2nd November 2026


Arttu asked me a really good question:
If we had the same farm with lots of varieties, would we be able to taste the difference in variety and what would that be?



Well, excitingly there are some farms like this: Santurio Sul run by Carmo Coffees, Finca Inmaculada in Colombia and many other places. But the reality is, the impact of the weather and the soil is so strong that some varieties do not shine in certain conditions. I’ve had many many Brazilian Gesha/Geisha coffees that are very disappointing and not floral at all. As you tasted in the Christmas Bragging Box you had the Guatemalan Ruiru 11 (a Kenyan variety) that you experienced as too sharp. Not everything works well in every soil type.

It is true that certain coffees have certain expressions. A Gesha will very rarely taste chocolate-y and heavy bodied. It will sometimes (often) taste floral. Here is my summary of how I’d expect main varieties to taste, as a broad brush approach.

Typica – Florals, Lighter body, good citric or malic acidity, definitely sugarcane/caramel sweetness

Caturra – Sometimes floral, definitely citrus, definitely some nice caramel sweetness, sometimes a little nutty

Catuai – Often chocolate-y, sometimes expressed as a lighter body, but can vary, often some nuttiness. Actually Catuai is a great example of a fairly bland coffee that is clean and can express more acidity or more sweetness depending on location and processing.

Red Bourbon – A little like Catuai or Caturra, this is a coffee that when well processed can be: floral, citric, complex, with red fruit and chocolate notes, a really impactful coffee (for instance, when I judged El Salvador Cup of Excellence, a red bourbon like this WON the whole thing). In contrast, a more basic red bourbon might just be chocolate, a little acidity and a nice body.

Maragogype – I’ve had less experience with these coffees, often they are also natural processed and then it’s harder to say what the taste is coming from. That said I’d say this is more of a big body, chocolate coffee and can be fruity if natural processed.

Pacamara – Now this is one of my favourites – for me Pacamara is hard to roast but has a complex spice/florality that is unique to this variety. Often a sort of baking spice (cinnamon) flavour. Also chocolate, normally fruits like apple and some citrus acidity. Very nice when natural processed.

SL-28 – Big red fruits, dark fruits, forest fruits, sometimes grapefruit and tomato when lighter roasted. Often florals and lots of acidity – citrus and malic.

Geisha – Ideally this should be jasmine like with lots of florals, citrus and zesty citrus fruit notes, black tea and sugarcane like sweetness and a delicate finish. It sometimes expresses as more peachy-apricot notes also.

74110-74112 – the most common Ethiopian varieties, I’d expect florals, citrus and black tea. Again sometimes stone fruits like peach. Not ever had this grown outside of Ethiopia though so I’m not sure.



Quality Control: Differing Experiences



So, I was quite surprised you guys didn’t like the Guatemalan or the Indian coffee I picked for the Bragging Box. But I trust you are cupping what you are cupping. What happens then? Well this is a great example of how two different labs, plus different taste buds, can equal a very different experience.



At my work in Osito, just last week I had a client complain about a coffee. It wasn’t bad they said, just not as exciting as the sample. So, I took time to explore how they were roasting it, cup with water more like their water and suggest a few things. In this instance I think the coffee needed a longer roast – not necessarily darker – but just slower and longer. The client said this yielded some success.



With the Hydro Honey from India, I just re-cupped with 40ppm water to get closer to your water profile. Tastes good to me – some cherry, red fruits and caramel notes. I think it also has very interesting florals… I’m curious to know what is different between my experience and yours. Here is the reality of that challenge and all the variables at play:


  • Different water
  • Different grinder
  • Different Ikawa (yes they are supposed to be the same but they ARE NOT due to altitude and usage issues)
  • Different cupping routine/systems
  • The literal coffee is different, in the sense that even if the lot is identical, the beans will be different



There is also the very real chance you do have 30kg of bad coffee and the rest of the coffee is good. Sounds bizarre but it does happen. Maybe bad beans get added back into the bags when the milling takes place, maybe the vacuum seal was broken, maybe just handfuls of bad cherry get through. Who knows? In reality, even with the best protocols these things can happen.



What I’m going to do going forward is cup more with your water PPM – (40 ish) – before I book things for Lehmus. I would also love to know how you roast your samples on the Ikawa so I can also dial that in a little bit more on my end. That these coffees didn’t land well sucks, but if we can use this as a chance to improve how we work together, that is a nice silver lining.


10th October 2026


Thoughts on Roast Fest

Coffees in the competition were all very good. I don’t think there was a single roast that I thought was actually terrible – nothing too light, nothing too dark. So then how is it that one coffee was so much favoured over others? Well, I think Espoon is doing something right; that said some people did wonder if the coffee he submits gets a special treatment with a tiny amount of co-ferments blended in. I don’t think so… but it might explain how he can win everytime? Personally, I don’t think I tasted that in the cups.



It was really nice to see the Finnish community gathering together. It seems like people are generally really friendly and enjoy connecting, which is quite special. The show itself – the Roast Fest – was similar to a few new events that I see popping up in London and a few other places. These are often much smaller coffee events than say Helsinki Coffee Show or London Coffee Festival. In fact, this new breed of shows is often very much pitched as “anti” or the alternative to those events. I think it’s quite a healthy swing the other way because these big events are super impersonal feel overwhelming. With a new more nerdy and smarter audience of coffee consumers, maybe this smaller kind of event might be perfect. The nerds can talk to the roasters directly and that’s probably really nice for them.



This is all really good because…



… the coffee industry is going through a bit of a mean patch. Maybe you caught this already but there have been some really public gossipy spats and fights going on as of late. Here are the two big ones:


  1. There is an Australian discount focused roaster who is claiming to be buying the same coffees as other roasters but charging much less. Specialty Coffee Factory Outlet (SCFO) - https://www.scfo.com.au/ They literally point at the other roaster and their prices, and accuse them of ripping off their customers. In turn, lots of people are coming out to counter these claims. The thoughts are that maybe the lots aren’t the same, that they are twisting the truth. In general, there’s been a lot of accusation making and none of it feels kind or friendly.
  2. Patrik Rolf. Me and Patrik go way back but he may have committed business suicide on a recent podcast and it gathered a lot of attention. Here is the link to the moment: https://www.instagram.com/reels/Dda-08XNdj3/ Basically he said he wanted to write contracts with coffee growers that said something like this – “if you don’t produce the quality we hope, we will reject the coffee at arrival and you have to buy it back from us.” It’s a little like the way supermarkets sometimes ask you to be able to return stock they don’t sell. Except, this would be monumentally harder (with global logistics) and really unfair on coffee producers as they just have to take the word of the roaster who receives the coffee (like they can’t taste it together)… In any case, people have been very angry with Patrik and his brand: April, ever since. What is really interesting about this is that while I think it’s unreasonable, it does highlight the experience of the roaster in that they book coffees, receive them and are disappointed. There’s very little recourse unless there’s a serious quality issue (mold, foreign objects, etc). This is even more painful if you book an expensive coffee – a Geisha or experimental lot – and it is not what you hoped for. That in essence, is what importers are for, to provide some degree of security and risk management for quality. Actually, this is where the margin for importers typically goes – to covering the losses of buying coffees that land and aren’t very impressive.


31st August 2026


The most crazy and modern coffee machines (actually they just re-do the outside of real machines, but looks cool): https://www.instagram.com/tinabobbe/



Some interesting articles that make me think:

Pricing and Ethics - https://dailycoffeenews.com/2026/07/24/this-is-how-you-get-coffee-shoppers-to-follow-through-on-ethical-purchasing/

So according to this article and the associated studies, people will happily pay the same amount, even if the package is smaller if they think the product is ethical. Like, people want ethically produced products and they will choose for them 50-60% of the time IF the price is the same as the other option, even when the bag is much smaller. Ever considered selling smaller bags to the grocery stores and leaning into the ethical approach. Could get some people off Paulig?



Do all cafes look the same? –https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877916626000056

Arttu and me noticed when we were in Amsterdam last year that a lot of cafes look the same. That it is in fact, really hard to create a café space that is really unique space. Yes, some cafes look different to one another but there are sort of waves of styles: original specialty – wood and brick – very new specialty – lots of metal and clean lines. But the cafes often look the same, whether you are in Berlin or Helsinki or LA.  This is such a topic of interest, there has literally been an academic article written on the topic (see link above). If you want a shorter version, here is the article from Fresh Cup: https://freshcup.com/researchers-ask-and-may-have-answered-why-coffee-shops-look-the-same/
It’s pretty laughable that when asked, most people couldn’t identify where a café was located because all the cafes look the same!



Coffee where we don’t expect it!



Over the past few years we’ve seen a real increase in the number of coffees made available from ‘new origins’ that are in the consuming side of the world. First there was Australia, then California, then Denmark (!) and now Netherlandsand Florida. While the European examples are very much for research purposes and nothing else, the most of the US and Australian coffee production is legitimately for sale into other markets. Of course, the prices of all these coffees are staggering when compared to most regular coffees. For instance, Frinj in California sells 100g of their most basic coffee for 45 Euro. At these prices the cost compete with Panama Geisha (which is already overpriced). All of this leads me to ask, if we were to produce coffee truly ethically, in a setting where all the workers, the owners, etc, made good “first world” wages, maybe coffee would cost $100-200 dollars per kg for green coffee. Maybe it would be a truly luxury product.


4th August 2026


Given that you launched the new South Sudanese coffees, here are some more articles about the project and about the situation there re: coffee, etc:

https://www.baristamagazine.com/excelling-in-excelsa-growing-coffee-for-peace-in-south-sudan/

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/3/3/south-sudan-farmers-pin-hopes-on-rare-climate-resistant-coffee

https://www.omwani.com/post/south-sudan-coffee-production-sourcing-guide



Another newsletter to consider: James Hoffmann (the most influential legitimate coffee influencer) just started his own newsletter. First edition is here: https://jameshoffmann.kit.com/posts/the-drip-feed-issue-1-from-james-hoffmann



Side-hustles     



As the master of side hustles, let me tell you, people can often spend a lot of time doing other jobs than their own. In Iceland I have seen that many people have more than one job (but there they often work less than 40 hours a week total - https://www.efta.int/media-resources/news/iceland-has-highest-employment-rate-europe). In any case, Arttu was curious about the reality that Paulig has changed to be more of a crisp/chips company these days and many other roasters local to Finland are doing ‘side hustles’ – better said, they have other sources of income.

