The 2009 Esmeralda Auction yesterday was pretty amazing. Once again this farm has broken records in terms of average price per pound. (The highest price so far on auction was in 2007 Best of Panama, where Esmeralda got 130 USD per lb.) Although I am not astonished anymore by the highest price at USD 117.50 per 453 grams of green coffee, what struck me the most was that even the not so tasty lots went for over 24 USD per pound (453g). See the results here.

If we look at this in perspective the best Cup of Excellence lots are selling for around 20 USD per pound. This is the reason why we decided to back out of the auction when prices went over 20 USD. The coffee is just not worth that amount of money, or to put it in a different way, our customers are not willing to pay those prices for qualities that are not up to those standards.

Just to give you an idea of the difference in coffee prices. The commodity price for coffee today is about USD 1.25 per pound. This is of course not a sustainable price for quality coffee, as the pickers and farmers are not making a good living at these prices.The cheapest coffee we have in house today was bought at USD 2 per pound, and people still complain about the prices in our store.

The fact is we need to wake up and smell the coffee. If we want higher quality coffees in the future, I think we need to prepare ourselves and our customers for prices that are much higher than what we are seeing today. Remember, in 2005 the Esmeralda also sold at a record breaking USD 20 per pound at the best of Panama auction. Today the same coffee is 117.50 USD.

There is little doubt that traveling to origin is exhausting. With work piling up at home while we were away there has been little time to blog about the last days of our Colombia trip.

I promised you more, so here goes.

Day 3:

Early in the morning on our 3rd day in Garzon, we started with a cup tasting at the Coocentral cupping lab. There were not many coffees on the table as this was at the start at the harvest, and the qualities are not 100% yet. Still we tasted a very intense and winy coffee that came from the Garzon area. Apparently the farmer of this coffee had been delivering consistent quality over the past years, so we decided to pay him a visit later on that day. After a short stop at the recieving point in Garzon to see how they analyze and grade the coffee and calculate the price for the farmer, we stopped at the mill in Garzon for a defect cupping. We tasted some minor and some major cases of both phenolic coffee, fermented coffee and also some low quality coffee from the area. It was really nice to get a perspective of what we are buying from the same area and also to learn more about defects. It is much easier to detect minor defects once you have tasted a very tainted cup.

After a quick tour of the local food market, we headed straight for the farm that had been producing the coffee we really liked earlier that morning. The farm Vereda la Soledad was located at about 1600 metetrs above sea level in a small valley. The farmer, Mr. Arcadio Cevalles had 2 farms, each located on separate sides of the valley, together with his wife and family. A family business if you like.

Mr. Cevalles took us on a tour up and down his valley of coffee trees, that pretty much looked like a jungle. He also showed us a 50 year old Tipica tree that he had just ripped out of the ground last year. (What a shame) The walk was quite steep, hot and humid so our translator passed out right in the middle of the coffee field. We therefore decided to make some natural afrodisiac and energy booster, Guarapa, the liquid pressed out of sugar cane. Little did we know that the sugar cane press was a manual one that used to be run by donkey power. Tim, Mario and myself stepped in and started to push the old sugar press in order to make some very sweet energy drinks.

It took us about 10 minutes to make 2 liters or so, and it was exhausting. While enjoying the Guarapa, we had a nice chat with Mr. Cevalles and it turned out that we were the first foreigners they had ever met. That totally blew our mind and hopefully we did not make a bad impression on them. (Although we probably were a bit rude not drinking all of the sugar heavy guarapa.)

At the end of the visit Mr. Cevalles showed us how he processed his coffee in one of his micro mills. Although the equipment was very basic it was very clean and did the job perfectly well. After all his coffee tasted great.

