Daniel's World of Coffee

The Next Wave in Coffee Auctions?

My friend and former colleague (at Intelligentsia), Steve Mierisch has been in contact lately about his family's farms' coffees in Honduras and Nicaragua.

Coming up on April 25th, they are holding an auction for these coffees. The Mierisches are working with the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, who own the Cup of Excellence auction system, the best known and most elite coffee auction program in the world. This is the first time that ACE has put on a private coffee auction program.

I've had many of Steve's family's coffees before, and they are excellent quality. What's really interesting here to me is seeing producers take it on themselves to make direct sales to their clients. In order to do this, you have to have high quality, you have to be extremely organized, and you have to have a ton of initiative. However, if things go well, I imagine that a successful auction will allow the family to continue investing in their own land and improving quality. That should be the model for as many producers as possible. This auction is exciting for that reason.

The Mierisches are not the first private producers to hold an internet auction, but it's still extremely rare and this bears watching, not least for the involvement of ACE.

Interested buyers can sign up for the auction here.

Coffee — Every Year is Better Than the Last

Happy New Year. I have been in the specialty coffee industry for over ten years now, and I can honestly say that every single year has been better than the year before, both for me professionally and, more importantly, for the industry as a whole.

Not everything is perfect all the time, of course. Sometimes we uncover new problems just as we think we are solving an old one. For years we bemoaned the low price of commodity coffee. Then it shot through the roof in a matter of months, and suddenly we were wondering if this industry was sustainable anymore. But crises are just opportunities. High costs, for example, just highlighted the need for increased efficiency and more resourceful practices.

The past year took me all over the world again, gracias a Diós, as they say in lands to the south: I had the chance to make coffee trips to Panama, Honduras, the Philippines, and Brazil. Not to mention the exotic, far-off land of Portlandia; my second-home New York City, and always-gorgeous San Francisco. In the coming year, I hope to make it back to Central America, to spend some quality time in Colombia, several weeks in the MOTHERLAND (Ethiopia, of course), get some real development work off the ground in the Philippines, and of course teach more courses in San Francisco.

Before my next trip, I'll be getting caught up right here on the blog with a few more articles, some picture and video posts, and whatever else coffee-centric that comes my way.In the meantime, from the chilly, dark, and crisp Pacific Northwest, here's hoping that 2013 brings you more wonderful coffee moments than ever before.

Ethiopia Guide Redux

Over the winter I completed work on an Ethiopian Coffee Buying Guide. Willem Boot was the driving force behind this and he's got main author credit, and he made the amazing coffee morphology photos it contains. I wrote most of the copy and created the maps and was responsible for the overall form.

Reader Dave Janetta was kind enough to create a smaller version of the document, for ease of downloading. I only have 4 hard copies left, of the hundred or so I took to Houston for the Ethiopian delegation, so if you want a copy, Download Ethiopian coffee guide sm.

Thanks, Dave!

Ethiopia Buying Guide Available Now

The buying guide I was working on for Ethiopian coffee, under the aegis of the USAID-ATEP project there, is finally finished.

We are printing up about a hundred coffees to take to the SCAA show in Houston at the end of the month. In the meantime, people can get access this document online here. This is a very big file and will take a couple minutes to load, even with a fast connection. Or you can download the pdf file by right-clicking the link.

This is a complete guide to understanding Ethiopian coffee, from production, to processing, to buying and selling. It includes phone numbers and emails of all the major cooperative unions and exporters, logistical information about buying Ethiopian coffee (and coffee in general). It even has an extended section showing the morphology of different coffee beans from different regions of Ethiopia (with astonishing high-resolution pictures).

I'll post some of the most interesting pictures and information here on the blog, but if you want to take a free master class on understanding how coffee really works, I recommend you download a copy for yourself.

Panama Course: Crafting Quality at Origin

I just want to give a heads up to those of you that follow this blog: I'm teaching a course in Panama in March of 2011.