N fact,

To be honest, I think generally this is quite uncommon in the roasting world. I think most roasters in specialty coffee are focused on coffee and nothing else. There are a few exceptions, the first and biggest that comes to mind is Tchibo in Germany. Tchibo is a little like Paulig and is the roasted coffee market leader in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary. But for the past 30-40 years it has been growing in it sales of household goods and clothing. In fact, I have heard that more German’s know Tchibo for its socks than its coffee! Here is its online webshop for women’s clothing – definitely not just a coffee company.



For specialty roasteries I think the biggest secondary income these days is merchandising and clothing. Consider Dark Arts or Friedhats who both have merchandising pages and are often putting out new things: magazines, scarves, incense, board games, all sorts of stuff. Going back to James Hoffmann, the founder and owner of Square Mile, he also has a merchandising company just for fun random stuff: https://tenshundredsthousands.com/This sort of hobbyist, fun, almost ‘lifestyle’ brand merchandising is very common and I think some roasters make good money in this area.  



Otherwise, I think some roaster’s side hustle is… their cafes! And beyond that also events. For instance, Manhattan Coffee in the Netherlands also has a really productive and successful events business that actually predates the roastery. Also, the other most common way to make more money is to sell equipment – brands like A Matter of Concrete (https://amatterofconcrete.com/) – snap up exclusive distribution deals so everyone in their region or country has to work with them.

30th June 2026


World of Coffee Brussels



Goodness – this was a hot one. With temperatures around 36-38 degrees, I’m amazed anyone drank any coffee. But we did! And in fact, the show itself wasn’t crazy warm so that helped.


There were a lot of things I noticed and I’ll break them down in no particular order:


  1. For the first time in awhile I saw a lot more washed/regular natural process coffees than co-ferments. A lot of these coffees shows of late are FULL with ‘special’ weird and wonderful coffees, like the Juicy line up you have now. I don’t think these coffees are bad, but when they are the only thing on offer (something I’ve genuinely experienced at coffee shows over the last two or three years), it does quickly grow tiresome. The prediction is people are losing interest in these types of coffees and that does seem to be the case.
  2. There are a lot of copy cat brands:
    CropSto instead of Cropster. Grainguard instead of GrainPro. In fact, Timemore, a brand that was considered a knockoff of Hario, is now deemed legitimate and other brands are copying them. Overall this presence of cheap knock off brands was a little funny. I’m not sure if it shows a maturing industry or just the reality that in every industry people are copying each other.




  1. Milkbok

    A few years ago a trend started in barista competitions of using ‘freeze distilled milk’. This is a sort of milk, where you literally freeze the whole thing, punch a whole in the carton, then allow it to defrost and the mosts watery parts of the milk are removed. Affectively concentrating the milk and making it fattier and sweeter. For the first time, I saw a company selling this product: https://www.milbok.eu/ These guys are based in Czech but it’s a UHT Longlife product so if you ever want to have the best milk for coffee ever- maybe consider reaching out.
  2. Turns out when you adjusts for inflation, coffee really isn’t so expensive at the moment. The picture below shows that in the 1980s the prices were actually MUCH higher.






  1. Speculation in the coffee market – commodity market – accounts for around 80 times what the physical market does. I couldn’t believe this but it was a fact shared by someone on a pricing discussion and I do trust his facts. So that means for each container that Café Imports books for Lehmus, there’s 80 fake containers moving around. Long story short, speculation when you look at all the different factors of coffee pricing, is by far the most important. This is a little scary because it means if I convinced everyone to buy coffee, or everyone to sell coffee, that’s more important than a frost in Brazil or the Coronavirus.

  2. People like bland things: https://europe.worldofcoffee.org/blog/congratulations-to-the-2026-coffee-design-awards-winners

    Don’t get me wrong, these are all nicely designed, but none feel particularly innovative. This clean, warm, friendly branding feels to be dominating the coffee market. Something to notice for new products or ideas.


3rd June 2026


Interested in some market predictions? Have a lot of time? Feel free to watch this webinar I was recently invited to: Link



Like a bit of science and love coffees with good acidity, this is an decent dive into where those acids come from and how the taste is formed: Link



When will this business get better! Is the economic situation kind of the same as in europe, US and nordics? Or are you seeing somewhere that everything is going great?



Oh dear… never! The reality is that as long as I’ve been in business I see that people struggle to make a profit. When coffee is cheap, when loans are cheap, when labour is cheap. Somehow, all that happens is that the market gets more competitive and ultimately coffee gets cheaper and margins get smaller. In reality, the businesses that flourish and succeed are those who have a healthy business model in all conditions. I think that is the real challenge. It’s also a matter of perspective ‘when will this business get better’ – because for farmers it’s a good time and  for 20+ years its most been a bad time.

In reality the time when the business gets better is when the price of the coffee is based not on the market, but on the farmers cost of production and their needs. Then we have static, stable and reliable pricing for different qualities and origins. Only issue there is the whole socio-economic structure we’ve been is predicated on growth and people love the stock market for that reason. To try to have coffee no long traded on the stock market would require there to be much lower interest in the commodity overall and that is not happening anytime soon.



I think I hear people struggling all across Europe and the US has really high prices these days, like roasteries are still feeling the pain of the tariffs from last year. I’d say that the Asian and Middle Eastern markets continue to grow and people there are happy to spend good money on nice coffee. It’s all new to them, so there’s less resistance to new ideas, to higher prices, etc, etc. I think Europe was saturated with coffee long before specialty coffee came along. Consider that there is so so much coffee drank in Finland but almost all of it goes via Paulig. If suddenly all Finnish people stopped buying Paulig and bought specialty coffee, all the specialty roasters would have to double, triple or even quadruple in size and you’d need lots more roasters to serve all the people. So the real challenge is Paulig.







Why should an importer or a roaster, for that matter, focus on a specific origin?



Actually this is a really important window into looking at different importers. The contrast between an importer like Osito or Café Imports is actually really large. We all play along like we are the same but our focus is totally different. I doubt anyone at Café Imports, Falcon, Sucafina or Ally would say this but there is an understanding that they want to be like a grocery store/supermarket. In an ideal world, the grocery store wants you to come to them for all your food. Your vegetables, fruit, your meat, your cleaning products, they will try to sell you everything that can as long as they don’t make a loss (or a big loss). That is how these importers work: they don’t ever want you to HAVE to go anywhere else. If you need Brazil, they have it. If you need special microlots, they have it. If you need Jamaica Blue Mountain or Hawaiian coffee… they have it! The worst case scenario if that you take your business elsewhere because as soon as you do, you might realise you can actually work with a bunch of their rivals and maybe get better coffees, service, or something else, from a competitor.



So if CI is like that – what is Osito or another small importer like? Well they’re more like a boutique shop. They don’t have what you need from everything, they focus on one or a handful of products and don’t want to compete with everything. There’s an understanding that they cannot offer all the coffees you might need, but hope that their points of difference and their quality (whether that’s coffee quality, or story, or something else) make them good enough to convince you to work with them. In reality, of course, Osito and others also grow to eventually become more and more like the supermarket. But, it depends on the goals of the individuals who run them. For instance, Cofinet and Caravela where originally Colombia focused businesses, like Osito, but they now cover a LOT of origins and do seem to be focused more on the goal of becoming a supermarket style brand. I know that Osito doesn’t want to be that big, we have no goal to replace Café Imports or supersede the big players. We run our own course and want to find a way to be profitable and successful in our niche.



On the specific origin thing: I think this is often very personal and driven by stories and founders. Like Primavera and Coffeebird were both founded by Guatemalans; so that’s what they focus on. Kyle met Jose in Colombia, and they decided to start Osito to be focused on Colombia. Ensambles is Mexican owned and focuses on Mexico. These things are often rooted in the start points and the experience of the founders. If you know a particular origin or coffee better then that’s what you will focus on. It’s rarely some big smart strategy thought up in a boardroom meeting. In fact, this focus on specific origins feels deeply connected to the reality that specialty coffee (even when its commercial trading and importing) is a passion business. People start importing brands because they are passionate about specific producers, origins or stories.



Something that isn’t coffee but super cool: recipes built from a chemistry standpoint - https://www.instagram.com/ayo.the.chemist/


6th May 2026


The Perverse Impact of CASH



Cash moves everything around… dollar dollar bill y’all! Sadly this is often the truth and I wanted to explore the strange impacts of cash, paying quickly and how this effects quality.


Imagine if someone came to you and said they would buy a lot of Lehmus coffee and they want it tomorrow, but they’ll pay you straight away. Maybe they ask for a discount. All sounds pretty reasonable. Well this happens as well at origin with producers and often, quite a lot more than we realise. You see, coffee growers are often cash poor. They need cash to pay for all sorts of things and with a crop that produces only once a year they often find themselves very short on money as the harvest comes around.



In Colombia, for instance, producers will sometimes pulp their coffee and sell the wet pulped parchment to a middle man or chayote for cash. These quick upfront payments are often done at prices way below the coffee market price, but provide liquidity to the producer. The chayote or middle man then dries the coffee, bulks it with other producers coffees and sells it all at market price making a cut like that.



In Brazil, we see the desire for quick money pushing producers to even pick unripe coffee. See the picture attached- this is literally picked coffee that was being dried on 28th March (way before the real Brazil season starts). This is particular bad last year and this year as the coffee prices are so high. Producers worry the prices will drop, so they’d rather pick unripe poor quality coffee that comes with a negative price, but sell on todays spot market which is at an overall higher price. Consider this example: The market on day 0 (zero) is $4/lb and the market on day 60 is $3/lb. Producer A has poor quality coffee that has a negative value (let’s say minus 25c/lb). Producer B has a great coffee that has a positive value or differential (say plus 50c/lb). If both producers could deliver on day 0, Producer A would get $3.75/lb and Producer B would get $4.50/lb. BUT, in reality to get that good quality coffee, well dried and well sorted, probably it will take 30-60 days. So the reality is, Producer A delivery their low quality at day 0 and gets $3.75/lb and Producer B delivers at day 60 and gets $3.50/lb.



