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

Popularity: 28% [?]

The Nod- written by Intelligentsia Coffee’s Green Coffee Buyer Geoff Watts – is always good and always interesting. Some weeks, though, Mr. Watts sets his coffee smarts aside and slams his heart on the table. This is one of those weeks. It ressonates with me and the desire to see true community and it may resonate with you and your passion. It is fantastic.

Hola:

I’m here in Lima, Peru helping to conduct a national coffee competition. In the understatement of the year, I will tell you that it has been an interesting week. By now you know that we’ve been actively involved in various coffee quality competitions for many years, with much effort going to the Cup of Excellence, which is the undisputed gold standard when it comes to these kinds of events. What you might not know is how much work goes into making them run. The preparations typically begin almost a year in advance, and there is a staggering amount of logistical coordination required to make the event effective and efficient.vA typical CoE costs well over $100,000 to operate and involves the efforts of dozens of people and many local and international organizations. It’s a ton of work, but the results are well worth it. I can say with certainty that the impact on the producing countries is profound. It is an opportunity for them to demonstrate to the Specialty Coffee world what kind of quality exists on their farms and what the real potential for future development looks like. These events have succeeded in raising the profile of many countries that had not been considered high-quality origins in the past and have positively raised expectations among consumers, farmers, and roasters as to what coffee can taste like when everything goes right.vJust over a month ago I was in Rwanda for the CoE and received an email from a friend asking me to participate in the Peruvian competition. I had done several of these events in Peru, even serving as head judge in a competition a few years back. They were typically very low-key events with just a handful of cuppers and a small number of coffees. With only a few exceptions, the quality had been decidedly mediocre. Given my travel schedule and previous experiences here, I was a little reluctant to sign on. In the end I made the decision to come because I believe in the importance of efforts that acknowledge and celebrate quality as a means of changing the face of the coffee industry and creating opportunities for producers that would not otherwise exist. Quality competitions are, in my opinion, an essential part of the movement to change the way coffee is perceived on both a local and international level.

What followed was quite interesting. After agreeing to participate as a taster, I was then asked to help assemble a jury. Given that the event was to take place in less than four weeks, it was a lot to ask. I reached out to some friends and colleagues, and we managed to make it work. I arrived in Peru on Sunday night only to find that I had been thrust into the role of head judge and leader of the competition. That meant not just managing the group, but also evaluating and selecting the local cuppers who would join the international jury, setting up the cupping schedule and establishing the protocols, monitoring and managing the roasting of the samples, coordinating the logistics for a proposed auction, and corresponding with the local media to explain the nature and importance of the competition.

I think I must have given eight or nine interviews in the last few days. (Much more than I had bargained for, to be sure.) The morning after I arrived I was whisked to the television studio to be interviewed on a live broadcast about the economics of coffee. The entire thing was in Spanish without the possibility of translation. Although my Spanish has improved tremendously over the last couple of years, it is still far from perfect, and it was a bit of a struggle to properly explain the complexity that is the world coffee trade in any detail.

The international jury arrived the next night and we got right down to business, starting with a calibration cupping to get the jury on the same page. The next few days we worked our way through the coffees, and to our mutual delight, there was much to be excited about. I had been worried. The previous competitions I’d attended had only produced a handful of good quality samples, but as it turns out there were at least three coffees that were scoring in the 90′s (out of 100, a great score) and many others that were 85+, which made them legitimate Specialty coffees. There were even a couple of surprises. We found one lot that had very overt floral and stone fruit traits with some characteristics that reminded us of Geisha coffee.vIn the final analysis, I’m glad I came, despite all of the unexpected responsibility and extra work that I had not anticipated and for which I was not compensated. The only thing that really bugged me was that most of the key players here still just do not understand Specialty Coffee. They have a very narrow vision of coffee and fail to realize the importance of working together to improve the overall quality being produced in the country. For them this competition is a bit of a dog-and-pony show, useful insofar as it can generate some publicity and serve as an example of how they are working to advance the cause, help the farmer, etc., etc. But it is a flimsy and half-hearted effort, not convincing at all, and more lip service than substance.vDuring my speech at the closing ceremony, I enjoyed the opportunity to cut through some of the spin and explain that there is a better way to do things that will provide more mutual benefit to EVERYONE in the Peruvian coffee industry, from farmer to miller to exporter. Peru has one of the most politicized coffee industries in the world, and this is the reason why the industry has failed to advance in the way that many of their competitors, including places like Nicaragua and Colombia, have despite the country’s incredible natural resources and amazing potential. Without strong vision and active collaboration, the industry here will continue to crawl along and stagnate, its progress indefinitely halted by lack of coordination, constant in-fighting and jealousy among the local players, ineffective leadership that puts self-interest in front of group success, and an unwillingness to actively engage with groups like ACE (owners of the Cup of Excellence) who could really make an impact. It’s a sad state of affairs, to be sure.

All that being said, I am glad to see that there are some things happening at a grass roots level. Certain cooperatives and organizations have really shown some impressive maturation over the last few years, and it is way past time for the new generation of coffee people to take over the leadership and change the focus to the lift up the small producer. With some concerted effort to provide better infrastructure, technical assistance and financial resources to producers, Peru could easily become one of the most exciting coffee origins on the planet.

Cheers,

Geoff Watts

Green Coffee Buyer
Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea

Popularity: 24% [?]

Each week, a Intelligentsia’s Green Coffee Buyer – Geoff Watts- sends out his Nod. It is a very smart person’s version of the Everyday Joe’s Communique. More often than not, those Nods are relayed to you here, on Appendix E-J. This relaying is about a month and a couple weeks behind.

However, the latest Nod contained this note:

“Greetings:

Geoff Watts (Intelligentsia’s intrepid Coffee Buyer) is currently working on our Direct Trade offering from Peru, Cruz del Sur, and has limited connectivity. You know what that means, right? A big update next week.”

What does that mean for you? Well, not sure. But, it does mean that it gives me a week to catch up via a Nod Digest. Here we go…

Bikes & Africa (8/25)- Mr. Watts is in Rwanda. He is riding bikes donated by Schwinn via Bikes To Rwanda to the farmers. These bikes help ensure that the coffee cherries get to the washing stations before they begin to lose important characteristics and other things dealing with their deliciousness.

“They call Rwanda the “Land of 1,000 Hills” due to its rolling landscape, and we biked across at least six or seven of them on our way to the Kabuye washing station, which is one of three belonging to the Maraba cooperative. The ride was tougher than expected. Going up and down those hills was challenging even for the fittest among us. The incline is steep and the roads full of loose dirt, making traction a bit of an issue. On the downward bits I came close to disaster several times while trying to navigate the ruts and rocky patches at a relatively high velocity. My brakes were not that good and braking on loose ground isn’t a simple thing to accomplish. Fortunately there were only two minor casualties among the twenty or so riders, and both of them ought to recover just fine. (I wish that I’d had a camera ready…one of the wipe-outs was most definitely YouTube worthy!).

