But what makes a good espresso blend? That’s not an easy question to answer. Not just because there are literally hundreds if not thousands of equally good blends that can be created, but because when you’re running a shop there are more parts to the question than what coffees taste good together. A better way to phrase the question might be, “what makes a good espresso blend that I can consistently sell?”

The Flavor Factor

All other factors put aside, if your espresso simply doesn’t taste good, then nothing else matters. Selecting beans that work well together can be a fun but also frustrating challenge–some coffees that taste great on their own don’t play well in espresso, and coffees you might overlook as a single-origin offering might really shine when joined to the right blend. Beyond that, there are a thousand tiny things that can radically change a potential espresso’s cup profile: roast level of the individual coffees, dosing amount in the portafilter, water temperature, and so on.

This is the hard work. It takes time, and the ability to roast each coffee to a given roast profile consistently, and a proper palette, and just the raw patience for continuous trial and error. But it’s also the most fun part, experimenting with and really getting to the essence of individual coffees.

Yeah, But Can I Get It?

Creating an espresso blend isn’t just about flavor, though. For any given blend you like the flavor of, you’ve got to find out if you can get it consistently at the volume you’ll need for your store at a price that you can afford. Many coffees–especially the best coffees–simply aren’t available all year, and may have a lot of competition for the lots. You might create an espresso that features a really distinct estate coffee that make for an amazing shot of espresso, but if that estate’s farm only produces 100 bags a year and you have a busy shop, you won’t be able to offer that espresso once the lot runs out. One thing some roasters do to address this is deliberately build a flavor profile around five or six coffees in a balanced percentage, to ensure that they’ll never need so much of any one coffee to risk running out of inventory; that is, they can offer it consistently because they don’t need as much of any coffee, so it’s more likely to be available.

Price is also a critical factor. One of my favorite espresso blends that I ever created was a blend that used a rare-ish Nicaraguan Cup of Excellence coffee as a base and featured a heavy percentage of Kaapi Royale, a high-grown Indian Robusta. The shots were amazing, but it costs me over $8/lb to make, meaning I’d have to raise all my retail drink prices by $1.50 to sell it without losing money. And daily customers aren’t going to pay $3.99 for an Americano, no matter how good it is (nor should they).

The Certification Issue

Things get even more complicated if you plan on offering an espresso that’s 100% organic or Fair Trade. Your available choices are more limited, with some regions of the world cut out entirely (such as most African coffees), and what’s available is not only going to be more expensive, but–to be blunt–may not be the best-tasting coffee from a given region. It can be a gamble, but it’s also a proven sales booster to offer an espresso with certifications, so the roaster has to weigh the pros and cons.

Choosing Which End to Start From

Many roasters create an espresso blend by starting from the logistical end: they look at the coffees that are available all year round within a certain price range, and then start blending from there. Others start from blending whatever they can find to create the best flavor, and then working backwards to find what coffees they can realistically source to fit that flavor profile. I admit I do the latter, which isn’t always the most reasonable way, because it can frequently mean finding a great blend but having to start all the way over if one of the coffees is too expensive or too rare and there’s no adequate substitution. But my primary concern is always sourcing the best-tasting coffee I can possibly find, and then figuring out later how to get it and keep it. Price, certifications, etc., all come later.

But whichever end you start from, the result should be the same: the best-tasting espresso you can get year-round at a price that’s reasonable.

The UK paper The Guardian ran a story today about a “50 GBP cup of espresso” (about $80), served at the Peter Jones cafe in London’s Sloane Square shopping area. Why the expense? Because the espresso blend, dubbed “Cafe Raro”, is made up of two of the most expensive coffees in the world: Jamaican Blue Mountain, and the infamous Kopi Luwak, or “weasel poop” coffee.