Starting to get it? The incentive to get good cash now, pushes down quality.



Being paid quickly can also be a bargaining tool for exporters. In the past I’ve heard of certain people committing to paying quickly to producers if they can get a discount. Even in the specialty market. So, while a producer could sell their coffee to someone like Osito (genuinely) who might offer more money but it takes 2-3 weeks to get paid, they may choose to pay to someone else (say… Caravela *cough cough*) and get a worse price but paid quicker.



Anyways, cash is important, paying early is important, it all has an impact and sadly often it isn’t the specialty market that benefits. Something to mull over.


2nd April 2026


Big News?

If this can be believed this - https://www.instagram.com/p/DWlHOBrlRvT/?igsh=OWR4eGh4NWNtejZh– is big news. EUDR was a major thing coming on the horizon and many producers and traders have spent a lot of money preparing. If its scrapped many will be relieved but also many will be upset. For instance, one of our partners in Ethiopia spent around $15,000 getting the data together. That’s just money they will have to throw away now… and they won’t be the only one. What is suggested instead is a sort of ‘levy’ or ‘tax’ on different origins, which will be re-invested into forestry. I actually like this plan better, so I’m happy if this news is true.





Summer Coffees



We have two nice lots picked out for the Summer Coffees:


  1. Buhweju, Washed Uganda from Lunar Washing Station

    This is a fun one – comes with a little UFO on the bag. We did a peaberry lot from this group for the calendar. This is a classic washed from this area. It is an SL28 variety that is more commonly seen in Kenya, but has been popular in this part of Uganda. This area, the Rwenzori mountains, borders the DR Congo and is, understandably, very dangerous! It is also apparently very rocky and is sometimes called the ‘Mountain of the Moons’ – hence the name ‘Lunar’ washing station. This is the one washing station from Long Miles in this area; Long Miles provide the Burundi coffees that you sometimes get for the Christmas Calendar.
  2. Fazenda Recreio, Natural, Brazil

    This is the farm I’ve visited most of any farm in the world. Maybe 8 times! It’s a smaller Brazilian farm, which means around 5000 bags. Still a lot but not so much mechanization. They don’t use machines to pick but have pickers who visit for part of the year.  They’ve won Cup of Excellence and placed in the competition a few times more. They process with naturals, pulped naturals but also washed! What’s really fun is that they produce olives and sparkling wine too – great place for an origin trip. This is a classic natural Catuai lot, rich, creamy and lots of chocolate.



A few nice videos to check out:




3rd February 2026


The Euro is up in value right now, so it’s a good time to book coffees. Especially as the coffee market is a little lower (around $3.30-3.35/lb). What’s interesting about this is that the US dollar is falling in value rather than the Euro going up. This is important, because the dollar is also losing value against the Mexican Peso, the Burundian Franc, the Colombian Peso, etc, etc. That means that – because coffee is traded in Dollars – the cost of buying coffee will also go UP. If you have a strong dollar then you can buy more foreign currency with it, including the currencies of producing countries. Bit complex, but basically the Euro looks stronger but the true cost of coffee maybe hasn’t gone down so much because it’s the US dollar that’s lost strength.



Identity and Coffee?



It’s a really interesting time in the industry, because the long term impact of higher prices is starting to really be felt. Short term – last year – when the prices were high most people could find some creative ways to get cheaper coffee, or had old contracts at lower prices. Now most of that has gone away and people can’t just suck up the higher costs anymore. Coffee has to get more expensive.



So, why is that causing issues? Well higher prices force cafeterias and restaurants to really choose for quality or to drop it. In the past specialty was more expensive, but not much more. Now it should be much more expensive.



What’s an even more interesting and challenging question is: what is specialty coffee if all farmers are paid well? You see, from the beginning specialty has had a dual identity: good coffee and good for the world. The idea being, in order to get better quality we need to pay more than commodity coffee and, as such, we get better coffee and do good while enjoying it. However, this has always been a bit of a funny dynamic. In reality, if we were motivated exclusively by paying farmers more, we would discourage quality – accept the quality produced by the farmers as it was and just pay more (!). Of course, there is an argument to be made that regular people wouldn’t have just paid more for better ethics, but if that was true, Fairtrade wouldn’t exist. People, at least some people, care enough about farmers being paid more that they don’t need better quality to pay more for coffee.



In any case, now that farmers are universally well paid for their coffee (almost universally), specialty has lost half it’s identity. It’s not really about ethics, it just about quality now. And actually, because of the higher prices, quality is probably going down. Like, farmers aren’t going to produce their best of the best coffee because they get paid well for it regardless. Why spend 2-3 hours extra cleaning your coffee before you deliver it for a few more cents, your paid well as it is. “Not worth it, might as well just deliver it how it is, the price is good now anyways.” I definitely see that in the coffees I handle these days – more quakers, more broken beans, less uniformity in the screen sizes. Quality IS going down.



It’s a funny thing that without low prices, specialty is having a crisis of identity. We needed the evil of low prices, to provide a reason for being. Now that’s gone, it begs the question for many roasters: “what is our true purpose and identity?”



I wanted to explore a few things that are on the way and my thoughts on them:



Rare Origin: South Sudan



South Sudan is the newest country in the world. It was founded on July 9, 2011 by a referendum of the people of South Sudan. Interestingly, it has always laid claim – along with Ethiopia – of being the birthplace of coffee. Whether that is true is hard to say, but coffee definitely comes from the area of Ethiopia and South Sudan, so it is very possible. However, unlike Ethiopia and much of East Africa, South Sudan doesn’t have a strong culture of producing coffee. For all these reasons, it’s super exciting that we’ve sourced two lots from this origin: an Excelsa coffee and a Robusta. Two non-Arabicas. I doubt the profiles will be as good as the best coffees Lehmus has BUT they will be interesting coffees and the novelty of a new origin, and new types of coffee is very cool. Be aware Jussi-Teemu, these may roast differently than what you’re used to. Likely both will roast like Robustas. So profiling them to be light enough for the nerds who will buy them could be hard.



Co-Ferments



We are working on a box for the Summer of ‘juicy’ co-ferments. I’m not a huge fan of these coffees but we recognize they are very popular with a lot of people. The real question is, are they what they say they are? It is still unknown if the co-ferments are truly co-fermented with the fruit to provide the flavour OR if there is a special sauce being added. I’m of the believe that some kind of edible essential oil OR other synthetic flavouring is added directly to the fermentation stage and that is how these flavours are produced. We’ve talked about this before, but we really don’t know so this will be interesting to see how the coffees are received. We haven’t picked the final line up yet but likely Passion Fruit and Mango are two of the lots on the way 😊


5th January 2026


Writing a newsletter into the past but that does give me one more week to drum up good ideas to share.

We spent a tremendous amount of time last year looking at the coffee market price. It really was the headline of the year and fundamentally has affected the industry in many ways. Many of your Finnish competitors are struggling and some may go out of business soon – but Lehmus is going strong. (Lappeenranta! Lappeenranta!).



When we look back on 2025 what really stands out as the big news from the year:


  • On 5th February 2025 the C-Market price broke 400c/lb (USD)! It went as high as $4.40/lb and has been on a rollercoaster ride since. What’s most interesting is right now it feels fairly stable at $3.50 per lb. A price which feels okay for a lot of roasters, but would have been eyewatering (aka very expensive) just two or three years ago.
  • A reminder that they decided from 2028 onwards coffee would be priced in metric tons. Easier for us to read and understand as Europeans but the prices will look huge.
  • We saw the most expensive cup of coffee in the world at around 700 Euro per cup being sold in the Middle East (… Panama Geisha, no surprise).
  • Keurig bought JDE Peets. This was a big consolidation, as JDE owns Peets, Douwe Egberts and many of the other largest coffee brands in US/Europe. Keurig owns Keurig… well it’s the US equivalent of the Nespresso.
  • EUDR was delayed, again! This is obviously good news for roasters because EUDR meant more paperwork for importers and therefore higher costs. These costs have been postponed. However, this is causing legitimate frustration for some businesses who’ve already invested in the technology and data to handle the new EUDR requirements. Consider, we have a exporting partner who paid $15,000 USD to map his farms. He can’t ask for that money back from us or the roasters until we need the EUDR… so now he’s short money for nothing. Even worse, many people started new businesses to offer services for exporters and importers (and large roasters) around EUDR. These businesses may go bankrupt as they wait for clients who expected to need their services for over two years while the law was delayed.
  • Tariffs – this was massive in the US. Really changed the game and caused a lot of pain and headaches. Imagine your house Brazil costing 12-13 Euro per kg or more, that’s what it was like in the US. It has fundamentally caused changes in how roasters were buying and will buy in future. We are glad it is over, but it’s been very difficult for the Osito US team and no doubt many other importers too.
  • We got a brand new scoring sheet from the SCA… but I and most people seem still totally unsure what it is. In reality, I don’t know anyone who has adopted it. It’s very confusing.



