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For over two decades at Crop to Cup, our core mission has stayed simple: connect smallholder producers to the North American specialty market. But connection alone doesn’t build a long-term, sustainable business.
To support our supply communities for the long haul, our role as importers has to be pragmatic. We supply feedback, financing, and commercial support so that our producer partners can stay increasingly competitive in a very competitive field.
In practice, our direct interventions are heavily focused on the coffee itself—improving quality, scaling volume, and building consistency. The commercial benefits of that focus are clear and shared across the supply chain. But coffee farmers are communities first, built on individual people and families. And those people often require support that falls outside the scope of farm yield, processing, or cup scores.
This creates a common business tension. Any commercial company has a primary mandate to act in its own commercial best interest and sharpen its core business. In coffee, that means pursuing goals that directly improve production and quality. But because that core mandate naturally stays focused on coffee-related outcomes, it often leaves community needs that fall outside the commercial scope unaddressed—even when supporting the broader community is at the heart of why we engage in this work in the first place.
A resolution to this tension came in 2022, when we sat down in Houston and listened to Nora Burkey speak about her work at The Chain Collaborative (TCC).
TCC approaches community development differently. Instead of arriving at origin with a pre-packaged agenda or pushing producers toward activities designed to yield a commercial result, Nora and her team ask a simple, powerful question: What does your community actually need?
That distinction clicked immediately. It drew a clean, logical line between two complementary pillars:
— Crop to Cup’s Role: Strengthen the scaffolding of the commercial relationship.
— The Chain Collaborative’s Role: Strengthen the scaffolding of the community itself—with zero strings attached, no —commercial agenda, and execution driven entirely by local leaders.
To see how TCC operates on the ground, check out this brief introduction video:
We put this approach to work alongside TCC with the Farmers Caucus in Trans-Nzoia County, Western Kenya. Through TCC’s Incubator program, 15 local estate leaders designed a pilot project on the Muinami and Yellow Diamonds estates specifically to help coffee worker families create alternative, year-round streams of income.
Rather than focusing on coffee, this community-designed initiative invested $15,000 directly into local priorities:
— Diversified Incomes: Supported 22 worker families in launching 5 non-coffee ventures—spanning livestock, poultry, beekeeping, horticulture, and a local agrovet store.
— Land & Infrastructure: Financed 3.25 acres of land leases for family farming and built 16 physical farm structures, including 13 livestock/poultry housing units, 2 apiaries, and a greenhouse.
— Direct Assets: Delivered 13 livestock animals (heifers, sheep, goats), 248 poultry birds, 26 beehives, and up to 10,000 crop seedlings per family.
The results proved that by giving local leaders the autonomy and funding to solve their own problems, small dollars can yield massive and meaningful impact. Building on that success in Kenya, we are actively expanding our work with TCC into our supply chains in Peru.
This season, we are expanding our direct financial commitment to TCC’s annual $15,000 Incubator grant cohorts, and because our roaster partners are equal stakeholders in these origins, we are implementing an easy, transparent way for you to join us on an ongoing basis.
This will be an Evergreen TCC Donation Option for all green coffee contracts:
— Opt-In Micro-Donations: You can choose to add $0.10 or $0.15 per pound to any active or future green coffee contract you hold with us.
— 100% Trackable: Your contribution is billed as a separate line item on your invoice, giving you a clean, simple paper trail for your business’s giving.
— Direct Progress Updates: Roasters who participate are added to a dedicated update loop, receiving direct, transparent progress reports on every new cohort funded by your dollars.
Whether you’re buying a single bag or multiple full containers, adding a few cents per pound ensures that every contract actively reinforces both sides of origin scaffolding—the coffee trade and the community that powers it.
If you’re ready to add an evergreen contribution to your existing or upcoming contracts, reach out to your trader or click below to email us. Together, we are thrilled to keep building.
Uganda, 2026
We’ve said it before, but we’re saying it again: Uganda is back, baby. Back to the days before the paradigm-shaking collapse of our longtime relationship with the centralized cooperative BUCOFA in 2019, chronicled here. When we say it now, we can point to how this claim has earned its resonance, and we can highlight the individuals who embody it. No one does so more fully than Masha Coffee, Sylvia and Alfred Achebet’s project that this year completed its first export of coffees processed at its new site, high up Mt. Elgon. Their story is worth amplifying for its success and how we believe it operates as a blueprint for more Ugandan actors in the near future, but also because it has been riddled with frustrations and setbacks—as true stories tend to be.
This piece is more tightly focused than our standard harvest reviews or previews. It is about one partner, what they’ve accomplished, the literal fruits of those labors now en route to North America, what’s on the horizon heading into future seasons, and how you can help. At the same time, it’s a reminder that doing just about everything right does not always make for smooth sailing.
To more deeply explore any of the additional Ugandan partners rounding out this new era, click on their image below. Otherwise, read on for more about Masha.
It’s tricky for us to discuss Uganda without retracing our company’s history, because—as most reading this likely already know—Uganda is where we started. Our work here began in 2005, and marked the country’s first quality-driven specialty initiative, a collaborative effort that involved establishing micro washing stations. By 2010, we had ironed out our operations to an extent that felt sustainable and showed us what was possible, but by the end of that decade, as farmer groups splintered and stations were eventually absorbed by multinational groups, we chose to step away and work exclusively with Ugandan-owned operations. In doing so, we learned that piecemeal agronomic and logistical support do not produce 86+ pt coffees. Consistently exceptional coffee requires a localized, resilient ecosystem, and an abundance of infrastructure dedicated to precision rather than volume.
It has taken us nearly a decade of searching for partners, coaxing financiers, recruiting producers and mill managers, and chasing talent everywhere we could find it—but right now, we really believe we have. Connecting with Sylvia, Alfred, and Masha Coffee in 2022 was perhaps the most critical turning point. The introduction came through our longtime friend Clare, who ran Quality and Education for the Uganda Coffee Development Authority, and who we first met just as things were falling apart in Bulaago—one door closing, another opening. In her role with the UCDA, Clare cupped just about every coffee that moved through the country, and organized its national harvest competitions. We’d long appreciated her help to aggregate samples and cup on our behalf, and when we asked her who in Uganda was doing the best work, she brought us to Sylvia.
But long before winning us over, Sylvia and her husband Alfred had earned the trust of their community through years working as a nurse and doctor in their home district of Kween. Sylvia’s progression from clinician to coffee producer replays a sentiment we’ve heard from many rural health care professionals: you need acute care to treat symptoms, but to meaningfully influence causes—stabilize income. She already had the standing and the space for it, including a giant tree on the family property that neighbors had nicknamed “the boardroom.” With help from Alfred, she launched Masha from the family farm in 2019, and as her profile grew throughout and beyond the community, more and more visitors began stopping by “the boardroom,” facilitating NGO funding for community training and outreach, which she used to build early infrastructure like solar drying beds.
Eventually, with participation exceeding the initial site’s capacity, the Achebets broke ground on a new washing station in Kabeywa, near Sipi Falls, at an elevation of 1,900 meters, with a collection zone running from 1,800 up to 2,400. In addition to the raw altitude advantages, this location and the mill’s construction were designed to be fiercely self-contained, in response to how difficult the place can be to access and how vulnerable the surrounding roads are to washouts. To mitigate uncontrolled fermentation from transit delays, Masha processes deep into the night as deliveries arrive, employing precise bypass demucilaging and temperature-calibrated fermentation protocols. Drying is equally methodical: a brief phase of full-sun drip drying and hand-picking, followed by controlled rotation in fully vented greenhouses over 7 – 12 days to slowly stabilize moisture content and water activity. The processing is supervised by Sylvia’s sister, Eunice, a trained agronomist who more recently earned CQI Processing credentials as well.
With the station complete and the team assembled, 2026 was set to be Masha’s first year exporting coffee processed from its own headquarters, and we shouldn’t diminish the accomplishment—they did it, and did it well. Using the sweetest, highest-Brix count cherries in the region, their slow, well-calibrated wet fermentation yielded a remarkably clean and vibrantly tropical profile, reminding us of ripe pineapple and passionfruit. At every sampling juncture, the quality has held up, and with nearly 300 bags produced, that is truly an accomplishment that we can’t wait to share once these coffees arrive later in August.
But as the timeline implies, things did not unfold as intended. In late 2025, as the season was beginning, Masha again ran into issues with its “impact fund” financing partner, Exim Uganda. Like the previous year, Exim did not disburse Masha’s approved funds until December, lagging behind the harvest and sending them into a scramble to concentrate purchasing. Additionally, they released only 60% of Masha’s approved line, ~10% lower than industry standard, forcing their hands in terms of milling and export partners. At that point, the situation deteriorated even further, with a much higher-than-anticipated milling loss, decreasing an expected 330 bag total lot size down to 290.
Even with all of the work, all of the trust building in the community and investment in the infrastructure—their trajectory was still derailed.
As far as intermediary orchestration is concerned, plans have been made to do better next year. This time, however, the best we could do was maintain a fair FOB price plus an additional buffer that will allow us to invest more in their operation ahead of the next harvest. Strategically, we’ll be linking them with Progreso and Root Capital for more diversified credit next season, and steering them toward The Coffee Yard for dry-milling. The link with The Coffee Yard should also help Masha level up aspects of their accounting, pinning them to a model in line with the cost-plus cherry buying framework that we successfully piloted with TCY this year. Thankfully, there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken—their wet mill did indeed yield strong volume of excellent coffee, so the priority is assembling the right pieces around it.
In addition to facilitating the right connections outside of Masha, we’re also excited to contribute directly to an improvement right on site—a kitchen. The washing station itself was finished only last year, and its conspicuous status as a shiny new spectacle has turned it into something greater than the sum of its coffee infrastructural parts. Like the “boardroom” once upon a time, this place is now a hub of all sorts. Agronomists and field mobilizers use it to hold training sessions and distribute seedlings. During harvest, farmers work their fields in the morning, then head to Kabeywa in the afternoon to deliver cherry. As we and everyone in the area knows all too well, rains often make it impossible to return home when planned, meaning farmers are often stuck waiting out washed-out roads well into the evening. Add in the 20+ staff working the station through peak season, and there are a lot of mouths to feed.
With all that in mind, the team’s proposal for a community kitchen feels extremely apt. For our part, we’re looking to raise $15,000, and contributions from roasters can go a tremendous way in bringing this vision to fruition faster.
