F. A. Q.

Do you really "Roast to order"?

Yes we do. Our roasting process starts with you. When you place your order online before midnight, (Central Time Zone), your order is added to the tally of coffees to roast for the following morning. Your coffee is then roasted in the early morning, packed in the afternoon and shipped on the following day.

How long will my coffee take to get to me?

Your coffee will be roasted and shipped the day AFTER you place your order. Average ship times vary from state to state. Within Illinois, you can expect your shipment to arrive the day after production. In surrounding states, shipping can take one, two or three days. Three days is standard for the East Coast and four for the West Coast.

How much do you charge for shipping?

We charge you what UPS charges us. This typically breaks down to between $5 to $9 to ship a pound or two by UPS Ground to almost anywhere in the USA. As you are checking out, the shopping cart will calculate your shipping for you.

Please click here for a production schedule and map of UPS standard ship times by state. These are merely guidelines, not guarantees. If you need a shipment guaranteed by a certain time, please select 2 Day Air or Overnight delivery.

How is your coffee sold?

Most coffee in our Online Store is available to purchase in 1/2 pound, one pound and five pound sizes. We do have some Reserve Coffees that are sold exclusively in the 1/2 pound size.

Can I add to an order I just placed?

Unfortunately, at this time we are not able to add to orders that have already been placed on our website. If your order is not yet in production, we can cancel your existing order and and you may place a revised one. Please send us an email at ordersupport@intelligentsiacoffee.com to let us know.

I am a member of the US Armed Forces, how do I order?

We ship all APO and AAE addresses by the US Post. Enter your military address in as normal and our site should detect it and only offer USPS as your shipping option. If it errors, please email Order Support via our contact page or call us at 888-945-9786 and we’d be happy to take your order.

I'm in Canada, do I get charged more/are there additional charges for shipping?

We are required by law to reveal the contents of packages shipped to Canada and to state the full value of the shipment, even if the package contains a gift. Customs charges may be levied when the package reaches Canada.

You are responsible for any duties, tariffs, taxes, or customs brokerage fees. These amounts must be paid at the time of delivery, so please choose a shipping address at which someone will be able to accept delivery. We are not responsible for these charges and cannot provide estimates as to what these charges may be. You may wish to contact your local customs office for further information. If for any reason the package is seized by customs officials, we will not issue you a refund unless all products are returned to us in their original condition. If the package is returned to us by customs officials or delivery is otherwise unsuccessful, shipping charges are not refundable. Additional shipping charges will apply if we need to reship a package that is returned to us due to delivery problems.

For more information on these charges, please visit www.usps.com.

Can I pick up coffee at your Warehouse?

Our Roasting Works is currently not set up for direct selling. Please visit one of our coffeebars for retail sales.

Are your coffees 100% Arabica?

Yes! We do not carry or use any robusta beans. It is not uncommon to see robusta coffee used as a blend ingredient for espresso blends to help with the crema and body of the shot but the flavor suffers dramatically which, we feel, misses the whole point.

How should my coffee be stored?

Your coffee is quite content in its unopened Intelligentsia bag. The one way valve on the bag allows CO2 that the freshly roasted coffee produces to escape without letting in the harmful oxygen. After opening your bag, however, we recommend moving your coffee to a dark, airtight container and storing your coffee at room temperature.

Try NOT to store your coffee in a cold environment. If coffee is stored in the freezer or the refrigerator, moisture will condense on the beans every time they are brought out of that cold environment and into room temperature which will quickly degrade the complexity of their flavor.

Stored properly in whole bean form, your coffee should retain much of its flavor for seven days after it was roasted. The flavor will slowly taper off soon after that and will be noticed in the high notes or acidity being dulled. The coffee will certainly be consumable but will not have the shimmering brilliance it once had.

How dark do you roast your coffees?

We generally roast our coffee a bit lighter than what is, in the industry, loosely referred to as Full City. The Full City level is typically a dark level but lighter than a French or Italian roast. We feel that the Full City level does not do justice to the delicate flavor notes that the coffee we purchase contains. In order for us to keep those flavors intact, we must roast our coffees a bit lighter so as not to burn off the subtle intricacies that make our coffees unique and world class.

The coffee I received is (or is not) oily- why?

Coffee beans develop oil on their surface in one of two ways:

They are roasted to a dark enough level which will pull the oils present within the bean to the surface. This is typical of a dark roast.
Given time, the oil present within a bean that once appeared to have a dry surface, will rise to the surface creating the oily film that is usually characteristic of a darker roasted coffee. Depending on the type of bean and what level it was initially roasted to, this can take from as little as a few hours to as long as a few weeks!

Is your coffee vacuum packed?

