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Our morning began last Tuesday with a trip to Calvo Export’s dry mill, where the Tres Oros mark of Oaxacan Pluma coffees originates.

Pale gringo sitting atop massive stacks of parchment coffee.

The role of exporter/mills like Calvo is not simply collecting coffee for export. Sophisticated quality control, technical assistance to growers, pricing intelligence, and marketing are all part of the game that must be played in the efforts to get better prices for coffee. While the cost of production continues to creep higher for growers in Mexico, the prices paid for Mexican coffees have stagnated, giving growers less incentive to maintain quality.

Jose Luis, the Director of Calvo, gave us the tour of the facility which was stacked high with bags of coffee held in parchment or pergamino, the papery endocarp that surrounds the beans and is removed just before export. Think of it as nature’s bubble wrap for green coffee. We walked the warehouse, drawing samples of coffee from many different farms for later sample roasting and cupping. One of the crew repeatedly demonstrated his hand-milling technique which I captured in this small video clip.

A series of machines removes the parchment, filters through broken and defective beans, sorts by size, sorts by density on angled vibrating beds, and in a final step channels the beans single file though an electronic eye that removes defective beans with a blast of compressed air.

Doug Zell wanders among the beans. Geoff and I scope out Calvo’s air roaster used for their domestic coffee brand.

Much shop talk between Jose Luis, Geoff, and John occurred and, in spite of my weak espanol, I was beginning to grasp the complex scope of the role of the green coffee buyer. It seems to require a good knowledge of diplomacy, agronomy, some detective work, and a healthy alcohol tolerance. Intelligentsia’s Geoff has the extraordinary ability to catch sleep in even the most uncomfortable of circumstances - one of his more useful ninja skills.

More to come…

This entry was posted on Friday, May 12th, 2006 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Coffee, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.