In spite of the challenges, Masha is our blueprint for what Ugandan coffee can be when we have this level of processing precision taking place at such high altitudes.
What’s even more exciting is that Masha is not an isolated success. What’s happening there is part of a broader and still-widening pipeline of stellar Ugandan coffee projects helmed by Ugandans. This season, also from Mt. Elgon, we had even more logistical success with Norman from The Coffee Yard, whose coffees landed in May and have been ripping off the cupping table—at time of writing, there are still 4 lots with some spot availability.
Looking ahead to December, Barbara from Kwezi Coffee is preparing to export a mixed specialty container that bridges Uganda’s premier regions, combining lots from her homeland in the western Rwenzori mountains with early-harvest microlots from Mt. Elgon in the east.
Furthermore, we are preparing for massive scale in the coming year. We mentioned Progreso earlier, and gave them much-deserved attention in an earlier write-up on our work in Peru, and lining them up here in Uganda will prove to be huge. They are currently deploying capital to upgrade quality infrastructure across several partner cooperatives, all set to come online next season.
Yes, we really do mean it—Uganda is back. It’s not exactly the same Uganda where we started operating back in 2005, and the multinationals may still have their volume, but meaningful infrastructure for true, traceable specialty coffee is again in the hands of the producers. To us, this feels like home.
Get in touch to grab some of Masha’s 2026 export and secure your spot for the stellar seasons to come.
PREFACE
2026 marks our second serious import from Vietnam, spearheaded by brooklyn-based lab manager Erinn Buhyoff. In total, our Vietnamese offerings represent a wonderfully wide spectrum of coffees from an equally complementary cluster of partners: approachably familiar washed Arabica from Zanya, process-driven experiments from Loc Rung, and paradigm-shifting Robusta from Great Cherry. The third of these categories is what sparked this piece—an exploration of how to improve upon antiquated approaches for assessing the character and quality of specialty caliber Canephora, as the species is largely referred to below.
What follows here is a deservingly thorough, open-minded, and disciplined treatment of sample roasting for Canephora. Our hope is that these experiments empower more roasters to invite these coffees onto their cupping tables—and, eventually, menus. The scope is deliberately restricted to sample roasting because we believe that this is the foundational prerequisite for everything that follows: cupping, production roasting, brewing. There is ample room for discussion on all of the subsequent stages of the coffees’ trajectories, but there has been far too little examination of this early step. Our goal is to begin remedying this, and as always—we invite you into the conversation.
Click here to browse all of our landed Vietnamese coffees and request your own samples.
And now, without further ado, read on for Erinn Buhyoff’s Roasting Canephora for Evaluation.
INTRODUCTION
While standardized roasting techniques for Arabica have become clearer and clearer in recent years, the subject of roasting Canephora (Robusta) remains relatively arcane in comparison. The industry dominance that Canephora enjoyed in the pre-“3rd wave” past would suggest an abundance of data poised to establish a baseline of standardized roast approaches—but this is not the case. Robusta’s heyday predates rigorous roastlogging, belonging to an era when data collection was not standard practice, thereby relegating much of that information to trade-secrets, or even myth. Either way, Canephora has changed significantly in the contemporary industry, as have our tools, techniques, and even taste preferences, thereby requiring the pioneering few to deconstruct modern roasting standards—developed with Arabica in mind—and rebuild, recentering Canephora. Recent developments with Canephora have been powered by producers in the field, and brewing science developments have elevated this once “ugly duckling” of the industry to a product worthy of the meticulous attention that Arabica has long commanded. And so we find ourselves here to help build the bridge between these two sides, with the objective of bringing that same level of focus to Canephora roasting.
OBJECTIVE
We will be focusing on roasting for cupping lab evaluation, and this setting will dictate our objectives.
In the cupping lab, our primary concerns will be:
METHODS/EQUIPMENT
These guidelines will help us reduce our own roasting bias, creating a level playing field for each sample that we are evaluating. We will be using the Kaffelogic Nano 7 Sample Roaster as our machine, and creating repeatable and executable roast profiles to roast each sample, fine tuning to achieve uniformity and quality preservation. The fluid-bed and roast-from-room-temperature nature of this roaster allows us to nullify a few common variables in roasting, namely thermal energy transfer from drum contact influencing development, and initial thermal momentum variance between roasts. The small batch size (50g) also allows us to stretch our sample material over the course of more roast trials than would otherwise be possible. For each roast profile tested we will record weight loss at different time intervals to map the drying profile. We will also record Whole Bean and Ground color numbers to compare exterior and interior/average roast development between roast profiles. Each roast will then be cupped blind by our lab team for evaluation, with the goal of selecting the roast that best preserves the intrinsic qualities of the coffee. Our cupping protocols will follow the CQI R-Grading standards. After multiple cupping rounds, the best performing roast profiles will be reviewed for roast batch consistency, comparing several roasts of the same profile.
The coffee that we selected to use for these tests is a Robusta Sẻ honey process from Đắk Lắk, Vietnam, available to us via Great Cherry. This coffee has a moisture content of 10.8% and a relatively high density of 850g/L, and has been extensively milled to ensure minimal defects that would influence roast consistency. We selected this coffee because of its small spherical bean morphology, its screen-size consistency, its standard processing type (for Canephora, honey and natural process are more common processes than washed, with honey giving us a clearer look with regards to roast quality differences), and the varietal being of a non-hybrid type. Our average score for this coffee is an 84 using the CQI Robusta Grading Form, which is on the higher end of our average Canephora scoring, meaning that sensorially this coffee has more than enough complexity to explore and refine through our roast experiments. The color meter we will be using is the Le Brew RoastSee Fusion, which has been calibrated to a Lighttells CM-200, and measured on the Agtron scale.
THEORY/APPROACH
Canephora has the reputation of being very difficult to roast evenly from the exterior of the bean to its interior. To contextualize this difference when compared to Arabica, one only needs to look CQI’s acceptable color number difference between WB/G (Whole Bean/Ground, Whole Bean measuring only the exterior color, and Ground measuring an average color throughout the bean, and thus a better measurement of the interior development) as defined in their recommended roasting guidelines for each species. Internally, we are referring to the spread between the exterior and interior colors as the “development delta.” The recommended Agtron roast color WB/G for Arabica is 58/63—a delta of 5—while the recommended Agtron roast color WB/G for Canephora is 48/78—a delta of 30. Our roasting approach will take this target into account, especially as it pertains to other variables.
Our bean shape and density are also very important to consider here, as our applied heat will have a more difficult time penetrating denser beans (exacerbating this interior/exterior development issue with Canephora), and high variance in bean shape would result in individual beans reacting to the roast profile in differing ways, resulting in potential roast defects. To mitigate these vulnerabilities, our test coffee provides us with an extremely consistent test subject in terms of bean shape, and its high density forces us to tackle the issue of balanced exterior/interior bean development head-on.
We also want to optimize our fan speed profile to aid our efforts of efficient and even development. Since we are using a fluid bed roaster, our fan speed will determine our agitation, as well as our thermal energy retention and expenditure. As coffee dries throughout the roast, it loses water and becomes less dense, requiring less fan speed to suspend and agitate the coffee as it continues drying. By tracking weight loss incrementally through the roast, we can see how the density of the coffee mass changes, and develop a fan speed profile that is appropriate.
Finally we want these puzzle pieces to come together with our evaluation goals in mind: consistency, repeatability, and minimal roast defects/imparted flavors. Our ideal roast profile will be able to clearly and transparently present the flavor profile of the green coffee, yielding a result that is neither too-dark or too-light. Finding this balance while ensuring even development will be our guiding light through our trials.
TESTS
We will begin by comparing the two most common starting points for roasting Canephora: one is the mythical “Low & Slow” Robusta approach, while the other is a standard washed Arabica profile. Each will be a 50g batch size, with varying heat and airflow applications. The specific profiles we’ll use to cover these two categories are the Kaffelogic Core Profiles of “KL Robusta” and “KL Washed” (each shown below). We will use these profiles to track the drying profile of the test coffee (measuring when and how much water loss the coffee is experiencing at varying intervals throughout the roast), which will inform our optimized fan/airflow profile for this coffee. We will also track the WB/G color numbers of these roast profiles at varying roast times to compare their relative interior-exterior roast consistency. Finally, we will cup the results of each test roast. Following all of this, we will create new roast profiles based on our weight loss tracking, color number data, and cupping preferences.
RESULTS
Following these tests, we can make a few observations comparing the test profiles. First and foremost our results suggest that the KL Robusta “Low & Slow” approach results in a greater development delta than the KL Washed profile, which has a more aggressive though controlled heat application (see Fig. 01a). We also found the KL Robusta profiles to produce dulled and muted flavors on the cupping table compared to the KL Washed. While “softening” the flavor profile and muting undesirable flavors may be preferable when dealing with lower quality coffees, it is not aligned with our goal of getting a clear picture of any given coffee, which requires us to preserve the good AND the bad.
The drying behavior of Canephora during the roast also yielded interesting findings. Overall, Canephora loses its water more slowly than Arabica, which means in a fluid-bed setting we will have to use higher fan speeds over longer periods of time in order to maintain proper agitation throughout the roast (see Fig 02a). We can also determine that the standard development range for Arabica with the KL Washed profile is much too light for Canephora, suggesting that Canephora indeed does need significantly more development time and higher roast temperatures to reach color numbers and relative development similar to what we are accustomed to from Arabica.
Compared to the KL Robusta roasts, the KL Washed roasts were much more dynamic, providing us with clearer and higher resolution sensorial experiences for any given test. Our cuppings yielded a preference for roasts in the range of 14-15% weight loss, whole bean color number range 65-75, ground color number range 115-125, and average total roast time of 7 minutes, which we determined to be an optimal range to perceive the widest range of intrinsic green coffee qualities, with minimal imparted roast flavors. Below the 55-60 range for whole bean color, we found the exterior of the bean to be developing too much roasty flavor for proper evaluation, while anything above 130 ground color number was grainy and lacked fullness and sweetness. While we would ideally like the development delta to be tighter, we found this range to be acceptable for these tests, leaving room for improvement that we’ll continue workshopping.
With these observations we’ve created new roast profiles that address our experienced issues, landing on a profile with an aggressive heat application (in order to address the development delta and to avoid dulling the flavor profile), an optimal fan profile for Canephora (due to drying differences when compared to Arabica), and fits our preferred development range.
