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Dear Coffee Retailer:
All
the hype about gourmet coffee, all the jive and extravagant
claims, might make you wish you'd held onto your sick bag
from your flight to Seattle. Some of the coffee promoters
are getting as insufferable as the cloying wine snobs who
rant on like crazed microbiologists fresh from an oenology
conference in Toulouse.
My
experience in coffee may not be as extensive as some-- just
five years-- but I can give you my honest view of the trade,
and that could even save you some money if you're now being
scammed with high prices. I'm offering this information here
in question-and-answer format, just to save time. Life is
short.
Q.
Do you tramp through the jungles looking for the best coffee
beans in the world?
A.
I've made trips to the tropics, but only to catch a fish or
hear a marimba band. Traveling down there to buy coffee is
nonsensical. The best green coffees in the world continue
to be sold by long-established brokers in our major ports.
For a relatively small cut of the pie, these brokers do all
the leg work and assume sizeable risks. They have to watch
out for tsetse flies, bushmasters, and Third-World businessmen--shifty
Peter Lorre characters to whom lying and cheating are as natural
as throwing a cat on the barbecue. The coffee roasters who
claim extensive travels in the coffee countries are usually
just working on their tans or getting rummy on the veranda--and
writing it off to the IRS. Two weeks later they're back home
calling the same U.S. brokers we all use.
Q.
Are you saying that all roasters start with the same green
coffee?
A.
Pretty much. Any knucklehead with $300 in his checking account
can look in the San Francisco Yellow Pages for a coffee broker
and buy a 70-kilo bag of the finest Colombian, throw it in
a frying pan and cook up something pretty close to those "rare
and special" beans you've been paying $9.00 a pound for.
Q.
But if it's that simple, why is the coffee so good from some
roasters and so bad from others?
A.
Given that most of the Northwest roasters start with the same
good green coffee, we should all be able to turn out a good
product. That may help to explain how a little company such
as Equator won a First Prize and a First Runner Up prize at
the prestigious Portland Cup coffee competition these past
two years. If a roaster's product is consistently "off"
it could be blamed on outmoded equipment that is slow and
dirty, tainting the coffee with smoke and tar. (Believe it
or not, a few people actually like that grungy edge, kind
of like a friend of mine who smoked strong Latakia pipe tobacco
which I understand is cured over a camel-dung fire.)
Q.
Why would these roasters keep using the old type equipment
if it's hurting the coffee?
A.
We use a Sivetz propane roaster. It's not as pretty to look
at as the traditional cement-mixer type, but it's ten times
cleaner, so the beans come out revealing their true character,
whatever that may be, depending on their nativity and upbringing.
Q.
I've had coffee from Sivetz roasters. Sometimes it was excellent,
other times not so good.
A.
The Pieta wasn't too good either after some knucklehead took
a hammer to it, but that has nothing to do with Michaelangelo.
There are many ways to screw up the coffee after it leaves
the roaster. The worst problem is staleness. Ideally, you've
got to get the beans sole and drunk up within a week of roasting,
and that can be hard to pull off. Retailers refuse to throw
away coffee no matter how rancid. They keep their dumpsters
bulging with day-old bagels and wilted spinach, but they hang
onto coffee that is the fishmonger's equivalent of a maggot-blown
squid left on the tailgate of a Studebaker pickup for three
weeks.
Q.
What do you do to maintain quality?
A.
I try to get the coffee to the retailers within 1 to 24 hours
of roasting. I'm also willing to send smaller amounts to little
places out in the boondocks who haven't developed the trade
yet. Sometimes I get a little crazy and start preaching to
retailers about taking good care of my coffee--until they
hang up on me or throw me out of the store.
Q.
Why don't you use those valve bags to keep the coffee fresh?
A.
I'd use them if they worked. Those bags may help somewhat
to retard staling, but mostly they have just made the industry
lazy with the false notion that you can shelve big quantities
of coffee for a month at a time. For example, there's a coffee
bar not far from my house that keeps forty pounds of ground
Starbucks in valve bags behind the counter. We know that Starbucks
buys good green (They use the same brokers I do) so it has
to be the reliance on the valve bag that has turned this coffee
to garbage.