Predictions for 2026:


  • I think many roasters who survived the last 12-16 months of high prices have done so with old contracts. They had contracts for coffee they wrote years ago when rates were good or they bought from origins that were slower to rise their pricing (like Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya). I think this year, those old contracts will run out and those ‘cheaper’ origins will be asking for more money. This could drive prices of coffee across the market (both in supermarkets, cafeterias, restaurants, etc) even higher. It could also drive some people out of business. For those businesses that have been using their low priced inventory to retain customers, and haven’t been able to put their prices up much, they may seriously struggle when they have to buy new coffees at much higher rates.
  • Maybe less of a prediction and more of a hope: we get tired of all the coffee festivals and some of them go away. There are so many coffee festivals now; I mean consider that the coffee roasting competition in Helsinki also became a festival, so now even Helsinki has two coffee festivals. Almost every major city has a festival – some are good for selling to home consumers, but many just cost the roasters money and do little to grow the brand. They are also getting more expensive. London Coffee Festival was one of the first city festivals, and cost like 10 Euro in the beginning and if you said you worked in the industry, even as a barista, they would let you in for free. It’s recently been sold to a big corporation and tickets are now like 100 Euro and they almost never give away free tickets. The logic of this all doesn’t make much sense any more and I hope that they’ll be fewer festivals but the ones that remain will be really top quality.
  • The coffee business that grow and flourish will be the ones who are smarter. I think there’s always been a fairly relaxed approach to the coffee market and currency markets with roasters. Now, I think there is a world where more roasters are hedging on the stock market and on the currency market to ensure they get the best prices possible. I already see some roasters using the inverted market to their advantage. I might even suggest you speak to Simone at Café Imports about booking in the price of next years Fox coffee now, it could be a deal with the current strength of the Euro and the backwardisation.
  • EUDR will finally happen. It has to – it just has to because of all the things I said above. 2027 onwards, it is happening.
  • Smaller importers are struggling, arguably Osito is in the minority where we are doing okay. I think there’s a world where some small importers go out of business this year and maybe some people stop taking these risks.
  • We see more robusta in supermarket blends and overall the quality of coffee gets worse. Sounds very doom and gloom, but seriously, with higher prices and people always looking for a deal, there is no other possibility than that large roasters will use even lower qualities and put more robusta in – especially now Robusta has sunk down from its $5-6/kg high prices (it is now around $3.50/kg).
  • We see some internationally famous cool branded roasters coming out of the Middle East or Asia. I think for a long time, Middle Eastern and Asian cafes have bought coffee from European and US roasters in order to look fancy, special and cool. I’m already seeing some places in Europe stocking Japanese and Singaporean roasters. I think that in the next 12 months someone like Friedhats or Manhattan or Sey Coffee, will appear but in a non-Western country and the super coffee nerds here will be ordering their coffees in. Watch this space!
  • There is a bizarre trend of really small roasters doing really high end coffees – here are some examples https://shoebox.coffee/ & https://cafen.co.uk/ & https://module-roast.com/ - none of these roasters are really doing large volumes, but they do high end. I am not sure what to make of this, I don’t see it stopping but I’m not sure what the future is for these brands. Just a point of interest for me.



Let’s see what 2026 brings and get going on the Calendar straight away. Keen to see what we can do, what new projects can be developed and if we can’t make you all rich doing it (joking, we will never be rich…)


A stupid but interesting video to finish the year: Why does Coffee make you Poop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZnAQ-PWQdg

7th November 2025




Sorry for the delay on this one, I spent the last few days mostly in bed resting. Horrible fever and flu. Probably something Arttu gave me when he visited 😉



Jokes aside, a lot happened last week when Arttu was here and I wanted to give a bit of a feeling I got for the Amsterdam coffee scene and somethings that stood out:


  • Expensive coffee… we tried a lot of expensive coffees, in many cafes there were options for filters and espressos for between 6-12 Euro per serving. We didn’t often choose for those, but it stood out that everywhere we went they were available. Regular priced coffee was also available (3-4 Euro per cup) and that was often just as good. In fact, it really stood out to me in one shop where I did opt for a special 10 Euro cup of filter, that it was nice but not very special. I wonder, if I wasn’t a coffee nerd/coffee professional, I’d find this kind of experience really off putting and make me not want to go back to a specialty shop. Imagine spending 3-4 times what you normally would on something and finding it not much better than the normal version.
  • Cool design… sort of… Originally I wanted to show Arttu some shops which I felt had interesting, cool designs – places like DAK or Four by Four. But actually after spending two days visiting lots of these cafes what felt surprising was that the ‘new/unique/interesting’ designs were all pretty similar to one another. Nothing new or unique, just a new trend/style. Developing a truly unique café space is obviously really hard. What also stood out was that a lot of the places had sacrificed efficiency (getting lots of seats in or arranging things so they ran smoothly) and/or comfort (many of the seats were just downright uncomfortable) for the sake of looking new and cool. I mean, you can only sit on a few hard metal seats before you realise you’d much rather be somewhere else.
  • Showroom… in lieu of a café can you do a showroom? What does this mean? Does it mean its more of a shop than a café, more of an event space than a café? Or as Arttu said ‘is it just an excuse to pretend to be something different’? We saw a few places claiming to be showrooms and not cafes and that was also interesting.



What does all this mean? Well in reality I think it means what I’ve long thought – innovation in coffee is actually really hard in coffee. People just re decorate the same things but the basics don’t change. I mean DAK for instance is pretty innovative, lots of fancy gears and machinery, but at the end of the day, the coffee was fine and I felt the space was missing a lot of humanity and connection. As a friend said to me “A cafe that nails all the basics and gets nothing wrong could be said to be a stand out.” And, very few cafes in Europe really do this. I think going back to basics and having good simple coffee, served well, with nice places that make money, that sounds like a better idea that random metal chairs that look cool for a year until everyone complains how cold they are to sit on.



Anyways, what else is going on in coffee?



The market is high again – why? Actually a bit of a puzzle. Brazil is posting good numbers for next years harvest … but maybe farmers are not delivering at the moment. That right, they have stock of coffee and are just holding onto it. Why? This is a unique one – the farmers have made so much money this year already, they don’t want to sell more coffee now because it could be too high a tax bill to pay. So, they wait until January. Could be the market drops then – we see. The mystery is also that the tariffs Trump put in place that are also making the coffee price high, might go away anyday. The tariffs are being reviewed by the supreme court.



EUDR - it is happening. I really think finally it’s going to happen. What could this mean: well the reality is that the range of coffees available may go down for a few months at least. It could drive up pricing for coffee and, in fact, for many other things. Packaging may go up a lot of in price because tree products will also fall under this. May be a good time to buy cardboard and packaging stuff before it gets more expensive.

28th August 2025


Bizarrely cheap Espresso Machine: Okay so I’ve seen a lot of coffee celebs promoting this machine in the past weeks – Casabrews. I can buy one locally for just 150 Euro... which is totally wild. I’m not sure if this is just wildly cheap or if all these famous people are just being paid a lot to lie. Here’s a video to consider it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49SKHJcRYqw
A podcast worth listening to: Okay so I’m in this one... if you want all my most controversial thoughts in one place, spare me an hour: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0ypnKG8p2tYnyy7U4lEP5Y?fbclid=IwY2xjawMe1F1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF0Q041S043UEFya3hsWWt0AR5Tz6Au1yJeiUKUUP06OX-A9TUfFt_m63Q_l5SA8ehOyzECg5ZvBRi1tSMutg_aem_B6nv0cyQLNlx9oTZPbNjRg

1st August 2025


It is Summer so a lot of things are quiet. We notice this at the Osito office, that people aren’t booking coffee or ordering much. But at the same time, there are a lot of things going on…. Mostly TARIFFS!



It’s a kind of boring topic in a way, the amount that the US chooses to charge for certain goods at the point of entry. Customs stuff. However, the current situation is likely to have a major impact on the coffee industry.

In essence, a week or two ago Trump decided he was angry with the Brazilian courts for pursuing Jair Bolsonaro – the previous President – for potentially trying to overturn the election a few years ago. Jair and Trump are buddies and Trump wants to support his friends. I won’t go into how crazy it is to meddle in the politics of another country in the way Trump is doing, but suffice to say, this is pretty crazy. So, how is Trump applying pressure? He has said he would put a 50% tariff on Brazil.


50% on Brazil means 50% extra costs on the cheapest coffees the US uses. Many people thought, given how much the US lives on coffee (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/coffee-consumption-by-country) and is the worlds biggest importer of coffee, that Trump might make coffee from Brazil excluded from the tariff. And, he did make some exceptions. But… not coffee! So, as of today, there is theoretically a 50% tax on Brazilian coffee arriving into the US. This will totally change the flow of goods globally.



Imagine if you are a good sized Brazilian coffee producer, you make say 10 containers. 5 containers are presold to a large roaster or importer in the US. But now, the importer/roaster, decides that they cannot pay this 50% tariff and their clients won’t buy at these new prices (a world where Brazil is more expensive than Ethiopia or Colombia). So, they cancel the contracts, maybe pay a fee or penalty, or maybe drop their order from 5 containers to 1-2. Suddenly, you need to go out and sell a lot of your coffee to new buyers, putting pressure on you as the producer to drop your prices. So does this mean the C market price goes down? No, the C market or stock market price goes UP! Because the amount of Brazilian coffee available in the US and the access to affordable coffee is going down. Simultaneously, the C Market is likely to go down, while Brazilian producers may drop their prices (start selling below the C market rate) just to ensure they have buyers for all their stock.



At the same time demand for other cheaper coffees that are being harvested right now will skyrocket. A nice basic Colombian may get even more expensive because US roasters see that as cheaper than Brazilian coffee (with the 50% tariff). Peru and maybe some African countries who begin shipping now, could see prices surge from US buyers who are willing to secure prices better than the Brazil rate.



Overall, we have to just wait and see but these new tariffs really matter and if they don’t change it could make business for importers like Osito very painful. Cashflow (how much money is in your bank account) is hard to manage for all businesses. Much more so, when you need to start paying arrival customs of at least $60,000 per Brazilian container that arrives.



Interesting article: https://dailycoffeenews.com/2025/07/29/what-is-a-light-roast-researchers-outline-vision-for-a-universal-standard/

This is a short article, but it highlights some research that may finally be able to create a scale of light-dark for roasting that we can all agree on. Would be a positive change to have a good universal standard on this!



Okay, for now, that’s it. The Christmas calendar is 23/24 coffees sorted and we are at 16 origins. There is a good chance the last one will put us on 17 origins. The coffees will cover a range of varieties from tiny to huge in terms of size and there will be every sort of process you can imagine. This should be a fantastic exploration of coffee, so tell all your friends to order one!

1st July 2027


Why so little coffee available? (buckle in this is a long one)

Selling green coffee is in one way very easy. You purchase a given quality, pay for the goods, the transports (insurance, etc) and then make that available to roasters. You can slap on a small margin but ultimately you never have to put your hands on the bags and the work can be done behind a desk and with the access to some coffee quality equipment (moisture meter, sample roaster, etc). This is the kind of ‘middleman’ work that often gets a bad name. That said this kind of work does clearly add some value.