R3 is this profile, with a target total roast time of ~7:05 and weight loss of 15% (see Fig. 03). We found this profile to fit our sensorial preferences and requirements better than the initial core profiles, as well as our earlier test profiles. Sensorially the roasts from R3 consistently provided clearly developed sweetness and body, while preserving subtle fruit and acidity qualities, and minimal imparted roast flavor. Our range of WB/G color numbers also improved to 75/124, though our desired and expected improvement was greater. Further adjustments can be made to the roast and fan profile curves to improve this, while hopefully maintaining or even improving the clarity and complexity that this profile is currently providing in the cup.
If you’re a Kaffelogic user, click here to download the profile.
CONCLUSION
As is often the case in coffee roasting, each roast reveals immense knowledge about the physical characteristics of any given coffee. Through many roast trials (& errors), we have learned so much about what makes Canephora unique, with so much more to uncover through further roasting. We have found out for ourselves that Canephora fundamentally requires more average development than Arabica, not only for the sake of its flavor profile, but also to ensure that the interior of the bean is being properly developed. Suffice it to say, if a Canephora roast appears to be a reasonable “light-roast” from the outside, there’s a good chance that the interior of the bean is significantly underdeveloped. We have also found that the difficult-to-penetrate Canephora beans respond poorly to slow, sluggish heat application, and more evenly develop when roasted with a more focused and aggressive roast profile (Arabica roasters may see a parallel here with high density Kenyan coffees). Finally, and most importantly, we have found not just an appropriate development range for lab evaluation, but also a development range for Canephora that fits our own palate preferences, which allows us to set an important reference point for work with Canephora going forward. Improvements still need to be made concerning the development delta, though I have faith that the theory and practical developments necessary to address this are imminent. There is also a whole world of processing types and varietals (arguably greater than that of Arabica) to apply these findings to, in order to find more generalized best roasting practices for Canephora, along with inevitable exceptions to these rules. We encourage roasters with the means to join us in this adventure—exploring the vast, long-hidden world of Canephora, repeating and refining our tests, making new discoveries, and igniting new passions in coffee.
We have no doubt that Canephora Roasting theory will soon catch up to its counterparts in agronomy and brewing, and we’re proud to be playing our part.
THE BASICS
If you work in the coffee industry, you should be sensitive to large systems acting against the benefit or will of the people they purport to serve. Staying informed, staying vocal, and staying clear about what matters are not the be-all end-all for making positive impact, but they are prerequisites.
With that said, we know that solidarity isn’t enough, but we still want to unambiguously express it: solidarity with everyone appalled and overwhelmed by what ICE is perpetrating right now in the United States—most visibly in Minneapolis—but to varying degrees throughout the country. With our key audience of cafe/roastery owners/managers in mind, we have collected some resources on workplace rights in the event of an interaction with ICE. These may be redundant, but if you have not yet had the conversation with your team, let this be one more bank of resources to kickstart that process.
Today, the 28th of January, is hopefully a pivotal inflection point—certain small signs indicate that the government is responding to the pressure sustained foremost by the people of Minnesota, with aspects of de-escalation easing into motion. It is fair to infer that we may soon see a degree of ICE reallocation to other cities and that at least slightly more attention will be paid to preserving the optics of legal action as audits and encounters nonetheless continue.
MEETING THE MOMENT
For that reason, now feels like a worthwhile opportunity to reorient around some of the basics. Some of this may be redundant, but if you have not yet had the conversation with your team, let this be one more bank of resources to kickstart that process.
Below, we’ve summarized some steps we can all take towards readiness in the one-the-nose acronym ‘SALT’, reminding us to Stay calm, Ask for a warrant, Limit access, and Track & Train — all of which are elaborated upon in a printable format linked a little further down.
We’ve also dedicated some extra energy to how I-9 preparedness can help your business prepare against one of the most common catalysts for ICE encounters at places of work.
We know that these are small steps, and that in dire circumstances legal technicalities can prove useless, but we believe that collective care requires readiness, and if we can make any aspect of that readiness quicker or easier—let’s do it.
I-9’s
For business owners & HR teams:
Not all I-9 audits result in an ICE workplace raid, but nearly all ICE raids start with I-9 audits. They are administratively tedious and boring, but much more common than the higher visibility raids that more often make the news. That’s why we need to know about them.
I-9 audits begin with a Notice of Inspection (NOI) giving business owners three days to provide their I-9 records. If errors or inconsistencies are found, owners are given 10 days to respond with corrections. You can protect your employees by completing I-9s correctly and on time (Section 1 by the first day of work, Section 2 within 3 days of hire). Details matter, since snags or inconsistencies within them are what trigger audits.
It is the employer who decides what information to ask from employees, and they should avoid over-documenting—no need to ask for anything that exceeding the “one List A document, or one List B + one List C document” requirement.
When storing I-9s keep them separate from other HR paperwork.
Also, if possible—avoid using E-Verify for filing, as this has been correlated to a higher chance of audits.
“KNOW YOUR RIGHTS” QUICK SHEETS: LINKED & PRINTABLE
Click the link at the bottom of any image to be taken to a printable PDF with active links
BEYOND THE BASICS
Pages 2 and 3 of the document above contain links to valid, vetted sources that are great jumping off points for learning more or further pursuing any of these concisely conveyed ideas. To close out this post, it’s also worth acknowledging that much of the potential progress hinted at right now is a product of serious, sustained messaging to politicians with voting power. In our experience, the best starting point for knowing where to direct your voice is 5 Calls, a site that allows you to set your location, search for issues that are important to you, and will then provide a comprehensive set of relevant representatives, how to contact them, relevant background information for the issue you’ve identified, and even a “script” to help orient the call/voicemail. Beyond this, entities like the National Immigration Law Center also provide several simple sign-ups and prompts for messages to legislators about issues directly related to immigration and enforcement.
As trying a period as this continues to be, we are also bearing witness to an incredible rallying around what’s right. Both as individuals and organizationally, we will continue doing our best to do more, to stay prepared, and to remain a resource for those of you we are already so proud to collaborate with.
For now—stay informed, stay loud, and stay safe.
INTRODUCTION
Expect the unexpected is a trite, overplayed statement that takes on something of a Barnum Effect—vague and timeless enough to always feel apt, no matter where or when it’s uttered.
And yet… the past year in coffee economics has perhaps upended even this, with such disparate disruptors and rampant volatility that the formerly vapid notion of expecting the unexpected now feels too hubristic to fit. More earnestly: 2025 proved that one can be shocked, again and again, long after we’ve reached herd immunity from surprise.
This was a year that began with the highest nominal arabica futures price in the history of the ICE Coffee “C” contract—then produced a 55% correction, a swift partial recovery, and long stretches in which intraday moves exceeded what may have often been considered a “volatile week.” Every stakeholder in the value chain—farmers, cooperatives, mills, exporters, importers, roasters, and lenders—found themselves navigating a market that reached historical levels both for costs and sheer uncertainty.
From macroeconomic tightening in the form of transient tariffs to looming regulatory upheavals like the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), 2025 offered an exceptionally vivid snapshot of a [coffee] world that was already under multiple kinds of pressure, but that saw all of these forces ratchet into unavoidable public consciousness like never before.
What follows here is less an attempt to make sense of it (ha!), and more of a collective sigh to acknowledge that—in spite of it all—we’re still here, still learning, and still supporting the partners that make these supply chains so special.
Without An Anchor
2025 began with an extraordinary number: 430¢/lb. It was February when the C touched that level, setting that afore-mentioned nominal record for arabica futures. The move reflected years of tightening certified stocks (a steady decline in the Intercontinental Exchange-approved deliverable inventory that acts as the market’s safety cushion), along with erratic weather in Brazil, rising production costs, fragile logistics, and an increasingly speculative macro economic environment—thanks in no small part to the return to office of a particularly finicky POTUS.
The “C” in Three
In an attempt to somewhat simplify the year’s macro-market behavior into phases, we’ll first break the market’s behavior into thirds, further unpacking each section down below:
Act I — The Climb (January–March)
The year began with the C surging from the mid-300s to over 430¢. Certified stocks—the exchange’s pool of real, deliverable inventory—were near multi-decade lows, Brazil’s early crop outlook was clouded by irregular rainfall, and speculative buying across a wider range of agricultural commodities pushed futures even higher. Many roasters hustled to secure forward coverage at historically high levels, while many producers deferred sales in anticipation of further increases. Cumulatively, it’s fair to say that this period was more a product of perceived scarcity than confirmed shortfall—a familiar hallmark amidst fear-driven rallies.
Act II — The Correction (April–August)
But as harvest expectations in Brazil improved, speculation thinned. By July, the C had collapsed to around 277¢, a level that may have felt “cheap” relative to the February high, but that remained historically expensive compared to pre-2021 norms. Many roasters that hadn’t already overcommitted took advantage of the dip to secure further forward coverage, thereby squeezing exporters: those who had bought cherry or parchment at peak local prices faced shrinking margins or outright losses unless differentials adjusted—which they often didn’t.
Act III — The Plateau (September–December)
By early September, the market had climbed back toward the upper 3’s and low 4’s, revisiting levels roughly in line with the year’s initial peak. Concerns over Brazil’s flowering rains, persistently low certified stocks, and renewed macro volatility (much more on that to come) all fed the rebound. Through Q4, prices held in a tight, elevated band—not quite the frenzy of the past winter, but still tense.
The central takeaway from this broad strokes portrait is not fixation (pun acknowledged) on the highs or lows, but that there was no stable reference point for the market all year.
Macro Backdrop: Expensive Money & Trade Friction
Beyond the supply-and-demand mechanics, 2025 was shaped by macro-economic forces that hit just about every sector, manifesting in coffee as conspicuously as anywhere.
High Interest Rates and Tight Credit
Global lending conditions remained tight throughout 2025. Even as major central banks cut rates, real borrowing costs stayed elevated, especially in emerging markets. This had several knock-on effects.
Exporters struggled to finance parchment and cherry purchases. Traditional short-term credit—once a reliable tool for origin-side actors—became either prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable. Cooperatives with weaker balance sheets faced liquidity crunches, pushing some to sell early, accept unfavorable terms, or reduce pre-financing to farmers. Importers absorbed more financing risk as delays, narrowed fixation windows, and larger working-capital demands became the norm.
