This past few days, we attended the “Event,” which is the Specialty Coffee of America Associations big trade show of the year. Thousands of coffee growers, importers, roasters & of course baristas and coffee aficionados joined together for a few days of great coffee, seminars, classes & coffee tastings. As they say, “Great coffee doesn’t just happen.”
Continue reading It’s Not Just for Breakfast Anymore, SCAA 2015 Specialty Coffee Event
Recent studies have shown many benefits to drinking coffee including lower rates of diabetes & heart disease. Some experts even say that coffee can help protect against Alzheimer’s & Parkinson’s disease. Good news to those of us who imbibe on a daily basis.
Drink more coffee, it’s good for you!
Continue reading Packed with health benefits, coffee gains ground with experts
Angela Patterson – Beale Street Brews
Our Real People, Really Good Coffee this week spotlights Angela Patterson owner of Beale Street Brews in Kingman, Arizona. Angela has been a pivotal player in the revitalization of the downtown area. Along with her hip & friendly coffee shop, the Beale Street Gallery of Fine Arts has allowed many local artists to display their work. She also supports our direct market Curibamba coffee. Stop on by & say Hi!
Continue reading Real People, Really Good Coffee – Angela Patterson – Beale Street Brews
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Follow the ongoing “Real People, Really Good Coffee” story, additional links for your reading pleasure, and sometimes we even throw in free coffee bonuses. Unsubscribe at any time. Join us in supporting direct market coffee trade & even “meet” the growers of fine Curibamba coffee. It’s fun, it’s easy & you get to take part in making the world a better place.
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For the home coffee roaster, the Behmor is a marvelous device that keeps getting better. Behmor now allows for saving roast profiles & real time monitoring. We covered the Behmor roaster in a previous post: The Joy of Home Coffee Roasting (With a Behmor)
Continue reading Behmor Unveiling ‘Connected’ Roaster and Brewer Models
Another month has flown by, and here we are in March already. We did however manage to get all of the materials for the solar coffee drying tents lined up, and they all have a waiting space in San Ramon for installation in May.
Meanwhile, we’re focused on the move. Just to bring you up to speed, our place in Lima is going to be needed by the owners, so we’ve decided to relocate home base in Peru to the cloud forest region of San Martin province and the tropical city of Tarapoto. Everything is lined up, we’re just waiting until the last possible moment to do the final wrap. It quite literally is a wrap, as we’ll be covering up everything that’s not in a box (and those too) in shrink wrap. Everything goes tomorrow!
We had wanted to go to Chanchamayo this trip personally, but there were many washed out roads & even impassable river crossings, so we just decided to focus on the growing season ahead (see Massive Flooding in the Peruvian Rainforest, and Torrential Rains & Mudslides Continue to Plague Peru.)
Continue reading Real People, Really Good Coffee Update March 2015
Back in the US
You may have noticed that it’s been a bit quieter on the site lately. We arrived back in the US late on January 11th, and have been running ever since.
Our coffee had been awaiting our arrival in the warehouse for East Bay Logistics in Rancho Dominguez, California just a few miles east of the Port of Long Beach. After searching for a reasonable LTL (less than truckload) carrier to bring our coffee to us, we ended up going to pick it up ourselves. The lower gas prices certainly helped this time. We were particularly blessed on this trip, as about 10 miles out of Needles. California, going down the steep hill into the Colorado River valley, we lost about a third of the tread on one of the trailer tires. It started to vibrate & we limped it into Needles and to a tire shop. We were surprised to see how bad it was & were grateful for the miracle of the day.
Continue reading Real People, Really Good Coffee (Update January 2015)
This blog post is a shameless promotion of our first import from Peru – Curibamba Specialty Coffee. It does however recap our adventures as we journeyed to the central rainforest of Peru & gives one a glimpse into the journey that your delicious coffee makes to arrive in your cup. Enjoy! (Reposted)
Continue reading Curibamba Coffee (It’s special to be a good coffee bean)
We just returned from Peru & that always means lots of mail, email, and work related stuff that had gone “on hold” for the holidays. All while trying to overcome jet lag & a time difference. Although we always stay busy & productive when we travel via the internet, there’s a whole lot more that pops up once one is at the home desk again.
Long before any work can begin there are the myriad things to check around the ranch. This time we had a couple of frozen pipes in the garden area, but otherwise everything seemed to have survived our absence fairly well. Solar system, check. Batteries, float voltage good (charged.) Water pressure, check. Water tank, low (our main storage.)
Now, returning to the house I realize that we have no fresh roasted coffee. This is of course completely unacceptable. However, since I import coffee & have volumes of green coffee beans, we just have to roast some…Enter the Behmor…
Continue reading The Joy of Home Coffee Roasting (With a Behmor)
Christmas 2014
Ahhh, 2014 is quickly coming to an end, and once again I wonder what happened to the year. It went by so fast.
Between watching world & financial events with open eyes & shuttling back and forth to Peru, I managed to accomplish a personal first, successfully importing over 3,600 pounds of specialty grade Peruvian coffee from the Chanchamayo region.
Now that really isn’t that much in the coffee world where the goal is to fill containers for shipping, each weighing 42,000 pounds, but for me it was quite an accomplishment to wade through the maze of customs regulations, not only in the US, but in Peru as well. It took quite a bit of time, and the jury is still out on how profitable it will be (if at all.)
It’s a little (actually a lot) of fear to overcome before moving ahead into the unknown. For years I had been thinking that it would be an interesting business, that is providing high quality imported stuff to what I imagined to be eager buyers in the US. The problem was always that the sense of being generally clueless kept me at bay. I always thought about doing my taxes when I thought of Customs. Up there with getting a root canal.
Continue reading Holiday Reads: Some Great Links, Year in Review