What is fatally flawed in this logic is it assumes that every coffee bought can and will be sold for the full price (incl. margin) that the importer has in mind. The reality is that unless it is a ‘back-to-back’ sale where the seller has a buyer already lined up, there is always an element of risk. Lets say you bring 300 bags of coffee to market and you expect 150 will be sold to buyers of the coffee who have worked with that coffee, that quality, or just are good partners. The other 150 bags you will list ‘spot’, i.e. available on your offer list for anyone to come and purchase. Let’s say 100 of those bags sell at full price. 12 months go by and your still have the other 50 bags, they are fairly ropey, old and less vibrant than before. So you sell these at cost price just to get rid of them, or maybe even a loss. Overall you should have made money.. except even this is still too simple a model.



The costs of having those 150 bags available ‘spot’ include storage, which you are paying, and more importantly, financing costs for the credit to purchase the coffee in the first place. As such, if those 150 bags have a value of say $10 per kg, monthly storage would be $150 per month and financing might be $900 (assuming a fairly good rate of 12% APR). Over the course of a year the 50 bags that do not sell, cost you $3600 in financing and warehousing of $600. So, if you sell these coffees at cost, they will lose you $4200.



And lets say, you have to sell them at a LOSS. Which, happens quite a lot, then you lose a lot of money. Let’s continue this theoretical: 50 bags valued at $10 but sold at ‘market rate’ today would go at $6.65 per kg. This is often what happens with really old coffee, it gets sold close to the commodity market price because that’s the value it commands. As such, the losses would be $10,050 plus the financing/warehousing totallying $14250!



If you have a margin on your container of $0.50 per lb on the originally container you would have made around $16,000 on the 250 bags sold at full margin. The losses of those 50 bags basically wipe out all that profit. Even in a world where you have a very healthy margin of $1 per lb, you would make $33k on the 250 bags and lose almost half the profit on the 50 unsold bags.



So, why all these theoreticals? Well the more expensive coffee is, the more expensive financing is (warehousing is fairly static). The more expensive coffee is the bigger the potential losses if/when you have to sell at close to market rate. Naturally, the obvious choice for importers is not to import those 150 bags for the spot sales but just to purchase the 150 bags you were almost 100% sure you could sell at full price and not offer so much spot coffee.



I think this is the main driving reason why coffee appears so limited in terms of offerings. On top of that there could be two other things which I have seen develop over the past few years. (1) Roasters in Europe are more keen to booking preshipment sample than a few years ago. When I was with Café Imports, almost no one did business this way. Only the big players who knew things well/took coffees on preshipment. Now a lot more roasters understand this is an option and due to the demand for good coffee, they’ll gladly taste and book on preshipment. So lots of coffees that would have arrived on a spot sheet 5-10 years ago, are being prebooked these days. (2) Maybe there just is less specialty coffee around. With the market being high, something I’ve discussed before, there is no real incentive for many producers to put in the extra 10-50% effort required to turn their commercial quality coffee into well prepared and dried specialty coffee. They just make less effort and sell their coffee quickly at the high market price. So, maybe there literally is less good coffee to go around.



Why is the market at $3/lb?



This is a hard one. In one sense I think that many speculative market are responding to articles like this one - https://www.gcrmag.com/illycaffe-chairman-andrea-illy-shares-2025-industry-predictions/- where Illy’s chairperson said the market will drop to $2.50/lb. This concept is explored more fully in this Coffee Intelligence article: https://intelligence.coffee/2025/06/can-market-predictions-shape-prices/



Overall, the Brazil harvest appears better than expected. Importantly it is much better for Conilon/Robusta and maybe bad for Arabica. So, why wouldn’t Robusta prices fall and Arabica prices rise? Well, the market for Robusta has been SO high the past year that some people shifted Robusta purchases to Arabica’s of low quality. If the Robusta market falls, Robusta buyers will buy more Robusta (sounds obvious) and stop buying Arabica coffees, which brings down the Arabica price.

That said, I am not fully convinced that there is a good reason for the market to have come down to $3/lb. There is no huge change in what we call the ‘fundamentals’ (weather patterns, crop expectations, etc), so in truth the market could be valuing coffee too low right now. That same argument could be made the other way though; that the market has overvalued coffee for the past six months and maybe $3/lb is a more accurate valuation. Overall I feel that we could see prices come back up (because there’s no reason why they shouldn’t) and even if they don’t I do not see the market dropping much more.


And finally … something silly because all this serious coffee chat might bring you down: https://www.instagram.com/manmakecoffee/

4th June 2025


Some Headlines:
  • C Market prices will change forever! When in 2028 they stop using USD per lb and start using USD per metric ton. So, expect to see the C-price jump from 3.50$/lb to $7700…per metric ton.
  • Fellow has released an espresso machine - https://fellowproducts.com/products/espresso-series-1#pre-order – I got the chance to see one in London at the London Coffee Festival and this thing is awesome. The Sage machines are fairly ubiquitous but I think the Fellow will become the new home espresso machine to have.
  • Brazil is predicted to produce less Arabica this year and more Robusta, netting an overall higher export volume but much less Arabica. Expect Robusta prices to fall and Arabica to gain…
  • However, the C-Market dropped to around $3.35 per lb today, the lowest it’s been since late January. What’s more the Euro is trading at the highest rate since late 2021. What does this all mean… it’s a better time to buy than it has been for the past 6 months.



An Article I wrote: https://perfectdailygrind.com/2025/05/high-prices-exporters-hesistant-to-sell-coffee/

This was an interesting one. It explores the nuances of why even though prices for coffee are high, it doesn’t mean everyone is wining and in fact could be bad for exporters (the people who consolidate producers coffee for export to importers).



How is the Advent Calendar progressing:

Excitingly we now 10 of the 24 coffees booked. We are using Fox Coffee Medium and Dark, Myllysaari light and the Pusupuisto Waykan from Guatemala. Alongside this we have plans to offer a tasty Mexican coffee, a Ugandan peaberry, the Sitio Santa Catarina from Brazil, an Ethiopian Anaerobic Natural, a Papua New Guina Natural and a Honduras Natural. Seven different origins so far. We are shooting for at least fourteen, but it would be great to get fifteen or even more. What is in the pipeline is: a more regular coffee from Panama (likely Bourbon washed from Finca Hartmann), a El Salvadorian Pacamara (which will be put in the calendar the day before or after the peaberry, to make a big contrast in the size of the coffees – should get people thinking), an Indian coffee, a Kenyan coffee, a Burundi and likely a Rwandan coffee. There’s obviously lots more than needs to be booked, but I’m trying to explore all avenues to get some really special origins and options for the advent calendar buyers this year. Watch this space!



Worth signing up to: https://gain.fas.usda.gov/#/home

You can sign up to get coffee related harvest/farming updates from the US government. These tell you about harvests, etc, and go into quite a bit of detail. All free of charge. If you just want the highlights and not spam emails, check out this:

https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/coffee-world-markets-and-trade-12182024



Some thoughts – Maximum Efficiency

I was on the phone yesterday with a client of mine who is considering taking a larger site for his roastery. His current location will no longer be available so he has to move out; naturally he felt he should move to a bigger spot. Bigger is better right? However, on the phone he was thinking that maybe this was a bad idea. His rent would go up and the market conditions where he is (labour, energy, etc) are all getting more expensive. He knew with the new space he would have to grow and likely have to open a café in the space just to pay the costs. He was realizing, those things weren’t making him happy and actually he wanted to get back to roasting coffee (that his passion) and not just doing business and administration. How does this connect with Maximum Efficiency? Well, with this situation he knew to make money to pay the rent in the new space, he needs to sell more, he needs to grow. In his current space, he can roast a decent amount but not so much, and still pay himself and a full time colleague and never stress about money. He currently has a very efficient business but one that is about at its maximum capacity. To grow, he would have to lose money, long before he hits the same point he is now. So, is it smart to do a bigger thing at lower efficiency or a smaller thing at maximum efficiency?



I see this when running cafes a lot. A café that serves 100 coffees a day in a take away heavy location, can be run by one person. It’s busy sure but it can be done. Two people, for sure! A café that serves 1000 coffees a day maybe needs like six staff, but they are all working flat out and it makes money. Often the cafes that serve 200-400 drinks per day, without the right systems, have four staff members because when it’s busy they need all four people but when it’s quiet there’s a lot of costs to just keeping those staff in the location. So actually, maybe the café selling 100 drinks a day makes more money than the one that sell like 300 drinks – because that small one is at maximum efficiency and that is where profit comes in.



I give credit to Lehmus for always roasting everything and making money out of it. Older coffees, leftovers (like last years Christmas coffees), it all gets sold. Some roasters are so focused on being quality oriented that when a coffee is a little old or less exciting, they have no avenue/customers who would take it with a darker roast. They end up sitting on sometimes hundreds of kilos of coffee that are going nowhere and only getting worse. This is a terrible business model. You can, of course, factor in ‘unsold coffee’ or inefficiency into a business model. You can charge an extra 25c per kg for all coffee, assuming some will not be sold. Or an extra 20c per cup of coffee for the hours of the day where the café is quiet. But ideally, you charge the most you can while doing the most with the ingredients and products you have, to get to maximum efficiency and the highest profit (without necessarily being ridiculously priced).



All too often, because people are passionate about coffee first and careless about business, there are cafes, roasters, etc, who run like this. And… it’s dumb. So, always something to consider when speaking to cafes and looking at your business. “How can we make this more efficient?” Or even, for cafes you supply, you can offer not just training in coffee but also training in how to make more money from the coffee they have?

11th April 2025


You might have noticed – the market dropped. A LOT. Why?



Well the lazy and easy answer is tariffs. But let’s unpack this a little. Because in a way the price could have gone higher. With trade tariffs at ports of entry, coffee already in the US is now, sort of, 10% discounted against new shipments. Which will likely drive up purchasing of spot coffees or coffees already in warehouses. Demand goes up, price goes up. But, the market as a whole has slumped down and the coffee market has gone down with it. The expectation is that with countries like Vietnam receiving 46% tariffs, India 26%, etc, Robusta prices will SHOOT UP. Meaning, even cheap cheap coffee will get a lot more expensive. All this expensive coffee, the market believes, will bring down the demand.