This is also where the role of hedging sharpens. In theory, hedging is how exporters and importers use futures contracts to lock in the value of a container while the physical coffee is still being purchased and processed. In practice, however, formal hedging has become inaccessible for most small and mid-sized exporters. It requires Intercontinental Exchange accounts, dedicated risk management, and—critically—significant cash deposits referred to as margin.
In 2025, those margin deposits just about doubled: requiring roughly $6,600 per container in 2024, and closer to $12,700 as ring in 2026. That means exporters who can hedge must tie up far more working capital at the very moment lenders are tightening advance rates. When credit contracts and margin requirements rise in tandem, hedging flips, becoming more of a barrier, with volatility cutting sharply into real operations as fewer actors have the capacity to insulate themselves from it.
To state it plainly: financing the same physical coffee today requires three to four times the capital it did before the pandemic, yet most importer margins—at least ours—have remained the same. Although these conditions aren’t new (they began building in the immediate post-Covid cycle), they have only intensified through the present. Coffee is capital-intensive at every stage from harvest to export, and expensive money means expensive coffee regardless of cup score or provenance.
Tariffs and Trade Policy Uncertainty
Tariffs may be the ominous overarching tagline of this entire year in economics—even if we seem to be bookending the year without them. As we all recall:
In early April 2025, the U.S. announced sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” covering most imported goods, including many agricultural and food products. The announcement on April 2, followed by implementation beginning April 5, created immediate uncertainty across global supply chains—especially those tied to U.S.–Asia shipping routes. Even though green coffee was not directly targeted, the policy’s breadth implied that categories could shift at any moment, prompting exporters, logistics partners, and roasters to rethink freight planning, forward coverage, and contractual exposure.
Snapping to mid-November, however, more than 200 food products—including coffee—were formally exempted when the administration rolled back much of the April tariff package. But by that point, plenty of damage had already been done: considerable sums of tariff dues had been paid, and months of ambiguity had delayed shipments, reshuffled routing decisions, and increased the cost of risk management.
Several coffee-producing countries also enacted internal tariff adjustments or VAT reforms (value-added tax rules applying to inputs, processing, export transactions, or the businesses handling coffee) that changed the underlying cost structure for exports everywhere. These domestic policy shifts—ranging from transaction taxes to revised import duties on fertilizers, fuel, and packaging—further complicated price discovery and squeezed margins at origin.
Currency volatility amplified all of this. The Brazilian real, which strengthened sharply in Q1 before weakening mid-year, magnified the impact of each tariff announcement or threat. For buyers and sellers on both sides of contracts, FX is yet another layer of friction, altering local cherry prices, exporter liquidity, and the dollar value of differential commitments.
Though they did amass a significant raw cost (exceeding $400,000 in our case) tariffs were foremost a destabilizing variable this year—another reminder that coffee’s economic environment can be shaped as much by politics as by supply, demand, or futures speculations.
Shipping, Geopolitical Tension, and Cost Volatility
Shipping rates—sporadically rumored as having some potential to normalize this year—did no such thing. Instead they oscillated sharply as continued Red Sea disruptions forced rerouting, congestion snarled key Southeast Asian ports, fuel markets swung unpredictably, and container shortages re-emerged in several exporting regions. Each of these pressures compounded the others, creating a logistical environment in which even well-planned shipments could be delayed, repriced, or reshuffled with little warning. For producers and exporters already navigating higher borrowing costs and an erratic market foundation, freight instability became yet another layer of risk—one that neither futures curves nor differentials could adequately account for.
Despite how universal these pressures were, they landed unevenly across the supply chain—nowhere more acutely than among the producer groups we tend to work with: remote smallholders operating in fragmented associations or small cooperatives. These communities have neither the liquidity nor the buffer to ride out violent price swings or chase rising cherry prices when markets turn erratic. That exposure creates two core gaps: the financing required to move coffee from cherry to parchment and from parchment to export-grade green, and the technical support needed to consistently meet quality expectations amid these shocks. Our sourcing model—built around pre-crop financing, cost-plus contracts, and long-term investment in farm-level capacity—is the mechanism we believe can fill that gap. In a year characterized by expensive money and unstable conditions, those tools were the only reason we and our partners could stay ahead of volatility.
Brazil
Even in a year with noise cascading from every direction, Brazil remained squarely at the intersection of coffee fundamentals and geopolitical theatrics. Beyond just the usual suspects of weather and forecasted yields, Brazil became central to the global tariff chaos as well.
When the U.S. rolled out its sweeping “reciprocal tariff” program in early April, Brazil—at 50%—was slammed. Coffee was not in the initial wave of tariffed goods, but the policy environment stifled any notions of assurance. And indeed, as the administration expanded and clarified its tariff lists in the months that followed, coffee was formally swept in—only to be pulled back out again during the mid-November rollback. The immediate effect, however, came long before any exemption: the prospect that Brazil—the world’s largest coffee exporter and a pillar of U.S. imports—could face even temporary tariff exposure was enough to trigger rerouting strategies, mass contract revisions, and a broad cooling of appetites for forward risk across trading desks. Even after the mid-November rollback and coffee’s formal exemption, the damage lingered, with months of policy whiplash having already introduced friction into freight pricing, container allocation, and exporter liquidity planning.
Meanwhile, the fundamentals were by no means calm. The year opened on the back of lingering confusion from the previous season’s irregular rainfall, leaving agronomists divided and traders bracing for either feast or famine. Mid-year, thankfully, was more forgiving: yields in several regions quietly outperformed expectations, contributing to the C’s fall from February’s record highs to July’s comparative lows.
But consensus seldom holds for long in Brazil. Flowering season arrived with poorly timed rains that—while not catastrophic—were bad enough to reignite anxiety in a market already hypersensitive to the weather. At the same time, internal conditions deviated from any clean model. Local cherry prices rose on domestic competition, making export purchasing harder than the C might suggest, and the real (Brazil’s currency) strengthened in Q1, weakened mid-year, and rebounded thereafter, constantly complicating the math.
As we know, Brazil’s market is both very big and deeply complex—driven by weather, labor, FX, domestic demand, and political blustering. In 2025, Brazil may not have been the source of the biggest surprises, but perhaps nowhere felt their effects more acutely.
EUDR: (Another) Looming Giant
Though tariffs dominated the headlines, the EU Deforestation Regulation continued radiating in the periphery. Even with enforcement timelines debated, softened, or reinterpreted throughout the year (continuing to be modified as recently as a few days ago, on the 5th of December), EUDR cast a bureaucratic shadow long enough to reach every producing country, co-op, exporter and importer.
At its core, EUDR demands something coffee has never had to produce at scale: plot-level traceability and verifiable proof that no deforestation occurred for the sake of production after December 31, 2020.
For some producers, this is an administrative headache, but for many more, it is far more severe. Much of the world’s coffee is grown by smallholders whose farms are irregularly shaped, unmapped, part of agroforestry puzzles, or recorded only in paper ledgers, if recorded at all. Even the act of creating a digital footprint for a farm introduces cost, labor, and the risk of misunderstanding.
As this look-back has already made exceedingly clear, 2025 was a particularly brutal year to ask a supply chain to invest in new administrative infrastructure. And that burden falls heaviest in the kinds of supply chains where we most often work: fragmented networks made up largely of underrepresented farmers—communities pushed upslope over generations and now operating at the very edges of market access. For them, these tech-driven compliance aspirations are prohibitively formidable, regardless of how rosy the aspirations may be.
Still—it’s not so difficult to perceive the desired big-picture upside: verified, fully traceable, deforestation-free coffee should command preference (and premiums) in markets where compliance becomes mandatory. The asymmetry, however, is glaring, with the path to compliance steepest for the producers least equipped to make the climb.
Differential Discrepancies & the Myth of the ‘High-Price’ Harvest
Central American differentials remained firm even as the futures market softened mid-year, reflecting constrained supply and higher production costs. Colombia stayed elevated, squeezed by labor dynamics, weather disruption, and peso volatility. Ethiopia softened only briefly as new trading structures took shape, and Kenya’s diffs remained stubbornly high as availability stayed thin—to name just a few.
Brazil’s differentials, meanwhile, blazed their own trails—often behaving independently from what shifts in the C or currency alone might predict. Above all, differentials in 2025 were shaped by origin-specific cost structures and supply conditions.
In practical terms, this meant the numbers were telling one story while production on the ground may have borne another—and the gap between those stories was frequently where margins were made or lost, with the deepest discrepancies surfacing upstream. Viewed from the farmgate, even a “high-price” year looked markedly different from expectation. If anyone looked only at the futures chart, they might imagine 2025 as a year of unexpected windfall for farmers—and to a degree, farmer income was up across many origins. But that rise was uneven, incomplete, and often inaccessible at the farmgate.
Local cherry and parchment prices are set in local currency and carry built-in discounts for capital scarcity, risk, and the cost of doing business. As a result, farmgate prices do not automatically climb at the same rate as the C. And because market “strength” in 2025 collided directly with a shortage of capital, most farmers were unable to fully capitalize on the run-up. Many sold cherry or wet, unsorted parchment earlier than they wished—not because it was the optimal moment qualitatively, but because it was when cash was available. Faster payment usually meant lower value, and for many growers the opportunity to capture the “high-price” market never materialized.
Costs, meanwhile, also rose unevenly. Fertilizer, fuel, and agrochemicals remained well above pre-pandemic baselines; labor shortages drove up picking costs or compressed harvest windows, weather volatility amplified crop risk, and currency movement frequently undermined nominal gains. The weight of these costs varied widely—strong cooperatives, well-resourced exporters, and effective government programs blunted the impact in some regions, while weaker or less mature structures left many farmers even more exposed.
2025 reinforced a concept that many of us know fairly well, but that still isn’t amplified loudly enough: a rising market is not the same as rising margins. Even in a “high-price” year, many farmers had little chance to benefit from the prices the charts seemed to promise.
WITHOUT A MAP
Exporters entered 2025 already managing a multi-year accumulation of structural costs—labor, transport, energy, compliance—and then watched the financial scaffolding beneath come apart plank by plank. Hedging costs spiked. Local price behavior largely decoupled from the C. Shipments delayed by tariffs or freight rerouting created cash-flow gaps that smaller exporters struggled to absorb.
Importers faced their own squeeze: fixation windows narrowed, margin requirements ballooned, FX volatility sliced into well-timed purchases, and many roasters became more cautious, reducing forward exposure and leaning harder on spot or short-term contracting. In an environment where the benchmark itself felt unstable and the cost of managing risk rose faster than the value of doing so, the industry leaned more heavily into differential-based contracting.