This is for folks who are damn serious about their coffee businesses and their coffee careers. The world's most unique coffee education course, among the coffee farms and cloud forests of Panama. A truly unforgettable learning experience that will launch you into the next level (and possibly several more levels beyond that).

This course is five days of intensive coffee education amid the splendor of coffee farms growing along a nature preserve in the volcanic cloud forests of Panama. It's as beautiful as it sounds.

And by the way, March is absolutely the month you want to be in the mountains of Panama. Warm and sunny without being humid. Cool breezes among the trees and mountainsides... it's paradise. The farm we are staying at is surrounded by nature preserves, and serves as a stopover for dozens of different tropical and migratory birds. In fact, they get annual groups of ornithologists that come and stay in these cabins.

But this is no idle sightseeing trip. We'll be studying intensively the workings of a coffee farm, with a special eye towards how quality is crafted. Course topics include:

• • Introduction to Sensory Analysis
• • Intensive Tasting Exercises
• • Coffee Tasting Training and Triangulation
• • Applied Roasting Theory
• • Hands-on Roasting Sessions
• • The Workings of a Coffee Farm
• • Tours of High Altitude Specialty Coffee Farms
• • Theory of Growing Coffee
• • Coffee Processing Up Close and Personal
• • Environmental and Social Sustainability
• • Buying Coffee for Your Business
• • Developing Relationships with Growers

Finally I should mention too that March is the end of the harvest season in Panama. We will have dozens upon dozens of fresh-crop, unsold specialty coffees on site for roasting and cupping. It would be great to see some of you blog-readers in Panama, but space is very limited, of course.

There's a website about the class here. Or you can send me an email to [email protected]

Consulting with Confidence

Every once in a while, people ask me what I do for a living in a funny way, like "So what exactly do you do?" Sometimes it's people from within the coffee industry who want to know why I'm always traveling to origin; sometimes it's people on the outside of the coffee industry who are thinking about making a career change.

It's often hard to respond, but that's because I have a very unique job, and I provide a very unique service.

I am a quality coffee consultant. There are three parts to that:

• QUALITY — I work on the specialty side of the coffee industry. I help people take average coffee and make it good, good coffee and make it great, great coffee and make it completely unique. Quality also characterizes the kind of instruction I give. If I cannot give you absolutely top-flight instruction, I will not take the job.

• COFFEE — The production chain in coffee is extraordinarily long. Many people who are experts at one step along the way (a great barista, an artisan roaster, a family farmer) have little knowledge about what happens at the other steps. My specialty is the whole chain... all of coffee... from the soil to the harvest to the export mill to the warehouse to the roasting plant to the packaging to the cafe to the demitasse. I help make connections and further education all along the coffee chain.

• CONSULTANT — I don't buy or sell coffee, neither green nor roasted. I help people who buy and sell coffee do a better job, make a better product, meet their goals as a company, and increase their bottom line. There are huge dollar values hidden in plain sight everywhere in the coffee industry. Every cappuccino or bag of green coffee could be better, more satisfying, and more profitable. For a fraction of what you spend on your machinery, labor, goods and operating costs, you can hire a world-class expert to maximize your potential.

I don't make sales pitches on this blog usually. This blog is where I write about what's interesting to me in coffee, and where you can get free nuggets of the kind of information I provide when I am working as a quality coffee consultant. But to answer the questions I often get, I'm posting this today.

So that is what I do. I have worked as a consultant in Alabama and New York City and San Francisco and Seattle; and Peru and Ethiopia and Guatemala and El Salvador. And many more places.

Check out my consulting website, recently updated with several new pages. If you are seriously considering improving your coffee knowledge, here is a partial resume of the work I have done in specialty coffee.

A Special Kind of Hotness

Part three of my videos in Panama, featuring the beautiful Tesse, the adorable Tiborcito, Daniel being way too excited to be crossing the Panama Canal, and a place that attracts bird-watchers and entomologists from all over the world.