But, after a short dip down to 325, it has hovered around 330-350c/lb. This is obviously a lot less than $4/lb but don’t forget that the previous all time record for the market before this year was $3.50/lb. So we are still close to coffees all time highs.

And in general, this shows that maybe the speculative and ridiculous part of the coffee price recently has been about 30-70c/lb but the fundamentals (the supply/demand, fears over climate change, etc) represent the $3/lb… so that isn’t going away quickly.


31st March 2025


Instagram Account Worth Following: noa__berger

A coffee scientist and journalist, Noa often has longer form stories on her Instagram, exploring the history behind a certain part of coffee. For instance, she just did one on Nestle/Nescafe and how that got start but also how it became a Global brand.



What’s happening with the market

Maybe a month ago you remember I said March would be really important in deciding the future of coffee prices. Weather in Brazil being the key variable. Basically, if weather was good, which meant a nice amount of rain but not too much or too little, then we might see a good Brazil year and in turn good supplies for the future. Otherwise, it would mean lower supplies for the longer term causing maybe even higher prices. Well, it seems like the rains were fairly good in Brazil. This could mean that, maybe around the end of the year we may see coffee prices drop. It could come sooner but given that none of the stocks will be on hand (in warehouses around the world) until late this year or early 2026, it’s safe to say that the price won’t fall massively until that time. I’d also repeat my prediction, because it’s the prediction of many in the industry, that the price won’t go back down to $1-2/lb, but will stay about $2 per lb. One last note, some trader friends are saying that the speculators might try to push prices up as much as possible as we get closer to the First Notice Day – 22nd April (I think) – so maybe you will see prices go up for a few weeks but this is likely a temporary change. And, one last last thought, all of this could be proven to be wrong if Trump genuinely puts tariffs on Brazil… that may blow up the coffee world.



Rumour?

I don’t engage too much in gossip and I wouldn’t do this unless it came from a trusted source but… apparently Diego Bermudez (who made all the whacky coffees famous) left Colombia over a year ago and hasn’t been back since, because the Colombian government revoked his license to produce coffee for adding additives to his coffees. If this is true it brings an end to the whole debate over “did he add something to his coffees to make them taste like this?” Apparently this is why he is so focused on his projects in Panama now. In any case, whether true or not, there’s clearly something going on with this that could blow up in the near future.



Pink Bourbon

You will have definitely seen this variety around. It was the Wilson Alba coffee from the competition in Sweden. Well, this was a kind of cool, trendy thing maybe 10 years ago. It’s really going mainstream now. I know of a farm in Brazil with it and a farm in India with it. What’s more, from my colleagues on the ground in Colombia we hear that more and more producers (at least those who do specialty) have pulled out all their classic varieties and are now growing Pink Bourbon, Chiriso and Aruzi(Arushi?). So, we are far from seeing the end of all the funny new varieties and in fact, I’d expect less and less normal coffee to come from Colombia and more and more whacky profiles. What is exciting about there being more Pink Bourbon is that this is generally a really tasty coffee (I’ve never had a BAD one) and if it is disease resistant, then it offers a lot to producers (yield, quality and security). Exciting times!



Article Worth Reading:

https://intelligence.coffee/2025/02/some-brands-still-selling-cheap-coffee/

Why? Because actually this is true all the time. One of the big issues at the heart of all coffee businesses, is that if other people use the product you sell to make money, in order just to do marketing… we are priced against people who don’t need to make money. That’s a losing bet and really stops the industry from being more financially viable.

4th March 2025


This is the last time I’ll focus so much on the C-Market price. Then let’s get a bit more varied again, coffee isn’t all about pricing but this is a really interesting time.



I went to a conference last week which cost quite a lot to attend – but they asked me to come as a panelist on a talk. So, free of charge. Which means, free of charge slides for Lehmus!



Please find attached a Coffee Market Analysis from a leading expert who has been working with coffee farm data and visiting farms for over 20 years. This old British man, he was very kind and also very clear about a few things. So here are the highlights:


  • The density of trees that are planted on farms in Brazil has gone up by 50% for Arabica and 100% for Robusta over the last ten years. BUT, production isn’t that much higher in all that time. Meaning, overall Brazil is getting worse and worse crops and the expectations of productions from Brazil have to be limited. However, the lower estimates, from big traders like Volcafe, don’t base they numbers on the accurate up to date tree density but use the old figures. So when Volcafe say 50 million bags, this is maybe out by 10-20 million bags (not great data).
  • If it rains consistently and in a good, normal weather pattern way, in Brazil in the coming month weeks, we might expect a good harvest this year. If that happens, global stocks of coffee will increase and the stock market price will maybe decrease. However, if this doesn’t happen. We will have another mediocre (or bad) harvest and the stocks that we have will be even more used up and… he predicts maybe a $5-6/lb market (!!!). This prediction isn’t crazy because its’ coming from a real industry analyst. We will know a lot more in the coming four weeks so watch this space carefully.
  • The consensus from the people at the conference and this speaker is that the worlds of a sub $2.50 (definitely $2) /lb coffee is gone. This will not change quickly.



There’s a lot of slides and without the speaker some things probably won’t make sense. So, instead of writing a few more paragraphs, please send me questions about the slides and I’ll fill in the gaps.

7th February 2025


What a week. On 5th February 2025 the C-Market price broke 400c/lb (USD). This is a really big record and we have entered into a new period of coffee pricing madness. What are the repercussions… let’s see.


  1. Farmer’s won’t do specialty


This may come as a surprise, but the reality is, if farmers get a good (or even a great price) without putting in any effort then why will they. At the moment, my contacts for commercial coffee in the Netherlands are offering Mbuni Heavy from Kenya and Rio Minas Brazil at 8.50 Euro per kg. For context, these are two fully defective commercial grades. Think the nastiest gas station coffee you can think of. Undrinkable by itself but used in instant coffee and the cheapest blends with maybe some nice coffee to make it palatable. And forget even doing specialty, Thiago, my colleague with Osito in Brazil, is sending videos that the harvest has come early in Brazil… how can that be? Basically, farmers are stripping green, unripe cherry off their trees to dry quickly and sell at todays prices. With high prices we won’t just see farmers discouraged from doing specialty but possibly even encouraged to do low price, low cost coffees because that is what the market needs/wants (overall) and that allows them to reduce their workload, their costs and overall make a good price.


  1. Supermarket coffee will get more expensive

    The buyer at Paulig might well all die from stress this week. If their hearts don’t pop, they might if the market stays strong for a whole year (which it really might). In the short term specialty coffee pricing will be up 3-5 Euro per kg. Which most specialty roasters can handle. But, when you dirt cheap coffee is up 3-5 Euro per kg, this is maybe double or even triple the cost. As prices rise, the value of the worst qualities will also rise. So, even coffees that Paulig might have not purchased before and are so low quality it’s hard to imagine, might be too expensive for them to keep their prices steady. As such, once their existing inventory and trades run out, prices in the supermarket will go up. This could be a good thing for brands like Lehmus. Imagine, if you sell a nice bag of coffee for 9 Euro per bag, maybe 11 Euro in the new market, but Paulig’s house coffee suddenly becomes 8 Euro per bag. Well, maybe people think, “I’d rather pay the extra few Euro and get something better and maybe drink less coffee instead.”
  2. …drink less coffee…

    Realistically people may begin drinking less coffee. If prices are 2x or 3x what they were, I’m sure we will see some people stop coming to the cafeteria (or stop coming so often). They may also stop buying so much coffee. But… maybe they begin buying more coffee to drink at home. I do think, the cafeteria locations are likely to be the ones that might see the biggest drop in consumption.
  3. The prices get higher…

    I predict the price will keep rising. Not forever but for a time. You see, in any market that is volatile there is opportunity for speculative business people to quickly buy and sell container contracts and make money on them. Imagine, if the market is $1 per lb and moves up and down 0.02$/lb per day, then you can’t make much money. But if the price is moving 0.10$/lb every day, then you can buy at the low point and sell at the high point and make maybe $4,200 per contract in a day without doing much more than clicking a few buttons. Suddenly, Gold traders, stock traders and many others might come running to invest in coffee and make a quick buck. All this new interest will only keep the price volatile and keep the price overall rising.
  4. People go out of business

    It’s sad to say, but people who aren’t big and have big finances, but do a lot of cheap coffee and may have contracts to keep delivering cheap coffee – they may go out of business. If you are Paulig you may be stressed but you won’t go out of business. If you are a medium sized roaster without huge finances but big enough to have contracts with supermarkets, schools, hospitals or other places for low prices, you may well go out of business if the market doesn’t change within the coming year. This could also be the case for certain kinds of cafeterias, certain importers or exporters.
  5. Exporters going out of business? Or not?


A few months ago Atlantica, a huge Brazilian exporter, declare (pre) bankruptcy. Basically they made lots of future contracts at low prices. But all of a sudden their farmer partners bailed on their contracts (“We didn’t have a good harvest, we can’t deliver 10 containers, only 1 container… *hehehe*) and this left them in a position of selling coffee at a loss to fulfill contractual obligations. Since then, we’ve been waiting for more exporters to go out of business for the same reason. But that hasn’t happened. I don’t really know why, but it could be that more people will. Or  it could be that governments and large institutions might have to support exporters in some origins to ensure they don’t go out of business.



Want to hear more about this – here is a podcast I was on this week which breaks down a lot of ideas and explores the issues in much greater detail - https://open.spotify.com/episode/5xSLU7rgyuIgJY4d3kdvZ1


31st December 2024


Continued C market Stuff



So, as you’ve seen the market has stayed above $3 for some time now. We are looking at more than $3.20 per lb as being a sort of norm. I do think the chances that the price drops lower than $3/lb in the coming 3-6 months are very low. Let’s see. In particular, what is driving prices in the past few weeks are confirmations that the Brazil harvest is low. Rain for the new harvest also appears poor. In one of the main growing regions, Minas Gerais, where Fazenda IP is, rain is %17 lower than average years. Not terrible, but not good. Sidenote: why is rain important? Like with most crops, in order to flower and grow properly coffee requires adequate rain. In particular what you see is that in good rain years, flowers develop which become cherries. In bad weather years, the tree with either die or put all its growth potential into leaves; leaves mean more sunshine being converted into energy for the plant.



