WATTS WORKS - COFFEE BUYING & DELAYED GRATIFICATION

The work of a coffee buyer always involves a lot of patience and anticipation. There is a delayed gratification of grand proportion. We spend a tremendous amount of time working on origin relationships and investing in quality development at the farm and mill levels, but the nature of coffee means that results do not come for months or even years.

The typical Central American cycle looks like this:

November – December: I'm in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Panama hanging out with growers, making plans, and prepping for the start of the harvest.

Late December: Things are in full swing. While the lower altitude coffees start ripening much earlier, the best from the higher altitudes really come off the tree in January/February most years. We start receiving samples from all the farms we work with sometime in early January and continue cupping throughout the harvest as coffees are being picked, fermented, dried, and rested.

January and February: I head back to most of these countries to check in on the harvest, discuss quality measures and start providing feedback about the successes or failures thus far. Everyone is working intensely. This is the time of the year when growers, millers, and cuppers are working seven-day weeks and long hours to keep up with the flow of coffee that is near its peak in volume for the year. Meanwhile, coffee lot samples are still arriving every day in DHL packages, and our cupping lab here in Chicago is hopping. Sometimes we are roasting and cupping more than 200 coffee lot samples in a week, meticulously evaluating both the physical and the sensorial characteristics of each sample. On our way to putting together an I-mark we cup hundreds of small lots (5-500 kilos each), grading each one so that we can provide useful feedback to our grower partners at the end of the season.

End of April: We've usually got most of the coffees figured out, and the first of them get loaded on ships to begin their journey to the US.

May: I jump on a plane again to visit the farms and farmer groups so that we can celebrate the end of harvest and talk about how things went. It is also the time for important “calibration” cuppings...I believe it is vital to have clear and transparent communication with local coffee tasters (and the growers themselves) about what this elusive “quality” really means. The best way to do this is to sit together at a table and cup through some of the best, worst, and middle tier lots produced that season and talk about them, share our perspectives and scores, and work on building consensus about what constitutes an 80, 85, or 95 point score (out of 100). It is this kind of dialogue that will bring us all closer to a world where better coffees become the norm, not the exception.

July: The coffees have arrived in Chicago, gone through the process of roast selection (we try to tailor each roast profile to the needs of the individual coffees, so there is always a period before sale where we tinker a bit to decide what the best roast profile should be) and been released for sale.

July and Onward: That's when all the work we've put in over the last 6 months really is validated. Because what's the use of all that time and energy if it doesn't produce a stunningly delicious coffee? I can buy mediocre coffees without leaving my home. This is why I wait patiently, quietly suppressing anticipation or anxiety, eager to see for myself the end result of all that effort. When a coffee shows up and I see my colleagues, friends, and fellow coffee lovers gushing over it, I get a deep satisfaction, and normally I'm on the phone shortly thereafter to tell the growers that their coffee has just made a lot of people extremely happy.

But the gratification is short-lived. Now that we have gotten Direct Trade relationships going in countries in the Southern Hemisphere, the harvest really never ends. On every day of the year there is coffee being picked somewhere in the world. Just when the Centrals arrive I'm back on the road, off to Colombia or Tanzania to find them smack in the middle of their own harvests. It is a perpetual cycle where loads of work is always being done in an effort to produce future fruits. It can be overwhelming sometimes, but I love it and wouldn't trade my chosen occupation for any other that I could think of. Perhaps international rock and roll superstar...but I'd have to give it a lot of deliberation.