In the afternoon we visited another farm in Garzon called Finca Villa Adriana. This was by far the most well organized farm I have ever been to in Colombia. I think the Farmer, Mr. Diogenes Polania, had some German DNA, because he was definately a perfectionist which is not very common in farmland, Colombia. Since the farm was only at 1300 m.a.s. he had a lot of problems with leaf rust attacking the trees. Half of the trees he had on his 4 hectars of land were under severe attack, but according to himself he was able to control it. (See the contrast on picture below. Left side is attacked by leaf rust.)

Although the farm was not in a high elevated area and the trees were under attack, the climate was quite cool which translates into longer maturation times and more flavour in the cup. The farm was very interesting and well organized so we asked Mr. Polania to send us samples of his coffee by the end of May so that we at least can see how it tastes like and give him some feedback. You never know, maybe it is a hidden treasure.

One of the most interesting parts of this visit was that we got to interview some coffee pickers together with our translator Sonia who is a teacher. As we all know teachers are not very well payed. Sonia earned about 10 USD per hour in her private school. A coffee picker earns about 7 USD per day if he picks about 90 kilos og red coffee cherries per day. (Which is a lot of cherries). This is what makes me frustrated when people complain about quality coffee being too expensive. It is not our coffee that is expensive it is the mass produced coffee that is way too cheap and not sustainable for a farmer, nor a picker in terms of income. If the consumers only knew.

After a full day in the field, both Tim and I went straight to bed after a refreshing beer. All the impressions and travel really makes you tired in the evenings.

Day 4:

Day 4 started with a really bad car ride from Garzon to Neiva. After a short plane ride from Neiva to Bogota, we went straight to Virmax’ office for a cup tasting where we tasted their newly crowned “SCAA’s coffee of the year” and some of the 2009 Colombian Cup of Excellence winners. It was a really strange experience to taste coffees at 2600 m.a.s. since the low oxygen in the atmosphere makes the aroma impression of the coffee really weak and different from what we are used to.

In the afternoon, I had a seminar / training for a group of Colombian baristas at Amor Perfecto, a small specialty roastery in Bogota. You would be surprized by the level of the baristas in Colombia and their enthusiasm. The fact that they are so close to the coffee farms as well makes me really envious, although most of them have never been to a farm in their life. To me that is madness.

The evening was spent eating a lovely dinner in one of Bogotas appartment buildings overseeing the whole city. The reason for taking an easy night in, was because on our last day in Colombia we celebrated my 30th birthday at a crazy place called Andres Carné de Res. If you ever go to Bogota, make sure you go there!

Salut. Tim W.

Exhausted from all the partying and socialising in Atlanta, we jumped on a plane to Bogota and from Bogota to Neiva the following day. Our main goal on this trip was to visit Finca la Lomita to help pick some coffee and experiment with some processing techniques in order to develope Mr. Alvaro Diaz’ coffee. It turns out Alvaro has left the farm and his wife for his wife’s sister. A huge disappointment for us as we have been trying to establish a relationship to this farm in order to develope the quality of coffee we want and improve the quality of life of Mr. Alvaro and his family. Sadly Alvaro was more committed to his lovelife than his coffee. As we do not want to be marriage counsellors we decided to look for another farm to work with, and typically when one door closes other doors open.

Day 1:

Going straight from the Airport in Neiva we visited the Almacafe mill located near by. A huge dry mill that removes parchment, sticks, stones, defects and sorts the coffee before it is shipped. The mill was quite large and a bit too noisy to hear what our translater was saying.

In the Afternoon we tasted some coffees that we brought from Norway together with the cuppers at Coocentral. This was very educational for both them and us and it helped the cuppers understand more what kind of coffees we are looking for in Colombia. We also tasted some coffees from Huila, Colombia and found a great coffee from a farm located not far away from Finca la Lomita. It seems that the Pital area has some great coffees that are right up our alley.

In the evening we visited a smaller dry mill in Garzon, where we met the crazy Mr. Gilberto which was the head of the mill. We discussed the possibility of them investing in a vacuum packing machine with nitrogen flushing in order to preserve the coffee that we buy from huila better. His immediate answer was: “we will do whatever you want us to do.”

