Average price for (seriously) the best coffee in Long Beach that has been meticulously sourced and roasted, showing up ridiculously fresh to your door: $13.50

Average amount of 6-8 oz cups from a 12oz bag: 20

Average cost, per cup of said best coffee in Long Beach: 67.5 cents…

67.5 cents gets you amazing. How’s that for emotionally appealing?

Want to know why? Well then read the diatribe below:

So if you’ve perused our Coffee Queue section you may notice the part about us referencing Aloe Blacc’s “I Need a Dollar…” song on youtube. He’s a favorite around here to listen to when we’re feeling the economic woes of our time. Most of this has to do when we’re running the numbers for how much a merchant account, payment gateway, and subscription service cost per transaction. You feel like you’re paying the mob sometimes. You wonder if someone is going to break your thumbs if you don’t pay up.

This time, however, it’s the commodities market. Without going into too much detail- in an economic downturn, people throw their money into things they know humans will always want- wheat, gold, oil, etc. Well it turns out that humans will always want coffee and therefore the speculation on future pricing goes crazy. That coupled with the fact that supply and demand are finally meeting worldwide for coffee (with demand set to exceed supply), and you’ve got an incredible hike in the price for coffee as a commodity. Now, mind you, this is for commodity coffee- this is the folger’s can of coffee or the Yuban sitting on the bottom shelf- this isn’t your amazing, boutique, specialty-grade coffee that is technically, at minimum, two-grades above commodity coffee.

So where does that leave us? Well, we have to charge according to the whims of the market price for delicious coffee. But, a way we can mitigate that cost is through our labor and that means free delivery!! Seriously- we want to get you this stuff because it’s great and it’s worth it. So order up, drink up, and enjoy…
~Andrew

In keeping with our posting on certifications and fair-trade, I had the great fortune to participate in a Rainforest Alliance cupping last week. The event was coordinated by a gal named Maya Albanese, along with Andrea Valenzuela, Shawn Hamilton, Rocky Rhodes, Ted Vautrinot and a bunch of other super gifted and talented people.

Rainforest Alliance “works to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practices, business practices and consumer behavior”(company website).

The cupping was a coordinated quality evaluative event where industry leaders from all corners of coffee came to cup, score, and discuss Rainforest Alliance certified coffees. The scores will come out in January but in practical terms what this means is that we sampled over 45 different coffees from all over the world and rated them based upon the SCAA’s cupping protocol. For those new to the term cupping, at it’s most basic form it is a highly standardized, somewhat ritualistic way of evaluating coffee based upon different categories. In many ways it’s like wine where you have a hundred-point scale and mark the coffee down from there. Anything above an 80 is considered “Specialty Grade.” Also like wine, however, is that the closer you are to a 90 score, the more people take notice of you and your coffee which, in turn, allows the farmer/co-op to sell their coffee for more money. The cool thing about Rainforest Alliance is that they make sure that this is done in a sustainable way with a heavy emphasis on environmental and social impact.

Another cool thing about this whole endeavor? I got to roast about half of the samples that we evaluated! It was such an honor (and admittedly a little agonizing) to roast for this kind of event where industry leaders are all scoring different coffees that I had personally roasted. The job of “revealing” the coffee instead of covering it with either darkness or poor roasting took on great importance; especially when you think that different farmers are entrusting you with the task that, if done poorly, can seriously hurt their chances of getting a good return on their coffee crop.

So what was it like? It was awesome!! Other than getting used to spitting out my coffee into a spittoon and being able to concentrate amidst the Slurping, I learned so much! The people were great and I felt my cupping skills grow exponentially.

Doing the thing…

Lots of spitting…

Discussing the scores…

The Kean roaster crew (The Mighty Shawn Anderson excepted)

From left to right, Jerry Folwell (no really), Ted Vautrinot (my sensei in the roasting world and beyond), and myself.

Many thanks to everyone involved including Martin and Karen Diedrich who have allowed me such wonderful opportunities!

After a recent email exchange with one of our customers about how Fair Trade affects our buying decisions here at RPR, I thought it might be good to do a posting on the subject of Fair Trade.

Warning- I’m doing my best to synthesize a subject that is fairly complex and has no shortage of very polarizing opinions… (a.k.a. please don’t hate me for painting with very broad brush strokes)

Fair Trade as a company (at least in the U.S.) has largely been the work of a man named Paul Rice. Mr. Rice founded a successful co-op organization in Nicaragua and in 1998 founded the national headquarters for Fair Trade USA (then called TransFair USA).

Fair Trade USA’s mission?
“Fair Trade USA enables sustainable development and community empowerment by cultivating a more equitable global trade model that benefits farmers, workers, consumers, industry and the earth. We achieve our mission by certifying and promoting Fair Trade products.”

