t o n x . o r g

The final and much-condensed (but photo-rich) chapter of my coffee adventure in Mexico…

John from Royal, Doug, Geoff, and Paul from Intelly and myself took the overnight bus from Oaxaca to the city of Huixtla in Chiapas and from there made our way to the mountain city of Motozintla, the “land of squirrels”. […]

After our visit to Calvo, we made our way to the headquarters of CEPCO (State of Oaxaca Coffee Producers Network), an organic coop comprising thousands of small farmers.

Here our crew would sample roast and cup many small coffee lots from different growers, seeking out the best quality samples, noting comparisons with […]

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, […]

The recuperating coffee achiever and sometime blogger Brokeback Steve recently posted his 300th daily “first cup” photo to flickr.

His pal Valerie is making some cool t-shirts to commemorate raise money to help steve through his tragic plunge and resulting bills. The back of the shirt reads “stick to coffee.”
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Between feverish photo editing (I took somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 photos during my travels) and catching up on email, the task of summarizing my experiences in Mexico is daunting.
I took it as an auspicious sign that one of my traveling companions, Intelligentsia’s Doug Zell, was also lugging around the hardcover of […]

Oaxaca, Oaxaca. Fried cheese. Fried grasshoppers. Mescal. Mescal. Mescal.
In spite of continuous light intoxication, I am learning much about coffee here. Less because of my exposure to it which is yet to come (the espresso we´ve found here has been terrible) and more from the conversations that our idle […]

U.K. barista champion and fellow coffee blogger James Hoffmann just returned from a whirlwind tour of El Salvador and posted this great report and some fantastic photographs. Reading his tale has me feeling excited about my own first trip to origin which kicks off this weekend.

a couple of the stunning photos from James […]

I follow a tremendous number of coffee blogs with my trusty RSS reader. There are more and more of them popping up all the time. Some are good, many are just junk blogs writing about coffee as a means of generating google ad revenue. One blog I’ve enjoyed is the far-ranging coffee […]

My cohort Kyle and I paid a visit earlier this week to the folks at Portland’s incomparable Stumptown Coffee.

Cuppers line up at Stumptown’s Annex. Trainer Stephen Vick keeps his cupping spoon close at hand.
Hanging out with the Stumptown crew is always a learning experience. Good coffee, good beer, and good conversation […]

Jay Caragay of Jay’s Shave Ice prepares to win the crowd at the otherwise vanilla USBC.
Amid all the noise of the parasitical peddlers on the showfloor (business people who remain sadly ignorant of the true nature of good coffee) there were some beacons of cool shit at this years show. Its hard to come […]