After talking with the cooperative (Coocentral) about developing coffees on different farms and sending us samples from various experiments in order to give them feedback, it seems that their attitude towards what we are trying to accomplish is very positive. In general it seems that a lot of farmers and the people at the cooperative and mill is willing to do what ever it takes for us to find and develope the coffee that we want. This seems a bit odd since we are an extremely small customer, buying only 40-60 bags per year. Compared to Illy or Starbucks who buy thousands of bags from the same area it does not make sense. It turns out that one of the reasons for their new attitude (it was not like this on my first visit 2 years ago) is because we have been paying good prices, way above the market price for the Lomita coffee 2 years in a row. This has gotten a lot of attention in the area and a lot of farmers have been trying to improve their quality and looking at Finca La Lomita as a benchmark for quality in the area. It is very rewarding to see that the big co-operatives and many of the farmers are willing to listen to small customers and that we can go forward as a good example for what quality can do to improve the lives of the farmers as well as the taste of the coffee. This is one of the biggest reasons why we are focusing on Colombia as our first development project. (not to forget that the Huila area has great coffees. The winning coffee of the year award on the SCAA show in Atlanta only a week ago was from Huila.)

The day ended with lots of beer and a local game called Teju. (If the picture is a bit blurry it is because, so were we)

The crazy Mr. Gilberto:

Day 2

Early in the morning don Mario and our translator Sonia picked us up to go to Pital and to visit some farms in the mountains near Pital. As usual our first stop was at Grupo Renacer which is a group of a couple of farmers that we have visited on the previous colombia visits. It was good to see that they had been improving their pulping and washing station since my previous visit where I commented on the fermentation tanks being dirty and difficult to clean which will affect the coffee in a negative way during the washing and fermentation process.

Instead of going horse riding (like we normally do)  Jairo and his wife Amparo and their friend Ovideo (picture) insisted on going on the back of their truck in order to be able to visit more farms in shorter time. We covered over 6 farms and got to see some processing and had great discussions about how to raise the quality of their coffee. In fact Ovideo, the farmer at Finca la Porcellana, decided to run an experiment for us with different fermentation times. He will also be hiring a couple of extra workers that will select only the ripest cherries before they are pulped. Samples will be coming in by the end of may and we will for sure invite some of you to tatse the results.

Day 2 was indeed an exhausting day, but very educational and constructive, especially for Tim V as this was his first trip to a producing country and there was a lot of impressions to digest. (I have never ever seen him so quiet before. )

Again it is very nice to see that the farmers are open minded and are willing to work with us to improve the quality of their coffee.

Tim and I are currently in Colombia celebrating my 30th birthday in Bogota. Therefore a report from day 3 & 4 will follow later on. Some more pictures from our trip below:

A week has passed and finally I have time to write on the blog again after some wild time on the countryside in Kenya.

It has been a fantastic week where I have cup tasted about 200 to 300 different coffees, if not more. Some terrible, but many of the coffees I have tasted have been fantastic.
I have been traveling with Thompson Owens (picture) from Sweet Marias and Peter Dupont (second picture) from The Coffee Collective during most of the week. We have had many great discussions and talks which have been very educational and inspiring for me.

I promised you a report, so here it is:

Monday was spent at Dormans head office tasting countless cups of various coffees with various qualities. I did not really find anything spectacular, as the samples were all control samples of the coffees that were going to be auctioned on the Tuesday at the Nairobi Coffee Exchange. The coffees on the table were selected because Dormans was unsure of its quality after cupping the lots the previous week.
Either way, the cupping session was really good in order to calibrate my palate for the next days of cupping.

In the afternoon we visited Coffee Management Services (CMS) in Ruiru. We met with Mr. Kamau. CMS is a company educating their clients in good agricultural practices. Their clients are mainly smallholder farmers which are members of Cooperatives. CMS also work as a marketing agent for the coops, which means looking for potential buyers for the farmer’s coffee.

