Brent is part of the Vermont Coffee Department. He cups over 5,000 coffee samples per year and you’d think that would be enough coffee, but he really wears coffee on his sleeve. He just got this coffee tattoo which really demonstrates his passion for coffee!
What’s your passion for coffee?
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Cowboy coffee is essentially coffee prepared outdoors, unfiltered, by fire. You don’t have to wear a cowboy hat to prepare cowboy coffee, but why should anyone pass up the opportunity to wear one anyway? Cowboy coffee shouldn’t be considered the finest, cleanest way to prepare coffee, but whether you are camping, or being a real cowboy, it’s hot, it’s coffee and it’s just fine. Plus you are outside drinking coffee, which means you are not working at your desk like I am right now.
How do you make it? Easy: You put coffee grounds with water, let it boil for a while in the fire, take it out of the fire, try to get the grinds to settle a bit, pour and enjoy.
The photo above from the National Archives is from the 1800s and shows some gentleman enjoying breakfast with a nice cup of coffee, presumable cowboy coffee, though they probably didn’t call it cowboy coffee back then. The description reads: 1849 - William Whiting, a lieutenant in the United States army, states, “Give a frontiersman coffee and tobacco, and he will endure any privation, suffer any hardship, but let him be without these two necessaries of the woods, and he becomes irresolute and murmuring.”
I’ve lead over 15 source trips for our employees to Costa Rica and Mexico since I've started working at Green Mountain Coffee. During our time in Mexico, our employees get to experience the life of coffee producers from coffee picking, traveling, and, of course, eating real, authentic Mexican cuisine – made fresh from recipes that have been around for generations. Picaditas, sopa azteca, enchiladas, enfrijoladas, and more. Everything is delicious. Despite the tough competition, my favorite dish was definitely the freshly made guacamole on with warm corn tortillas. I ate this every day of the trip. When we sat down in a restaurant, we immediately asked for a few orders of guacamole and tortillas to keep all the employees (including me!) happy.
The name for guacamole comes from the Nahuatl language – the language of the Aztecs, āhuacamolli, which literally translates to “avocado sauce.” You can thank the Aztecs for other words you know well and use daily such as tomato, chocolate, and chili.
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It is easy to imagine how nice it is to go to Costa Rica in January especially if you are leaving behind a climate that includes a down jacket and snow shovel. Every year employees get to leave their home climates to go on source trips to warm coffee producing countries, like Costa Rica. And that's what I first got to do in 1996. I was a trainer in what would now be called Continuous Learning and our 'classrooms' were in the old Java U in Waterbury, VT. The building was torn down years ago and very few remember the building, but I'll never forget the day my boss and her boss asked me to follow them into one of the classrooms to tell me I was selected to go on the employee trip to Costa Rica.
Fast forward to 2013 and I have led four trips to Costa Rica (15 in total between there and Mexico) and I never get tired of bringing employees there. One of my favorite groups to visit in Costa Rica is Altura de San Ramon in San Ramon. One reason is Luis Campos (upper left), their General Manager, who I adore and admire. He's been to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. in Vermont many times sporting his leather hat, soft spoken manner, and just plain tallness. As well as a coffee farmer and cattle rancher Luis runs the Association of more than 500 farmers. Another reason it is a favorite group to visit is the other friends we have made over time there, like Manuel Antonio Quiros (bottom), who has also been here before. Manuel is a coffee farmer, but also runs a car repair garage and dabbles in bonsai.
This year instead of going to Luis' house like we usually do, we went to Sergio Hernandez's farm for a short tour and snacks made by his wife Martha. Sergio is a coffee farmer but he also raises day old chicks to sell to chicken farms that raise them for fried chicken and broilers. He proudly pointed out that those little chickens gross him $90,000 per year. When we got to the top of the hill full of coffee trees, he pointed out (again not without a certain amount of pride) the coffee farms that his many sons own. It was at the end of the day, and I can't tell you exquisite the light was; it was the kind of light that has no humidity to it, no bugs to it, just light and fresh air, and warmth (upper right). It’s the kind of view and company that encompasses how the employee source trips make people feel.