Roasters, for their part, were navigating one of the most challenging cost environments in recent memory. Record and volatile green coffee prices—buoyed by supply disruptions, tariff impacts, and persistent inflationary pressures—compressed already thin margins across green coffee, packaging, energy, and labor, forcing delayed payments, tighter terms, and strategic reshuffling of purchasing practices. The collapse of robust spot menus and reduced availability of both volume and variety of samples meant many roasters were effectively paying more for the same or lower quality coffee, and in some cases were asked to secure supply on SAS-NANS terms for the first time. These pressures, felt from sourcing through to retail pricing, underscored how 2025’s cost dynamics impacted every link in the value chain, requiring each actor in the supply chain to rethink sourcing and contracting strategies in collaboration.
TYING IT TOGETHER: OUR APPROACH
No matter how volatile the New Normal may prove to be, responsible supply chain actors need to ask these sorts of questions—how can we build better tools? Better agreements? Better hacks?
For us, answers have come in the form of doubling down on transparency, predictability, and the kinds of structures that create more distance between producers and the market’s worst impulses. One example is our ongoing push toward 20-day moving-average fixation, a simple mechanism that mitigates the drama of daily closing prices with a smoother, more representative benchmark. It removes the need for perfectly timed decisions, eases fixation anxiety on both sides of the contract, and anchors purchasing more tightly to the real costs of moving coffee.
Where volatility is highest, we’ve leaned even harder into max-price, cherry-plus cost-plus models—structures that extend cost-plus all the way to the farmgate and are built around a simple promise: the farmer’s price moves when real local cherry prices move, not when global speculation does. These contracts start with verified production costs, add a fixed margin, and then incorporate a transparent adjustment band tied to local cherry competition and FX. When cherry prices rise beyond that band, we do not automatically increase the contract price; instead, we seek buyer approval to raise the max price. If approval isn’t granted, we simply collect whatever volume can be purchased at or below the agreed ceiling and process and export that—typically at a lower overall cost, since we aren’t paying for supplier-risk buffers. The trade-off is that roasters may be asked either to accept reduced volume or to raise the max price, but in all cases they can be certain they’re not paying for fluff. This shared rule set keeps producers protected in competitive markets, shields exporters from being caught between local arbitrage and fixed contracts, and ensures roasters don’t absorb unbounded spikes disconnected from quality or availability. In places like Uganda, this has been the single most important mechanism keeping purchasing orderly through what would otherwise have been a destabilizing season.
And finally, because forward risk has become so much harder to manage, we are preparing to launch a Buyer’s-Call Extension Service for full-container customers in 2026—a small, optional fee that converts seller’s-call contracts into buyer’s-call within a defined window. It preserves the cost structures producers and exporters need, while giving roasters the ability to fix on a day that aligns with planning rather than panic.
None of these tools eliminate volatility—that’s simply not something that we can, in earnest, aspire toward. But what we can improve upon is a framework for participating in volatile markets without being ruled by them, allowing producers to plan, exporters to finance, and roasters to buy without total tethering to the market’s most theatrical moments.
ONWARD!
If 2025 deserves anything, it’s a place in the industry’s collective time capsule—a year so wild, so structurally strange, that many of us may remember exactly where we were when certain prices flashed on our screens or certain policies were implemented (or revoked). We learned a great deal—about our partners, about our own operations, and about the resilience that emerges when every link in the chain is tested at once. And perhaps most importantly, none of this was experienced in isolation. If you made discoveries of your own this year—about risk management, about sourcing, about the tools you now trust or no longer trust—we’d genuinely like to hear them. Feel free to reach out; part of documenting a year like this is acknowledging that we all weathered it together, and many of us came out of it with tighter systems, deeper relationships, and a clearer sense of how to build toward whatever comes next.
Looking forward, we remain committed—through cost-plus baselines, through relationship-forward contracting, through steady experimentation—to cultivating as much calm as possible amidst all the chaos. Here’s hoping (but by no means expecting) a far less interesting year in 2026!
It starts by getting involved earlier in the harvest. Here is a quick guide for navigating forward contracts and learning how to use our harvest planner tool. Timing is important. So is communication. Put them together and we get better, more intentional coffee every time.
Buying in this way unlocks early access to a wider range of coffees, at better prices. It also allows us to be better partners all the way down the line. And knowing how this works is critical to getting the most out of working with Crop to Cup.
Harvest timing varies based on altitude, rain fail, age of trees, annual harvest patterns, and on-farm practices. Ultimately, it boils down to us receiving samples over a 6-10 week period, starting around the peak of the main harvest and continuing through the end of harvest at top altitudes. Our lab provides feedback and recommendations to producers. We use these samples to present ‘pre-shipment offers’ to roasters who have expressed an interest in buying ahead.
Pre-Shipment contracts are put in before a coffee is shipped; approval is against the pre-shipment sample. This is good for repeat relationships, core menu items, fixed price contracts (like grocery or white label), and for those who simply like to get more hands-on.
Once an offer is approved we ask our partners to mill the coffee and send us a contract sample that is directly representative of what’s being put in the container. We approve this pre-shipment sample (PSS) 2-6 weeks before shipment, which takes another 4-8 weeks to come here and clear customs. Over that time we list the coffee on the ‘forward offer’ section of our website so that roasters can reserve as many bags as they’d like, or simply sign-up for samples.
Pre-Arrival contracts reserve coffees that are on their way, but not here yet. Confirmations come once a coffee lands and everyone gets to taste the arrival sample. Pre-arrival contracts are good for those who know they have a need to fill and want to lock-in a set number of bags at a known quality and price for small-to-medium-sized needs.
All in all, our buying season is 12 – 24 weeks for each harvest which is split into two phases: Harvest (pre-shipment offers) and Afloat (forward offers). After that, a coffee is here and published to all as a ‘current offers’, which can be bought spot (one by one) or contracted as well.
Current Offers are landed and available lots. While they are not the point of this article, they are useful for so many reasons. From our point of view, it allows us to promote new suppliers, take bets on coffees we believe in, and showcase our favorite flavors from every harvest. For buyers, this is the best place to shop for last-minute needs, backups, bridges between contracts, short-term features, or other special use – like competitions, R&D, or internal education. Spot coffees are great for sniffing out new suppliers or for when you aren’t sure exactly what you want and want to cup across a variety of available options.
Our hope, however, is that once you find a coffee that speaks to you, you will consider coming back the next year. And if you do, you might as well let us know. Once we know you’re interested, we’ll present ‘pre-shipment’ or ‘pre-arrival’ offers to you depending on when you catch us in the harvest.
Forward contracting will save you money as well. Let’s get completely transparent: Our margin is 35-45c over cost for current offers. This drops to 20-30c for those who buy ahead from our forward offer menu and 10-20c more for those who commit to buying with us based on PSS approval. Timing is the biggest variable in our pricing structure because good planning makes the biggest difference to us and our partners. The only other variance (10c) is lot size–some micro-lots simply take more hands-on time than others. Check out our pricing and contracting FAQs for more information on this topic.
Timing is essential, which is why we’ve created an easy-to-use Harvest Planner tool to keep you informed across all producing countries. It’s the first thing you’ll see scrolling down on our homepage. You can see what is going on and what you can be doing country by country, month by month.
Change months to see what countries are in harvest
The date automatically shows the current month so you can see a list of countries that are harvesting, shipping, and arriving right now. Change the month to peek ahead in the year. Clicking on a country will pop-up a preview of our purchasing strategy there and link you to a list of active producer partners. Click on the (?) next to Harvest, Afloat, or Arrival and you’ll get a list of recommended activities for that phase of import.
HARVEST – It’s time to contact your importers to see what’s crossing their table. You’ll get options by email that include price, cupping notes, and estimated timing. If you like what you see you can commit to any number of bags to grab the reduced price. When samples come available, oftentimes upon export, you can cup for approval.
AFLOAT – It’s time to check out forward offers on our website. If you like what you see, sign-up for samples and/or contact us to reserve as many bags as you need. When the coffee arrives you’ll get a sample to cup for approval.
ARRIVAL – It’s time to request samples. If you like what you taste, order a few bags spot or contact us to reserve as much as you need.
Communication is important. Transactions that require more trust require more communication. Get in touch with your rep or email us to talk about pre-shipment offers.
Also, check out our journal page to read Harvest Updates, Projects, and Initiatives in areas where we work.
Ben Heins in PNG, August 2018
It was this cowboy’s first rodeo in PNG, but Crop to Cup’s fourth year with the AAAK Cooperative. So, I had an idea of what was going on. Trip prep included conversations with the charismatic cooperative head, Brian, as we all worked to encourage the first ever cupping competition between the farmer “clusters.” For review, AAAK comprises Apo, Angra, Angana and Kange Cooperatives (with the addition of Angana, the name recently changed from AAK). These coops span the three coffee producing provinces in Papua New Guinea; Eastern Highlands, Western Highlands and Chimbu/Simbu. Different places, different languages, different cultures with one thing in common. Coffee.
Due to a history of differences, the cooperative’s message has all along been one of unity. Brotherhood in coffee. Which is what makes the idea of a cupping competition so different.
But elders in the coop have reason to try something new. Kids are running off to the cities (Goroka, Port Moresby, Lae, Hagen) in hopes of cosmopolitan careers. Not many find it, and the farms are drained of talented young minds that could have otherwise focused on the business of agriculture. That’s what prompted Brian Kuglame, a farmer from Simbu province himself, to form AAK in 2000, to encourage self-reliance in his and surrounding communities. Eighteen years later, I’m here to survey the results.
I can pay Brian an awkward compliment (my specialty). At the outset he was so energetic, wide-eyed, insistent and passionate that it came off as slightly saccharine. He talks like his mouth just can’t keep up with the enthusiasm of his mind. And all that he had to say was just too hard to believe.
AAAK is now 62 active clusters. Many clusters require flying into a remote air-strips, which is perhaps a godsend if the road from Goroka to Kundiawa is any good representation of the general state of infrastructure (and I think it is). To be sure, he leans on the AAAK management (Apo – Warren, Angra – Jerry, Angana – Kombuk, Kange – Stanley) to help motivate his clusters and organize action and activity. That said, Brian still plays Atlas. He travels 5 days a week, flying many of those days. His moves are graceful, forceful and calculated. To give you an idea of his foresight – I have to talk about Brian’s bag – called a bilum.