I am not going to explain in detail all that CMS does in this post, but basically CMS will help us to set up a direct trade model with a coop in Kenya and provide us with the documents and transparency so that we are sure that the farmers are getting payed their money. This is especially important as we try to buy the highest quality coffees for a premium price.

We heard about some cases in Kenya where farmers have not got their money yet after the 2007/2008 sales. I can’t even express how disrespectful and harmful that is to the farmers and the coffee trade!

CMS however guarantees the money will go to the coop within 14 days after the sale has taken place, and after talking with a lot of coops and farmers, they often get payed before the standard 14 days.

In the afternoon we went to the New Gatukuyu Coop Society where we had a very nice meeting with the chairman of the coop and his fellow farmers. Meeting farmers eye to eye is very rewarding and we had some great conversations with them about how to improve the quality of the lives of the farmers as well as the quality of the coffee they produce.

Tuesday featured some more cupping at Dormans and also a visit to their factory where we could see how they will coloursort, handsort and vacuum pack our coffees, once we have bought them.

In the afternoon we visited the Gikanda Farmers Coop. Society and the Ndaroini and Gichathaini factories (wet mills) where they have processed some of the best Kenyan coffees this year. Their coffee always stood out on the different cupping tables during the week. Although all the good coffee has already been processed, we managed to get a glimpse of some sorting and weighing of Mbuni coffee (picture below), which is terrible tasting natural processed coffee made out of the leftovers from the harvest.

On Wednesday we visited the huge Central Kenya Coffee Mill in Nyeri where the parchment is removed from the beans, beans are graded, sorted, and cleaned from any foreign matter before they are packed in burlap for storing before the weekly auction in Nairobi or packed in containers for shipping. We also cupped a lot of great coffees from Kiawamururu, Gichathaini, Ndaroini, Kangocho, etc. In the afternoon we visited Kiawamururu which was a great factory. No wonder they produce great coffees!

At the end of the day we had a meeting with the Karagoto coop society, where they have produced the best Kenyan coffee I tasted on this trip. The coffee is produced at the Tegu factory / wet mill which is part of this society, and I will for sure blog more about this coffee on a later stage as I have already bought 19 bags of it.

Thursday and Friday were spent cupping all the best coffees we had found on the trip and a visit to the Kiariaini factory, which was a bit dissapointing compared to all the great factories we had already been to. Therefore it was good to get back to Nairobi for some serious sun bathing by the pool.

Next stop for me is Ethiopia for a week of sightseing of probably the greatest coffee producing country in the world..

See the slideshow below for more pictures from Kenya.

Our national television NRK sent a very interesting and critical documentary about fair trade yesterday.
You can watch it here

Although we endorse the principals of sustainable trading and also care about the welfare of the workers that in our case pick our coffee, we have never been huge fans of the fair trade organization.

The reason for this is because we believe it does not benefit the farmer in long term, because there is too little focus on the quality of the coffee and the certification is too expensive and the control system is not efficient.
We have also experienced that most fair trade stamped coffee is of poor quality.

Therefore we have a different take on the principals of fair trade:
We pay more for better quality and try to create a relationship with the coffee farmers in order to make them focus on quality of the coffee as well as for their workers. You can only get the farmer and the picker to do a better job if you pay them well for it.

An example of this is our project in Colombia with Finca La Lomita. We are currently paying USD 2,50 per pound of green coffee for Mr. Alvaro Diaz’ coffee which is over USD 1,20 above the market price and the fair trade price. We know that Mr. Alvaro Diaz is getting his money and we know he pays his workers well.
How do we know? We communicate with him and we visit him and talk to him and his neighbours as well as with the cooperative he works with.

Although we are paying more for a better coffee, we cannot call the coffee “fair trade coffee”. Despite this my conscience is a hell of a lot better.

