The Royal Blog

If you are still shopping around for an amazing competition coffee or a unique holiday offering, there are several coffees on our Crown Jewel menu that fit the bill. As the team prepares to go to Denver for the US Coffee Champs qualifying events, I have selected some of my favorite coffees to brew at […]

Editor’s Note: Since we published this article about two years ago, demand for coffee grown by women producers has grown tremendously. We’re so very honored to work with these incredible women.  I want to use this space to highlight Royal’s current offerings from women producers. Now more than ever there is demand from coffee buyers […]

Edith Gonzales and Rosi Quiñones from Royal wrote a grant proposal for the Canopy Bridge travel grant offered to help finance sourcing trips for businesses interested in visiting coffee producers. Edith and Rosi’s proposal won funding to pay for airfare for Mayra Orellana-Powell (Royal’s Marketing and Outreach Director) and Sam LaRobardiere (from Theory Collaborative) to travel […]

In January, Rosi and I flew to Colombia to attend the Mejor de Huila competition and auction organized by InConexus and Royal Coffee. We met up at the Bogotá airport with our fellow cuppers, an international coterie of coffee professionals from Asia, Europe and the US, to catch a flight to Pitalito in Huila. From […]

In the Third Wave coffee market, where the unique qualities of the producer, region, and altitude are popular to tout, the specialty coffee industry has contributed to a romanticized story of how coffee is sourced. The storyline which most consumers understand as ‘direct trade’ follows a roaster spending a significant amount of time searching for […]

If you haven’t recently studied a good map of Colombia, I recommend it. I have a cheap but pretty good atlas I picked up on sale when the Emeryville Borders went out of business a number of years back. I like to study it occasionally; it’s my idea of a good time. Running South to […]

Royal Coffee and InConexus Colombia present a cupping of 30 specialty coffees selected from over 200 entries. Royal has been working with Inconexus since 2010 and we have seen them deliver quality improvements and incredible relationships with farmers. See it for yourself in Huila this January. Loyal readers of our blog will be all too familiar with […]

Staff Picks! This week in staff picks, Ethiopia makes a strong showing from the Crown team. The Trading team found two Colombian offerings that represent the coffee rainbow that country has to offer, from the humble Supremo 17/18 to the much vaunted zero-defect vacuum sealed microlot. Rwanda and Sumatra aren’t far behind, and the result […]

Staff Picks! This week at the cupping table, Ethiopia, Sumatra, and Colombia dominated in terms of arrivals. We also have the beginnings of an influx of Brazilian offerings, but this month truly seems to be the calm before the storm. The Ethiopian selections in particular lightened our spirits, as you can see below. Taste in […]