It seems like every few years Luwak coffee makes waves in the news as it finds a new market of adventurous consumers fascinated by the novelty. The truth is that it is a good coffee that is difficult and expensive to produce, but it largely seems to sail on a reputation of lurid gimmickry. Normally I’d be tempted to accuse the Peter Jones store of the same, but the Cafe Raro offering comes under a white banner: the proceeds from selling shots of the coffee go to benefit the UK’s MacMillan Cancer Support.

So while I don’t think the store is out to cash in on a foodie craze, I will say this: I doubt it’s a good espresso. Jamaican Blue and Luwak both have extremely soft bodies that would yield a weak mouthfeel in a shot, and both have subtle notes that I can’t help but think would get in each others’ way. The roaster in me considers it a crime to dilute by blending any truly distinctive single-origin coffee, even if it’s with another expensive single-origin. Having never tasted it, it’s all academic, but that’s my educated guess.

So we moved roasting operations to a room in the back, into the conference room we used to rent out. Customers would still frequently wander back to the roasting room and ask what we were doing. Invariably they would ask if I was “grinding beans” in the roasting machine. I’m not sure why grinding is always the first conclusion people jump to–I don’t know of any food production industry that requires a 1350lb, burning cast-iron monstrosity to grind anything–but there you are.

The pros of roasting for an audience are pretty clear…you become an ambassador for your coffee knowledge, you help educate customers about the finer points of specialty coffee and the time and effort it takes to produce, and you build a reputation as a coffee pro. The disadvantages are a little less obvious, but they’re definitely worth considering. Frequently stopping to answer questions can take your attention away from the beans, and I’d be lying if I said that it never happened that I burned a batch because I was explaining to a customer all the ways a roaster prevents burning a batch. Also, the more busy the wholesale side of things gets, the more pressed for time you are on a daily basis. I did occasionally have to politely ask interested customers to come back another time as I was busily packaging hundreds of pounds of coffee for a wholesale shipment.

Now I’m in a somewhat ideal situation: my roasting room and cupping lab is in the basement of our retail space. On busy days where focus is important, I can kind of shut myself in and work uninterrupted. But we also have a street-facing garage door that we can open, so there’s plenty of opportunity to hold roasting demonstrations and cupping sessions. In short, I can be as public as I like, which is great. I like roasting for an audience, but I also tend to get “zoned into the beans” and once I get into that flow I like being able to run with it.

Analysts aren’t exactly lining up for a death pool, but there are legitimate concerns about Starbucks’ inability to deliver the experience its brochures promise. Baristas are little more than tollbooth operators now thanks to automatic machines, and even many of its proponents admit that Starbucks has lost what mystique it had, feeling more like a McDonald’s than a coffee house.

In short, the people high up in the chain (as opposed to the customers) are finally wending their way around to the obvious: aggressive expansion for its own sake isn’t a sustainable business model, especially when you’re dealing with a volatile commodity like coffee. So what should your model be?

The [Starbucks] store had a funereal air the other day as a handful of loyal customers sipped beverages and jotted goodbye notes in what amounted to a book of condolences.

Next door, the Broadway Cafe was bustling. “You win because of the coffee,” said Jon Cates, one of the owners.

Anyone over at Big Green listening?

In almost any industry requiring a degree of craft, from making cupcakes to speaker boxes, there’s going to be at least one guy who twigs onto the fact that you can trade on mere competence gilded in mystery and an air of exclusivity, rather than naked excellence. In the coffee world, where typically prices are influenced by the commodity market status, R Miguel Meza is that man. From the press release:

R Miguel announced his new venture, R Miguel Coffees, with a bold statement of purpose, “My passion has been to procure and make available coffees that are unimaginably rich, flavorful and rare. [The company] will offer coffees so startling and so rewarding that the experience alone is worth the price of admission. No one can simply buy an RMiguel coffee, as it is made available exclusively by invitation only. These are all coffee beans so immensely flavorful from years of precious care and impeccable processing that tiny amounts are made available from the world’s most loved coffee trees.”