Fresh roasted coffee cannot be vacuum packed Our coffee is packed in a foil bag with a one-way-valve. The bags are filled and heat sealed to lock in the freshness. Because our coffee is less than 24 hours out of the roaster when it is shipped to you, the degassing process is still occurring. The one-way-valve allows CO2 to escape, yet does not allow oxygen to get in. This ensures that your coffee is as fresh as possible when it arrives at your door.

Where is your Yemen and/or Arabian Mocha Java?

We have chosen not to carry coffees from Yemen due to the very inconsistent quality and poor human rights record that Yemen as a country has.

We realize that it is a very unique tasting coffee when it is good but, in the end, we felt the bad outweighed the good. In its place we now offer Mocha Java- a new blend utilizing coffees from that area minus the Arabian Yemen.

Why do your coffees keep going out of stock or out of season?

We know that once you find a coffee you love you want to continue to purchase it throughout the year, but we would like you to think about coffee a bit differently than you are used to. Coffee is an agriculture product (like strawberries or tomatoes) and it has a certain period of time that it is in-season, fresh and tasting delicious and a time when it is not (think of strawberries or tomatoes in January). Geoff Watts and our Intelligentsia Buying Team buy only as much coffee as we can sell while it is at the peak of flavor. For this reason, you will find our list of coffees changing over time as we run out of some and introduce others. If you do have any questions about what coffees are in season at any given time, please feel free to contact us.

For more information on this topic, please visit www.inseasoncoffee.com.

Can I buy your Black Cat blend in its green form?

We do not offer Black Cat as a green blend because each coffee that goes into Black Cat is roasted to a different level and then blended. To blend them together first and then roast them all at once would not produce Black Cat.

Do you offer (ESE) Pods?

We have discovered a couple of websites that have referenced Intelligentsia Black Cat Espresso in pods, but this information is incorrect and we do not offer them.

You used to carry Fair Trade coffee, why don't you anymore?

We believe that the Fair Trade model is not really designed for a company like ours. It was created to try to balance trade inequities in the commodity business and to discourage traders of commercial or entry-level Specialty Coffee from under-paying and exploiting cooperatives. This was specifically designed to monitor the international financial transactions between the exporting cooperative and the importer. In recent years it has also been used to enforce labeling practices of roasters. Generally speaking, these coffees have historically been purchased under conditions of extreme anonymity—no traceability, no accountability. We support the existence of Fair Trade and believe that it has had a net-positive effect on coffee trade.

We do not, however, buy commodity coffee; we buy boutique coffees of the very highest quality, and we travel and work very closely with the growers themselves. We spend days at a time with them, we sleep in their houses, and we are engaged in a continuous dialogue with them about how to grow together and benefit. Experience has shown us that we can achieve better results through our own efforts and attain a higher level of transparency than we could by simply purchasing Fair Trade coffees. Lastly, it is important to us that the producer gets maximum return for their work. Many of our coffees come from cooperatives that are Fair Trade certified, and we could easily make them Fair Trade coffees. If we did so, Intelligentsia would pay a commission to Fair Trade for the use of the Fair Trade logo. Our belief is that the money makes a bigger and more positive difference when it goes directly into the hand of the producer. Instead of buying the right to use a label we just give the money to the grower.

We will continue to buy coffee from Fair Trade certified cooperatives, but in these instances Intelligentsia is choosing not to pay for the marketing rights of Trans Fair and FLO.

How is Intelligentsia Direct Trade™ different than Certified Fair Trade?

Certified Fair Trade is a certification that is owned by FLO International and licensed in the US by Transfair USA. It has been around for decades in Europe and is applied not only to coffee but also cocoa, sugar, bananas, and other commonly traded agricultural products. It is a "blanket" certification designed to ensure that every product bearing its label is purchased at a base price that is above the cost of production for the farmer. Different products have different base prices. For example, the Fair Trade export price for coffee delivered to the exporting cooperative is $1.26 per pound unroasted and $1.41 for unroasted organic certified coffee. It is also a certification specific to democratically run cooperatives, and does not apply to private farms or private exporters.

Intelligentsia Direct Trade™ is the name for the Intelligentsia model we apply to our coffees. Every coffee bearing its label was purchased in full accordance with these principals:

Quality must be exceptional.
The price to the grower must be at least 25% above Fair Trade prices.
The grower must be committed to healthy environmental practices.
The grower must be committed to sustainable social practices.
An Intelligentsia representative must visit the farm in person at least once per harvest season.
All the trade participants must be open to transparent disclosure of financial deliveries back to the individual farmers.

How do you define "healthy environmental practices"?

When we discuss healthy environmental practices at Intelligentsia, we understand this as producers taking proactive measures to ensure the health of the ecosystem both on and around their farms. If the farm uses irrigation, are they recycling the water? What happens to the water used for de-pulping and fermentation? Is part of the farm being maintained as forest? If pesticide or herbicide is used at all, is it minimized and applied responsibly? These are the questions we ask. It is not a dogmatic approach, as we recognize that there are different realities on different farms, but it is essential that every Intelligentsia Direct Trade farm is consciously following protocols that preserve the environment.

