. Visit WalMart or Trader Joes and you'll see "Fair Trade/Organic" coffee that sells in large packages at prices close to $4.00/pound - I assure you, this is NOT good tasting coffee.

But in the final analysis, I think the fair trade system has been good for coffee, and it has also been the starting point for a number of programs initiated by US roasters that are designed to be more specific to local markets and to have more of an impact on the quality of the coffee itself. These include the Starbucks CAFE Practices program (used n conjunction with dramatic increases in fair trade coffee purchases), the Counter Culture Direct Trade program, Intelligentsia's Direct Trade program and the Green Mountain Farm Identified program. All of these programs use the fair trade system as a starting point, and then layer on additional quality standards and the benefits of direct trading arrangements.

I hope this helps, and please feel free to write back if I can answer any questions. If I can't answer your question directly, I can certainly point you in the right direction.

I wish each of you and your families a happy, healthy and prosperous year ahead.

Kent

Supporting the Growing of Higher Quality Coffees

Hi Everyone,

How are you all?

I’ll roast this weekend on Sunday the 15th and deliver and ship Monday. Please send your orders by Sunday morning, though we’ll have some extras available if you don’t get this until later in the weekend.

I’d like to ask a favor of you. Attached is a new flyer we’ve developed to explain our fundraising coffee program. If you know of a school group or non-profit organization that may be looking for a fun and easy way to raise some money, I would be grateful if you would forward this flyer to them and ask them to give me a call. Thanks in advance for your help with this.

This week, I carefully, carefully raise the lid of the Pandora’s Box of social issues in coffee. This is a broad area that encompasses every side of the human condition, to include economics, health, human rights, markets, education, weather, kindness, misery and every emotion and effect in between. And necessarily I’ll take this in small pieces in the coming weeks and months, because every side of these issues deserves to be told and understood if you drink coffee.

Today, I’d like to share some thoughts on the farmers in the world who are working to elevate the quality of coffee to its highest potential.

The best analogy to coffee quality I can think of is that of wine, perhaps now more so than ever. We know there are gradations of wine quality, starting with the stuff in the really big bottles on the bottom shelf at the store that taste just OK but get the job done, moving up into smaller bottles with marginal improvements in quality that might be in the $5 range, and upward to the $8 - $10 bottles, where we’ll stop for a moment.

These wines, often marketed under a name something like Green/Red/Blue/Orange Turtle/Bicycle/Frog/Frisbee, now seem to have achieved some level of mainstream drinkability, so they have become the “new black” of wine. You see lot of variations of these for sale now in our stores.

Then we journey on to the better wines, bearing the names of wineries and better growing regions and specific vineyards and vintages.

Coffee falls into similar categories. On the bottom shelf (with the big bottles), we have instant coffee and the lowest grades of pre-ground supermarket coffee. Alongside the $5 wine, we might find pre-ground coffee with the name of an origin country (most often Brazil or Colombia) or sometimes a roast level (dark or light). And with the Blue Duck wines are the better grades of mainstream coffees, sold ground or in whole bean form, from fancier roasters or brands and usually with a better pedigree (an origin country, of maybe even a region).

Then on the top shelf in most stores, you’ll find an empty spot next to the best wines – the best coffees out there aren’t found in mainstream stores. And honestly, most of the country hasn’t seen the best the coffee world has to offer because it is slow to arrive in the hinterland. Here, I am talking about coffees traceable back to a single grower or very small groups of growers. These are coffees that have been held apart and processed outside of the large processing plants that dominate every major growing region in the world. And most importantly for this discussion, they are coffees being grown by farmers who are very consciously working to make their coffees taste better.

These are farmers who know what their coffee tastes like (most don’t), and how to evaluate it on a scale of quality that gives them a reference point for moving their quality higher and then ideally garnering the higher prices that come with improved quality.

But here’s where the risk lies.

I have massive respect for anyone who farms for a living and does it well. Weather and bugs and hard work and the vagaries of soil conditions and unforeseen climate changes make the lives of those who grow foods for a living a challenge. Coffee farmers then layer on the gyrations of the global coffee market, where bumper crops in the major producer countries can send prices screaming downward, and in confronting these challenges, there are a number of avenues they can take to elevate the net income of their farms.

This includes steps that can be taken by any food farmer, increasing crop yields, making the farm more efficient, recycling materials from the farm to cut costs and being more careful with labor costs and supplies.