Our first stop was at a small farm with roughly 200 trees. That’s the way farms are measured here, in tree count rather than in hectares. Really they are more like coffee gardens, super tiny compared to even the smallest farms in Latin America. The farmer we met was in his late fifties, with 10 kids (and one more on the way!). This was one of three small plots he had. In total he will likely earn about $1,000 this harvest season from his coffee, a relatively large income when compared to the national average, which is somewhere around $350 annually. But he is worried about the future as the land resources become pretty miniscule when divided 10 ways. This is a common problem facing African farmers. As the populations continue to explode, resources become increasingly scarce. As it is, this entire country is already cultivated. There really is no room whatsoever to expand and every inch is accounted for. And the soils are getting worse as a result of the widespread planting of Eucalyptus trees (a gift of the Belgians) that make for good firewood and building materials because of their quick growth but have a very negative impact over time as they suck the water table dry and worsen the acidity of the soils.”

The Nod then took a couple weeks off for a wedding. Then came…

The Coffee To End All Coffees (9/19)- In the concert industry, there are awards. Best indoor venue, best outdoor venue, etc. For some large number of years in a row, Colorado’s own Red Rocks Amphitheater won the best outdoor prize. So many times, in fact, that it is now known as the Red Rocks award and Red Rocks is removed from the running.

There is a coffee like this…

“and it goes by the name of Esmeralda Geisha. It is indisputably the most revered coffee the world has seen in decades. Among coffee professionals and tasters it has gained a reputation as being in a category by itself, so profoundly flavorful and unique that it cannot be fairly compared with other coffees. Among connoisseurs it has achieved an almost transcendental status, capable of inspiring sensorial awe.”

So why is this so fantastic? It seems to be because of the long journey it has traveled from coffee’s roots in Ethiopia. This particular tree was taken to Kenya in 1931, then Tanzania in 1936, then Costa Rica in 1953, then Panama in the 1960s…

“But it was soon forgotten, as it was much lower-yielding than other available varieties and farmers did not see any advantage to planting Geisha when they could get much better production out of Caturra or other hybrids.

No one talked about or thought about Geisha until 2004, when Daniel Peterson of Hacienda La Esmeralda decided to investigate these odd-looking, tall and spindly trees that were growing on his family’s farm. He harvested and processed them separately from everything else, and then on a whim (and with much reservation) entered them into the 2004 Best of Panama competition. To his astonishment, it captivated the jury to such a degree that many were awarding perfect 100-point scores in the competition, an extreme rarity among the cupping crowd. Many thought it was a trick, that someone had slipped an Ethiopian coffee on the table as a surprise. The coffee was so floral, so seductively sweet and aromatic, so honey-drenched and alive with tropical fruit notes that we all had a hard time believing it was really a Panamanian coffee—it defied everything we had come to expect.”

Wild…and now it sells for $130 per pound- UNROASTED.

That was interesting, and Watts could probably use a bit of that Esmeralda before spending a lot of time on airplanes back in the United States…

Here and There and Chemistry (10/3)- Great coffee deserves to be enjoyed as fresh as possible. We believe this. Several shops are beginning to brew one cup at a time via various methods – Chemex, Clover, French Press. You order a cup of the brew you want and it is delicious.

“You see, brewed coffee changes continuously as it sits, with or without applied heat. All coffees contain some amount of chlorogenic acid, a mildly bitter acid which slowly breaks down into quinic acid (the same thing found in tonic water), imparting a sourish taste to the coffee. Like most reactions, this happens faster or slower depending on the temperature. But one thing is certain—after 30 minutes or so the coffee will have changed, irreversibly, and lost just a little of its perceived sweetness and vitality.”

At Method in Atlanta, Mr. Watts enjoyed a Kenya before hopping on the plane to L.A. (which he loves and is the site of Intelligentsia’s new roastery). After a couple days there, it was across the country to the NYC.

“On Wednesday night we held the grand opening of our new training space in Soho, a cool little joint right on Broadway. I was amazed to see so many people come out, and there were a hundred or more people in attendance. Very good stuff. I’m excited to see what happens with the NY coffee scene over the next several years. It has been stuck in time when it comes to coffee, lagging far behind the impressive movements that have developed in the Pacific Northwest and spread slowly Eastwards. Perhaps it’s a sort of stubbornness and obsession with tradition that has held the Big Apple back all these years. Maybe it’s the incredible costs of doing business. Either way, true Specialty Coffee has finally arrived, and I get the sense that New Yorkers are really going to embrace it. At least I hope so—the country’s biggest and most famous city really ought to be drinking the best coffees this planet can produce, it just makes sense.”

Then it was back to Chicago before heading off to Peru, where we’ll hear from Mr. Geoff Watts next.

Further:

• Bikes To Rwanda
  
• Article about Esmeralda

Popularity: 26% [?]

Each week we receive The Nod…kind of a coffee digest from Intelligentsia’s Green Coffee Buyer, Geoff Watts. It is always interesting, but some weeks it is simply too long. The man has a lot floating around in his head about coffee and its industry. Enjoy this week’s Nod and then enjoy some of Intelligentsia’s beans in brewed form the next time you come to Everyday Joe’s.

Hola:

Sitting in the airport here at O’Hare, wondering why it is that the International Terminal is so under-serviced. It’s unusual as most prime-time international airports go the extra mile to stuff their international terminals full of shops and restaurants and decorations and various amenities designed to impress visitors (and suck cash out of their pockets). O’Hare is, of course, huge, and most terminals there have a decent assortment of places to eat or sit or shop for things you don’t really need. But Terminal 5 is a no-frills stripped down traveler processing unit. And not even a very efficient one. What’s up with that?

I’m here awaiting my flight to London, which will be followed by a flight to Kenya. Tomorrow morning I’ll make the last leg over to Rwanda, where the first-ever Cup of Excellence competition is getting ready to enter the final round. There are several things that are amazing about this:

- Eight years ago there really wasn’t any top quality coffee being produced in Rwanda.

- There are at least three African nations (Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia) that have been involved with Specialty Coffee for many decades and should have been better positioned put on a CoE event.

- Most of the jurors attending the competition have never before purchased Rwandan coffee, and it will be the first time that many of them taste this coffee!

Suffice to say, it is going to be a big coming-out party for this tiny country that is re-shaping itself at an astounding pace after completely falling apart just 15 years ago.

Next week I’ll be reporting on the cuppings and goings-on. I’m especially excited about this since I’ve been so close to the development there over the last five years. It really does feel like a school graduation of sorts, though it is important to remember that everything there is still very fragile and there is still a long way to go before their coffee industry can become strong, self-sufficient, and sustainable. The local industry still doesn’t really know itself. Grower groups there have been guided along a path, but they have much to learn about long-term self-management and are still developing the orienteering skills that will allow them to navigate in a quickly changing coffee world. So I guess that makes it a high-school graduation…

But they have a lot of things going for them. There are a lot of young people that are driving the quality process, and with any luck, they should form a solid base of leadership in the future. They’ve got a natural advantage over Latin American producing countries in the form of abundant labor. There are many people living in a tiny place, and the Rwandans can apply a massive amount of human effort to meticulous process control on the farms, at the washing stations and in the dry mills. At a time when other producing countries are battling real labor shortages, Rwanda is flush. And, at least for now, they’ve got a government that seems to function well and does not create the kinds of obstacles (outdated and archaic coffee industry bureaucracy, endemic corruption) that some of their neighbors deal with.