A bilum bag. In PNG they sell them in stores and you’ll see them on the roadside as well. A cultural institution to be sure. But Brian, he has his own bilum. This thing is the Amazing Dream colored coat of bilums. White with multicolored tassels, emblazoned with the AAK logo and prominently displaying the name of each constituent coop in its respective color. After a welcome with sing sing outfits and dancing, there was a cascade of greetings from top management all the way down to Taylor, our roaster guests and myself. Then Brian. When his turn comes Brian steps on stage, pulls out the bilum and begins speaking to the audience in the local pidgin. Not understanding a word, I did follow the tone as it started out enthusiasticly, then built into a crescendo of pride approaching reproach, sounding like anger. He holds the bilum up to the crowd, unzips it, and pulls out….
A bilum tied inside the original bilum. Without context, I have to say, this is all very comical. I mean – this bilum is so ornate it was like the Ark of the Covenant…and then, after all the build-up, when what came out was another bilum – I almost spit out my water. But Brian, ever the savvy leader and cunning educator, was using the bilum to make a point.
The inner bilum said, ANGANA. There were 3 more bilums – APO, ANGRA and KANGE. These are the names of the 4 sub-cooperatives, each meaning ‘brother’ in the local language. The outer bilum represents AAAK cooperative, but it was also the mother, showing how all of the sub-cooperatives are actual brothers. The cluster groups, Brian explained, are the children – and the children are what everyone is working for.
The structure is important because Brian is pushing this year to overhaul the pricing transparency system. He calls it a new docketing system. It means farmers are registered and payments to AAAK will be reported out and transparent. (not that there isn’t honest accounting happening, but it’s an old paper receipt system and hard to unravel the dollars in a way that is easy to comprehend).
This merit-based payment, on top of the cupping competition, could be a cause for strain as well as an opportunity for engagement. And so we saw Brian pull out his bilum of many colors at every gathering – reinforcing their connection to AAAK, the strength in solidarity and folly in falling out. Not a rookie move for a man that’s battling poaching from other exporters and apathetic farmers within his group. When you look into the audience while he talks, you see head nods, grunting in approval, smiles – all a part of his gentle massage of compliments, reassurances, appeals for patience and diligence, and at last his challenge. Do this for your kids. We’re all doing this for the next generation.
This is the challenge of smallholder coffee. And this is execution at its best.
Of our visits, our very first was to Kesevaka Base Camp. And it is one worth first mention.
I laugh just thinking about it, because it started with a few uneasy white guys standing on a dirt road. Brian has a loudspeaker on the AAK Landrover – and to let Kesevaka know of our arrival he hits an overhead button in rapid succession. Goose honks blurt out of the truck as we side-eye each other. Seemingly nothing happens next. We get out of the car and see a welcome banner across trees in the distance. We can hear a crowd. Far off. Not talking. With a low hum – like a hive – that is then suddenly punctuated by screams. Shrieks of terror, male and female.
Okay, Kesevaka – you have my attention. Just then, a somebody slaps the inside of my knee and quickly rides a hand up my inner thigh. It was a combustion of emotions; scared, mildly violated and maddeningly confused. I turned around and saw a betel-nut stained grin on a dancing old woman, who, was clearly over the damn moon that the car delivered us to her driveway. (We later learn that the leg shake is like a handshake for special greetings in this region.)
But before Kesevaka, we were taken to the Jucuru Training Center.
The training center broke ground in the last 18 months and is on track to be completed in a few more. Youth engagement is the goal. I touched on the problem earlier. This is the AAAK response. Upon arrival you’ll see hundreds of bee hives (arranged in a hive structure that is designed to look like the tree-shape of the AAAK logo – photo above). You’ll see a fish pond to teach fish farming, a piggery and livestock training area. You’ll see fruit trees and gardens, a demo coffee plot, a newly built tool shed, and a model home. Space has been staked out for the 3,000 sq ft training center building, and a large campsite to host up to a hundred youth at a time.
If you go you’ll see a banner where Brian has put four steps to follow….or rules to live by …. or goals to aim for, depending on how you look at it.
Once complete the Jucuru training center will bus in youth who will camp on the premises. Kids will learn all the skills necessary to have a diversified agricultural business on the home front. Grow your own food, plant 2000 coffee trees for income. AAAK will provide a set of hives and queen bees for any farmer with 2000 trees so that they have additional revenue through honey. Now breeding pairs of pigs and chickens are on the center. As they reproduce livestock will also be given to farmers, so they can start to build wealth through animal husbandry. Maybe I’m just looking through at twenty years of dedication with fresh eyes – but it was overwhelming. A clear vision, a tactical path, a charismatic leader. All the ingredients. And us. I have to tip my hat to my man Jake – Brian credited him with the idea of focusing on youth. Jake – you lit some sort of fire under that man – because he’s on it.
The week proceeds with multiple base camp visits. But the many beautiful welcomes and grandstanding couldn’t overshadow other good news on the coffee front. Quality is up.
The AAAK staff are well trained from CIC (PNG Governmental coffee support org – where Brian in fact worked), and with better prices and consistent purchases from Crop to Cup, have invested in the next steps toward quality, mainly centralized wet mills and drying. Both Kesevaka and Kogai have wet mills in various stages of completion. Brian thinks that taking in more cherry will help the consistency of coffees. I tend to agree – and when I asked Simon of Apo Coop about some construction details, he was on top of it.
Ben: With this new mill you’re going to need a lot more drying capacity
Simon: Yes. We have already begun working on the raised mats for drying
Ben: What are you going to use for the new drying area? Perhaps you look for the shadiest side of the hill.
Simon: Of course. We selected this site for just that reason.
These conversations were par for the course on most processing investigation. Same went for other ag practices. They have AAK nurseries, and are mainly replanting Blue Mountain (Typica) and some Bourbon . No complaints here.
Rust and old trees are bugaboos – but Brian suggests that these are just symptoms of farmer apathy. Easily resolved with a re-invigorated community. Again – I don’t disagree. I also should say – I don’t think I’ve been anywhere else where our presence has meant so much. The pride that the farmers have in hosting visitors, and moreso, knowing that their community’s name gets to the States on a coffee bag – it’s frenetic. Which is to say, from Brian’s point of view, the purpose of our visit was to help invigorate, and we did our best indeed.
Which brings me to our final day in, Waingar. This is the day we reveal the winners of the cupping competition.
It’s no exaggeration, hundreds of people attended. Brian worked all night erecting the stage, decorating the area, preparing gifts (sweet potatoes) for all AAAK members that attended. He also has a couple additional guests, a speaker from the Simbu county Ag Board (who we picked up ad-hoc along the way — remember how strategic I think Brian is?) and a representative from Care International and the savings bank project that will open accounts with Waingar farmers right onsite at the end of the event. Part of Brian’s new docketing system is direct payments into farmers’ bank accounts, with some automatically going to a separate savings. Again, a nod to the thoroughness of the vision and exacting execution and follow-through.
It’s the day of the event, and I’m thinking through what I’m going to say. I consider a redo of a joke that bombed during my opening speech in Kesevaka – I resist. We begin with a beautiful sing-sing welcome where we’re all escorted via locked hands, with fully decorated young women of Waingar, for what seems like a sweaty-palmed awkward eternity for us all, I’m sure.
Personally, I can’t wait. For two reasons. First, I’m genuinely excited. And more importantly, I’ve been promised that Taylor gets to personally hand-off the sow and bull pigs that will be awarded as second prize. And as you see above, the local reporter that traveled with us chose that EXACT photo for print!.
These prize pigs, we saw later, were donated back to AAAK’s training center to begin their first piggery!Literally returning the prize pig to AAAK so they can begin the breeding center
The awards are emotional in PNG. Farmers literally just start howling with pride. The Kopio chairman was carried to the stage. It was real. This wasn’t another coop meeting. This was a celebration, with delegates from the USA. This was a stepping stone back to self-reliance. Brian said, “You see. We told you that they would come, we told you they would buy, they are here. Now you see,”
This was the start of a road that the next generation can walk confidently – expecting that as they invest, as they resist the call of that city life, that their sweat will be rewarded with a dignified life that allows them to surely provide for their families, and slowly improve their economic position.
Today – I write this after a walk on the beach in East New Britain. Tiny town of Kokopo, which is the city center after the volcano in Rabual destroyed the old downtown. As you walk off the hotel beach you get to the local beach, filled with banana boats and their betel nut chewing owners – waiting around to take goods and passengers across to the Duke of York islands a few miles off the coast. At the end of the beach, I run into a few young folks with curious smiles on their faces. University kids – studying education – having a few beers on a Friday. We get to chatting. After they get done explaining that they like Americans because they really can’t understand a lick of English from Aussies or Kiwis, I find out that two of them are from the Western Highlands. They grew up in Mt. Hagen – an hour or so from our awards ceremony in Waingar. They know the AAAK coop. Their families are farmers.
Ben “Everyone says the young folks aren’t staying on the farm, they come to the cities for jobs”
Sam: “Yes, that’s true. But most don’t find any good work”
Ben “Brian says that farmers can make good money if they work hard on the farm, and have many incomes from agriculture. Is that true? Can you make good money if you stay”
Sam: It’s true! The farmers are rich! Really.
Damned if Brian ain’t right. His leadership, vision and work ethic are flooring. If you’ve had anything to do with this coffee – I hope you get goosebumps. This is a real one.
“It felt kind of funny”. My first few days back from my first time in Brazil, this is how I tried to describe my experience. “It was familiar. Yet totally different.”
Food is relatable, so I start by describing the mixture of queues, customary and new, that make Brazilian food a masquerade of the familiar. Beautiful, bountiful breads I later learned are made with manioc or cassava flour instead of wheat [1]. Pizza is popular, thank you, but only to be eaten with a fork and knife if you please. Peppers; you’ll find peppers galore – sweet, though, none of them are spicy. And you’ll walk into a random road-side gas stop to find it seats 200 people and serves up top-notch BBQ. Even the local rum, cachaça, it tastes like rum you know … only with a distinct ‘fresh, green, sugar cane’ flavor [2].
Or take the landscape, contorted cerrado trees cut by straight rows of coffee that ran out over the horizon. It was a complete cross between an African Savannah and Iowa corn-field.
Or listen to the stories – familiar formulas with totally different denominators.