R Miguel coffees can retail for over $200/lb and can be purchased by invitation only. I’d normally say something like “..and it’s causing quite a stir in the coffee world”, except that honestly no one in the industry seems to care very much; most references I’ve seen to the company, when there are any, usually consist of rolled eyes and a dismissive comment. Ironically, this mass indifference is probably the best thing possible for Miguel’s business model. Think about it: you can choose your clients with your invitation scheme, so you deliberately hand-pick rich people who consider themselves gourmands but don’t actually know much about coffee, and don’t know how little they know about it. If what they taste is anything but outright terrible, the high price tag will convince them they’re experiencing magic–after all, it’s been proven that price influences the uneducated palette–and since no pros feel threatened by Miguel, there’s no one contradicting that magical impression.

So if no one gets hurt, as they say, is there any problem with this model? After all, by all reports Miguel is actually a competent roaster, in the past frequently scoring 90+ with his coffees on CoffeeReview.com when he was working for his parents at Paradise Roasters. That’s a respectable track record. So what’s the problem?

I think AndyS at Portafilter.net put it best:

One of the terms championed by Counter Culture, Intelligentsia and others is “transparency.” In our context it means (among other things) that the consumer is educated in detail about where, when and how a particular coffee is sourced. The concept, I believe, is to develop a consumer awareness of the remarkable variety and richness that coffee origins have to offer. Yet when R Miguel names his coffees “Ambrosia” and “Nectar,” it is the precise opposite of transparency. I guess you’d call it “opacity” instead.

Is opacity the next step in our coffee evolution? In other words, will roasters with a proprietary offering “let the coffee speak for itself,” but only from behind a black curtain, so that no one can tell who’s talking?

In a third-wave coffee culture where coffee pros commonly swap hard data that’s integral to the success of their business, is this return to the illusion of coffee as a mysterious synaesthetic experience–in other words, to the world of stereo speakers and luxury cars where measurable build quality and price are necessarily unrelated–an expected occurrence?

The question is particularly interesting to me because I’ve had the occasional and minor “crisis of faith” in the third-wave approach, where roasteries would open across the street from me and ask that I teach them how to succeed against me in the market. I have no true horror stories about it thankfully and in fact have made friends in the business this way, and as a result I believe in the value of transparency. But R Miguel’s approach seems like the logical end of my secret fears about running a coffee business. And here I am, shortly to open another roastery; should I copy his model? Retreat behind a curtain and use vague terms and a nice haircut and sidestep any scrutiny by the fellow roasters who–let’s face it–aren’t the ones paying my bills anyway? But I look at it, and I don’t like it. I don’t see it as a viable long-term solution, as it risks withering in isolation quickly if the repeat business doesn’t come.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not interested in picking a fight with Miguel, and having never tasted his coffees I’d never tell you not to buy them. He has a strong enough track record with reputable reviewers and there are in fact some aged coffees (assuming he’s selling them and that they make up the high end of his offerings) that are in fact worth $100-200/lb. due to both their quality and the incredible amount of labor that goes into producing and properly storing/aging certain varietals. I’m more interested in it as a point of discussion, both from a commodity standpoint and as a question about the third-wave philosophy.

But it seems not everyone at Starbucks is toeing the company line…some baristas are rebelling against the move. Starbucks Gossip has printed a mini-manifesto from one such barista in New York:

I would like to say that I think this decision is a poor one, and, at the risk of being reprimanded for insubordination, I will not be following this new method for calling and marking. I feel as though there are several flaws that will cause confusion, frustration and, potentially, a waste of product and time for partners, and far worse, alienate both partners and Starbucks customers. I’ve composed a detailed list of problems that can and, more than likely will, arise from the “Skinny platform.