This jury will be star-studded. Does that sound funny? I think it does, but that’s one of those great things about the coffee world. There are some incredibly dynamic and visionary persons who populate it, people who are very capable of creating wonderful things, who in another life would likely be rock stars or painters or field-leading researchers… or flailing lunatics. (Sometimes it’s a fine line.)

Most of the cuppers are friends I’ve known for many years, folks I’ve spent weeks at a time with in various countries evaluating and discussing the merits of contending coffees, brainstorming ideas for improvement, imagining what this will all look like ten years from now. The Cup of Excellence circuit has made this possible. With nine participating countries (Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Rwanda) there is ample opportunity each year to meet up for the intense four-day cupping that forces us all to dig about as deep into a cup as one can go. Complete dissection. I liken it to taking an MRI on the bean and then sitting around for an hour contemplating and interpreting the images. These cuppers will come from Scandinavia, Japan, Central America, Europe, the US, Australia and Taiwan for the opportunity to taste and discuss these coffee specimens. I’ve been traveling the “circuit” for about the last six years and have made some great friends with other roasters and coffee buyers over time. Most of them will be there in Rwanda. It is without doubt the most talented coffee jury I’ve ever seen. Should be pretty amazing.

Next time you hear from me I’ll be midway through the competition, and there will be a big smile on my face. For a smile on your own face, drink some Itzamna, our Direct Trade Offering from Guatemala.

As always, find our Nods at:
http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/origin/offerings.

Onwards,

Geoff Watts
Green Coffee Buyer
Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea

Popularity: 16% [?]

Each week, we get The Nod – the e-mail newsletter from our roaster, Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea. Usually, the content of said Nod is rather interesting, and worth passing on to you.

Last week, the Nod arrived in my inbox and I opened it and it was long. Real long. Perusing it, I could tell it would be interesting. Geoff Watts – author of The Nod & Intelligentsia’s VP of Coffee – knows quite a bit about many things, and perhaps the primary thing is coffee. In this latest edition, he explains the rising cost of Kenyan beans…an explanation that can, for the most part, be translated to many coffees and probably many of the other things Mr. Watts knows quite a bit about.

So, in order to assist you in your navigation of this explanation, a handy little summary is below (and is also offered at the end of Mr. Watt’s essay). Click on a point of interest and you can read the expanded version. I do, however, recommend reading the entire thing in context. Just start below the summary if that is your desire.

The Summary:

• Big rises in costs of production at the farms in Kenya.

• A shortfall of volume and of quality coffee in the recent harvest, leading to greater competition over top quality lots.

• Our movement towards Direct Trade in Kenya and investment in the farming societies and in building relationships.

• The falling value of the dollar.

• Greater costs of production here in the US with the costs of everything from roasting, packaging, and transporting having gone up.

• A reworking of the quality pricing model to better estimate real costs of production and attribute appropriate value to exemplary/exceptional quality coffees

• And of course the coffee is among the best harvested the entire year in Kenya, so you know it is worth it, my brethren.

The Nod:

Hola:

Last Friday saw the release of one of our favorite, and in my humble opinion, best coffees. A question that we have been asked since this time is: What’s up with the Kenya prices? Why have they risen so sharply this season? There are a lot of things that have contributed. I’ll try to explain as clearly and concisely as I can, knowing full well that the latter has never been one of my strong suits. Let’s break it down into a couple categories:

1.) The rising production costs at origin.

This is not just occurring in Kenya. EVERY coffee producer I know has seen coffee production costs rise dramatically over the last two years. It is a worldwide phenomenon. What has gone up?

A.) Fertilizer and Transport costs. This is directly related to the rising prices of fuel worldwide. We’ve felt it here in the US, but man….many developing countries feel it even harder because they do not have any buffer whatsoever. Their governments do not have the kind of reserves we’ve got or the ability to subsidize prices for farmers. So while fuel costs have risen profoundly here, they’ve gone up at an even faster rate in many coffee producing countries. As a result, everything that requires energy to produce (fertilizer is just one example) is also more expensive now. I was recently examining fertilizer costs in Guatemala and found that in many cases it has more than DOUBLED over the last two years. So the farmers are paying more for inputs than they ever have. Transporting the coffees overland (farm to wet mill, wet mill to dry mill, dry mill to exporter, exporter to port) has gotten way more expensive as well, due once again to fuel costs.

B.) Labor costs. Labor is often the number 1 or 2 most significant cost of production on a coffee farm. It keeps getting more expensive as the labor force dries out. This is especially true in Central America where there has been (and continues to be) mass emigration to urban areas and to the United States. In Africa it is not quite as big a deal as labor is still abundant in many places, but they are still facing the problem of the “aging farmer”. Most coffee farmers are in the latter third of their lives and increasingly find it more difficult to put in the work needed to manage a coffee farm to its top potential. Younger generations have not shown an interest in being coffee farmers. Why would they? They look at how their parents and grandparents have fared and they see the poverty and depressing commodity cycles and mercilessly rising costs and intense climate impacts and the sheer unpredictability of it all and they say “no way!” Why would they want to follow in their father’s footsteps when the path has failed to take them anywhere?

C.) Cost of Production per hectare has gone way up due to falling productivity. There is always a chain reaction that takes place when coffee farmers aren’t making enough money for their crops. First they stop making inputs (they use less fertilizer, spend less on husbandry, stop pruning, and stop planting new trees) and then they cut costs during harvest. This means fewer cherries per tree and more disease and fungus problems as trees become old and weak. It means less care taken in selecting cherries for ripeness. It means the per-hectare cost of production is higher than ever while the quality has gotten worse! Trees growing in poorly managed and nutrient deficient soil get quickly debilitated. They don’t produce as much coffee and they struggle to bring the fruits to full maturity. The reality is that today the costs of production on most coffee farms (and other agricultural products too) are WAY higher than they were even two years ago, sometimes by as much as 50%. The market is going to need to adjust to this somehow, or a lot of farmers are going to be in big trouble over the next couple of years.

2.) The Kenyan Auction system dictates market price.

The Kenyan Auction system was the model on which the Cup of Excellence was founded. It has consistently been the world leader when it comes to delivering the BEST price per pound for coffee of quality. Every year there are a handful of coffees that crack through into the $4.00+ range and sometimes quite a few. It is a great system for finding “market value”, as there are close to 20 exporters who compete at auction to purchase the best coffees. Each exporter receives an “auction book” and accompanying set of samples every week, and each Tuesday there is a live auction during which all those coffees get put on the block. There can be ferocious competition sometimes, especially whenever a true 90+ coffee passes through.

This season was a low crop and the general quality was not very great. When that happens, the prices for the best coffees get even higher than usual since everyone is scrambling to get a piece. That’s the nice thing about the auction from a farmer’s perspective. It also rewards scarcity, so when there is a down year in volume or quality, it drives prices for the good stuff even higher than expected because various buyers are fighting over a smaller number of available coffees.

Unfortunately, the individual farmers are not always beneficiaries of these nice prices. The link from farmgate to auction is not as clean and direct as it should be, and layers of organizational inefficiency (and outright corruption as Kenya as a nation has managed to institutionalize corruption like no country I’ve ever seen!) eat away at the profit until there is next to nothing left for the farmer. Banking is screwed up there, with interest on debts overwhelming any income.

So while the auction has yielded many clear benefits, there is still a lot of work to be done to make the system sustainable, meaning making it viable for the farmer.