I traveled with urban-educated farmers in their 30s, each of them fresh back to the farm and in a generational struggle to get their parents to take specialty seriously. Each teaming up with agronomists, Q-cuppers and one another to make the most out of whatever leash they’ve been given to surf the third wave. Running experiments, reading articles and developing specialty brands while managing the day-to-day responsibilities (and change of pace) that comes with being back on the family farm.
And I met their parents, Japanese-Brazilian cowboys, and some of the region’s first settlers. Proud to send their children to college, and even more proud that they chose to come back. Stern-faced and straight-laced, they prefer the tried and true ways of how things have been done…but you may still find a Brittany Spears cassette hidden away in their car.
It was a mash-up of vignettes from the America Midwest with scenes from Hollywood’s Grease, imposed over How The West Was Won. It is the story of many family businesses and entrepreneurs that I know, of many Americans in coffee, complete with a road trip outfitted with Brazilian chicharrons and an Alabama Shakes soundtrack.
The effect was disorienting, and by the time I got to the farms I was halfway to dizzy. Coffee, at least, finally something familiar to me.
Except it wasn’t.
I saw farms absolutely thriving without a sliver shade in sight, yet chock-full of life.
I met twenty-foot tall harvesters that treated trees more gently than any but the most careful of hand-pickers.
I watched top quality specialty coffee set out to dry, constantly being turned with amazing loving care and attention. By tractors.
I met farm workers who have more rights than Walmart employees, and farmers with 30+ years of experience managing the world’s most modern coffee farms … while they were tasting their coffees for the very first time.
I saw vegetable coolers being used to experiment with cold fermentation, and living libraries of new varietals, designed in the lab for performance in the cup. I saw coffee grown at a scale I’ve never seen before, and experimentation at the nano-lot level that I never thought possible.
As I said, it all felt kind of funny. Conflicting, unsettling even. I couldn’t put my finger on it until I remembered a design term that described my feeling fully – the uncanny valley.
The uncanny valley refers to renderings of humans which appear “…almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers” (thanks Wikipedia). Somewhere past cute and into creepy – I think of the puppets from Team America.
In the same way everything in Brazil was close to how I expected it to be, but just different enough to be unsettling. That funny feeling I felt was just all kinds of bias leaving my body. Bias which was getting in the way of me seeing specialty in Brazil for what it is and what it is coming to be.
This bias is a gap that stands between Brazil and specialty. So small you can skip it if you know where to step. But with conventions so deep that you can fall right in if you don’t know where to look. It is why older generations in Brazil find it hard to believe that specialty is the real deal. And why U.S. specialty balks at the idea of Brazilian micro-lots.
But I came to see Brazil as a serious source for top-end specialty. There is momentum and mass building behind quality in Brazil, right now, so obvious as to be undeniable. As proof I’ll point to the people I met who are pushing top-end coffees to new heights, using infrastructure and tools unavailable to farmers elsewhere in the world. I am excited to watch a new crop of farmers as they take their farms forward in generational strides, every harvest pushing back the horizon of what’s possible with Brazilian specialty.
So now I describe my trip as one through an uncanny valley. A personal journey to the belief that the future of Brazilian specialty is near, here, even, if only we will get out of the way. And if you have the patience, my good readers, read on and I’ll tell you how I got here.
Our story starts with one woman, Yuki Minami. That’s her pictured between Maya and myself in the photo above. Without her we wouldn’t be in Brazil. But hers was a mission so aligned with ours, and a personality so compatible, that because of her we were inspired to study up on Brazil to see where were could pitch in, and if we could find happy homes for her coffee.
This was 2017/2018, and Yuki’s first export as Aequitas Coffee.
For readers new to this story, Aequitas Coffee is equal parts educator and exporter. It is Yuki’s vehicle for helping fellow producers to become aware of what they have and their options for participating in specialty.
The normal exporter – farmer relationship in Brazil is paternal, patriarchal even. It’s not common for farmers to know where their coffee goes, how it is priced or if it could score well enough to break out of the top-shelf designation of Sc 16+ 2/3 SS FC. And while that’s the premium price a farmer can get, it’s still only top of the heap for commodity coffees, and not at all how specialty is traded. So, for Aequitas to invite us down to host a workshop that gives feedback, talks pricing strategy and discusses trends with producers – well let’s just say that this was a first in many ways.
Yuki’s mission is to empower farmers with knowledge of what they have and how they can compete in this game we call specialty. She plays the game well and her work lives up to her word; Yuki does so much to support her community that even she’d blush if I listed all that I saw here in one place. Her primary communities are those around her farm in São Gotardo, fellow members of her Japanese-Brazilian community in the greater Cerrado Minero region, and women in coffee anywhere.
Her style is more to connect, collaborate, facilitate, educate and lead by example. She’s the type who needs to eat her weight every lunch so that her body can keep up with the energy within. She’s a researcher at heart, I think, because she takes time to get smart but when she moves, but when she it’s towards long-term objectives barely on the horizon. If you can’t tell, I’m a fan.
Still, the last thing a fish will discover is water. And even as Yuki raises the bar in Brazil her work is overshadowed by stereotypes that stand between Brazil and specialty in the minds of her parents, colleagues and customers.
With few exceptions, we still see coffee from Brazil as bulk, mechanized, a commodity. Responsible for supplying nearly half of the world’s coffee, and by far the biggest influencer on price – we have reason to think Brazil and bulk in the same sentence.
I mean, the one time I asked for a sample of a Brazilian 2/3 SS FC I was laughed at – apparently this is like asking to taste a Big Mac before buying it. [3]
And because interactions like of this we assume that farming in Brazil is unsustainable, and incapable of producing specialty. Even as I met people, saw farms and tasted coffees to the contrary, this base assumption somehow held on, impacting what I was looking for and what I saw.
My resume is working with smallholders in places more remote than Minas Gerais. Places where we measure harvests in terms of kilograms cherry per tree, not in liters per hectare as they do here in Brazil.
Sidebar: I smile when I think back on just how difficult it was to show Yuki’s father what a coffee farm in Africa looks like. After stumbling over conversions of trees per hectare and liters to kilograms I resort to showing photos. But even when looking at a photo of a small Ugandan shamba one of the farmers asked ‘so, where’s the coffee’?
“You see”, I said, “before running off to Ethiopia to get those prices remember that they only get 1.5 – 4 KG cherry per tree to your 9 – 12”.
When working with smallholders the best we can do for quality is to encourage healthy trees through good agricultural practices, backed up by selective picking and proper drying. They simply are not able to separate by varietal or experiment with post-harvest processing. In contrast, here in Brazil, coffee is harvested and dried mechanically; efforts to improve quality are in genetics and fermentation techniques.
In the end it all makes a difference – genetics, harvesting, processing and drying. But to-date I had only been trained to the see upstream indicators of quality associated with smallholders[4] and not what was possible when we put our scientists to the task. I found myself looking for what I knew instead of into that which was new. And the more I actually looked the more I liked what I saw.
There’s harmony to be found in the relationship between proud farmers, honest leaders and strong organizations. I appreciate the craft of feeling the soil to judge its health, or in knowing fermentation by the straightness of a stick. I grew up in coffee rubbing parchment to measure moisture or biting on a bean for the same, and still do this while my moisture meter takes its time to tare. I see integrity in varietals that are heirloom and native to the region. And wisdom baked-in to how each family selects for the right shade of red, then navigates the complex web of relationships, business and personality that guides how coffee is processed from there.
But there’s also something to be said for the modern means we have for quantifying, measuring, tracking and influencing the world of variables that impact quality. With enough control, coffee can be closer to a clean science than a messy negotiation between nature, culture and environment.
I love the mess, don’t get me wrong, and I always will. But I wasn’t even really aware that there was another way until I started seeing things from Yuki’s point of view. She has an eye for artistry, absolutely, but she paints with pragmatism.
She has never said as much, but the mission of Aequitas is empowerment through education, so I imagine that to Yuki learning is what is most important. And with learning as priority #1 the rest is easy to breakdown. To learn you need the ability to track. Tracking requires taking measurements over time. For measurements you need consistency and controls. For time you need a plan and some patience, cause there’s just never enough time.
Which is why Yuki, Edson and everyone in this generation seems ravenous in their hunt for knowledge. Yuki’s curiosity is as big as her appetite, and the world a buffet of examples she can learn from. The tastiest of notions make it back to her cupping table via the living laboratory that is her farm, where she has the control to try for consistency, to track and improve over time.
From the way she talks about it, Yuki sees mechanical dryers not as a short-cut, but as additional tool that helps her practice her art which is quality. Through her eyes I can see the daily danger that is dew, and the beauty of watching coffee dry in a straight line. I see the possibility that comes with control.[5]
Where I once saw rows of technified coffee and thought, ‘hmm, no shade, no birds, poor soil, unsustainable’. Yuki sees life in soil that otherwise would be too acidic to support more than sparse savannah. She sees the immense amount of effort her family puts into maintaining the land, and points proudly to the white streaks of calcium that line the road in to town, without which nothing would grow.[6]
Yuki grew up walking along the rivers, lakes and other permanently protected areas of their farm. She played in the forests that make up an additional, mandatory 20% of her family’s land. She’s spent time poking through the coffee trees and knows well the abundance of life they contain.
All the data points kept adding up, but my shift still seemed to click over at once. Emerging from the uncanny valley felt like shrugging off a heavy backpack or that moment when the sun escapes from behind a cloud.
It was the birds that did it.
Sereima and Jacu birds eating berries off the patio. Sparrows, swallows, kestrels and parakeets, owls and toucans. I’m not talented enough of an author to tell you what I mean by this, but if you lend me your imagination I’ll do my best to take you there.
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Driving through Yuki’s coffee farm was like racing through a healthy hedge maze. It had been a long day, my head full with all the all aforementioned information. Whipping past rich green leaves, vibrant red and yellow berries; life bursting from the trees up to the point of pruning up living walls of green stretching 12’ overhead.
With such straight lines, from a distance, it’s easy to forget that it’s still just nature in here.
Until we are in there and an orchestra of chirps trumpet in from the left or right, heralding a flurry of black and blue (and yellow, and red) as tiny birds blast out from the branches and stream into the alley between. They join in the middle of the row, a confetti cannon of chaotic colors leading your way through the hedgerows, staying just in front of your windshield like flying toasters in reverse.
We chase them down row by row until we until we finally come across the harvester, a 20’ tall needle in a 120 hectare haystack. One of her playmates from back in the day, Almir, was driving a harvester.
We hopped on.
