Appendix E-J

Each week, we at Everyday Joe’s receive The Nod – the official e-newsletter of Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea. We love Intelligentsia for quite a few credible reasons including their ongoing pursuit of justice in the coffee industry. We also love their coffee in our mouths. They appear to have quite a few exciting things coming down the pipes in 2009. Read further so you can be excited as well…then put their coffee in your mouth.

Hola,

I’m in Bogota, Colombia enjoying some time with friends and seeking to loosen up and disengage whatever stress barnacles managed to build up over 2008. Every year brings plenty of joy and stress, among other things, and while the turn of the calendar year may not be an all-powerful life-cleanser, it is certainly as good a time as any to step back a bit and do a system re-boot, if for no other reason than that it feels good.

At the moment I’m staying in a hotel called Celebrities Suites, which I can vigorously recommend. The place is perfectly located in central Bogota and the rooms are big and tastefully set up in a clean, sparse, Scandinavian kind of way. Each room is themed after a different celebrity, and the slogan is “escoja con quien pasar la noche” (choose who you would like to spend the night with). Sinatra, Greta Garbo, Beyonce, Sean Connery, Bob Marley, Angelina… they’re all here. I got assigned J.Lo when I checked in, and after the first night, I moved up to Alfred Hitchcock when I found that the place was nearly empty and the rates were ultra-discounted for the holiday.

Thinking about what is in store for 2009, I cannot remember entering any year in the last decade with more reason to be excited, despite whatever economic difficulties continue to linger. We’ve got an incoming president who has the entire planet slightly giddy with anticipation of Change, in whatever form that may take. Even without knowing what exactly is to come, there is a sense of trust that it will somehow be good, that our collective world is on the verge of altering course in a decidedly positive way. And I do believe that what is sometimes needed most is just a basic belief among a large number of people that a door has been opened, an obstacle removed, and that we have an opportunity in front of us to unify international efforts that perhaps seemed quite a bit less possible just a year ago. Inspiration can accomplish a lot, regardless of where it comes from or what it really means. Working with coffee over the last 13 years has shown me that oftentimes the most critical and elusive element needed to achieve real forward progress is the ability to motivate people. Once motivated, people tend to rise towards their real potential and even surprise themselves in finding that they’ve got more ability to control the outcome of their works than they had previously believed.

During the last pile of years that I’ve been traveling, I found that whenever I mentioned I was from Chicago, regardless of whether I was in Africa, Indonesia, or Latin America, few people had any sort of knowledge of the city. Was it on the coast? Is it in California? Whenever there was any sort of recognition it came down to one of three things: Al Capone, Michael Jordan, or wind. Such has been the legacy of my home in the eyes of the world at large. But the last few months have been different. Now when people hear “Chicago,” there is a noticeable light in their eyes as they say “Obama!” Good stuff.

As regards to Intelligentsia and our plans for ’09, I would like to mention just a few things before I sign off to take my first tango lesson. Here, in no particular order, are some of the places we expect to be putting our energies:

1. East Africa
Kenya and Ethiopia should be on nearly every coffee lover’s Top 5 list when it comes sensory quality. Some of the most deeply flavorful, complex, nuanced and profoundly sweet coffees the world has to offer come from these two countries, and yet they still lag far behind places like Costa Rica and Colombia when it comes to consumer recognition.

This is partly because of a lack of infrastructure and access to technical resources have meant massive inconsistency in quality when compared to some of the more developed countries in Latin America. Corruption and limited transparency in the financial chain have played a big part in holding these industries back as well. Windows are opening, however, and I’m particularly excited about what the next few years will hold for our coffee projects there. You’ll be hearing a lot about them in the coming months.

2. Indonesia
In 2003 when I first traveled to Indonesia on a three week tour through Sumatra, Java, and Bali, I turned right back around and spent the next several years focusing most of my efforts in Central and South America. Indonesia was just too messy and too far away. Situated on the other side of the earth, it takes nearly five days just to get there and back. The coffee industry is incredibly fractured, and the efforts necessary to attain the levels of transparency and quality made it seem like it would rival the work of Sisyphus. I wasn’t necessarily prepared for the work then, but it is now 2009 and things are different. We’ll be putting in the work to get some world-class coffees out of Indo in the coming years.

3. Coffee by the cup, brewed to order
The age of the urn and the airpot is coming to a close. I believe that brewing in large batches is antithetical to the very idea of specialty coffee. Once brewed, coffee begins to lose aromatic and flavor qualities almost immediately, and after even 15-20 minutes, it has changed so much as to have lost many of the very things that made it special in the first place. This method of preparation means that the retailer loses out because they are dumping a lot of coffee down the drain after it gets too old to sell (at least I hope that they are doing this!). The consumer loses out because she is deprived of choice. What if I want a cup of Kenya, my sister prefers a tasty coffee from HueHuetenango, and my girlfriend wants to drink some Colombian coffee from Santuario? People have different preferences and they ought to be able to choose their favorite coffee each time they walk into a shop rather than settle for whatever happens to be on tap at the time. The coffee loses out because it doesn’t really get a chance to show what it can do.

4. Coffees being bought and sold seasonally relative to their harvest cycles
There is always harvesting happening somewhere in the world, and we are aiming to showcase coffees from each country we work in during the months in which they are in their prime. Doesn’t that just make sense?

5. More information about each coffee delivered to our customers through the web
There is so much detail behind each and every coffee we sell, but much of it has historically gotten held up in my laptop or in my brain. Coffee Info sheets and Nod emails and the like have been a good vehicle to get you more intimately acquainted with the origins of our coffees, but they only scratch the surface. Look for much greater depth of information and interactivity to be coming your way—I want to help you understand these coffees the way that I do, and in lieu of bringing each and everyone of you with me to the farms, I’m going see what I can do to bring the farms closer to you.

There is surely a 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 but I need to get to my dance lesson. Before I leave, I am going to ask you to read up on Kurimi, our Direct Trade offering from Ethiopia. This coffee is tasting great and is one of our real successes from 2008. So goodbye for now, happy 2009, and I hope you are all as excited about the coming year as I am.

Saludos,

Geoff Watts
Green Coffee Buyer
Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea

Further:

• About that Sisyphus fellow
• Concerning Kurimi
• Intelligentsia Official Site

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