Neiva, Colombia – I was practically stumbling out of the plane. It was only a 40-minute long plane ride but I swear (and I don’t believe I am exaggerating when I say) it was one of the biggest teases of my life. You see, that previous night I got into Bogotá around 1:00 a.m. (thanks to delays in Miami). After two hours of sleep, I was up again to catch a 7:00 am plane to Read more…
I have just returned from a trip to Rwanda where we visited our partners and cupped through a wide range of coffees coming out of this season’s harvest. We are excited about the coffees we will have in this year!
We love Rwandan coffee and have been working with many of the same suppliers for the last 5 to 6 years. They have consistently been working on their production, and we have seen the coffees being produced have great consistency in cup quality.
Our fresh crop Costa Ricans have landed in our warehouse in New Jersey. 🙌 Whether you are looking for honeys that pop or a Geisha that stuns, we got you covered. We all know there’s a lot to love about Costa Rica. Whether it’s the lush mountains from a picture or the promise of adventure in a tourism catalog, we already feel close ties to this coffee origin. We may even have been fortunate enough to experience these things first hand.
we have an established office and lab space that has been fully operational throughout this season, this has given us an ability to function on a much broader scale in our efforts to find coffees that are cupping great and show a good range of what can be produced in Ethiopia. It has also facilitated building relationships with new suppliers and stronger relationships with our existing partners.
Kenyan coffees are important to us, and we love both the big classic fruit profiles as well as the subtle, herbal-like Kenyans. It has taken a little more cupping work this year to find the kind of coffees we love Kenya for and we realise they are expensive, we have been extra careful to only buy coffees that at the time we cupped them for purchase were tasting outstanding!
The first El Salvadors from Las Cruces are shipped and on the way. Los Pirineos just ended the harvest and we are currently making our selection. Quality this year looks great. Compared to last year’s cupping, at this stage the coffees seems to be more intense and fruit driven, with a lot of structure and body to it. We spent days in different periods both in the fields and at the cupping table and we have high hopes for both quality and new interesting profiles.
The two daughters, Maria and Arlene, who assist their father in running their farm, are a glimpse of the future generation of coffee producers.
We just started selling coffee from Indonesia, and wanted to take this opportunity to tell you a little bit more about the project. This story has everything, an underdog entrepreneur trying to win over the villagers, fighting climate change, building communities, and of course, delicious coffee for you.
I wanted to write this blog post just to give you all an insight into how we in work with samples. Samples are a big part of the daily routine here in the Lab and our main way of selling coffee to our customers. In average, we roast 3 hours daily, to prepare for cupping or to send out to you guys and gals.
Last year was a pretty productive harvest for Costa Rica. In the history of the country there hadn’t been so much volume like the 2015-2016 harvest. Which was good but at the same time tough for farmers to sell their coffees because of the high offer in the market. Despite the harvest was massive for Costa Rica, the good quality was there and I found great coffees among a small group of 6 farmers, with whom we decided to start to work for many years.
2016 has been an unusually tough year for most coffee farmers in most parts of Colombia because of El Niño – a complex weather pattern resulting from variations in ocean temperatures, that can lead to extreme weather conditions. Because of drought this year harvests have either been delayed, very small, or in some cases even non-existing. A severe lack of rain in many coffee growing regions has affected the quality of the coffee in a negative way, and thus there has been an increase in the number of hollow beans, leaf rust, and broca (coffee berry borer).
This year’s production volumes in Rwanda have returned to a more normal level after last year’s huge harvest. As a whole the production volume appears to be average, though some rule changes in how cherries are delivered has caused some regions to drop in volume more than others. Overall we have less coffee available than last year but the quality of the coffees is generally improved.
We are at the time of year when many roasters are thinking: what’s next? We’re talking about fresh greens, of course. We’ll try to give you an overview of our current and upcoming purchasing so you can plan the next 6 months or more. There are lots of fresh crop goodies on the way from Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Colombia and Brazil. And if all goes well we’ll launch a new origin, Indonesia.
Israel Degfa is a young business man in Ethiopia with a sure and steady focus. He owns thirteen washing stations and a farm, across the South and South West of Ethiopia. In previous years the production at these washing stations has been focused on volume but over the last two or so years Israel has shifted his focus, and is now working on the quality of processing across his washing stations as priority.
We are introducing a selection of coffees for the first time, through a new project were we are working with a single farm. The farm is able to produce lot separation according to different parts of the farm and by varietal, with complete traceability. This is the first opportunity these coffees are being exposed to the market in this way. We have been working with Mohammed Lalo over the four or so months I travelled to and from, as well as around Ethiopia. The anticipation of the final results from our investment and the investment from our new partner has been mounting.
The most fascinating thing with costa Rica is the awareness of lot separation and different processing and preparation methods. You’ll find great representative coffees of everything from fully washed, different levels of honeys as well as super clean naturals. Even if the coffees can be expensive due to cost of production we totally find it worth it.
We both want to maintain transparency in what we do and communicate why we chose any one of the coffees we sell over the many others we cup through. So we have looked at the kind of profiles we work with from Ethiopia, we have associated these flavor profiles to colors that make sense to us and we have created a color wheel of Ethiopian coffee profiles.
Working in coffee in any producing country is like working in a shifting landscape, and for me no landscape shifts quite so much as Ethiopia. Still a magnificent landscape all the same.This 2015/2016 season has been really exciting for us because of developments in our own business which have lent us far greater scope to explore and uncover the coffees of Ethiopia.
I guess many are thinking of Brazil as an origin with huge mechanized farms selling relatively cheap coffees by the container. But this is really not the case.
2015 was as a great year for us at Nordic thanks to all of you that’s supporting us as producers, exporters and clients. We know that many of you have great sales before Christmas and we would like to give you an update on fresh available and incoming coffees, as well as some good offers. Hopefully this will help you plan the purchase for the next months.
We have made a new film! This time from Colombia, showing some of the various farms, environments, production facilities, surroundings, and daily life of the farmers we are working with in Colombia.