This was my first encounter with a harvester and, quite frankly, I’d been anti. I’d assumed them to be incapable of selective picking, and harmful to trees. But by the time I hopped off I wanted my very own.
I looked up and saw not a monstrosity, but a beautiful, modern machine designed to vibrate berries off of branches as gently and efficiently, as possible. I looked back and saw a row of happy trees, slightly disheveled but better off for it. I got exciting hearing Yuki talk about the technology progressing every year. About how you take your quality map into a harvest plan, which informs how you set arm placement, vibration and rotation speed … for example. Needless to say I was impressed, and asked for the specs on her Jacto K3 Millenium[7].
Ears still buzzing, we made our way over to the drying patios where we get out of the car and took a knee to look for pooling after a recent rain. Even with our attention down we could not help but notice the toucan perched up above. This was the final straw, where I made up my mind that I’d had it all wrong.
While there’s no arguing with the Smithsonian standards for Bird-Friendly farms, and that these farms would not qualify.[8] Farms which do not qualify are not inherently unfriendly to birds.
But if you go at dusk you may see two owls, like we did, just waiting for a meal. Or hummingbirds darting in to the irrigation line, looking for a drink. If you have a farm dog you can smile as they bound through the coffee bushes, disappearing for a moment only to produce squawking grouse chased from their perch. If peregrine falcons can take roost in downtown Chicago it should not be a surprise to see Toucans thrive here in Brazil.
The sun sets early here; it’s already getting lower when Yuki suggests we break for coffee. She drives us up to a ridge within the coffee farm that overlooks a newly planted plot, short enough that we can see all the way west. There’s a trailer here, set up as a lounge. A long picnic style table runs down the middle with water, a stove and coffee setup.
This trailer moves around the farm as a break-station for workers. A bit nomadic, but in this case, totally romantic. Looking out over the coffee fields, hearing nothing but the buzz of bees and rustling of leaves, I would have fallen in love with any coffee Yuki wanted to serve in this setting. But it was this juicy yellow bourbon, which we drank to the last drop, making another before heading back to the farmhouse.
We arrived there at 5:01. I remember the time because as we pull up motorcycles are pulling out, and Yuki explains ‘5:00, time to go home’. While land is wealth, and ownership associated with the political right, the left has been in power for long enough that farm workers have more rights in Brazil than they do in America, or on any other farm I’ve seen. The amount of times I heard “there’s a machine for that”, is one reason why – most labor on the farm is mechanically assisted. But it’s also in the relationships. Due to the diversity of crops allowed in the São Gotardo region most farm workers were from the community and there year-around.
São Gotardo grew to 30,000 people in under fifty years, yet receives an additional 20,000-30,000 more seasonal workers each year, in particular for the winter (July) carrot harvest. It is said that these workers are from the Maranhão region of northern brazil, though in truth they can come from anywhere. And
they are just some of the many ‘sem terra’, without land. This is a movement, associated with the political left, that represents the rights of many migratory workers and which encourages squatting as a strategy. It’s a real issue; like the US, Brazil’s history saw waves of immigrants coming in to settle land in large tracts. This leads to a large landed elite, as well as many (former slaves) who were not able to take part in this land grab.
Still, without coffee, today these workers from the north would be ‘sem emprego’, without jobs. Jobs which seem to be very organized and regulated. Not taking a side here, just rounding out a rather complex issue. Because, in fact, some argue that the reason you don’t see many small coffee farms any more is because labor is so well protected that most cannot afford to mechanize, comply and compete.
Regardless, the outcome is that those farmers who are left are competitive, and are just now turning their attention to specialty.
We leave São Gotardo,, and the Minas Cerrado region, to visit another farmer in Santo Antonio do Amparo. The story of Miriam is beautiful, and inspiring. It involves paint horses, funky fermentation, the dawn of Brazil’s organic movement and the mobilization of women in coffee in the support of women in coffee. That is to say that it is a story for another day.
We did not get to share about our visits with Edson or Maycon; partners in Aequitas and heart-warming people. You did not get to learn of Ana and her work at São Luiz Estate. About Renato or Maxwell; sharp, young Q-cuppers on the rise. Or about Camila’s research on the gastronomy of varietals. Suffice it to say that has a deep bench stocked with top talent. We have found great partners, and can only hope to be great partners in return.
Like Aequitas, we want suppliers to know what they have so that that they can compete, thrive and sustain in their commitment to specialty. But as Saturday morning cartoons taught me, ‘knowing is half the battle’. I add ‘only’, because on a long journey, halfway still leaves a long way to go.
Farmers are getting on the specialty train at every stop, but without an open-minded market they won’t have a ticket to ride. The other half of the battle, then, involves changing mindsets about how we in specialty think about Brazilian coffee. Starting with our own.
Towards this end I offer my journey through my own bias as example, and hope that it is useful in yours. But if you find yourself still questioning Brazil’s ability to get down with specialty, ask yourself this. How can coffee from a place with such passion fail to have heart? How can the world’s leader in coffee production, policy and research not have what it takes to execute at the upper end of what’s possible? How can generation of farmers with the heart, mind and hands for specialty – people like Edson Tamekuni (pictured above) – how can you expect them to sit back and not take part in their own future?
With a generation of people like Edson taking the reins US specialty buyers will be lucky to just hold on. Did you know that most of Brazil’s coffee goes to Europe (Germany), and that every auction sees Asia (Australia) taking the top? Did you know that the washed process was invented in Brazil, as were pulp-naturals? Farmers here have always adapted to what customers ask of them. It’s time we got their ear.
Still skeptical? That’s fine. Visit us at SCA 2019 in Boston where we will be making room for a cupping of Brazilian experimental lots. Tasting is believing, so put your skepticism in your pocket until then and come with an open mind and clean palate.
(mural from ‘King of Fork’ café in São Paulo)
[1] Which gives them the best of textures. Firm, chewy on the outside, fluffy in. I came back and made this Pao de Queijo recipe right away and found it quite good (I subbed half the shredded mozzarella for fresh, and used a top notch parm, which I think made a difference).
[2] A flavor that comes from distilling sugar cane juice directly, skipping the step in refinement that makes molasses
[3] 2/3 = the first number states how many defects are allowed; 2/3 is the cleanest commodity designation with maximum of nine secondary and no primary defects (which is close to the C2C standard of 0 primary and no more than 5 secondary)
SS = Strictly Soft; this is confusing, as technically it means lower altitude (less dense) beans, but in practice in means beans which are clean of rioy defect
FC = Fine Cup; a designation of cup quality
[4] Farming for quality as a smallholder: (1) Get to red ripes. (2) Plan for lot separation. (3) Dry slowly. Farmer for quality in Brazil (1) Know your genetics, (2) Quality mapping (lot separation plan), (3) Proper post-harvest processing
[5]Speed: 0.35 to 1.25 miles / hours.
Brake: 8 KG max (heavier brakes slow roll rotation, aka, the forgiveness of the harvester)
More information, and a 3D tour of the machine, available here
[6] SMBC certification requires adherence to the same standards for organic coffees, plus an additional requirement that 40% of the farm have shade cover
[7] We haven’t talked about this yet, but next year I want to see if Yuki would run experiments to see what happens in the cup when we modulate the drying curve over extended periods of time.
[8] Yes, Minas Gerais (translation; general mines) is a mining state, and the next town over has old quarries that bring all the calcium the soil in São Gotardo needs to support the State’s richest diversity of crops.
This is a story of a coffee farmer named Mawazo, two goats and a bicycle. It’s a short story, but a strong example of the work that IWCA is doing across East Africa.
Since 2012, IWCA Burundi coffee growers have a project to select good cherries and sell the green coffee at best prices in order to have a second payment or a bonus. This crop, the bonus was distributed on 16th of December. They marched with a banner of IWCA Burundi to welcome the team which came for the distribution.
In front of the march was a woman, MIBURO Mawazo, on a bicycle. It’s not common to see a woman ride a bike in Burundi! After the distribution, Mawazo came and presented her story:” I was at home when I heard about IWCA Association. I became a member and in March 2013, I received 60,000 BIF ( sixty thousands Burundi Francs ) as a bonus of the coffee I sold to the Karehe washing station. I bought this bicycle and now if my child is ill, I can take him to see the doctor on my bicycle.
“Today, I actually received 140,000 BIF for bonus and two goats from Burundi Friends International. I will continue to work hard and well with IWCA and I hope to get a motorcycle in a nearest future. I am thankful to IWCA for that.”
– Story and photos provided by IWCA Burundi.
Mt. Sinabung is erupting in Sumatra. This volcano has been shooting ash into the air for weeks now, and the government has evacuated an estimated 17,000 people from around the mountain’s base. This volcanic eruption directly impacts the coffee farming community with whom we work in Simalungun in Sumatra. Here at Crop to Cup, we are organizing an appeal for donations- made through the Donate link attached to this post.
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It’s going to be a white Christmas in central Sumatra this year. Not snow, though; ash.
This is because Mt. Sinabung is erupting. This volcano has been shooting ash miles into the air for weeks now – the government has evacuated an estimated 17,000 people from around the mountain’s base and most people are just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
This directly impacts the coffee farming community with whom we work in Simalungun (Sumatra, Indonesia), and we are putting the word out that there are people who could use your help this holiday season. Here at Crop to Cup we are organizing an appeal for donations – made here or through the Donate button at the bottom of this post.
The largest shelter near Simalungun is called Tiga Binanga; it is currently housing 2,500 people. They are organized, and even have a Facebook page you can check in on for updates. You can follow this link to read their initial proposal for support from the government, and read below for a breakdown of the refugees they serve.
Total number of Refugees 2.447
Data per November 30, 2013
These are coffee farmers. I’ve heard that their immediate needs include fresh food – the government has provided rice, noodles and dried fish only. Also diapers for babies and for the elderly, as well as underwear and socks for children and adults. We have established a contact there through whom we can make and track donations; if you are interested in making a donation or getting involved, it would be a great gift to give this Christmas. Any amount helps.
Please click here for their most recent “Situation Report” (SitRep), and contact me with any questions as to how your funds would be put to work : jake@croptocup.com
If you have the bandwidth to make a personal donation, it would be put to good use. If you can forward this to your friends, or like their page on Facebook, this helps too. If you run a business and would like to hear some ideas for a month-long donation drive I am organizing, please email me – these refugees will be here for a while. We plan on making one donation before Christmas, and another by the end of January.
If you would like more than 8 samples, please contact a trader directly.