Fresh From The Roaster….

On April 12th starting at 9am (Est) commenced the 2007 Colombian Cup Of Excellence auction.

We joined forces with a group of other roasters calling ourselves “The Zephyr Alliance”.
David Kastle and Scott Reed from Zephyr Coffee Brokerage in Louisiana acted as a intermediary gather the collective roasters together.

We were bidding on lots #2, 4, 5, 21, 24 & 30 as our choices. Actually Lot #5 was our #1 favorite.

Bidding was going crazy for lot #1 & 2. We all thought the folks bidding were nuts! It was like who could spend the money for bragging rights.

With that being said, the best part is that a large portion of the money will go directly to the farmer. This should help them improve their farm from purchasing better equipment and help toward improving their crops.

Now my personal thoughts on these coffees where that I have had better tasting Colombian coffees than what was at this auction. Maybe this is a sign to me that there may not be too many great tasting Colombians from the first crops this year. Yet I still find it hard to believe that the judging panel rated these coffees this highly. As us roasters commented on our cupping notes, we were getting the same results on our cupping sheets. So we were validating our results verse the judging panel
and this made us very skeptical on the process and how it translates to us roasters. Kinda gave us the “Buyer Beware” feeling.

Another factor to why I think the auction went a bit crazy is that they change the format for the Colombian COE coffees by only offering one time this year verse twice in prior years. I’m sure by doing this was part of the reasoning to help up dollar amount on the bidding.

Due to what we saw was happening from the auction, as a group we set limits to what we really felt the coffee would be worth to us and our customers. So sorry to say that we walked away without winning any of the lots.

We are not discouraged by any means. We know there is still plenty of great coffees out there – even in Colombia. We now look forward to the next upcoming Cup Of Excellence auction featuring Nicaragua coffees on June 6th.

Off The Cuff! & Daily Source Code!

Wow, busy day!

Just got done seeing the episode off “Off the Cuff” where Mary and I acted as a the backdrop and hand clapping support for filming. The episode is on Betty Barista. Hmmm… so who is Betty Barista? Go to this link and watch:

http://www.theindychannel.com/video/11492440/index.html

Also, I got to get an audio comment and mention on Adam Curry’s Daily Souce Code Episode # 575. He had a caller who didn’t like his sample of Folgers Coffee.

Thanks Adam for helping us plug the http://www.independentcoffee.org/ site. I was trying to say that I was giving you credit for inspiring me to create the PodCasts for this site. Guess I got a little tongue tied.