What is happening at La Cabra

This month we visited our partners in Mexico for the first time. Jesús and his team at Cafeólogo impressed us with their attention to detail, and their beautiful coffee shops in Chiapas. We tasted some of the finest lots we have yet been able to find in Mexico, and trust Jesús to continue to deliver excellent quality through his focus on community building and innovative processing. A truly enlightening trip, increasing our anticipation for our upcoming Mexico releases.

While this year’s was a shorter trip to Central America, we were able to spend some time in El Salvador with the producers of the excellent coffees we were able to share last year. We’ve also been in close contact with our partners in Guatemala and Costa Rica, and are expecting the first early harvest samples soon.

The rising c-price

The current very high commodity market pricing for coffee, although on the surface a positive for farmers, means that the financial incentive for quality is effectively diminished, leading to a great deal of hard work from our partners on the ground. Maintaining relationships with producers, emphasising the long-term stability benefits of producing speciality coffee, and ensuring them that roasters like ourselves will still pay a healthy premium above the C-price is the focus for the moment.

Many small producers that deliver to large buying centres across Central America can receive a better price for unsorted, wet coffee than they received for well processed and sorted lots last year, so the quick reactions required to maintain relationships is something we have spoken at length about with our exporting partners. On the upside, most are reporting excellent quality this year, so we are looking forward to securing lots from some of our long-term friends, like Mauricio at Altos, whatever the increase in cost may be.

Discover Rwanda & Brazil

There are many ways to produce excellent coffee, over our years of travelling the coffee belt we have seen many; from tiny 2 hectare farms producing micro-lots in Huehuetenango, washing stations compiling the work of thousands in East Africa, to huge mechanised projects in Brazil. The mechanisms through which quality is developed is rather different through all of these methods, but the common theme is intention. Each step is considered, with an intent on producing lots of consistent high quality. In the case of this month’s coffees, these steps are rather different, but both producers have the same intention, to produce a high quality coffee with a clean and fresh flavour expression.

This month we are sharing two coffees with a clean and fresh expression, but produced in very different ways. Fabiano Diniz creates surprisingly clean coffees compared to much of Brazil, while at the Shyira station, Muraho create an excellent example of a typically fresh washed Rwanda profile.

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