In February our head roaster spent three weeks visiting the farms that produce four of our Ethiopian coffees. Here's what she came back with — and why it matters when you brew Wednesday morning.
The road from Addis Ababa to Yirgacheffe is two hundred and seventy kilometers and takes most of a day. The last forty are unpaved. You climb steadily through coffee country — past Sidamo, then Gedeb — and the air thins, cools, and starts to smell of woodsmoke and wet earth. By the time you arrive at Worka Sakaro, the elevation reads 2,050 meters on the truck's dashboard.
This is the third year we've worked with the Worka Sakaro cooperative. The first year we bought one bag. The second year, three. This year, eleven — almost everything they produce at the natural processing station goes to either us or one of two other small American roasters. The relationship has gone, in three seasons, from speculative to dependable. That's how it's supposed to work.
"The price of really good coffee is mostly the price of paying attention. We pay double the Fair Trade minimum because that's what attention costs."
What changed this year, I think, is that the cooperative trusted us enough to show us the parts they don't show everyone. The drying beds, sure, and the wet mill — those are the showpieces, the things every visiting buyer wants to photograph. But this year we sat in on a quality meeting, where seven cuppers worked through twelve samples from different sub-stations and graded them. We watched the women who do the hand-sorting — the most undercompensated job in coffee, almost universally — pull defects out of dried parchment for eight hours.
I am not going to tell you that everything is fine in coffee. It is not. Climate change is hitting hardest at the elevations where the best Arabica grows, and many of the producing countries we depend on are politically unstable in ways that affect the people in the fields more than anyone. The C-market price — the commodity price coffee is benchmarked against — has been below the cost of production for many farms in many years.
What I will tell you is that there are still ways to buy coffee that send most of the money to the people growing it, that pay enough to keep them choosing coffee over the cash crops they'd otherwise switch to, and that produce coffee good enough to make the whole arrangement worth the trouble. That's what we're trying to do. It is harder and more expensive than the alternative. We think you'll taste the difference.