For coffee farmers, the route to a better bottom line can include certifications that translate into higher prices from buyers. You know about these, and they include organics, fair trade, shade grown, bird friendly and a new form of private certification schemes practiced by more socially conscious large roasting companies. I’ll dig into all of these in future articles.

And then there is the quest to elevate the quality of the coffee itself.

Here, I am talking about quality from the standpoint of the farmer and the inherent taste of the coffee. This is not about the quality of the roasting or the freshness of the roasted coffee or the way it is ground or the water that was used for brewing or the amount of the coffee or the brewing method. It’s about the beans.

At the farm level, there are fundamental aspects of quality, like picking the beans at the right time, processing the coffee before it ferments and properly drying the coffee, but then there is another level related to the cultivar (the variety of coffee plant), the terroir in which the coffee is grown (the special combination of geography, weather and soil related to a particular growing site) and the isolation of very special lots of coffee from other coffees grown on the farm.

When a farmer achieves the correct balance of these factors, the result is magical, a beverage on par with the finest foods and wines in the world.

And now with the new “third wave of coffee” (the first two being coffee’s beginnings as a commodity beverage and the second, the surge of awareness and quality that started in the sixties and seventies), growers and roasters are pushing coffee quality higher and higher. At the farm level, the more progressive growers have learned to taste (or “cup”) coffee with an eye to improving the quality in the cup. Small micromills (like those Tanji and I saw in Costa Rica) enable farmers to isolate individual lots of very special coffees that steer clear of the pooling of coffee by the large processors. Roasters have stopped over-roasting coffee and are working at lighter roast levels to bring out the underlying tastes of the coffee. And grinding and brewing to order (as they do at the Royal Bean) avoids the off tastes that come with pre-grinding coffee and using invasive brewing and storing methods.

So, this is a chain of respect, of the growing of the beans, the processing, the transport, the roasting and the serving.

In 2007, a microlot from the Hacienda Esmerelda farm in Panama won the “Best of Panama” competition and in the auction that followed, captured a high bid of $132 a pound (green) from a consortium of three boutique roasters from North America. This is the highest price ever paid for any coffee, but its an example of how far the quest for quality can take a farmer.

Today, nine countries reward their best coffees through “Cup of Excellence” (CoE) competitions that celebrate the very best coffees from those countries in a given year. The competitions entail both cupping (tasting) scores and auctions, and green coffee prices for the winners have ranged in recent years from just under $20 to $50 and beyond (these process go to farmers accustomed to receiving a dollar or less a pound for coffee sold into the pool system).

And perhaps most important of all, these competitions garner a lot of publicity, and raise awareness of coffee quality all over the world.

We often think of coffee in terms of a price per pound, but in actuality these very high end coffees often end up sold by the cup at prices in the $4-$6 range. This is not affordable for one’s daily cup, but I think this is a very reasonable price to pay for a cup of the very best coffee available in the entire world. Splurging on one of these great cups of coffee once a week or so would not be too much of a stretch.

But where this all starts is on the farm, and the farmers do this as their life’s work and need to get paid – and without premium payments for their investments in extra labor and micromills and sample roasting equipment and smaller batches, the whole system breaks down. The motivation goes away and growers return the relatively easier existence of growing commodity coffee.

Somewhere in the marketplace, these extraordinary coffees need to command a higher price. These higher prices empower the roaster to pay more for green coffee purchased from his or her importer, for the importer to pay more to the exporter in the origin country and for the exporter to pay more to the farmer or mill.

In densely populated urban areas and college towns where there is a lot of great coffee available, the awareness of the many facets of coffee is high and it is comparatively easy to sell whole bean coffee for $15-$20/pound and cups for $4 and more. It wasn’t always this way, and we can thank the pioneers like Alfred Peet (Peet’s Coffee) and George Howell (founder of the Coffee Connection chain that thrived in the Boston area before being bought out by Starbucks) for starting the progression of great coffee, education and availability that made this possible.

But get past these major markets, and the tastes of even the most aware of coffee consumers are still evolving.

Without the critical mass of foodie-oriented shopping streets and high population densities, higher grade coffee does not so easily sell itself. Education efforts like my newsletter and similar outreach by thousands of other small and midsized roasters are dedicated to raising awareness of great coffee – and with that, raising demand. And that demand then motivates the farmers in origin countries to try harder still.

And then the coffee gets better and better and we all benefit . . . all the way up the chain.

Starting next month, I will start to receive the new crop coffees for this year, and I’ll have some opportunities to bring you some amazing new flavors. Stay tuned.

And thanks for your support.

Enjoy the sun this weekend. We sure have earned it this winter.

Kent