Tag Archives: Intelligentsia

Borderlands 2016 Harvest Hits Stores

2017-01-23 Comments Off on Borderlands 2016 Harvest Hits Stores

  In the past week, lots from the 2016 Borderlands harvest starting hitting stores in a big way. The Borderlands lot is the featured coffee on Counter Culture’s landing page, which is a mixed lot from two different communities. https://counterculturecoffee.com/ Just a few days later, Intelligentsia celebrated the opening of a roasting and training facility […]

ode to the author

2016-07-28 Comments Off on ode to the author

14 years ago Michael Sheridan was assigned to me. I was working in the southern Philippines (Mindanao) for CRS, and Michael came in as a Fellow. He’s called that a “lucky break“, and it was for me. We had this odd organizational hierarchy, where I was his “mentor”, but not his supervisor, while he seemed to […]

The USBC Origins Project – Day One

2016-04-15 Comments Off on The USBC Origins Project – Day One

Back in Februrary, after watching the USBC Qualifying Event in Kansas City, I committed myself to this, an initiative I called the “USBC Origins Project.”  I found myself wanting more info on the coffees that baristas had so carefully chosen for their routines—who grew those coffees?  where?  how?  which exporters and importers took such good […]

Apples and Oranges

2015-11-24 Comments Off on Apples and Oranges

When the Fair World Project published this comparison of select brands in the U.S. coffee market last year, I was sorely tempted to respond here. To explain publicly what was happening privately: that I was being asked by Fair Trade roasters in the upper tiers to arrange meetings with Direct Trade roasters in lower tiers […]

Nariño’s Third Wave

2015-09-21 Comments Off on Nariño’s Third Wave

Nariño, Colombia, strikes me as a coffee origin that everyone in coffee knows, but very few people in coffee know well. . . I have had the extraordinary good fortune to get to know Nariño better than most over the past four-plus years as director of our Borderlands Coffee Project there.  When I first started […]

Back-to-School Theme: What (and Where) I Drank This Summer

2015-09-08 Comments Off on Back-to-School Theme: What (and Where) I Drank This Summer

It’s that time of year again: back-to-school time.  Which means it is also time for the annual “What I Did This Summer” essay. As a home roaster in Ecuador with a limited array of locally available coffees available to roast, my annual summer vacation affords me the opportunity to branch out and sample all the […]

G < (E + M)

2015-06-09 Comments Off on G < (E + M)

The first part of the Colombia Sensory Trial featured coffee buyers and quality control experts from some of the most important coffee organizations in the Americas.  During two cupping panels at Intelligentsia Roasting Works in Chicago, they scored pairs of Castillo and Caturra samples collected from 22 farms in Nariño, Colombia. The second part enlisted […]

4 Perspectives on the Colombia Sensory Trial

2015-05-06 Comments Off on 4 Perspectives on the Colombia Sensory Trial

I have been writing here about the Colombia Sensory Trial for more than a year.  With presentations of the findings coming up at Re:co Symposium in Sweden and the Nordic Roaster Forum in Denmark, there will certainly be more to say in the coming months. For now, however, I will let this topic rest, leaving […]

SCAA Symposium video: “A Simple Question”

2015-04-29 Comments Off on SCAA Symposium video: “A Simple Question”

Yesterday SCAA Symposium organizers posted a video of my presentation “A Simple Question: Castillo or Caturra?” Watch it in its entirety here. .    

A simple question: Castillo or Caturra?

2015-04-09 Comments Off on A simple question: Castillo or Caturra?

Yesterday I had the honor to present the preliminary results of the Colombia Sensory Trial at the 2015 SCAA Symposium. The Colombia Sensory Trial is a cross-sector collaboration with allies in the research community (the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Kansas State University and World Coffee Research), industry (Counter Culture, Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, George […]