Q.
What about secret blends? Do you have any?
A.
No, and neither does anyone else. There are only a handful
of distinct coffee types in the world, so how can you make
a secret out of that? That's like saying I've got a secret
gin and tonic, or a secret scrambled egg, or a secret soda
cracker. We coffee roasters have Indonesian, Central American,
and African coffees to play with, and we putter and combine
them until we start repeating ourselves. And we'll be stuck
with this simple menu until an alien airship descends and
presents us with a bean that is truly new. Or maybe global
warming will someday let us grow coffee in these rainy mountains
of Oregon, producing something new and different. Hey, then
we'll be able to buy American without getting hosed for Kona!
Q.
How do you do your Kona?
A.
I try not to. Why bother when good old Guatemalan Huehuetenango
tastes better at one-third the price? We do roast Kona for
those who absolutely insist on sacrificing their money to
the volcano.
Q.
What about Jamaica Blue Mountain?
A.
I think it would be wiser to spend the money on the Franklin
Mint's collection of miniature historic chamber pots of the
world in solid sterling silver.
Q.
If Equator coffee is so great, why haven't I heard of you?
A.
For the same reason everyone has heard of Itzak Perlman and
no one has heard of Arthur Grumiaux. Perlman is an excellent
player who has been heavily promoted since he was a kid on
the Ed Sullivan Show; Grumiaux hated promotion and constant
concertizing, so he remained quietly in Europe where he recorded
for Philips. But when professional string players talk among
themselves you will hear them say Grumiaux was the best violinist
within recent memory. When it comes to roasting coffee, I
try for the Grumiaux approach: Do your best work, but don't
bring on an early heart attack by attempting to take over
the universe. (It's not worth it--there are millions of civilizations
beyond the stars who have never even heard of this planet,
much less of you or me.)
Q.
You're selling coffee for $5.50 a pound. And yet there are
plenty of people still willing to pay nine or ten. What's
going on?
A.
I don't know. Maybe the buyer was blinded by the fluorescence
of the ink on a four-color slick brochure from some big roaster.
Maybe the fresh, volatile varnish on that brochure addled
the buyer's brain and made him write a check for $100 when
a $50 check to Equator would have brought the same coffee--probably
even better.
Sometimes women will pay double because the salesman has an
accent like Sergio Leone and is wearing an eight-hundred-dollar
suit with ostrich-skin shoes in pale yellow. Is that a good
reason to toss away thousands of dollars on coffee in one
retail season? I say no, not even if the guy is also an experienced
gigolo who is willing to throw himself into the deal for free.
Q.
Are you anti-Italian or something?
A.
No one could be against a country that gave us Pizza, the
espresso machine, and Tony Bennett. But it's also clear to
me that we must never forgive Italy for inventing the Fiat.
Even worse, the Italians are now exporting coffee that is
roasted over there!! That's like making a Caesar salad in
New York and sending it out to Seattle on a Greyhound buss!!
The only way I could match the Italian product for staleness
would be to scratch around under the floor mats of my car
for beans I spilled two years ago.
Maybe the flow of roasted coffee from Italy is a communist
plot to make our people hate espresso, thus sabotaging a growing
industry here. I hope someone in the Clinton administration
looks into this--but I'm not holding my breath--they'd rather
fool around with a minor crisis like Haiti or Cuba.
Q.
Where can we find your coffee?
A.
The best gourmet stores in Eugene, Oregon literally move tons
of my product, but I don't expect you to come to this mudhole
of a town just for coffee. There's really nothing going on
here except a bunch of anxious yuppies in mid-life crisis
running endlessly around a bark-o-mulch track, a bottle of
Evian water in one hand and the leash of an attack dog in
the other.
If you would like to try some Equator coffee, call us for
a sample. All we ask is that you judge it fairly by observing
the date on the bag and brewing it within a week of that date.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here,
but it can never forget what it's like to wake up with a really
good cup o' Joe. Here's wishing you happiness and riches as
we ride this crazy java tidal wave. Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Greg
Roberts
Sales and Promotion
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