Tasting notes: Pecan, chocolate
Current coffee for this project: Brazil - Carmo estate
Process: Natural
Varietal: Yellow Bourbon
Altitude: 950-1200 metres
We are so proudly excited for this new project. The idea here is simple - Sustainability for all stakeholders. Thats the idea behind every coffee, but in the current global economy that has become more difficult and the end result is if you want to focus primarily on quality and consistency, then a higher price comes with that. So to try tick all the same boxes we normally do, but offer something more affordable we had to think how we were going to do that. In addition, we wanted to add 50 cent to every kg we sold of this coffee (that will go towards good causes here in Ireland) and still make it more affordable than anything else we sell. Was this even possible? It certainly wasn't the easiest to source. In the end this has required a different approach and a lot of research and coffee tasting.
For our first coffee in this project I think we have done well. We were quite happy with the quality, which to be honest was the hardest thing to get right at these lower price points, but then we were so lucky that the farmer we stumbled across is also one of the OG's of the speciality coffee industry in Brazil. We always felt that Brazil was the best place to start sourcing for this project as Brazil has a lot of advantages many other origins do not. For example, Brazil has wide, flat, high lands which are often around 1300m above sea level good for arabica and speciality coffee. This kind of terrain allows for large machinery to harvest a lot of coffee very quickly which improves economies of scale. Also, coffee from Brazil is often a good crowd pleasing flavour in general. This is combined with a farmer that is one of the original producers of speciality coffee in Brazil.
Another benefit we have regardless of what coffee we manage to source for this project going forward, is that we have an amazing state of the art Sovda colour sorting machine. This will allow us to clean up defects in otherwise lesser quality/consistent coffees that would not be possible to this standard without that machine.
So in summary, we were able to source the coffee affordably, pay fairly, used our good friend, Keith in Green coffee imports, who is based in Dublin, who used to live in Brazil, to source the coffee directly from the farmer/co-op. The coffee was imported straight into Dublin port and so transport was also more affordable and environmentally friendly. This has all resulted in several small cost savings that are not always possible while maintaining the quality of the product. So the end result is you get a good coffee, the farmer, importer and roaster and now you, the wholesale buyer all get a good deal and we get to help the local community while we are at it. A win win win all round.