1) We have been trained since day one to follow a specific method of drink calling/marking. Changing it up now will cause FAR too much confusion. For all stores, high volume stores in particular, this can severely impact speed-of-service, drink quality, customer satisfaction, labor, and product usage. Miscommunication between customers and partners, partners calling drinks and partners making drinks, and partners making drinks calling the drinks to the customers waiting to receive their drinks will inevitably lead to drinks having to be discarded after being made, customers becoming angry and impatient, assuming it is employee incompetence…

Starbucks to Open Regional Farmer Support Center in Rwanda

(press release)

“We are very excited to have a regional Starbucks Farmer Support Center here in Rwanda. We look forward to working with Starbucks to offer additional support to the coffee farming community here and in the neighboring countries,” said Paul Kagame, President of the Republic of Rwanda. This center will offer many new opportunities to enhance our methods and produce even greater volumes of our high quality specialty coffees.” Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) chairman Howard Schultz announced today that the company will open a regional Starbucks Farmer Support Center in Rwanda. The facility will provide an opportunity for Starbucks to collaborate with farmers in Rwanda and in the East Africa region, and demonstrates the company’s continued support for their efforts to expand the availability of their high quality, specialty coffee worldwide.

Sounds great possibly? Uh-uh. As Addis Fortune reporter Shlomo Bachrach observed in his recent article “A Support Centre–An Agreement in a Black Box“:

What has it now agreed to? What is the practical effect of Starbucks’ acknowledgment of Ethiopia’s ownership of the names Yirgacheffe, Harar and Sidamo? Does it involve any payments to Ethiopia? How firm and substantial a commitment has Starbucks made to marketing Ethiopian coffee? What rights did Ethiopia grant to Starbucks? What does Ethiopia gain in exchange?

Essentially, things are rockier than they look: Starbucks kicked off recent negotiations with Ethiopia’s government by benevolently agreeing to not do something it shouldn’t have been doing anyway–claiming that it “owns” the name of another country. In return for offering to be marginally less unethical, it is asking for future partnerships with unspecified terms in Ethiopia’s fledgling tea industry, among other things. It has also offered to build a support center for Ethiopian agribusiness, but in return it gets first crack at a high-demand crop:

Starbucks has made a welcome announcement, which can, if it is more than a token gesture, have a positive impact. Such a centre will, of course, do at least as much good for Starbucks as for Ethiopia, since it gives them better access to premium quality coffee at a time when demand is growing and a shortage is on the horizon.

So essentially Starbucks builds a kiosk with brochures on irrigation in it in Addis Ababa and in return they get the potential to corner the market on one of the world’s most valued coffee sources, and get in on the ground floor if Ethiopia’s tea gamble takes off.

Oxfam congratulated themselves quite a bit when Starbucks signed a toothless licensing agreement last October; it seemed premature then, and even moreso now. (Again, I support Oxfam’s aims, I just think they’ve been a bit blind lately.)

Interestingly, the major resistance to this idea isn’t coming from specialty coffee drinkers, independent roasteries, or even Starbucks–it’s coming from McDonald’s’ own franchisees.

To add espresso beverages to current stores will require about $100,000 in retrofitting and equipment purchases for each individual store. That’s a lot of coin to drop to sell coffee drinks, and many franchise owners are worried they won’t make their investment back. It’s not an unreasonable fear, as even purveyors of poor mass-market coffee like Starbucks factor a certain ambiance into the price of their lattes. Take away the neutral colors and quiet jazz, add in harried crowds and beeping fry machines, and it’s going to occur to someone much quicker that they just paid $4.00 for a terrible cup of coffee.

One bright side of this is that dedicated specialty coffee drinkers may not feel much impact; McDonald’s ability to truly compete in the specialty coffee market is in doubt even amongst its own people, and it’s much more likely that the only other company who should feel threatened by McDonald’s move is Starbucks. Starbucks is already starting to really feel the backlash of overexpansion, with hiking dairy costs and slimming margins on the beans (thanks to recovery of worldwide coffee prices after a 30-year low). If Micky D’s taking of a few points of market share means a few less Starbucks on my local street corners, I can’t say that hurts my feelings much.