This is the first year that Intelligentsia has begun to purchase some Kenyan coffee using our Direct Trade model. It is super-freaking-exciting to me, because I’ve wanted to work more closely with farmers in Kenya for almost a decade. It is my favorite coffee year-in and year-out, and it has always been profoundly saddening that the farmers, despite great auction prices, never seemed to really be able to move forward.

About half of what we purchased this year was purchased under Direct Trade principles with prices negotiated directly with the farming communities, full transparency in the chain, and quality rewarded with premiums. It is a significant step for us and for Kenyan farmers as it was not permitted under law to deal directly with farmers until about 22 months ago, and today the huge majority of coffee is still passing through the auctions.

We WANT TO BE AN EXAMPLE. We want to show Kenyan farmers what is possible and participate as leaders in the effort to re-engage farmers and introduce new expectations about transparency and commitment at the farm level. We want to earn the trust of the farmers and prove to them that pursuing a long-term, Direct Trade relationship with Intelligentsia is a great option for them. Based on lots of experience buying coffee in Kenya, it is my opinion that we’ve partnered with some of the best cooperative groups in the country, in the heart of what I consider to be the top growing region in Kenya.

I’m hoping that next year all of our Kenyan coffee will qualify as Direct Trade and that we will be able to sell it that way. For now it should be considered “Direct Trade in Transition”. This season we purchased some coffee in the auction and some directly, all from the same cooperatives whose coffees we’ve been buying in the auctions for several years. For any DT system to work in Kenya it is vital that the farmers are able to see a true benefit by selling direct versus selling through the auction. So the auction will continue to function as a sort of “market regulator”, at least on the high end, and at least until Direct Trade takes hold and farmers begin to really understand the value of working closely with roasters and establishing reliable, long-term markets for their coffees.

3.) The Falling Value of the Dollar

We feel this pretty hard-core in many countries. The problem is that farmers pay everything in the local currency, pesos, shillings, quetzales, francs, cordobas, lempiras, but they get paid in dollars. So labor, fertilizer, bags, boots, everything has gotten more expensive for the farmer due to the fact that the local currency is worth far more versus the dollar than it used to be. If this continues, at some point the industry at large will need to decide whether or not the coffee market can continue to be tied to the dollar since another 5-10% drop in value will make the equations completely untenable for the farmer. Even without adjusting for inflation, most farmers are making LESS today than their parents did…in real dollars per pound. That is not acceptable.

4.) The rising costs of production here at home.

As you know, Intelligentsia is a company that believes in constant research, development and innovation. We’re freaks about quality, and we spend money, time, and energy to make sure we get it right. That’s why we’ve invested in roasting locally in LA, that’s why we keep hiring staff for Quality Control and Roasting, and that’s why we invest so much in our Baristas. We’re always doing things to try to make our coffees even better, and there is a price that comes with that. I would hazard a guess that we have one of the deepest teams in the industry when it comes to coffee expertise and knowledge.

But beyond the costs of innovation and intense quality control operations, our raw materials costs have risen sharply. Fuel costs are high, and we depend on fuel to roast and deliver coffee. It runs our roaster’s afterburners, which clean the exhaust to ensure that we are good stewards of the local environment, but those suckers eat up gas like it was candy. We will probably need to invest in alterative technology soon.

5.) Coffee has always been very under-valued and under-priced.

There is another point that must be made, one that is to me more important than everything I’ve just mentioned: The fact is that coffee has never been valued correctly to begin with, dating back to well before all of the recent economic downturns. The only coffees that have succeeded on a large scale over the last 20 years in getting the value they should have been a handful of well-known brands from Jamaica and Hawaii (Kona). And as we all know, those coffees usually cannot even hold their own in the cup when compared to the best coffees from places like Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Guatemala, Bolivia, and so forth. They get smacked up and down and exposed for being very well cultivated, very clean, very well-handled but altogether too mild and, for lack of a better word, just boring.

When I say “the value they should” what I mean is this: valuation based on actual costs of production and real intrinsic/material quality. Just like any other business, coffee farmers ought to have the opportunity to sell their coffees at a price that nets them a profit, and that is tied to measurable quality. The better the quality, the more a coffee farmer can stand to earn in a competitive market.

Let’s select a couple of industries for comparison. The wine, spirits and beer industries all have some obvious similarities with coffee. Wine has a lot in common with coffee with regard to the way it is produced (fruits produced under specific environmental conditions and then processed into liquid goodness) and in the way it is talked about. The language of tasting is nearly identical between them, although coffee is actually the more chemically complex of the two beverages and has a greater range of potential flavor. When we talk about beer and spirits, there is similarity with coffee because these are considered “luxury goods” and they are consumed as liquids.

Now consider the range of prices you might find when shopping for a nice bottle of Scotch whiskey. You can probably find a fairly cheap bottle at your local supermarket, something that is kinda nasty going down and even worse once it has had time to soak in. You can find something mid-range, a decently distilled blend of decently produced malts. And if you go to specialty importers or big-time liquor stores you’ll find a huge variety of small-batch, limited production single malts that have been aged for many years to improve the texture, perceived sweetness, and complexity. The prices will range from $10/750 ml for true swill that will surely pummel you into joyless submission by the next morning to perhaps $150 for the finest commercially available single-malts. Most Scotch drinkers likely find their place of comfort somewhere in between, happy to pay $30-$40 for a nice bottle of Glenlivet or Macallan.

With beer it is the same…your basic six-pack of aluminum Milwaukee’s Best cans can be had for a couple of bucks, while you could easily pay $12.00/16 oz bottle for a nice Belgian small-batch.

Surely wine has been the best explored by most consumers when it comes to “tasting the range” and learning about what the low-end (frighteningly astringent and sour and ethanol-like with big-time headache power) and the high-end (ah, kill me now while I am floating on this cloud of sweet and savory bliss) can deliver on the pleasure scale. Most wine people, like beer or scotch drinkers, settle somewhere in the upper-middle of the range. No cheap stuff, but save the tip-top-barely-out-of reach shelf for those who have made a lifestyle out of sipping priceless delicacies. The $10-$40 range seems to serve people quite well when it comes to measuring out a nice pleasure-to-value ratio.

Then we could even expand the discussion to cheese, where the scale takes us from Velveeta all the way to the nicest 15-year old hard cheese with more taste per square millimeter than there are bad jokes in Marc Johnson’s arsenal. (Marc is our Marketing Director, he tells lots of bad jokes, and my comment means infinite taste, for those keeping track at home.) One costs $1.50/lb, the other costs $50.00/lb. One makes you fart and weep and rot away from the inside, the other one makes you want to high-five the cheese guy.

My point is that consumers have learned how to differentiate value pretty well for most products out there in the world today. They, of course, sometimes attribute value to certain things due to reasons of fashion or trend. And sometimes clever marketing combined with gullible consumers can lead to freaky pricing for what are really low-quality goods. But most of the time people come pretty close to getting it right, over time.

When you consider coffee, one thing to realize is that there is a very small amount of truly high-quality coffee available in the world. Just isn’t produced very much. Why? One reason is that it is very hard to accomplish. Really, really hard. The second is that the world has rarely been willing to pay farmers what it actually costs to produce this kind of quality. Instead of being priced according to actual costs of production, with better coffees getting additional premiums as a result of their better taste, coffee is priced like corn, cotton, soybeans, petroleum, or other commodities out there. It is a futures market that has always determined value.