How do we define "sustainable social practices"?

To get to the answer we must ask a single question: Is everyone involved in the production of coffee on an Intelligentsia Direct Trade farm benefiting? Again, every farm is different. We work with small growers who farm two hectares of coffee and do all the work themselves. We also work with farms that employ 300 people during the year. What matters most is that there are good living conditions and the opportunity for measurable economic growth. We avoid trying to tell a farmer what “sustainable social practices” means and instead prefer to let them tell us if things are working. But there are some tangibles that we can examine. On a medium-sized or single farm we must know what the pickers are being paid, how that wage compares to both the legislated minimums and the average in the region, and whether the workers feel it is a good deal. Are there health services provided? Are there other community services that are financed by earnings from the sale of coffee? On a small farm, the key question is whether or not the farmer is making a living from coffee and earning enough to invest in the health and education of the family. Is there economic progress? There is a big difference between subsistence and development.

What is the relationship of "organic" to Fair Trade or your Direct Trade certifications?

There is no relation at all. Fair Trade certification is completely different than Organic certification. We believe strongly in organic farming practices, and we are working each year to make more of our Intelligentsia Direct Trade™ coffees organic. Organic coffees carry an additional certification from either OCIA, BIOLATINA, QAI, or other NOP-approved organic certifying agency. We look forward to certifying an ever larger percentage of our coffees as both Intelligentsia Direct Trade™ and Organic.

How do you guarantee that your Intelligentsia Direct Trade™ coffees meet the criteria you have set out for them?

We use our eyes, our ears, and our mouths. To see something for oneself is the most powerful validation. Geoff Watts, Intelligentsia’s Coffee Buyer, personally visits each grower, cooperative, or estate farm every year and spends time there. He documents his trips with photos, talks to the pickers in the fields to make sure that they are receiving what they are promised and examines all the facilities on the farm. Once he is standing on a farm, it is easy to see whether there is shade, whether the pickers are being treated well, and whether the farm is respecting its environment. Again, it’s a matter of forming a true relationship with our producing partners. If something is not right, we fix it, the same way friends do. If we feel that any of the producers of our Intelligentsia Direct Trade coffees are not actively improving both quality and sustainability on their farms, we stop working with them. We maintain an ethical responsibility to ensure that things are working well for everyone involved at the farms, and this means not turning a blind eye to something that doesn’t seem right. If there is a question to be asked, we will ask it.

How do I know that you do what you say?

The proof is in the cup. Quality is not an accidental thing and does not happen without very careful attention to detail at every step of the way: from fertilization and pruning (farm husbandry) to picking (of ripe cherries only), to fermentation, drying, and sorting. All of this takes a lot of work and does not happen when there is no tangible incentive or reward. Farmers that don’t get paid well for their work don’t do these things, and those who don’t respect their land and the people who work on the farm face a constant uphill battle to produce quality. Rarely do they produce "Grand Cru" caliber coffees. There may be the occasional exception, but in ten years of working intensively with coffee, this premise has been proven true over and over and over again.

But if you still don’t believe, ask the farmers themselves. They are here in Chicago many times throughout the year, visiting our stores and roasting facilities. Write to us and we’ll advise you of the next time they will be around.

Which Intelligentsia Coffees are currently designated as Intelligentsia Direct Trade™?

Currently all of the Intelligentsia “Marks” are certified Direct Trade. This includes: Tres Santos, Colombia; Cruz del Sur, Organic Peru: Anjilanaka, Organic Bolivia; Zirikana, Rwanda; Edelweiss Finagro Estate, Tanzania; Kurimi, Ethiopia Yirgacheffe; Abongabong, Sumatra; La Tortuga, Honduras; Los Delirios, Organic Nicaragua; Los Inmortales, El Salvador; Flecha Roja, Costa Rica; Itzamna, Guatemala; Flor Azul, Nicaragua; El Machete, Panama. Additionally, our signature Black Cat Espersso Blend achieved Direct Trade status in October 2008. Eventually we hope for all of our coffees to bear the label, but it is not simply a matter of purchasing the sticker. It takes time and lots of work, and so we are going country-by-country to make it happen. In the near future we plan to continue to develop several new Intelligentsia Direct Trade relationships, including some in East Africa and the Pacific.

Visit our Online Store to purchase any of our Direct Trade or other coffees. For further information on Intelligentsia Direct Trade Coffees, please contact:

Geoff Watts
Vice President/Green Coffee Buyer
Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, Inc.
p: 312-521-7953
e: watts@intelligentsiacoffee.com

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