If that happens, which at this point is maybe a 50/50 chance, there’s another upside, in that local shops could get more frontage. McDonald’s wants to become a “beverage destination”, but it will occur inside already-existing stores. Aside from a few “New!” signs in the windows, the topography of your local street corner won’t change much as a result. Now imagine standing on said street corner with a craving for coffee. Knowing what’s available between McDonald’s and the local coffeehouse next door, do you want to stand in line for ten minutes and pay four bucks for something you know you aren’t going to like? In the actual experience, McDonald’s won’t get you your latte faster or cheaper or better-tasting than local competition, and in fact will likely be worse in all areas. Which, in absence of a Starbucks next door, could mean more business for nearby independents.

That’s a scenario hefty on “what ifs”, but the point is that where there was once a time I might have worried about McDonald’s jumping into the coffee business, now I don’t consider it much cause for alarm. After all, it’s not the first bad idea they’ve had.

In Part 2 I discussed why I don’t think Fair Trade is the best option for getting the best beans at fair prices to everyone involved. But in fact, I didn’t even touch on my single biggest reservation about TransFair: It’s one company.

TransFair has spent years building the Fair Trade brand and getting people to associate their logo with social consciousness–but what happens if TransFair one day dissolves? Another nonprofit will have to start all the way over with a new logo, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing for years until people mentally latch on to it. Fair Trade has set itself up as the single lynchpin in the marketplace that defines fair practices in the coffee industry, but coffee is a gigantic global industry. A single nonprofit, no matter how big, can’t be everywhere at once and as a result many of the small and poor growers who really need the help end up falling through the cracks.

So there must be a better option, one that’s scalable and supports the two most important roles in the coffee chain: the small grower, and the specialty roaster. Direct trade is that option.

In direct trade, the roastery develops relationships with individual farms, cooperatives, and growing associations. The relationships largely develop in an “old-school” way; word of mouth, personal visits to the farm, and sitting down with the farmers and cupping the coffees themselves. Each roastery and farm must decide the terms of the working relationship, from working conditions, pesticide usage, and revenue distribution. In other words, you’ve got to do your homework, and that could understandably be considered a downside to direct trade.

The upside of course is that the roastery hand-picks the best of the best coffee varietals and can personally vouch for its quality and social consciousness all the way through the chain. In addition, direct trade is more flexible, so if an estate such as Selva Negra hires temporary labor during harvest months but pays them fairly, they’re not automatically excluded. It allows a wider variety of coffees from which to choose when the grower’s size or organizational structure isn’t an issue.

Ultimately direct trade allows social consciousness to work with the free market instead of trying ineffectually to grapple with or control it. Coffee consumers have already proven that they can and will vote with their dollars, which is the one thing Fair Trade has really gotten right. But direct trade allows everyone in the chain to vote with their dollars, and doesn’t require a single and financially-weighty worldwide watchdog agency to administrate it (and absorb money from small farmers while doing so).

Where can you get direct trade coffees? Direct trade is growing rapidly but is still a relatively new movement, so unfortunately you can’t expect to walk into just any shop and expect to find some; also, some regions of the world such as Ethiopia simply can’t offer direct trade coffees because the government controls the trade and auctions all the beans. Maybe the biggest stride was recently taken by Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters, a Chicago-based mid-sized roaster and wholesaler who recently took the step of deciding to offer only direct trade coffees. (I applaud that, but I find their recent trademarking of “Intelligentsia Direct Trade”–with the attendant implication that they somehow invented the direct trade model–unnecessary at best and somewhat sinister at worst.) More and more coffee shops are starting to advertise direct trade, and you can even find them online at places like Stumptown Roasters and RareCoffee.com. They’re often mixed in with Fair Trade coffees, so be sure to ask. Remember, with direct trade the growers get more of the profit than with Fair Trade, so be clear that it’s direct trade coffees you’re after.