Here is a link to a small article about Finca La Lomita and Mr. Alvaro Diaz getting payed a premium (by us) for his quality coffee. Scroll down on the page and you will see a picture of his wife and son as well as the boss of the cooperative he is part of.

During my visit to Finca la Lomita last month, my friend and exporter Mr. Alejandro Renjifo shot some film on my handycam.

Although Mr. Alvaro Diaz is speaking spanish and it might be hard for those who don’t know any spanish, most of the things he is talking about is translated by Don Alejandro.

There is some great information on the video, and it reflects on the everyday life of a coffee grower. I personally find it very interesting.

There are also a lot of pictures from the farm here.

When I was in Colombia a couple of weeks ago, I visited Cooccentral, the cooperative where we found the Finca La Lomita coffee last year.
I arrived there on the sunday night after being a cupping juror in the 2008 Colombia the Cup of Excellence, so my palate was pretty calibrated and fine tuned to detect excellent coffees. We were presented 6 coffees on the table and we tasted them blindly. In other words, I did not know which coffees we were tasting.
After a 30 minute quiet cupping, we all agreed that one of the coffees on the table were outstanding and of very high quality. I described it as extremely sweet like sugar cane, fruity and floral aromas and flavours and a very nice balance. I scored it 89 points out of 100, using the Cup of Excellence format.
When we revealed the grower of the coffee, it turned out to be my friend Mr. Alvaro Diaz of Finca La Lomita.

Once again he had surprized me with his excellent coffee.
Since one of my reasons for going to Colombia was to visit Mr. Alvaro Diaz, I was extra happy to be able to tell him when I met him the day after that his coffee was tasting great.

We have now agreed upon working together in order to improve his coffee and of course his quality of life even more. Therefore we have agreed that we will buy his coffee for a premium price of USD 2,50 per pound (456grams) for the next 3 years, if he is able to deliver good quality. This is far above market price which in Colombia as of today is about USD 1,50 per pound for his quality of coffee. For Mr. Alvaro it means an extra dollar per pound straight in his pocket.

In return for getting better payed, Mr. Alvaro will invest in better equipment on his farm and also do a lot of changes in order to improve quality of the coffee, reduce his impact on nature and also improving the life of his family.

If you want to read and learn more about the project, we have uploaded a lot of pictures and text on our Flickr account.

It has been a while since I visited Colombia and it has also taken some time before I got to write about what I discovered there. I am very proud to be able to tell you that we did not only find great coffee there, we also found a plantation that we are trying to work out a relationship with. Mr. Alvaro Diaz who owns Finca La Lomita is very much in to quality and a man with great visions and ambitions.

The story goes back to when I was visiting a cooperative for a cup tasting of their coffees from Huila, Colombia last November. Mr. Alvaro Diaz who had heard about some forreigners visiting the cooperative, wanted us to taste his coffee too, so he got on his motorbike and drove for 3 hours in order to get some feedback from us on his coffee. When he arrived we were just about to pour the water over the coffee we were tasting so he came a bit late. We felt a bit sorry for him not only because he came late but also because his coffee was still in parchment (not roasted). We decided to wait for the guys in the tasting lab so they could roast his coffee. 20 minutes later we could finally taste his coffee against the other cofees from that area.

Alvaro Diaz cupping his great La Lomita coffee at the cooperative cupping lab.

After tasting the coffees we were all amazed by the quality of the coffee that Mr. Diaz had given us a sample of. The coffee was extremely mature, soft, sweet, crisp and had a lovely berry and jasmin aroma. In fact we all thought it was one of the best coffees on the table.

We decided to pay his farm a visit later on that afternoon to see what he was doing to his coffee in order to get it to taste that good.
The farm was beautiful and Mr. Diaz was doing a lot of good work. He was very focused on sustainable growing principles. The wet mill he had on the farm was so clean we could eat from it and he was even picking out defects from parchment before he delivered his coffee to the dry mill. I am posting some pictures to give you an idea of the farm.