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During a layover in Singapore on the way to Sumatra to meet with some of our coffee producers in the region, our team had the chance to dig into some of Singapore’s famous cuisine. Late in the day and a little groggy from the time change, we headed to a restaurant recommended to us to have the best crabs around.
This country loves their seafood. Although one of the most popular dishes in Singapore is the chili crab, the group went for the crab dish with white pepper, with spring onions, and garlic, an original recipe by the owner. I'm a devout vegetarian - I didn't get to eat the crabs - but had to listen to everyone ooh and ahhhing over their own. I had a great meal of mushrooms and noodles! We joined the clean plate club during that meal; rave reviews from a sleep-deprived, time zone shocked coffee buyers!
Have you ever been to Singapore?
We tallied up the number of cuppings we did in Waterbury, Vermont for 2012 and the big number is 7,142 cuppings! That number represents the samples that we cupped in Waterbury alone, with a sample representing a contract for green coffee which is normally in the size of 42,000 pounds. You can see that these cuppings represent a lot of coffee. One sample has six cups put out on the table; multiply that by the number of cuppings and that’s 42,852 cups of coffee. Since every sample should have three people cup each cup, we’re now looking at 128,556 cups cupped, or “spoon dips” for lack of a better phrase.
But now...for our top cuppers! Brent, Coffee Generalist, cupped the most cups this past year clocking in at 5,610, or 33,660 different cups he dipped a spoon into. Getting the “silver” medal was Penny at 5,088 samples and your humble correspondent who won a “bronze” at 4,966. If you see any of us vacuuming the drapes at 11:30 at night, now you’ll know why.
We’re quickly approaching cooking season here in the United States. Between turkey, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie, we thought you'd like to hear about what some of our countries of origin for coffee eat to celebrate together. Let's start with: Guinea Pigs in Peru, also known as cuy.
Jose Espiritu Pintado, President of Frontera de San Ignacio
It’s estimated that 65 million cuy are eaten every year in Peru. High in protein and low in fat, they can be fried, grilled, or roasted. They don’t take up much space. They taste like rabbit and/or chicken and reproduce like the former. They’re so important to the diet of small coffee farmers in remote areas in Peru (which is most of Peru) that we’re funding a food security project to help raise more cuy. In the picture is my first experience with cuy in the town of San Ignacio, Cajamarca, Peru, near the border with Ecuador. We were visiting one of our best suppliers of Fair Trade Organic Peru, Frontera de San Ignacio. Like any good meat, it goes great with potatoes.
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What do you cook to celebrate time with your family and friends?
You might think of Honduras as the country next to Nicaragua in Central America or where the great diving on Roatan Island is. But it is also the 8th largest grower of coffee in the world and grows more coffee than Guatemala.
Honduras is one of our larger suppliers of Fair Trade Organic coffee and we were long overdue for a visit to see some of our suppliers down there. Last week we hosted 6 different coops for 2 days of cupping, meetings, plant tours, some tourism, and plenty of good food.
One of the guests named Jose Danilo Mejia is the president of CARSBIL. His coop is based in the department of Intibuca, and the offices are in “The City of Hope” (Ciudad de la Esperanza). When I picked them up at the hotel, he and I hit it right off as he heard that I raise animals and do a lot of gardening. He was impressed, though he might be less impressed if he saw how non-profit my small farm in Vermont is.
It turns out Jose Danilo is Lenca, a sub category of the Mayan races that populated (and still do) Mesoamerica. It’s amazing how many different indigenous groups there are who grow coffee that ends up in my cup of coffee. He shared a bunch of pictures from his community that I thought were very interesting:
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He said that this school bus is actually run by the community for local transportation, where it’s mostly used by coffee farmers to get around. It was stuck in the mud… And in the second picture you can see why!
