new coffee is here!
To all our dear supporters & coffee lovers:
So happy to share the good news that after much wait and anticipation, the new crop Ugandan coffee has traversed the Atlantic Ocean, cleared customs, and arrived at our roastery in northern California! AND IT’S DELICIOUS!
The mood when the first of the year’s coffee arrives is kind of like the frenzy around the year’s first Beaujolais. People converge in the tasting room, our head roaster Charles tries to settle everyone down so he can pay attention to the 100 gram sample he’s roasting to perfection, and we all bump into each other waiting for the first cup to brew. It’s inevitably been a long wait, with at least one or two snags in the road, some anxiety, and a good amount of anticipation.
This year’s coffee is the best we’ve had from the Peace Kawomera Cooperative. It’s character (some combination of nutty richness and a strong vanilla and spice note) is enhanced. The light roast is sweet, and almost chocolaty. The dark roast is strong, with a little bit of a smoky punch, and a sweet finish. Hats off to the farmers, who continue to refine their production and quality control mechanism. Quality is the goal of our work, and we’ve put a lot of time in on the ground in Uganda tinkering with fermentation times, drying techniques, sorting, and cupping. See my post from 2006 for more on that story.
We’ve got a little bit more news—the introduction of a re-designed package. We thought we’d wait for the new coffee to introduce it’s new clothes, so here it is:
Director of National Sales and Organizing Holly Moskowitz with a sack of the new coffee, and a package from our first production run.
Yours in Peace (and with some great coffee!)
Ben
July 18th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Hi Ben!!
Hope you are doing well these days!
i was just flipping through my mothers oprah magazine and to my surprise found an article about Mirembe!! I was so excited to see JJ and Arons faces smiling out at me!
Glad to hear everything is going well!
Annie =)
July 21st, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Annie!
So good to hear from you, and thanks for the post. We too were really excited to learn about O magazine’s interest in telling to story of our project—it’s great to know that so many people are going to read about this story of hope! I wish the online version was up so we could post a link to it! (sometime soon, I think)
For anyone wondering, Annie was part of a delegation of almost 20 US college students who visited the cooperative in 2006 as part of a leadership development program for United Students for Fair Trade. For more about USFT and the delegation, please visit:
http://www.usft.org/fairtrade/files/u1/EAfrica_Exec_Summary.pdf
Annie, stay in touch, and thanks for the post!
Yours,
Ben
August 10th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I will post the news about the new crop on our Temple newsletter.
All best,
Judy Neri