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Following my trip to Mexico with the Intelligentsia crew, I got to spend some time hanging out at their amazing roasting works in Chicago. Intelligentsia pulls no punches in its commitments to ethical sourcing and quality at every step of the chain. Meeting the crew there and seeing the great work they […]

Coffee in bloom - unbelievably pleasant smelling. Gives the bees an extra buzz too.
I’ve got an edited selection of photos from my Mexico trip up on Flickr.
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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 […]