While we were at the farm Mr.Diaz asked if we would like to buy the coffee he had drying on the patio at that moment. We explained to him that we needed to get a sample of he coffee sendt to Norway and taste it at under familiar surroundings before we could answer his request. The reason for this is that it is very easy to get emotionally affected by the great people behind the coffee, and this will of course affect the taste of the coffee too. Therefore we always blind taste the coffee at home with Norwegian water, before we decide what to buy.
We agreed that he would hold the coffee for 14 days in order to give us time to go back to Norway to taste the coffee. (This meant no income for Mr. Diaz for 14 days, which is hard when you live on a hand to mouth basis.)

We got to Norway but did not get to taste the coffee until after 15 days. The coffee was still great, so we immediately made a call to our exporter in Colombia in order to purchase the La Lomita Coffee. When our exporter called Mr. Diaz, he was allready on his way to sell the coffee to the FNC, which would have given him USD 1,50 per pound. When he heard from us, he immediately turned his car arround and drove straight back to celebrate. We finally agreed on a price of USD 1,90 per pound for twenty 70 kilo bags.

Next step is to try to get Mr. Diaz to commit to a contract where we invest a little bit in the local school and some processing equipment in order to try to improve the quality of the La Lomita coffee for the next years and also in order to improve the lives of the people behind the coffee. What could we get back for doing so? A lot of knowledge and an amazing coffee!

Here is some facts about the coffee and Finca La Lomita:

Prodcer: Mr. Alvaro Diaz
Harvested: November / December 2007
Origin: El Socorro, El Pital, Huila, Colombia.
Growing conditions: 1650 – 1750 m.above sea level. Restricted use of some banana palm trees for shade. Average air temperature 20°C.
Size of he plantation: 10 hectar whereas 7,5 h. for growing coffee. Of the 7,5 hectares used for coffee, Mr. Diaz is intercropping by growing beans and various vegetables for his family.
Coffee variety: Caturra

Processing: Alvaro Diaz is picking his coffee togeher with his family and some hired freelance pickers. The Coffee cherries are pulped on his farm every night after picking. The pulper uses very little water in order not to pollute the sorrounding environment. In addition, the water used for processing the coffee will go through a buffer where it is filtrated by nature before the water is let out to the surroundings. The left over pulp from the cherries are used as compost.
Mr. Alvaro Diaz with his wife and kids.

After pulping, the parchment beans are fermented in water tanks for 18 to 30 hours depending on the temperature. After fermentation, the beans are dried on african suspended beds which is covered by transparent plastic in order o protect the beans from rain. The beds are divided in to small boxes in order for the workers to take them out 1 by 1 so hat they can sort out the defects from the beans. After drying, the parchment beans are transported to the local cooperative where he parchment is removed, the beans are sorted and defects are picked out. Then the coffee is packed in jute sacs before they get shipped to Norway.

Since the coffee is not always vacuumpacked in origin, we are currently experimenting with vacuum packing of the newly arrived coffee in order to keep it fresh for longer.
So far the experiments seem to work well, so in the future it looks like we will be vacuum packing all of our coffees.
Coffee does not only have a short shelf life after roasting. It looks like the green coffee will only stay fresh for 2 to 8 months in jute sacs and possibly up to a year in vacuum bags.

Taste profile:

Aroma: Intense aromas of red berries, spices and jasmine.

Acidity: Mature and sweet acidity like in fresh red berries.

Mouthfeel: Rich and soft at the same time. Juicy sweetness and oily texture.

Flavour: A complex coffee with some delicate jasmine notes. Intense notes of red berries. Mild but long aftertaste of spices like cloves and cinnamon.

The La Lomita coffee is allready available for purchase in our store and will probably be in stock until this autumn.

Mr. Alvaro Diaz o the right. We are sitting on one of his drying patios. (my t-shirt is courtesy of M’lissa)

Drying beds on Finca La Lomita.

Picking out defected beans.

Fermentation tanks.

Intercropping at the farm.