Latest
Features
Riley Thomson, head of the Volcafe Way program in Costa Rica, recently interviewed Carol Mata Gutierrez, a coffee producer in Tarrazú, about how coffee farming has changed — and what she hopes more producers will come to understand. In addition to agronomy strategies, a major focus of Volcafe Way is sharing business best practices with producers — a message that resonates with Carol, who has a…
Riley Thomson, head of the Volcafe Way program in Costa Rica, spoke recently with Victor Hugo Sanchez Fonseca, a coffee producer in Perez Zeledon, about how coffee growing has changed and why he joined the Volcafe Way program. Good afternoon, Don Victor Hugo. What is the size of your farm? Good afternoon, the size of the farm is 4.5 hectares. I currently have coffee…
There are some pretty flexible definitions in coffee, and microlots and macrolots (or community lots, as we refer to them) are among the terms that differ, depending on whom you ask. It’s easier to start with microlot. Coffee Shrub has defined it as “a lot produced separately, discretely picked or processed to have special character.” Similarly, The Roasterie blog uses…
Jeremy Moore says he found his taste for coffee following his parents around the coffee shops of Europe. Much later, he and his wife Erika turned their shared love of coffee into a wholesale roasting business and later also cafes. The guiding idea behind both enterprises is that it's not enough to just serve good coffee or do a good…
As coffees from Ethiopia arrive in the store — three washed and three natural — our head of content spoke with Bruck Fikru, general manager of Volcafe’s operation in Addis Ababa (Volcafe is Genuine Origin’s parent company). They discussed both how coffee works in Ethiopia and how — though there isn’t yet a Volcafe Way team in place there, due to the…
“I knew I wanted to be in the hospitality industry, I just wasn’t quite sure how,” says Joy Park, owner of Elabrew Coffee and Lightwave Coffee Roasters in Los Angeles. “As corny as it sounds, I love serving people. If you take a moment to feel what it feels like to make someone’s day. I love it.” Park went through the…
“Profitability is good to chase, but hard to achieve,” Elizabeth Mbau said back in May, on a call from Costa Rica. In April, Mbau joined our team as the Africa coordinator for Volcafe Way, bringing with her experience from Technoserve, where she monitored a coffee initiative in Kenya; the Rainforest Alliance, where she oversaw the impact of a certification program…
“I got in touch with the IWCA chapter here in Guatemala, called Mujeres en Café, and I started talking to Celeste Fumagalli, who was then the president. We started talking, and we arranged a field trip for all the producers to learn about the Volcafe Way.” Maria Renee Morales, assistant manager at Peter Schoenfeld, GO’s sister company in Guatemala, recently…
By Jen Hurd World Coffee Research (WCR) recently hosted a lecture and tasting around its new F1 coffee hybrid varieties at the Buckman Coffee Factory in Portland, Oregon. As someone who’s always loved Punnett squares, I was very excited to learn more about the type of research being conducted and to get a better understanding of what the future holds. WCR…
Emily Smith spent several years as a quality-control manager for a large specialty roaster in Washington State before becoming an independent consultant to smaller roasters, helping them to build greens portfolios, explore purchasing options and make better decisions around pricing and logistics. Perhaps inevitably, she’s now also roasting herself, and with a partner will soon launch a brand under a…