Some historic data analysis

I borrowed this from a colleague of mine, but this hasn’t been released to the public yet, little pre-release for Lehmus:



During the 1970s, when the coffee market was regulated, the C price spiked above $1.40 per pound – a level regarded as the upper limit for consuming countries, as set by the International Coffee Organization (ICO). The market exceeded this threshold in May 1976 and remained above it for a total of 26 months, briefly dipping in July 1978. A similar spike occurred from March 1979 to July 1980, lasting 16 months. In real terms, during the C market’s peak in 1977, the percentage of value added for roasters and retailers dipped to 42%. In 1989, the market was deregulated, ending the quota system. For the purpose of this discussion, I’ll define a price spike as coffee prices exceeding $2 per pound. I’ll focus on the period from 1990 to the present, during which the market has operated without the constraints of a quota system.



Using monthly average price data from 1990 onward, there have been 408 months in total. During this time, prices exceeded $2 per pound for 45 months – in other words, just over 11% of the time.



These price spikes happened in the following months:
  • April 2024 - December 2024 (9 months)
  • October 2021 - September 2022 (12 months)
  • April 2014 (1 month)
  • October 2010 - February 2012 (17 months)
  • April 1997 - May 1997 (2 months)
  • July 1994 - September 1994 (3 months)



What history tells us is that price spikes seldom happen, and when they do, for very short times. The price spike in the 70s lasted a little more than 3 years. On the flip side for coffee producers, I’ll define a price crisis as any period when prices fall below $1.40, aligning with Fairtrade's introduction of a minimum pricing structure to cover producers' cost production. Out of the 408 months, the C market spent 292 months below $1.40 – nearly 72% of the time. And parallel that with 1994, and value added for roasters and retailers was at 81%.



What’s my take...

Start planning for costs based on a $3.20 per lb market, then hold off buying anything until you have to. It is good to have a plan in mind for what it looks like to buy $10 per kg Serra Negra but to be frank, I’d advise that you keep doing the good/medium specialty with Cafe Imports (Guatemala, etc) but be willing to use me or search hard yourself to get some cheaper coffees for the cheaper products.



Now... the calendar!



This is the last time I’ll talk about the advent calender – until we plan next years – but I wanted to give my honest feedback as a user. I received a box like everyone else, and Arttu kindly sent an English copy of the coffee document. Overall, I really enjoyed the coffees and the process of getting a new coffee everyday. I never did anything special with the coffee, I weighed it, ground it and then brewed it on my Moccamaster. Maybe that was the way most people enjoyed the coffee each day in Finland – I hope so. Going day by day, I was surprised and enjoyed the contrast between lighter and darker roasts in particular. My favourite coffees were (in no particular order): both Ethiopians, the Kenyan, the Costa Rica, the Guatemala, the Nicaragua and the Indian coffee. I think my least favourite was the Test Roast and Chinese coffee. What I felt was most impressive about the project was that if someone drank all the coffees, they’d basically have had a full experience if specialty coffee in 24 days: not only lots of origins, but also different taste profiles, different roast profiles, new modern styles like the Nestor and classics like a darker roasted Indonesian (Bali) coffee. A real exploration of specialty without any snobbery. I think that was really great.



One thing I would have loved is if the packages were all the same weight. Some days I got almost 40g of coffee, and other days exactly 30.0g. It would have been nice to get 30g everyday or maybe like 30-32g. With the range being so wide, I knew each day I had to weigh and change my brew water volume accordingly. This is quite picky, but if this could be achieved, I would have loved that.



27th November 2024


It’s been quite a month with regards to the C-Market. So I’ll touch on that a little but I thought we could also talk about the Advent Calendar concept and how different it has worked out for different roasters.



C-Market

As we speak the C-Market is getting close to $3.17 per lb. For reference, this is only 20c/lb less than its record high. However, if we took that previous high and adjusted it for inflation, the price would be more like $14/lb… to technically coffee is still cheap.



Nonetheless, coffee is around 3x what it was 4 years ago and it continues to gain ground and get more expensive. Why (the short version):
  • Stocks are short around the world, there just isn’t all that much coffee in warehouses and for that reason people are willing to pay more for what is available.
  • Why is there is little coffee in warehouses – well the price is so high on the stock market that the future price (for contracts 3, 6, 9 or 12 months from now) is cheaper than the current price. This isn’t the normal and without going into lots of complex detail, if you have coffee right now and it’s hedged on the coffee markets, you actually pay the banks for the right to have it. So, holding stocks is risky and costs money.
  • Climate Change: this is a big topic and is a cause for the underlying growth in the value of coffee but isn’t so much to do with the present spike.
  • Brazil: Some traders are estimating a 1% decline in production in Brazil for next year. Some are predicting 15%. Either way, the assumption is that it won’t be a great year. This drives up the value of the market.
  • Speculators who are just trying to make money are more invested in commodities than in the past because many commodities have shot up in value over the last few years (cacao, sugarcane, robusta, etc).
  • Robusta… yes this is also expensive, so the Arabica price is also being driven up by people buying Arabica to replace Robusta (who would have thought that!).
  • Finally and most importantly, the EUDR delay has not yet been passed into law and the EU Parliament have 2 weeks to make it happen. If they don’t come 30th December 2024, the postponement will be cancelled and EUDR comes live.



To read more about this try these:



In brief, my prediction is, the EUDR postponement law will pass in 2 weeks time and then the price will drop down, but maybe only by 20-30c. I think we will see pricing of between $2.50-3.00 for awhile.



Advent Calendars

Phew… a much lighter topic. But also a really interesting one. In a previous newsletter we talked about how the advent calendar got put together but now we want to do a little comparison. Because, Lehmus’ calendar sold out and many people have clearly taken notice in Finland. However, this concept is not new and it’s very interesting to see how other roasters handle it.


The first advent calendar for coffee I ever saw came from 19 Grams Coffee in Berlin. This was an expensive box with little tins inside, one for each day of the month. These are still availableso clearly the concept worked for them as they must have been doing it for at least 5-6 years now. However, over time the options have grown. Let’s explore what other people are doing with this idea:


  1. The cheapest box I could find was 34 Euro from a Dutch website that mostly specializes in equipment – Coffee Friend. This contains 24 coffees, each coffee is 24g. This is really cheap and also in a kind of nice box, so my assumption is the coffee must be pretty basic. Only beans was available, not ground coffee for this one.
  2. The most expensive is likely this one from The Barn – it was available for 375 Euro (yes…) but they’ve just discounted it (either because it isn’t selling or because it’s Black Friday) down to a still eyewatering 281.25 Euro. This box is just 12 coffees and each one is a Geisha. The box is very pretty but contains just 50g. So, to put that in perspective the cost per gram is 46 cents (0.46 Euro). To brew one cup of coffee from this box (at home not in a shop) would cost you around 8 Euro. No doubt, the coffees themselves are very expensive but if we priced this box in line with Lehmus two new Panama Geisha’s (which were very expensive) the box would cost around 140 Euro.
  3. There seem to be a lot of more expensive options but not so astronomical. The Barn have a more regular coffee offering, again 24 coffees (50g per box) which costs 131 Euro and Onyx an advent calendar of 24 coffees (30g per coffee) at 183 Euro. The Onyx box is especially pretty but The Barn one is also quite complex. Interestingly the Onyx one has coffee from Finca Carrizal like Lehmus and similar Colombians (Sebastian Ramirez, not Nestor Lasso, etc).
  4. In the more affordable range was 19 Grams who I mentioned above, doing a box for 96.50 Euro (with 50g per coffee).
  5. The Advent Calendar that looks the most like Lehmus is from Naughty Dog. It has a similar Box and a guide with 24 pouches labelled from 1-24. This box is available for a staggering 120 Euro… why staggering? Because there is only 20g per coffee. This means that per gram the cost is 2.5x what the Lehmus box was.
  6. Interestingly even Nespresso is getting ion the action. The product is marked as ‘Soon in Stock’ but they are offering 24 capsule for 49 Euro. This is a total of 103g of coffee… making it actually slightly more expensive than The Barn’s Geisha offering (capsule’s don’t come cheap when you work out the price of a per gram measurement).
  7. The other way I’ve seen roasters do this is to offer less than 24 coffees. For instance, Good Life is offering 4 bags of coffee and so were (it’s sold out) Coffee Collective. That is one per week. Crankhouse are doing 12 coffees with 60g each priced at 98 Euro but pitched as very expensive special coffee. This is probably done because its just a lot easier to source 12 coffees or 4 coffees than 24. Pricing on these is often closer to the normal price for coffees but can be very expensive. I think one of the nicest but more expensive options I’ve seen was done by Archetype in the US last year (not available this year) this was around 1kg of coffee for 130 Euro but in very pretty boxes that looked like the buildings the roastery operates out of.



To put this in perspective, Lehmus calendar cost 10 cents per gram. At the highest end Nespresso coffees option costs 47 cents per gram. So, the range of pricing on these products is sometimes as much as 4x what Lehmus charged, but the product is in itself not massively different.



Okay, so a lot of links and a lot of numbers. The reality is the Lehmus roastery calendar was very cheap relative to a lot of the competition. This is maybe why it sold out so quickly. I think when you compare the packaging, the Lehmus advent calendar looks nice but isn’t as impressive as some of these other options. I do think Lehmus is the only roaster offering multiple roast style (light, medium, dark) in the calendar and also the one offering the most origins. That said – I’m excited to try the coffees each day and will be tasting along and making notes – sending them to you at the end of December. I am not so sure I’d be more excited if there was more gold on the box and I’d definitely be more annoyed if the coffees came in lots of small boxes I had to unfold and put in my recycling – a little bag is much easier.