Much has been written about the “coffee crisis” of 1999-2004, which put hundreds of thousands of coffee farmers out of business because the prices people were paying were below even the most basic, rawest costs of production. One thing that was exposed was that we as consumers (and those of us working in the coffee business as roasters, retailers, baristas, restaurant owners) really need to re-think the way we understand value as it applies to things like Specialty Coffee, and coffee in general, which is not actually a traditional “commodity” in any practical way. The range of different qualities, different production costs, and different cultural traditions behind the coffee are huge and diverse.

The reality is that we fight nearly a century of history during which coffee was bought and sold as a commodity and where the idea of the “bottomless” cup became entrenched in the minds of most consumers. Coffee has usually been a loss-leader for most restaurants and shops, given away for free or for next-to-nothing. Cheap coffee is far-and-away the norm.

Our objective is to try to get things right. We want to pay farmers what these coffees are really worth. When someone purchases Intelligentsia coffee, they are getting an amazing deal. Some of the best coffee produced on the planet for what still amounts to very little compared to what one might expect to pay for any other consumable the sits at the top end of the quality spectrum. That’s not to say we over-pay. We’re not a charity, and I do not have much faith in development models that show up in Africa or anywhere else and give money away without building anything that can last. That model has proven over the last 30 years that it simply doesn’t work, and in many instances has even made the problem of poverty WORSE.

We pay what both we and the farmers agree to be the right price, call it whatever you like: fair, just, honorable…those are just adjectives. The whole nature of this business, as I see it, is to figure out what farmers need to earn in order to produce extraordinarily great coffee. That’s what I do; I work with them to figure out how much everything costs, to quantify those things, and make sure that the farmer, who shoulders so much responsibility and so much risk in this whole deal, is profiting from his/her work and is in a position to grow and evolve. We want to contribute to building a coffee industry where growing coffee is an attractive career choice. Where the children of coffee farmers will decide they DO want to continue the family tradition, and can make that choice without needing to be certifiably insane.

That might have been a bit too long winded, a bit too lengthy to divine the key points. In acknowledgement that this is likely true, here is a summary. In short, the prices we paid this year for our Kenyan coffees reflect:

- Big rises in costs of production at the farms in Kenya.
- A shortfall of volume and of quality coffee in the recent harvest, leading to greater competition over top quality lots.
- Our movement towards Direct Trade in Kenya and investment in the farming societies and in building relationships.
- The falling value of the dollar.
- Greater costs of production here in the US with the costs of everything from roasting, packaging, and transporting having gone up.
- A reworking of the quality pricing model to better estimate real costs of production and attribute appropriate value to exemplary/exceptional quality coffees
- And of course the coffee is among the best harvested the entire year in Kenya, so you know it is worth it, my brethren.

And with that, read even a bit more about Kenyan coffee, the subject of this week’s Nod.

As always, find our Nods at:
http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/origin/offerings.

Best,

Geoff Watts
VP of Coffee
Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea

Further:

• Intelligentsia Official Site
• Kenya- Gaturiri Auction Lot Fact Sheet

Popularity: 29% [?]

Ladies & gentlemen- the Nod. A weekly note from Intelligentsia Coffee’s VP of Coffee, Geoff Watts. It is e-mailed to Everyday Joe’s (because we use the beans roasted by our friends in Chicago), and then we post it here for you, because we love you. Enjoy.

A Nod or two ago I started reflecting on how my relationship with traveling has changed over the years and especially how some things that never before had seemed burdensome were now beginning to feel a bit wearying. That’s to be expected, I suppose…most things are more exciting when they are new, and it is easy to disregard small drawbacks when one is so entertained and occupied with assimilating fresh experience. It strikes me that somehow this condition must sit at the epicenter of the Happiness equation—the ability to continuously experience the world and its sensory delights with fresh eyes, the ability to soak it all up and never get saturated. Wasn’t there a film about that? “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” I think it was. It might be interesting to watch that in a double-feature with “Groundhog Day” and juxtapose those two scenarios.

Regardless of the fact that some things in life seem destined to become mildly less stimulating after much routine and repetition, there are, fortunately, always surprises. And every year there are trips that end up being particularly inspiring, stretches of days or weeks that leave me feeling renewed with the kind of silly but invigorating and intoxicating optimism that you can almost bathe in.

This last trip was that way. I spent the weekend in Cali, Colombia doing some roasting and cupping at Café Palo Alto, a small coffee company that I help run there. Often when I’m working there, I feel as though I’ve stepped into the way-back machine, remembering the days when Intelligentsia was just a tiny retail outfit with a 12-kg roaster in the store. It’s a lot of fun. The challenges that come with operating a start-up business are of course all too real, and I suspect relatively similar for all new business owners regardless of location, but I enjoy the simplicity of dealing with a compact and immediate universe where most decisions feel comfortably free of weight.

After a couple of days I was joined by Mary and Neil Smith, two Chicagoans who had bid on and won a “coffee origin trip” that we had sponsored in a charity fundraiser last summer. Before the trip started, I must admit that I was a little less than enthused about the prospect of chaperoning a trip with two complete strangers. People are strange, that we all know very well. Some nice, some not so nice, some happy-go-lucky, some just plain unhappy, some frivolous, some cynical and some defeated. But this was a blast. These two new friends, one of them a professional in the high-quality fresh fish industry and the other a now full-time musician, went with me to Cajibio (about two hours from Cali, close to the old colonial city Popayan) to visit a farm called Santuario. You’ll be hearing a lot about this farm in the coming months and years—it is a breathtaking example of what can be done with resources and intention, and I hope that it may serve as a model for future generations of coffee farmers.

What makes it so inspiring? Part of it has to do with providence. I can’t shake this feeling that for some reason I’ve met this farmer at precisely the right moment in time, the right point of convergence in the coffee world, a time when both of us are ready to take the tools we’ve developed and map out what the future of coffee can look like. Coffee 2000. The new deal. You see, this farm is the farm of dreamers. It was started in 2001 at a time when investing in growing coffee seemed like a patently ludicrous proposition. The market was in the gutter, the planet was oversupplied with poor quality coffees, and the immediate future seemed pretty bleak for most growers around the world. Farms were going out of business left and right, and would continue to do so for the next four years. Many economists probably would have recommended gambling on NBA games or selling typewriters as more promising career moves. Milk-based drinks were dominating the landscape in the US and overseas retail markets, new “energy drinks” were capturing the attention of the sugar-addicted youth population, and coffee beans themselves had somehow become the least expensive part of most “coffee” beverages.

Still, Camilo Merizalde decided he wanted to grow coffee. Wow. I’m quite certain more than a few trusted friends were suspicious that someone must have slipped something into Camilo’s aguardiente. Coffee? The same crop that has bankrupted thousands of farmers and held millions more in a state of perpetual uncertainty and debt? Where production costs are rising at a pace that far exceeds rising values? Where small changes in world climate could throw the whole formula out of whack? Yes, that one. A fool’s pursuit.

