18 Plants.

The Tonx subscriber letter for 1/26/14

[Part of a series of Tonx Propaganda. Each fortnight the Tonx crew ships out a new bean and I’ve had the privilege of writing most of the letters to subscribers we include. These are some of my favorites]

Whenever I visit a coffee farm, I’m always overwhelmed by the scale. It’s like entering a library just to check out one book and getting struck by the uncountable volumes full of words within.

As a small roaster, we often struggle to quantify what our real impact is in this vast landscape. We understand we’re making a positive contribution, and the role we play does matter, but we’re cautious not to overstate our importance.

As coffee drinkers, what does our little chunk of personal consumption mean in the massive coffee cosmos? Does it even register? Is it meaningful?

Let’s do some math. A typical coffee shrub, after several years of care and protection, might produce enough cherry to provide close to a pound of roasted coffee per year. And given that an average coffee drinker will consume about a pound and half of beans each month, we can estimate roughly what a personal coffee grove would look like:

Roughly 18 plants.

Thinking about it from this perspective, wouldn’t you prefer that those 18 plants be grown on good land, managed and cared for by producers possessed of craft and vision? Wouldn’t you prefer those 18 plants to be the sweetest variety of Coffea arabica, grown sustainably, displaying dynamic and delicious flavor? Wouldn’t you prefer to know that great care was taken at every step of the way from those trees to your cup, and that the people working on them were well compensated and acknowledged?

Choosing to drink great coffee isn’t hard — most of the convincing you might need is found in every cup. We’re here to do everything we can to help make sure every cup counts.

– Tony and the rest of your friends at Tonx