Last year they used their Fair Trade social premiums to build 14 kilometers of road to one of their remote communities. Here’s an example of an improved road in the third picture.
This past weekend was the 10th Annual Let’s Talk Coffee, an annual event hosted by our friends at Sustainable Harvest (a coffee importer based in Portland, OR). Every year, Sustainable Harvest brings together its own farmers, exporters, roasters (like us!), banks, non-profits, and other interested people for four days of coffee talk -- presentations, panels, round tables, business meetings, lots of coffee, and field trips to coffee farms. We were excited to finally meet some of the Arhuaco Indians from northern Colombia who are part of ASOANEI, one of our Fair Trade Organic suppliers.
Pictured are (me), Aurora Maria Izquierdo, her son Jorge, and Lindsey Bolger. They were as excited as we were that we were buying their coffee as they didn’t initially know who their buyer was. As a gift, Aurora gave Lindsey and me “assurance” bracelets – two small white cloth wrist bands with a little bead in each one (one white and one black). They were made in their community and blessed by their shaman (for lack of a better word) to make sure that we didn’t forget them nor stop buying coffee from them. Rest assured, I won’t forget: it was the highlight of my visit.
We drink a lot of coffee here as part of our jobs. And even better, we get paid to drink and then evaluate it. Even though a lot of evaluating any beverage you drink for pleasure is subjective, there are still some objective ways to judge coffee for purchase. By the way, I should explain: I'm talking about the Coffee Department in Waterbury, Vermont, where we shop for and buy the millions of pounds of green coffee that we then roast and package and ship all around the United States and Canada.
We can't taste every single pound of coffee we buy (though that would be fun), but we do taste a lot. And when I say taste, I'm really talking about cupping, which is the professional version of tasting. (Want to know more about cupping and slurping, go here: “Why slurp?”).
We buy coffee by the container, which is the big metal box you see on large shipping vessels. Generally speaking, you can put about 42,000 pounds of green coffee in one container. When we evaluate that lot of coffee, the seller sends us a composite sample from that huge pile of green coffee. A few beans from this bag, a few from that bag, a few from that bag over there, until we have one pound of green coffee ready for us to roast and cup.
Before we roast it, however, we measure how wet or dry the coffee is in terms of moisture level. If it comes in too wet, it might not have been properly dried at origin, or maybe it got wet on the boat ride over the ocean. If it's too dry, it might be old coffee. We still cup it, but that's an example of an objective way to evaluate coffee.
We do a visual inspection of each sample as well. It should generally be a uniform color and size, without foreign material, bits of stone, twigs, and beans with insect damage (among other issues.) Even if a sample looks sub optimal, we still cup it, but note the state of the sample. Some coffees look beautiful, but don't taste that great while some coffees don't look so great but taste amazing.
We roast the samples ourselves so that we can control that important stage. And then the real proof is in the cup. We use the Specialty Coffee Assosication of America cupping sheet to tally our scores, average up the scores and then decide if the coffee passed the grade or not. The cupping sheet lets you score based on fragrance/aroma, flavor, acidity, body, aftertaste, balance, uniformity, clean cup, sweetness, and then there are ways to score defects and taints in the coffee as well. If it seems like a lot to keep track of, after the first 1-2,000 samples, it gets easier. Our supply chain uses the same scoring system so that we can all communicate in the same language, in spite of everyone speaking so many different languages.
We like metrics here and so we keep track of a lot of our activities:
So, if you ask how we know if the coffee will taste good, it's because we drink so much of it. We drink the bad stuff so that you won't have to. On top of that, every sample that we cup was also cupped by the importer, by the exporter, and even by the co-op or farm. There are many, many ways for a coffee to shine or receal itseld as an imposter of great coffee.
Next time you have a nice cup of our coffee, don't forget how much work went into making it a nice cup of coffee, and also don't forget all the work that went into making sure it's not a bad cup of coffee.