I’m sure he heard a lot of that, but he was driven. He apparently caught what I myself am afflicted with, and what many a friend has experienced in the past—coffee has a seductive power. It gets in your system and won’t leave. It offers incredible intrigue, much like wine but far more complex. More fascinating than a yellow submarine and with more potential to impact human lives in a positive way than perhaps any crop in existence. But it can be an unpredictable and capricious companion, elusive and frustratingly impermanent.

So Camilo planted coffee. He took what was at the time nothing but pasture land, nearly barren, and created a farm. And he did it as dreamer and a perfectionist would, taking nearly two years to consult with farmers, agronomists, environmental engineers, coffee roasters and exporters before getting it up and running. The result is a coffee lover’s fantasy, a perfect marriage of exceptional environmental advantages and an engineer’s sense of orchestrated harmony. Most of the farm sits at close to 2000 meters, a glorious altitude for the best types of coffee tree. It is partitioned in a sensible fashion, divided into lots of Typica, Bourbon, and other heirloom varieties of coffee that are revered for the cup characteristics of their seeds. Each section was planned out meticulously based on advice from field-leading agronomists, with a big variety of different shade tree species and other plants spaced appropriately to promote the symbiotic ecosystem interactivity and minimize the need for additional inputs to keep the coffee healthy.

Having the farm organized as such will allow Camilo to identify specific niches on the farm that produce unusual quality and provides for the harvesting of coffees by variety—something many farms lack since varieties tend to be interspersed in such a way as to make them impossible to isolate. Currently, Camilo has nearly 20 additional varieties growing in a test garden, soldiers preparing even now for a time in the distant future. Over the next several years we will work together to classify the quality traits and potential of all of these experimental coffee types, looking to identify some treasures. And knowing Camilo, we’ll be experimenting together every single year as we try to fine-tune the processing methodologies in order to get maximum sensory expression in the coffees.

It’s a little paradise there, and I’m extremely excited to be working with a farmer who shares our vision and is just crazy enough to be willing to take necessary risks that would cause most others to balk. That’s how progress is made, and while it is surely premature to make any grand proclamations about how together we will redefine the model for both coffee grower and coffee roaster, there is nothing wrong with dreaming.

I’ll share more about Santuario and the rest of the trip to Colombia in next week’s Nod. For now, get yourselves ready for an impending onslaught of new crop coffees from Central America and East Africa. Port strikes and unexpected rains have collaborated to delay shipment of many of the coffees we normally expect to have ready for sale in June, but the tide is about to come in. Over the next weeks expect to see new Direct Trade coffees from Kenya, Tanzania, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala showing up on the offering sheet. In the meantime, we are proud to launch the 2008 edition of Los Delirios our Organic Direct Trade offering from Nicaragua. Enjoy!

As always, find our Nods at:
http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/origin/offerings.

Onward,

Geoff Watts
VP of Coffee
Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea

Further:

• Intelligentsia Official Site
• National Geographic Coffee Map

Popularity: 19% [?]

Each week, we post “The Nod” from Intelligentsia (the coffee roaster who produces the fantastic beans we serve) here on Appendix E-J. It is always a source of coffee knowledge, though this one (written by Intelligentsia’s VP of Coffee Geoff Watts) touches on the philosophy of time and the frustrations towards corrupt governmental systems as well. Hold on to your butts.

Hola:

I’m sitting here at the little café outside the Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi, Kenya. Times like these are the dregs of my work, the most uncomfortable and least enjoyable part of being a coffee buyer. Just waiting and nothing more. Nothing to do and just enough fatigue to sap any will to try to make something of the time. I’ve realized that the act of waiting with nothing on the line, no tension whatsoever, is one of the most frustrating elements of life.

Years ago, when I first started traveling relentlessly, I was able to find pleasure in transit. New airports, new people to observe, and the anticipation of getting somewhere not well-known were enough to make the transit interesting in one way or another. Now those things have worn away from repeated use. I used to take a certain satisfaction and pleasure in explaining to friends that I never, ever got bored. Not once. For almost two decades boredom was a foreign condition. At the very least, there was always something to think about or some sort of meaningless distraction that would allow time to wash by unnoticed. I took pride in that.

I remember fondly the arguments I used to have with Doug Zell (Intelligentsia CEO) about keeping track of time. Ten years ago, in our first Roasting Works on Cortland in Chicago when our production staff consisted of me and a handful of guys packing coffee, I walked in one morning and saw a gigantic clock hanging on the gray cement wall in front of the roaster. I took it down immediately. “What point is there in watching a clock?” I asked. It slows things down, causes one to start measuring time in an unnatural way, giving individual minutes an undeserved importance in the scheme of things. It makes the day feel longer. If I want to know what time it is, I’ll check. There are now clocks on cell phones, watches on arms, clocks on the computer, clocks everywhere. The last thing we need is to have one in our face, staring down at us all day and tempting us to look, almost forcing us to care about the steady progress of the little revolving hands.

A day after I took it down, I entered the office and there it was, back in place. Geez. I decided to hide it this time, so I stuck it behind a pile of coffee sacks where it could tick-tock all day and bother no one, entertaining itself in solitude. That’s when we argued about it, a silly exchange that danced between philosophic and metaphysical objections to the intrusion of regiment into our natural state of being and pragmatic reasonings about productivity, organization and time management. Funny stuff. I think we both had a point, but I’m not sure we ever found consensus. In the end we moved the clock to a less conspicuous location and let it be.

These days I have a much harder time staving off boredom during the transit times in my trips. Partly it is due to changes in the way I perceive time. Often I want the day to last longer with more time in the morning to wake up and gradually ease into full consciousness, more time in the afternoon to get things done, and more time in the evenings to unwind or indulge in hobbies or entertainment. Years seem way too short, as do months and weeks. More to do than there is time in which to do it.

Bicycles transporting coffeeFor this reason, I really begrudge time that I deem to be completely wasted. There are very few occasions when I hand out that designation. Sometimes I can watch TV for hours, gaining little of importance, but enjoying it nonetheless. Or idling in a coffeeshop, just chilling, just watching the world go by. That can be fun too. But standing in lines at airports, standing in lines at security, standing in lines waiting to enter or exit a plane… there is absolutely nothing to appreciate about that. Standing in line at immigration or staring at a moving belt hoping that my luggage will pop out is not fun at all.

But I think the worst may be layovers. 6 hours, that’s the most ruthless of them all. It’s not enough time to get into the city and back, not really worth the expense or effort, but it is more time than can be passed having a meal or wandering the airport. Just off a five-hour transit from Rwanda or Tanzania, most of it spent reading a book, I have no immediate interest in setting my eyes back on the pages. My friends and colleagues back home are still asleep, a full 8 hours behind, so there is no point in communication and the roaming charges are too steep anyhow.

It is those six hours that I loath, made worse knowing that another six hours are waiting for me in London Heathrow, when I arrive blurry-eyed at 5 AM tomorrow morning after another nine hours airborne. At 5 AM nothing is open and the airport is as sleepy as I am. And six hours from now I will step on another plane, ready to sit once again for a full eight hours on the way to Chicago. I will arrive as rush hour begins, so after waiting in lines at immigration I will wait in the back of a taxi, inching along I-90 on the way to my apartment. When I get home, I will sink into a chair with my brain not working well after about 30 hours without significant sleep. The evening itself will be wasted too because I’m not really wanting to go to bed for the night but I’m too blurry to really get much out of the remainder of the day. I will try to watch a movie, but will invariably fall asleep in my chair two-thirds of the way through, missing the resolution. When I awake tomorrow, much of that day will be wasted too, since the combination of jetlag and lack of sleep will reduce me to about 60% functionality.

