At the RENACER coffee school, we promote sustainable farming practices that are proven to increase yields, and we train farmers how to select coffee for quality. All this has led to increased incomes for farmers. Double the yields and double the price, and we quadruple incomes for many farmers. From experience, we know that healthy trees produce […]
The Borderlands project took place on two sides of the Colombian – Ecuadorian border. In Nariño we know about the hidden potential to produce high quality Arabica coffees. We’ve shared some of the stories from there previously on this blog. Less than 100 miles away, while the Andes mountains continue tracing the spine of South […]
A few weeks ago, some exciting and hopeful news came out of Colombia. You might have missed it, as It was predictably lost in the news cycle which was dominated by the horrific mass shooting in an Orlando night club; the permissive gun laws in the US; the Brexit and its global economic ramifications; the […]
What’s in a name? Apparently, a whopping $9.56 per pound. In December 2015, that was the difference between the average retail price that select specialty roasters charged for lots that included growers’ names and the average retail price of those that didn’t, according to the folks behind Transparent Trade Coffee (TTC). Whoever they are. (Am I the only one […]
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 […]
(I’m interrupting my series on investment in farms for a few posts on current topics) I’m currently in Northern California visiting family for the week and happened to have a serendipitous encounter with the CEO of a mid-size winery in the Napa Valley while camping with friends. This winery is probably a label that Ric […]
This is the second in a two-part conversation with my friend “Alex,” a respected colleague in coffee, that explores the opportunities, limitations and impacts of microlots. Read the first part here.
I have a friend in coffee whom I am going to call “Alex.” S/he is brilliant. Driven. Focused. Working hard to make coffee sourcing at her/his company more profitable for people in its supply chain and less damaging to the planet. Alex and I have had an ongoing conversation over the past few years about […]
The CRS Coffeelands Blog turned five in November. Here is the content from the blog’s fifth year that you, the readers, liked the best. Or rather, it is is the content you read the most, since in some cases you did not care too much for what I had to say.
Back in January, I described our plans to stage a side-by-side sensory analysis of Castillo and Caturra samples grown by participants in our Borderlands Coffee Project in Colombia. Originally, we had planned to do this exercise independently. But as we moved forward in our planning and began talking to more and more friends in coffee […]