A Licensed Q grader is the name of someone who has been certified by the Coffee Quality Institute, based in Long Beach, CA. These cuppers must pass a rigorous 3 day exam, made up of 22 sections on coffee related subjects like green coffee grading, roast color identification, coffee cupping, sensory skills and sensory triangulation.
If that sounds confusing, just know this: A Q grader is someone really good at tasting, cupping and evaluating coffee. There are now over 1,000 Licensed Q Graders in the world and 9 of them work for GMCR. (Including me!) One of the consequences of standardizing coffee evaluation has been that the playing field between consuming countries and origin is a lot more level than it has ever been. Farmers and cooperatives are able to better evaluate the quality of their coffee and knowing the value of one’s product is crucial in any marketplace.
Not only have we been busy getting our staff certified as Licensed Q Graders, we have been actively promoting the program in our own supply chain. In particular, we help fund some of the Q Grader classes in a large portion of our Fair Trade Organic supply chain in Peru. We’re already getting better coffee from Peru and that means we’re able to buy more coffee in Peru.
If you’d like to see a short video of the most recent Q Grader Certification class we held here in Waterbury, Vermont, go here: All of the “students” in the video are employees and it was filmed and photographed in our brand new coffee lab.
Congratulations to our newest calibrated cuppers Fred Gillen and Pat Donnelly of the Coffee Department in our Waterbury, Vermont cupping lab! When a new member of the cupping team starts cupping we ensure they are calibrated to the team before their scores are used to approve or reject coffee. The process to be calibrated to the team takes months of practice cupping every day. It also involves talking and learning about the coffees we buy, why we buy them, when we buy them, and how we use them.
After studiously apprentice cupping for months, it became obvious that Fred and Pat were calibrated to the team. At that point Lindsey Bolger invited everyone into the lab for the 'official' ceremony. She put the official shawl on Fred and Pat, bonked each one on the shoulder with her cupping spoon, and declared them "Calibrated." Now their scores will be included with the teams’ for approving or rejecting coffee. Congrats Fred and Pat!
Every year we send employees on what we call “Origin Trips” so they can meet farmers, learn about coffee, and have some fun together. Each year we go to Costa Rica and I have the good fortune to lead that group since the trip began.
This year we visited a new supplier for us called Coopedota based in Tarrazu. A very well-run coop that sells us Fair Trade coffee, they also happen to be the only coffee cooperative in the world that is carbon neutral. They have a famous coffee shop in the front of their mill, and you can bet we got to sample their drinks more than once. Most of their baristas have competed in barista competitions and their skill and knowledge was obvious.
Pictured above is Victor Romera Madrigal, who owns Finca San Pedro, a 4-hectare coffee farm (about 10 acres). He sells Fair Trade coffee and employs pickers from Panama, who happen to be from an indigenous group called the Guaymi.
I asked the Guyami who we met at Victor’s farm to say a few words in their native language called Ngabere. It’s impossible to describe how mystifying it sounded to us. It’s obviously not a Romance based language (European), so we were all flummoxed but thrilled to hear a language so different from English or Spanish. It was beautiful. I've lead many Origin Trips and been to many different countries, but somehow, someway I always manage to find something new and special to share and remember. The world's filled with wonders.
-- First, a story: We just put a large addition on the front of our roasting and packing building in Waterbury, VT. While we have since moved into a larger Coffee Lab with big windows and more space, our old lab had one window, which looked out over the construction site. When it was raining and 30 degrees and guys would be out working on the steel and the concrete, we would be inside cupping coffee all morning.
Talk about gratitude and guilt. We would comment on how grateful we were to be paid to drink coffee for a living, but at the same time, how guilty we were to be warm inside while guys were working hard outside, in the cold, rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, well, you get the picture. Every now and then, you could get one of the worker's attention and we’d wave sheepishly giving them a mild thumbs up in thanks for building our new addition. If anyone needed a cup of coffee, it was our construction team!
