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 […]
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 […]
Yesterday SCAA Symposium organizers posted a video of my presentation “A Simple Question: Castillo or Caturra?” Watch it in its entirety here. .
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 […]
I reported here almost a year ago about the Yellow Maragogype, a genetic curiosity we stumbled onto in our work Nariño. Today, the first chapter in the Yellow Maragogype story comes to a fairy-tale ending: just in time for the arrival of thousands of coffee professionals from around the world for the 2015 SCAA events, […]
Today: how representatives of six leading specialty coffee companies who share our commitment to transform the coffee chain in Nariño, Colombia, are helping us create opportunities for smallholder farmers and developing new sources of extraordinary coffee.
A year ago we made three New Year’s resolutions on this blog: Generate more results-based evidence. Help the coffee sector navigate uncharted waters. Borrow a page from the microfinance playbook. Today we revisit those resolutions to see how we did on each one in 2014.
Over the past six weeks, this blog has been devoted exclusively to the CRS Colombian Varietal Cuppings–a series of comparative cuppings of Castillo and Caturra samples from our Borderlands project involving leading roasters and importers in the United States, Europe and Australia. Even when I took a week off from reporting on the results of […]
Today I interview Adam McClellan, green coffee buyer for the iconic Portland-based roaster Stumptown, as we resume our series of conversations with specialty coffee tastemakers regarding their participation in our Colombian Varietal Cuppings. In September, together with Stumptown’s head roaster and quality control manager, Adam cupped sample pairs from 10 farms in Nariño participating in our […]
When we published our 2014 New Year’s resolutions back in January, at the top of the list was this: “enlist industry leaders and research institutes in a comparative cupping of two leading Colombian coffee varieties, Castillo and Caturra.” That public commitment set off nine months of frenetic activity during which we collaborated with the International […]