Sounds awesome. And in many ways it is. Mr. Rice and Fair Trade USA have spearheaded all kinds of social, environmental, and economic good in the communities that they work in.

That said, there is some doubts by some in the industry that Fair Trade is achieving all of these goals.

Also, Fair-Trade certifies co-ops, not individual farms or farmers. This is intentional on Fair Trade’s part as they see the co-op as the mechanism of change for alleviating poverty. While commendable, this means that in the event that the co-op is corrupt, bogged down in bureaucracy, or just not managed well, the premium that the consumer and retailer pay for “Fair Trade” coffee does little to empower the community.

Fair-Trade has a “price-floor” upon which coffees that are Fair Trade certified won’t go under, guaranteeing a living-wage to the co-op. This “price-floor” will also rise with the markets so that Fair-Trade minimums will always be slightly above the market commodity price. While this is great- it does not give incentive for quality. Commodity coffee is just that, a commodity- traded like gold, silver, wheat, and barrels of oil on a commodities exchange. Contrast that with specialty coffee and you have the difference between a store-bought tomato, and a home-grown heirloom cherokee purple. You’re going to pay more for that heirloom tomato, but you are getting what you paid for in terms of taste.

For us at RPR, Fair Trade is icing on the cake. It’s great when it’s there, but it is never a substitute for a more active and engaged buying program. We only buy from brokers who have a direct link between them and the farmer(s) they are buying from. We pay anywhere from 50%-200% more than Fair Trade minimums and because of that direct link, we know exactly where the money is going. This is on top of the brokerages themselves investing their own time and money into the infrastructure and quality of the community.

The substance of our sourcing, is in the cup. And that amazing quality is never at the expense of social good.

So apparently Peugeot has put together a “people-mover” concept car that, among other things, has an integrated coffee maker built into the back seat. Now, aside from money, the money, and the ridiculous amount of money this would probably cost- how awesome would it be to sip on your freshly pulled shot of espresso while reading your financial times newspaper, all the while gazing serenely at your perfectly manicured J. Crew baby- on the way to said baby’s yoga-charter-school?

You laugh because it’s true…

Is it hot in here, or is it just the steam from my integrated coffee maker??

My friends,
This is a little last minute, but we’re going to be taking a little R&R this coming week. We’ll be out the roastery from Tuesday, August 2nd till Tuesday, August 9th. That’s right, a whole week. We know, it’s going to be rough, but if you get your order in before 8am on August 1st, we’ll do a special delivery the same day. Any orders received after that time will be painstakingly roasted to perfection on said 9th. We hold you in our hearts…

One day I’ll be this good.

Stay classy Long Beach…

~AP

1. The decaffeination process itself

and

2. If you have an amazing coffee, most won’t't send it off to be decaffeinated.

There are several ways to decaffeinate coffee. The top two that I’ve seen in the industry are water-process (sometimes called Swiss Water Process but the term is trademarked and others follow the same principal) and methylene chloride.

The water-process style of decaffeination basically follows this principal: You take a ton of green, unroasted coffee and divide it into batches. You take the first batch and soak it in a lot of hot water for a long time to extract all of the water-soluble flavor compounds and all the caffeine. You toss those beans but keep the water. You filter out the caffeine but not the flavor compounds. You then soak the next few batches of beans in the now flavor rich but caffeine-free water. The idea is that the green coffee will give up all it’s caffeine, but not it’s flavor compounds because osmosis-ly it’s full of flavor but there’s room for caffeine (think of a club in L.A. that’s “full” until the beautiful people arrive).

The methylene chloride version is a little simpler. You steam the beans, rinse them with methylene chloride for a while to remove the caffeine, then steam them again to remove the methylene chloride.

Both processes have their own pros and cons but the main point here is that you are definitely doing something to the beans and that something is going to dramatically alter the beans’ original flavor profile.

The second problem decaf drinkers face is that if importers/brokers/roasters find an excellent coffee somewhere in the world, they don’t want to send it off to get all decaf-ified. To them, it would be like freeze-drying fillet mignon for beef-a-roni. While some people live in that kind of opulence, most do not.

But wait, there is good news my loyal decaf drinkers! While nobody is going to send off their private auction-lot Esmeralda there is a lot of really, really good decaf coffee out there. You just have to find someone who is dedicated to quality, no matter if it’s for regular or decaf. You know, someone who doesn’t like to toot their own horn, but they are pretty awesome at roasting coffee, someplace local, the kind of guys you want to invite over for a barbecue and a beer, a roaster who’s name rhymes with Nose Mark Hosters… you know, someone like that…

Toot toot,

~Andrew

Long Beach, CA

P.S. Here’s Swiss Waters’ big-wordy but still kind of cool explanation of their decafeination process…

And here’s some science  from seven years ago that may or may not be relevant to the specialty coffee industry…