Yes, our job is to drink coffee - and what a blessing! In our Lab, some people cup coffee - the evaluation of coffee before purchase using a spoon, lots of slurping, and copious notes. Some people do finished goods tasting: drinking coffee that we already roasted and packaged that is ready for sale, in order to make sure it is tasting the way it's supposed to taste.
In terms of how much coffee people drink, let's use me as an example. Last year I cupped 5,514 samples of coffee, and I wasn’t even the “high-scorer”. Brent cupped over 6,000 samples. Each sample has 6 cups (the size of a small bowl of clam chowder). When you cup, you're only sipping a little from each cup, and usually you spit it back into a cup or container. So that comes to at least 33,084 cups that I tasted.
But that's just with cupping.
Just about every afternoon at around 2 pm for "kaffee klatch", our green coffee planner Kevin brews up a pot of something different for us to enjoy. Since we probably only do it 3 days a week, and I travel a bit for work, and we get nice vacation benefits, let’s say that’s 110 cups per year. I usually drink 2 cups a day on Saturdays and Sundays, so 4 on the weekends, which comes to 208 cups over 52 weekends. So here’s the math: 33,084 + 110 + 208 = 33,402 cups of coffee in one year.
How much do you drink in a year? Tell us.
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It all comes down to what we call terroir.
Like wine, coffee expresses regional characteristics and exhibits the effects of its terroir, or "taste of place." Differences in soil, altitude, rainfall, processing techniques, and even social conditions affect what's in the cup. One of the most important conditions is the areas own traditions and for handling and processing coffee.
Take Sumatran coffee, like our Fair Trade Sumatran Lake Tawar.
Beans from Sumatra have always been highly prized not only because of their full flavor, but also because of their distinct appearance. Sumatran coffee beans, when green, are often asymmetrical in shape and have a deep aquamarine tint.
The drying techniques employed by Sumatran coffee farmers also contribute to the coffee’s distinctiveness. These techniques involve an extended period of the coffee bean’s exposure to the pulp of the berry after the berry has been harvested—a process which is believed to produce deeper tones in the brewed coffee.
Compare that coffee from southeastern Mexico, along the Sierra Mountains, like our Fair Trade Organic Mexican Select.
Coffee farmers process their beans using their own local wet mills. This process results in a balanced acidity in the coffee, for the process of fermentation and drying are quite immediate to each other. While this organically grown coffee is cultivated in an environmentally friendly manner, its flavor is improved as well. Being shade grown, the coffee plants mature slowly, creating sweeter coffee beans.
Since our team gets the chance to go to these places, see the people, we also get to know their traditions, their culture. While you may not be with us on the trip, you do get to experience these places through their coffee. Guess you can say, you can tour the world through your coffee cup.
I was at a lecture years ago with the great Ken Davids, coffee genius, and he said he thought that people sort of over-did the whole idea of pairing coffee with food and they end up feeling locked in and not being creative and spontaneous. That said, he thought that heavy foods went better with heavier coffees (like Dark Magic® or any of the extra bold coffees) and lighter food should go with lighter coffees. That should give you some broad ranges to work in, right? According to Ken, coffee works best with desserts.
That same conference, I attended another lecture by Timothy James Castle, a foodie and writer. He thought that were two best ways to pair: Contrast and resonance. Here are some examples right from my notes:
I drink this coffee at home in the morning, just about every day. The bag is really pretty, the green is so classy looking and yet friendly. More importantly, the coffee is clean, bright, fruity, and sweet without being sugary. It's acidic without banging me over the head with it.
It goes without saying that I like fairness and social justice in my coffee and that I like to support the organic movement every chance I get. I've never been to Ethiopia, so I don't have an exotic or touching origin story to share with you. I have met one of the supplying coffee cooperative's General Manager, named Tadesse. He’s sort of famous in the coffee world, partly because he was in Black Gold: A Film about Coffee Trade. [Every time I see him I have to reintroduce myself and in spite of that, he never seems to remember me. I don't hold that against the coffee.]