Was that enough complaining for one day? I think so. Not much can be gained through complaint. But I did want to shatter the myth that being a coffee buyer is always sexy and exciting. It is great work, no doubt about it. But just like most anything else, it comes pre-loaded with plenty of significant drawbacks. Often I wish that NASA would stop sending people and plants and monkeys into orbit and focus their energy on making earthly transport more efficient. It might yield nothing, but then again I’m not so sure what we’ve gained in the last twenty years after trillions of dollars spent on endless, secretive, and obscure space programs. Why not put the money into education and get us a bunch of new millennium Einsteins who will transform our ability to manipulate Time?

Anyway, back to Rwanda. I spent the last week there, a glorious week, spending quality time with many good friends: coffee students, farmers, researchers, co-op leaders, development workers from various NGOs, and some local business people. This time I was also in the company of an admired peer and one of my closest buddies on the planet, the immensely talented Peter Giuliano (the buyer for another coffee company called Counter Culture). He and I work together in Rwanda, and it may strike some as odd that we collaborate so closely. After all, our companies are direct competitors in many ways and many markets. But there is tremendous value in this kind of cooperation. We always learn from each other, every single time we are together. And by combining our energies and insights we are able to accomplish a lot.

Development work (that’s what working with coffee in these countries is, really) is incredibly complicated. The puzzle is large enough and intricate enough to defy imagination. But the reward is almost inconceivably gratifying. Getting amazing coffees out of the mess that exists in many producing nations while helping to improve the livelihoods of those whose efforts makes these coffees possible is a hard-to-beat endeavor. I can’t think of many things I’d rather do. When Peter and I put our heads together on this stuff, we often make things move more swiftly more precisely and with more immediate results than either of us would probably achieve doing it solo. I am grateful for our friendship and professional alliance.

This past week we visited several coops that we are in partnership with here: the Nyakizu, Rusenyi, and Humure groups form the backbone of our Rwandan coffee mark Zirikana. First up was Nyakizu (Abakundakawa), located in the far south reaches of Rwanda, very close to the Burundi border. It is a small group and has been in a decidedly chaotic state for the last three years. They’ve switched Presidents three times, and the entirety of the cooperative management team has been in constant flux. Makes it hard to earn progress when the leadership turnover is this dramatic. The coop is beyond bankrupt, and they nearly lost their washing station last month as BRD (Rwandan Development Bank) made moves to repossess it in the wake of missed payments on outstanding debts. In total they still owe more than 150,000 dollars to the bank, and at this point anything they’ve been able to pay has been gobbled up by interest. No movement whatsoever on the principle.

Why is that? We’ve been paying great prices from the start…way over “market value” and more than we pay in many Latin countries, where economies are a bit more developed and labor costs are considerably higher. We’ve volunteered thousand of hours giving training and advice. The PEARL project (and now SPREAD, a follow-up project with a clever new acronym for a name) has spent countless thousands of dollars in the last few years on technical assistance and infrastructure to help build the capacity of the cooperative. RWASHOSSCO, the recently formed federation of cooperatives that helps the individual groups with export and marketing services along with countless other hard-to-measure types of assistance, pours loads of energy into helping these groups get on track.

The answer to that question (like the answers to most questions having to do with coffee) is not simple. A big piece of it is lack of reliable and competent leadership and management. Too often, elections (more accurately called “appointments”) are mostly political in nature. It is not the best educated or most qualified individuals given responsibility, but rather the most popular, the most outspoken, or even sometimes the most gullible—those willing to step into a role where failure is the likeliest outcome and who will later shoulder the blame when things go wrong. In so many instances the leaders are the ones who want to climb over the rest, who see the position as an opportunity for personal gain, and who are shameless enough to seek it even at the expense of their neighbors. There is this Latin story that Peter reminded me of which explains why it is so easy to boil crabs. You throw them in the pot, and as the water gets hotter they try to escape. Once in a while one will almost make it, getting a hook on the top of the pot after major effort. But just as it is about to get over the top, the other crabs reach up and pull it back in. That happens all the time in developing countries. So corruption or incompetence leads to financial mismanagement and loss of profit. The leaders change, the debt grows, and the cycle starts over again.

Next up on the list is interference from private companies or state-run coffee exporters who lure coop members away with “bribes” in the form of artificially high cherry prices that will probably cause the company to lose money on the business but will bring them farmers and help them acquire overseas clients. The coops lose out on coffee because the competition is rigging the game. What happens then? Not enough volume of coffee to sell means lower income, lessened ability to pay back debt, and an erosion of confidence among cooperative members. Soon enough the coop will crumble, the washing station is put on the auction block, and now the farmers have no other choice but to sell to the private company. Of course, those high cherry prices are no longer there at this point and now the exploitation can resume without resistance.

What else? Electricity failing for long periods of time mid-crop and causing quality loss. Random and unpredictable weather events leading to more quality loss because farmers are not trained to deal with unexpected complications in the formula. Delays in payment due to export complications that can arise from a myriad of places (often a result of shoddy infrastructure) lead to further debt. Lack of cash on hand to pay for incoming cherry puts coops at a severe disadvantage versus privately funded stations and results in further loss of volume, which lowers total income and reduces economy of scale.

Next week I will tell you the second half of my story from Rwanda. And hang in there, OK? Rereading what I wrote, I want you to know that I am telling you all of this not to get you down, but to illustrate just a few of the challenges that face these new and fragile organizations. And to point out just how inspiring it is to see them endure against all odds, and to begin to show signs of real progress.

And speaking of progress, you might remember the story of Victoria Dalton-Diaz and her Matalapa farm. I said that we might have a Micro-Lot from her farm, and that’s just what we are featuring this week. This coffee met all the requirements for Direct Trade status and we are offering it as Los Inmortales, El Salvador Micro-Lot: Finca Matalapa. The coffee offers up delicate floral aromatics and a juicy citrus acidity. Please enjoy it while it lasts.

As always, find our Nods at:

http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/origin/offerings.

Onward,

Geoff Watts
VP of Coffee
Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea

Popularity: 16% [?]

I was looking around on this thing called “YouTube” yesterday and found the video below, made by our coffee family at Intelligentsia. It is quite good and worth your time. That’s right, I know the value of your time. Please watch. Love you.

[

Popularity: 22% [?]

Each week, Intelligentsia (whose beans you drink when sitting inside of Everyday Joe’s) sends out it’s Nod, penned by VP of Coffee Geoff Watts. For some reason, I found this latest Nod quite fascinating…enough to make me stop reading halfway through, go brew a fresh french press of our house bean of the week (Rwanda Zirkana), and then finish reading whilst sipping. For some reason this makes me feel like I can better understand what Mr. Watts is saying, when really I think I just want to be him. Read on…you’ll understand.