Be sure to watch part one and part two.

Incidentally, I'm quite serious about organizing a trip to Ojo de Agua. We are looking at the week of January 3rd or January 10. I will of course post more about that if it's happening, but if you want to get at the top of the list, send me an email at [email protected].

Just to give you an idea of where all this is, I've included a map. The marker here is for the town of Volcán. Just to the northeast, you can see the large volcano. On the far side of the volcano is Finca Sofia (featured in the earlier videos, and quite close to the place shown in this video). Just north of that, shrouded in clouds in this Google Map view, is a vast protected forest land called Palo Seco. The farm lies right up against this protected zone, surrounded, in fact, on three sides by protected forest land.

View Larger Map

Coffee Tasting All Over America

How do coffee buyers decide which coffees they will carry? They taste them. In this video you can get an inside look at this process.

We put over 60 fresh-crop lots of Ethiopian coffees, each with a different flavor profile, in front of coffee buyers all over the United States this past spring. I posted about this project in the spring, here, here, and here. This video explains the outcome.

Coffee Roasting and Cupping Courses in California

Before I headed off to Ethiopia in March, I went to Mill Valley, California, where I often go. That's where the laboratory of Boot Coffee Consulting is. I do lots of work with Boot Coffee. It's a pretty unique operation. Basically, this is super high-end coffee education.

For the last few years I have helped teach the classes in the laboratory there, specifically cupping and roasting courses. I'm now often the lead instructor for the Intro level courses. If you have ever read this blog and thought about taking some coffee courses, you should think about coming to one of our Roast Profiling & Cupping courses. I'm teaching one in May and another in June, but Boot Coffee offers them year round.

Students always remark on what a great class it is. There's a great blend of technical information, theoretical instruction, and hands-on work. I've had people who worked in the industry 10 years come to one of these and leave by remarking how much they learned in just three days. But we also get beginners all the time. After one course they are already way ahead of the game.

We always make great friends, and the setting in Marin County, California, is beautiful and peaceful.

For instance, this picture is from a class I taught this past winter. The middle two gentlemen, Rick and Daniel, were passionate coffee lovers but had not really worked in the industry much. Flash forward a couple of months... I just ran into each of them at the trade show in Los Angeles, where they were cupping fresh crop micro-lots by the dozen; coffees that many professionals never get the chance to experience. These guys are hard core!

So I was down in California doing this stuff before I went to Ethiopia, and I will be back there again soon. In our next installment: off to Africa.

Ethiopia Cupping Caravan

Those 40 new specialty coffee shops in NYC that you read about in the New York Times? They have to get their coffee from somewhere... this post is about the hidden side of the specialty coffee boom.

I'm writing on the road here, at the Atlanta airport. In another 20 hours or so I will be touching down once again in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee.

This trip is all about the Cupping Caravan in Harar. A group of 14 coffee buyers from around the world are coming together to cup coffee out at the farms and mills.

We have mobile cupping units, complete with cups, spoons, mini grinders, electric roasters, a gas stove and kettles for water. We're driving out to the mills in the remote areas of Harar via 4x4 vehicle. We have electric inverters to hook the equipment to the car batteries for roasting the samples. We're cupping all these coffees on site at the coops!

Most Ethiopian coffee farmers have never tasted their own product prepared the way the consumer prepares it. In fact, most of them are not even aware that there is such a thing as a roasting company (since roasting is done daily by the small batch on little metal pans).

We're taking all the information and process that takes months to exchange and collapsing it to a single day. I don't think I've ever been as excited for a coffee project as I am for this one. Deals will be going down, as well. The buyers are getting a chance to buy directly from the coops.

These are the changes that have to continue to happen at the production end of things if we are going to keep having such wild success on the consumption end of things that we see detailed in today's New York Times.

Please check out our facebook page and leave a comment there. As usual when on the road, my posts will come when I have the opportunity to use the internet.