Because of the constraints of the blog format, I’ve only really touched briefly on the differences between Fair Trade and direct trade. If you’d like to know more, here are some great resources:

• Reason Magazine: “Absolution in Your Cup” (thanks to Roger for this one)
• The Stranger: “Direct Challenge”
• Intelligentsia explains their direct trade model
• EthicalCoffee.net

Many socially-conscious coffee lovers peek into the windows of their local shops looking for the tell-tale sticker with the Fair Trade logo, wanting to balance their beverage with the peace of mind knowing that farmers overseas are getting their fair share. Unfortunately, Fair Trade certification doesn’t automatically guarantee that customers are getting the best coffee for their dollar, or that the growers are getting the maximum profit for their beans.

Before I lay into TransFair USA for what I think keeps Fair Trade certification from being truly effective, I want to make it clear: I’m not arguing for the abolition of FT, or saying that it should never be used. What it’s done for the public consciousness about the status of coffee growers is itself astounding. But I do think that it’s important to know where they’re misstepping and why, and that if you truly want to practice coffee social consciousness by voting with your dollar there are other options that are better for everyone involved.

There are two basic things that keep many of the world’s finest coffees out of Fair-Trade-certified bags: money and size.

1) Certification costs money; for many growers and retailers, too much money. To be certified by TransFair USA costs money from both sides: the growers must pay to have their beans certified, and roasters/retailers must pay yearly licensing fees just to be allowed to carry Fair Trade beans.

For the grower, it costs between $2,000 and $4,000 USD to assess a farm, plus annual recertification fees and a small percentage of the price of each pound of coffee sold. A small estate farm–the kind of farm that produces the highest-quality coffees–might sell an entire year’s crop for under $20,000. That’s a significant barrier to entry. Selva Negra Farms, located in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, produces one of the best coffees in the world, winning the Cup of Excellence in 2003; but their coffee business is only part of the farm, which also produces livestock, flowers, and is a vacation resort. The plantation is widely renowned for sustainability and positive working conditions, but coffee is only part of their overall income–for them, paying $4k out of that coffee revenue isn’t feasible.

For the roaster, putting an FT sticker in the window adds about ten cents a pound to the cost of a coffee in licensing fees. This amounts to about a 10% overall increase in buying costs, on top of paying the higher minimum floor price for the coffee in the first place, all for “participation” in a program in which the roasters have no vote about how that money is being spent.

2) The size and organizational structure required by Fair Trade simply isn’t possible for many growers. Costa Rica’s Hacienda La Minita produces what is generally accepted to be one of the top three or four coffees in the world: Cafe La Minita. The plantation is wealthy, yet the owner William McAlpin is consistently held up as a model of humanism in independent and international business. McAlpin literally coined the term “estate coffees”. Whenever a journalist writes about shocking working conditions on coffee farms overseas, Hacienda La Minita is frequently referred to as the utopian alternative.

But Fair Trade certification requires any participating growers to be part of a farmer co-operative. Any other organizational structure is automatically disqualified from consideration by TransFair. That means family plantations such as La Minita, individual independent farmers, and for that matter any farm that hires outside labor, are all ineligible for certification no matter what the worker conditions are or how good the coffees are. Growing regions where the coffee trade is managed by the government as a matter of economic survival, such as Ethiopia, are also ineligible, meaning entire countries in the coffee-growing world are excluded outright.

The poorest independent farms and estate farms who produce rare varietals who stand the most to gain by increased profit share are by definition excluded from participating in the program that so loudly claims is there to help them.

Fair Trade is a well-intentioned brand that nonetheless leaves behind the best growers in the world, trumpeting “rigid quality control” that ultimately doesn’t actually reflect true working conditions, trade practices, or especially coffee quality. They hemorrhage money: even after six years of net deficits spent in building the brand, their most recent financial report on their site shows them spending $3.2 million in order to collect only $2.9 million in licensing fees.

Fair Trade isn’t bad, it’s just misleading and mismanaged. With some core structural changes it could probably become the agent of change it bills itself as. Nonetheless, there must be a better method of trade practice that doesn’t require a single, worldwide arbiter and doesn’t exclude the very people it’s supposed to empower.

Direct trade is that method, and in Part 3 I’ll explain why.