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C Market: Volatility Notwithstanding
This week in macroeconomics, US employment numbers disappointed expectations of higher growth for the third consecutive month as non-farm payrolls poster lower increments since July. The stock market ended two weeks of indecisive movement by dropping lower after the jobs report, accompanied by a...
Crown on the Road: A Free Educational Event Series
Royal Coffee is proud to announce Crown on the Road, a free educational event series popping up in Los Angeles & the Bay Area. Join us for this free series while we anticipate the opening of The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab & Tasting Room. UPDATE, 11/15/2016 It's been such a pleasure putting on...
Introducing Ras Enjori: The Berry King
Introduction by Chris Kornman Ethiopia is coffee’s Mecca. The Arabica species traces its origin to the western edges of the country. Ethiopia is the rare producing nation whose internal consumption equals its export volume. In Ethiopia, coffee is not just a product, not a mere cash crop, not even...
Catracha Quality Project Measures the Impact of the Ocean Journey to Oakland, California
We have been observing and collecting data in Santa Elena as part of the Catracha Quality Project to improve upon green coffee processing strategies. (See related Catracha articles here). But once the coffee is ready to ship from Honduras, we cannot ride along in the container as it makes its...
Fall Coffees – Looking at Autumn Arrivals to Spice Up the Menu
Around this time of year many roasters begin to worry if they will have enough Central American and Mexican coffee to make it till next season, or if their Sumatra is starting to taste like a musty jute sack or if their Ethiopia will start to lose its lemony luster. While those concerns are...
Examining the Relationship Between Fermentation & Quality in Santa Elena
For the last several weeks, members of the Catracha Quality Project have been presenting results of a data survey conducted during the 2016 harvest season in Santa Elena, Honduras. To go back and read some of that work -- which includes detailed process maps and an analysis of correlation between...
Can Cherry Selection Correlate to Higher Cup Scores in Catracha Coffee?
When the Catracha Quality Project began, Catracha organizers encouraged producers to focus on the quality of the coffee by selecting ripe cherry. In the Royal Blog last week, Arvin Juan presented a post-harvest process map, the result of two years of observing practices and interviewing producers....
C Market Indecisive After Recent Drop
This week in macroeconomics, American households noted an increase in income while US manufacturing surveys reported a decline in output. US stocks and indices traded mixed with conflicting views on a potential interest rate hike expressed by Federal Reserve officials ahead of chair Janet Yellen’s...
Home Gardening, Coffee Farming & Climate Change: A Coffee Trader’s Perspective
I was reading the news the other day and came upon a really disturbing article in The Guardian about climate change and coffee. The gist is that in the coming decades climate change is going to make about half of the land which is currently suitable for growing coffee no longer viable for doing...
Hanjin Shipping Enters Dire Straits
More news from the shipping lanes. Here at Royal Coffee, we are in the business not only of selling coffee, but making sure coffee gets to where it needs to be, when it needs to be there. To that end we work with a number of shipping companies, and lately some of these companies have been in dire...
The Catracha Quality Project Process Map
When we started the Catracha Quality Project (CQP), our first goal was to create a map to visualize how the Catracha producers were processing coffee from cherry to dried parchment. Over the last two harvests in Santa Elena, we interviewed producers and observed their practices to create a...
C Market Tumbles into the Weekend
This week in global finance, US stocks posted the largest loss since June and all major indices declined to their lowest level in months on news of North Korea’s nuclear weapons test and further commentary from Federal Reserve officials indicating the possibility of a second US interest rate hike....
From Popayán to Oakland: One coffee’s sojourn measured in human hands and daily temperatures
Once a coffee cherry is picked from the branch, every step it takes until it’s brewed is a desperate act of preservation, a struggle against the entropy that will inevitably degrade the dying seed. In a perfect world, short distances traveled in stable environments would contribute to that...
Single Farmer Lots from YCFCU & Royal Coffee
Since the inception of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange in 2008, full traceability back to the specific farmer has been limited to large estates capable of exporting their own produce. Beginning in 2012, however, Royal Coffee and YCFCU began a program of separating single farm lots from the larger...
The Catracha Quality Project Results Are Coming
At the end of July, Catracha Coffee single farm micro-lots arrived in the Royal warehouse in Oakland, California. The coffees were produced by individual farmers in Santa Elena, Honduras, and the lots ranged from 5 to 20 bags. All bags were printed with the farmer’s name to ensure traceability....