Ethiopian coffees are very popular for us cuppers, as well. When we have too many samples to cup in the lab, the joke to Brent, who organizes the cuppings, is something along the lines of "Brent, I'm too busy to cup, but if you put some Ethiopians on the table, I'll drop everything." Or "Brent, it's my birthday, can't we just cup Ethiopians today, please?"
So, make your birthday everyday and have some fine Fair Trade Organic Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee.
We do love Fair Trade. I love Fair Trade. I wish we could sell more of it. Luckily we still sell millions of pounds of Fair Trade Certified™ coffee every year, and if you don’t know what that does for small farmers around the world, you’ve been asleep or in Antarctica.
As much as writing 100% and Fair Trade in the same sentence makes my heart go pitter patter, we’re trying to strike a balance We are committed to increasing our purchases of sustainably produced coffee, but we are also competing with many other companies who are not, so it’s a challenge. But the more people ask for and choose Fair Trade products, the more demand we can build for the certification and the more momentum we can build to help more farms become certified. More certified farms = more certified coffee = more opportunity to for you to have a wide selection of Fair Trade java from us to love.
In the end, remember: choosing Fair Trade coffees support the movement – get your friends and family to do the same.
- From @Bluesky107
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I always feel like this is a complicated question to answer because there are so many variables to how any one person’s system works - and then there’s always some subjectivity involved, too.
Let’s start with the basics: The pH scale measures the acidic or basic properties a substance. The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14. A pH of 7 is neutral. A pH less than 7 is acidic. A pH greater than 7 is basic.
On the pH scale, most coffee is just below neural at 5. Remarkably, orange juice and beer are considered more acidic than coffee.
For people who want that lower acid coffee - and there really is no such thing naturally (save for those gimmicky, chemically-altered coffees targeting a certain niche market), we usually recommend Indonesian coffees, like Fair Trade Organic Sumatran Reserve, and darker roasted coffees. The former tends to be gentler on the stomach due to the drying process, according to fans like you, and the latter are less acidic due to the longer roasting process.
Here are some of my own personal observations about acidity:
- Cheaper, lower-quality coffee will be more acidic and bitter
- Dry process coffees, or "naturals", tend to be less acidic (like some African and Indonesian coffees)
- High grown, washed Arabica beans from Central and South America tend to be brighter and more acidic (in a tangy way, not in the pH sense)
- The lighter the roast, the more acidic it will appear to be (though on the pH scale its not significant)
- Darker roasts are naturally less acidic (but not by much). This runs counter to what people think about dark roasts.
- The longer the coffee sits after brewing, the more acidic it gets (literally). This is a good reason to use a Keurig® brewer or brew with a French Press.
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Coffee is non-nutritive, meaning it has no nutritional value. Being a studious fellow, I looked on our own website and verified that a typical 6-oz. serving of black, drip coffee has 2 calories. Which I may have just burned off typing this last sentence. Our flavored coffees like Fair Trade Island Coconut®? Free of calories and carbs. Brilliant!
Just remember: I'm talking black coffee. If you put sugar or honey in there, they add calories. If you put Organic Valley Half and Half in your coffee like I do, you can see the results when you go to the beach for the first time in July. Time for the 2%.
Of course, coffee does offer a number of trace minerals (Thiamin, Niacin, Folate, Phosphorus, Magnesium, Manganese) and is a good source of Potassium, Pantothenic Acid and Riboflavin. Some even say that you are more likely to be friendly to other people if you have a hot cup of coffee in your hands. (There are a lot of friendly folks around our office – just saying).
There's a good chart on our web site that explains the ins and outs of coffee nutritional information here: http://www.greenmountaincoffee.com/nutrition.aspx
So - the moral of this story? Time for another cup of coffee for me!
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