Hola:I have the rhythmic whirr of the sample roasting machine in my head right now. The repetitive sound of beans spinning around in the barrel of the roaster punctuated by the staccato clicks of the fan belt as it revolves, round and round and round… It’s a comforting noise, grounded and consistent, the kind that drifts subtly into the background and eventually escapes notice as the mind pushes it aside to make room for other thoughts and activities that require full attention.

The green coffee samples themselves are here for their audition. This is a make or break time for most of them as the majority will get only one shot at making it into one of our flagship Direct Trade Intelligentsia marks like Los Inmortales, Flecha Roja, or Flor Azul. They’ve been prepped in advance by their handlers, and each sample has been meticulously hand-sorted to remove defects, screened to eliminate undersized beans, and packed in a small bag for the flight to Chicago.

Once here, they must first pass their physical. Our QC team inspects each one, sorting them to identify any visible traits that might give us insight into how uniformly they were fermented and dried. Imperfect beans are counted and tallied. Then they get screened to determine the distribution of bean size and the internal humidity is measured to ensure they fall within the 10.5% to 12.0% range where they have the best stability and greatest shot at longevity. Every sample is logged into our database for future reference.

If all goes well with the physical, the coffee gets in line to be roasted. These days it is a long line. We are receiving hundreds of samples from Central America and East Africa right now because the harvests have either just finished or are in their final weeks. But, like the Postal Service, the Intelligentsia QC Team pushes through. Lately we’ve been evaluating between 25 and 30 samples each day, a tremendous pace when one considers that on average it takes nearly 45 minutes for a single sample to get through the entire process.

The roasting process itself takes between 10-12 minutes per sample with a goal of absolute uniformity. It is of the utmost importance that we take every necessary step to make sure that when we taste the coffee we are judging strictly its intrinsic merits, mostly free of any roast-related flavors that can obscure or modify natural characteristics of the coffee itself. That would be unfair, thus the mantra: “While all coffees may not be created equal, each shall be treated as equal.” Until proven otherwise, of course.

For this reason we insist on blind cupping. Immediately after arrival each coffee sample is assigned a coded reference number that we’ll use to identify it. Over the years we’ve gotten to be very good friends with a lot of the farmers we work with and that can certainly influence the way in which a coffee is perceived. If I know, for example, that a particular Colombian sample came from Jair Garcia, I will have formed great expectations well before I ever dip my spoon into the cup. So to avoid bias or the possibility of being persuaded by something other than the taste of the coffee itself, we keep ourselves in the dark until we’ve finished the evaluation process.

Once the roasts are completed, we grind a sample of each and lay them out on a whiteboard. This allows us to visually compare the colors of the grounds and identify any roasts that have strayed from the target. The subtlest of changes in roast degree can have a profound impact in the cup characteristics, so we maintain a very strict approach to dealing with variation. If a roast is visibly lighter or darker than the control sample, or if we even suspect that the roast has somehow interfered with the essential character of the coffee, we’ll put it back in line for a re-roast.

After one day of rest (to allow the beans to settle down and de-gas) we prepare the cupping: eight to twelve coffees per table, three cups of each. Every sample is weighed out on a digital scale, accurate to 0.02 grams. The grinder is flushed between samples to clear out any residual grounds that could infiltrate the next coffee in line. Water is boiled and allowed to cool to between 97-98 degrees C as measured by a digital thermometer. Then the pouring commences and a timer is set so that we can allow each coffee its 4 minute steeping time before agitating the brew (“breaking the crust”) and evaluating the aromatic traits.

The cupping lasts about an hour. The first ten minutes are all about aromatics, both the dry fragrance and the wet aroma. Then comes the tasting, the moment of truth or, more truthfully, a “series of moments taking place over time, combined and compressed into a single score that reflects the relative quality of the sample.” That is to say, no snap judgments allowed. First impressions are nice, and certainly valuable, but they do not tell the whole story. By tasting the coffee over a period of about 30 minutes we can study it, see how it evolves as it cools, see what characteristics hold steady and which fall apart. Oftentimes there are a few sleepers in the mix, coffees that don’t impress all that much initially but yield gorgeous and delicate flavors as they cool that allow them to rise above the pack. And there are of course plenty that seem quite delicious at first, only to reveal subtle flaws later on that weren’t noticeable on the first look.

It is critical that we have at least two Intelligentsia-certified tasters at every cupping, so that we have a balance of opinion and some checks and balances that can help overcome human error. Every coffee cupper, no matter how experienced, is fallible and likely to get overly excited once in a while about a coffee that may contain a slight imperfection or to overlook a great coffee that got lost in the shuffle. So we cup together as a group, and once everyone has finished scoring, we engage in a discussion, coffee by coffee, to compare notes and argue the merits or failings of each. Most of the time we are all very well calibrated and close in our scores, within two points of one another, which comes from having spent so much time tasting together. But now and then there is some disagreement, and when that happens we take the time to revisit the coffee, discuss it, and try to come to consensus about how we ought to score it.

By the end of this process, we’ve landed on a score (out of 100 points), which reflects our collective opinion about the real quality of the coffee. The best are selected to be sold as our Direct Trade Intelligentsia marks, and they are indeed the cream of the crop.

Once a coffee is fully put together, we then discuss the results with the farmers, looking to establish some cause-and-effect relationships between things that happened at the farm or mill that may have led to particular tastes in the coffee. It’s not enough to know that a given sample is Good or Bad or Great; the farmer is looking to know WHY, and we share a responsibility to try to understand the variables and figure out how to replicate successes and avoid failures for future harvests.

Then comes the wait. Even though we’ve already identified these great coffees, it will be at least two months, perhaps three, before the coffees arrive in Chicago after milling, export preparation, shipping, and customs clearance.

It’s a detailed and exhaustive process, but it is worth it. At the end, we are able to sell coffees that really sing in the cup and are examples of what coffee can be when grown, processed, and sorted with the highest level of care.

At the moment we are chin-deep in Central American coffees: Los Inmortales, La Tortuga, El Cuervo, Flor Azul. All of these are in the final weeks of the construction stage and will be making their way to our Roasting Works sometime in late May or early June, ready to impress. During this part of the year, the QC team is usually working long days in order to make sure every coffee sample gets thoroughly tested. Sometimes the massive amount of effort that gets put into the selection of our coffee goes unrecognized, and I’d like to take this opportunity to give a big-time shout out to Sarah Kluth and Chris Kornman, the two QC staff who make it all work. You are superstars!

And since I did mention Jair Garcia earlier, let’s revisit Tres Santos, our Direct Trade offering from Colombia. Also be looking for two new coffee releases next week: a spring blend (name TBD) and Finca Matalapa, El Salvador. More information coming soon.

As always, find our Nods at:
http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/origin/offerings.

Good luck to all of us,

Geoff Watts
VP of Coffee
Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea

Further:

• Intelligentsia Direct Trade explained
• Intelligentsia official site

Popularity: 13% [?]

From Intelligentsia, the coffee roaster who’s beans we proudly brew.  

Greetings:

This week’s Nod is something just a bit different. Since there are probably many of you have never met Geoff Watts or Sarah Kluth (Intelligentsia’s Vice President of Coffee and Director of Quality Control, respectively), we thought that it might be interesting to see them live and in action.

On Wednesday, Geoff and Sarah were invited to ABC 7 here in Chicago to talk about cupping and we invite you to follow the link:

ABC 7 News

Popularity: 16% [?]