“You sell coffee.” Yes, Captain Obvious. But there’s more to it than that..

Le Coffee Guy
Aug 9, 2017 · 5 min read

For those interested in coffee as more than a mere commodity, achieving consistent taste as required by coffee chains is the bête-noire. Celebrating coffee’s nuances is what our company is all about.

Coffee has over 800 aromatic components, and it’s a challenge for even the most trained experts to decipher a particular coffee. Like wine, a coffee gets its unique characteristics and taste from its terroir, its soil, micro-climat, altitude, a specific harvest, process (natural or washed), roasting, brewing method, etc. So many elements come into play.

At Le Coffee Guy, we know that a lot of work and hands come into action to give each coffee unique. We combine our senses with art and science to convey the fruit of each farmer’s labor.

How Le Coffee Guy Buys His Coffees.

Le Coffee Guy wants to play a role in challenging and rethinking the model where quantity comes before quality. We strive to work with likeminded partners (from producers to cooperatives to exporters & importers) that pursue a transparent and equitable model of coffee trade: transparent pricing structure, transport that is as direct and efficient as possible, open communication amongst all partners.

The idea is simple: to connect the end-consumer as directly as possible to the farmers. In the coffee trade this means cutting out unnecessary many middlemen who claim more of the profits, setting up transportation as direct and efficient as possible, setting up a cutting edge roasting, packaging and shipping process that allows us to offer eco-friendly, great quality coffees made by proud farmers that are rewarded (and recognized) for their hard work to our customers at a great price.

Why go through all the extra effort, wasn’t the conventional model just as good?

One of the key points in Le Coffee Guy’s business model, which mainstream coffee roasters don’t, is the link that Le Coffee Guy creates between the coffee producer and the person enjoying the coffee at the end of the chain.

Most coffee producers are never credited for the effort they put into producing. Their coffee has been mixed at origin or it has landed in the importing country and the roaster has slapped their name across it and labelled it as their brand’s Colombian or Brazilian coffee. It’s important to be able to trace your coffee all the way back, just as you would with milk or beef, not just to the country or region but to its exact farm and producer. Traceability is essential for quality and ethics.

That’s why with every coffee you receive your coffee card and it credits the person that has spent all year growing that coffee. The person who has found a specific patch of land they thought was special and chosen the specific intricacies of growing and processing the coffee. All these things a producer chooses to do impacts the flavor profile of the coffee and makes it unique.

Why is this model so important?

When it comes to the traditional commodity coffee supply chain, the system is broken. The cost of producing coffee for farmers is often more than they get paid, meaning they make a loss on most of their harvests. The problem resides in that they own the farms, so they’re trapped in an industry that leaves them financially vulnerable. A lot are struggling with fluctuating commodity prices and difficult weather conditions due to climate change, so we’re glad to be making a stand against the status quo.

A lot of fancy words. Maybe it’s easier with an example. Let’s look at one of the major producing countries: Colombia. Colombian coffee is grown by over 750 000 small coffee farmers and their family. On our trip to Colombia late 2015, we got the chance to visit several coffee farms in different regions.

Farmers peeled the fruit, known simply as “cherry,” in a wet mill with a hand crank. A few of them let the pale seeds sit for 24 hours, fermenting in the cool mountain air, while most just left them overnight, rising early to rinse them in natural spring water.

Some of the farmers dried them on cement patios while others used raised bamboo and plastic mesh beds. They raked the coffee into rows and covered them up when it rained. They stored the dried seeds in sisal bags and transported them into town on the backs of mules or on top of colorful municipal buses.

At the town’s cooperative, a man in charge poked a little hole in each sack and shook out a bit of the seeds, which he called “pergamino” (or parchment coffee). He hulled the parchment coffee in a little sample mill and carried the green beans that came out into a glass booth, where he sorted out the ones with physical defects. He let the farmer know how much the cooperative could afford to pay him or her based on Colombia’s internal price of coffee — which we later learned was directly tied to the previous day’s Arabica prices in dockside warehouses in Europe and the United States. At last, a few employees of the cooperative grabbed the sacks and emptied them out into a growing pile of parchment coffee from other farms in the vicinity.

From the cooperative in that little mountain town, the pile of coffee would be trucked off to a dry mill somewhere on the way to port, where it would be mixed in with more coffees from other regions. At port, it would sit on pallets before being loaded into a container and raised over the railing of a ship. The ship would travel thousands of miles to a distant port, where the coffee would be offloaded into an importer’s warehouse and eventually delivered to a roaster.

As you can see from this example, it’s impossible to tell which coffee belongs to which farmer. No one had tasted them before dumping them into the pile. We want to halt the supply chain back at the moment where the coffee lost its identity — it’s connection to that farmer who harvested it.

Of course, this is not something we can do alone, let alone do in a very short time. So to the best of our ability, we only buy green coffee from likeminded importers where we can precisely pinpoint where the beans are from and who put so much care into growning them.

Why should it matter to you (as a consumer)?

Simply? Better coffee. Plus the feel-good bonus of knowing your money is doing something worthwhile. But also, by helping the farmers we work with and building good relationships with them, it means your favorite coffees will return to our Coffee Menu with each harvest.

Le Coffee Guy

Written by

Transforming coffee from fast-food-type drinking to something better for the people in France. See what is http://www.lecoffeeguy.com

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