6th November 2024


Donald Trump is big news. Not only because it’s just crazy that he’s officially back, but also because it will affect the markets. Surprisingly many people think that it will improve the market conditions because his business policies are (lower taxes, etc) helpful to large US corporations. Let’s see. Expect more volatility in Euro value and C Market pricing.



I spent the last weekend in Helsinki with Arttu and Jussi. In my role as Director for Osito I was sponsoring the Roasters Challenge. Twelve roasters came together from across Finland to roast the same coffee and pick a winner. Whose coffee was the best? The coffees were roasted on Dietrich, Loring, Giesen, Probat, Ikawa (yes 20+ sample roasts to make 1kg) and other roasters. We cupped them blind and sadly, Lehmus didn’t come out on top.



What was interesting about the competition – well, quite a few things:
  • Similar. The coffees all tasted fairly similar. I found the cupping in Helsinki very hard, many times I went back and changed my scores, changed my notes, etc. It is really hard to taste 12 similar coffees and pick a winner; let along cup 12 of THE SAME coffee with slightly different roasts and pick a winner. Quality was high and despite Lehmus not winning, I think it’s worth saying there wasn’t a single badly roasted coffee from the 12 versions.
  • Goldilocks (not too dark, not too light, this one’s just right). I recupped the coffees yesterday in order from lowest scoring lot to the best scoring in my own lab. I tried to see if I agreed with the order or not. I didn’t fully agree, but what I did learn from the process is that: the darkest roasted coffees scored worst, then the lightest roasted and finally the winners were in the middle. What was most interesting to me, was that the winning coffees tasted simple, if possible a little bland to me. Lehmus’ version had more fruit/citrus notes but also a bit of a bitter aftertaste. The winner had a simple clean sweet profile, but had a short aftertaste and was pretty simple to me. Apparently in this setting, the cuppers/roasters liked the coffees that were clean but not too underdeveloped and that is the only way I can categorize the winning lots. Maybe something to consider for Nordics Best Roaster in Gothenburg?
  • Order. I feel that the roasters who scored the worst were on the second half of the table. The coffees were scrambled and listed A, B, C, and so on. Lehmus was the last coffee on the table, K. I would say that the winning coffees all came from the first half of the table. Maybe that’s just coincidence, but I actually think it’s just as likely that (a) first impressions matter and (b) the more of the same coffee you drink the harsher you judge it. Take me for example, when I first starting cupping I thought letter A (the first coffee) was the best. Why? Because I hadn’t drunk any good coffee all day and it was a lot better than the hotel coffee. But, in the end this was my least favorite coffee. Still, if I’d stuck with my first instincts, I would have scored that very highly when it was (in my opinion) a over roasted coffee. So, I think if all the judges start cupping and taste the coffees in order, then by the time they get to the end of the table their palette is tired, they can’t taste so well anymore, they are maybe subconsciously already over it (“do I have do drink MORE of this coffee?”) and that leads to worse scores.
  • Setup. Water, cups, grind size, all of this matters. I think the same coffees cupped at Lehmus roastery would have performed very differently. At Good Life’s roastery, again very different. It’s really worth taking this into account. With that in mind, for future competitions, if you can find out what water will be used and even maybe the grind size, you are at a big advantage because you can roast to that profile.



Still – ignoring all this – the coffees really were so similar that a different day, a different group of cuppers, etc, would have likely scored them differently. It is kind of the flaw in roaster competitions. The reality is that the only way to really do this fairly would be to cup the same coffees 4-5 different ways (different waters, bowls, grind sizes, etc) and pick the best of the best. In the end, for a competition like this what you have is ‘The Best of… this particular situation, this group of tasters and this set up.’ So, to claim that makes anyone the best roaster is a little short sighted. And… I think we all know this.

1st October 2024


You asked me to dive into what it took to source the coffees for the Advent Calendar and this is actually a really interesting topic.



Right now, the price of coffee is rising – the C Market hit 13 year high last week. What does this mean? Other than the fact that coffee is more expensive and if you booked coffee months ago that will last you into 2025, you just saved a lot of money, it also changes how buyers operate. Firstly, people are aggressively trying to buy whatever spot coffee is available. If there is a cheaper lot on a spot sheet, it will get sold. Even if stuff is somewhat pricey relative to a year ago, it might now look cheap. Then there is the other reality that importers likely don’t want to put too much coffee on their spot sheets because the more spot coffee you have (opposed to pre-sold coffee to regular buyers), the more risk that coffee won’t sell and you have to discount it heavily to get it moving. Let me explain:

Imagine this scenario. In 2020, you buy a lot for $7 per kg which you sell on your Importers spot sheet for $8 per kg. But no one likes, it. It sucks! A year goes buy, and you decide to sell it at cost price $7 per kg. Still no one wants it. Fine, you think, let’s sell it at a bargain price of $5 per kg. It sells. You lost $2 per kg.
              Now imagine the 2024 scenario. The same coffee costs $12 per kg, which you sell on your spot sheet for $13 per kg. No one likes it. A year goes buy, you offer it at $12 per kg. No one buys. You find the only way you can sell it is way below the cost price, down to $7 per kg. It sells. You lost $5 per kg.



These scenarios really do play out. I know it first hand! As such, at a time like this it isn’t wise for an importer to have lots of unhedged coffee on their spot sheet. Coffee is expensive and taking a risk lots of people want your coffees when they might not could lead to major losses. Better buy less and sell out quicker hoping the market will calm down.



Finally, there is another issue: EUDR. We have talked about this a lot but I want to highlight this point again: if coffee is in Europe already or clears European customs before 31st December 2024, then it automatically passes EUDR standards. This reality means that buyers are trying to get their hands on coffees now before the legislation comes in.



So, what we have is this:



People looking to buy whatever is available before newer more expensive coffees arrive + People trying to buy coffee before EUDR comes into force + Importers being risk averse and not stocking as much coffee on their sheets
=

A real pain in the butt to source coffee right now                             



As a real world example of this, I ordered around 10 samples from Café Imports for the advent calendar. I planned to order many 4-5 coffees from the selection. There were a few really amazing lots and also a few bad ones. In the end, when I went to talk to Café Imports all but 2 of the coffees were sold out. I didn’t wait 2-3 weeks to cup, it took me 1 week to turn around samples. I wish I had been quicker! In order to find these coffees I’ve had to look far and wide and cup maybe 50 lots and reject a lot of coffee that was old and not worth it.



What was my thinking, how do I decide on this?



First starting point is to work with importers who are in the right place. We are buying coffee from Vollers Dongen, Molenbergnatie (Café Imports) and Pacorini Antwerp. In these warehouses are a whole range of importers and I happen to know who they are and a lot of their staff. So, I started by collecting together these names and making a plan on which coffees were coming out of which warehouse. Ultimately, if we sourced 14 coffees from 14 importers in 14 warehouses – the shipping alone would likely be $1500-2000. So, avoiding that really helped focus my attention on importers in the same place. From there, I focused on which importers are experts in which origins. Then I ordered fresh samples and cupped. Where I felt confident, some lots were booked first and cupped later. If things had of gone better with Café Imports, my plan was not to work with Sucafina. If Sucafina had Kenyan coffees (they were sold out and the Café Imports lots are old or bad), I would not have gone with Falcon. But in the end, we needed to source from Café Imports, Falcon, Sucafina, Osito, Delagua, Primavera, This Side Up and Cata Exports to get this calendar together. Thankfully most of those importers are in one place (Vollers Dongen).



What this range of importers does is it enabled us to buy a range of different fresh crop origins with different processes, profiles and price points. There will be coffee from China, Indonesia, Kenya, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Costa Rica, India, Mexico, El Salvador, Rwanda and Burundi. There will be famous producers like Nestor Lasso and regional lots like the Guatemalan Women Producer group we ordered from. There are experimental fermented naturals and clean washed lots.



I’d say, at another point in my working history this would have been easier. But it wasn’t impossible. Connections, a deep understanding of who is good at what and when the freshest coffees are available, all helped me to move quickly and aggressively talk importers into reserving lots for me (pending my cupping approval).



I’m very excited to hear all the feedback on the lots you get. I think that some of the coffees won’t be everyones favourite, but the Lehmus Advent Calendar will definitely showcase the full range of specialty coffee (both origins, process, etc) and all at a price of 10 Euro per kg.

30th August 2024


C-Market and Stocks Generally 

The Euro is trading at the highest it has for a long time now. Around 1.11 USD for each Euro. Makes a small difference to pricing and should be positive… if it wasn’t for the C-price! It is trading around $2,50/lb or  5,50$/kg (5 Euro per kg even with a stronger Euro). Tough time and we don’t see prices dropping soon.



Espresso Surveys

James Hoffmann of Youtube fame is currently running one of these but Samo Smrke also did a survey of how people are brewing their espresso. It’s very interesting to see how home baristas (and probably nerdy ones because normal people don’t respond to surveys) are making longer, thinner espresso. Check it out: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_LZFYXodQc/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==Worth following Samo if you don’t already.



Crema – whats in a name?
The first espresso machine with significant pressure came out in the 1950s and the team who produced it found it created this foam, so they named it ‘crema café naturale’ (Italian for natural coffee cream) and the name never changed.



Bigger Topic: Cup scores? Whats the deal? Do they mean anything?



So, probably you notice that some roasters, most importers and exporters and other industry people reference cup scores. These are just numbers assigned to the coffee based on the quality of the coffee. But, what is interesting is that there are lots of different ways to get to these numbers. Some people use the SCA cupping sheet, some use the Cup of Excellence score sheet (which only really works for 86+ coffees), some use other formats and, for instance, Café Imports have designed a whole app where you don’t add any numbers, just flavour notes, and it assigns a score based on all the flavours. Some of the score sheets work on a qualitative basis – i.e. you taste a coffee and think “how tasty is the acidity in this coffee, is it disgusting and mostly not there, it’s a 1 or a 3, is it fresh, lively and enjoyable maybe a 8 or a 10”. Other cup score systems are based on intensity: “regardless how pleasant or unpleasant this acidity is, if its really really sour then it’s a 10 and if it has absolutely no acidity it’s a 0”.



The point I’m making is that while we score coffees out of 100, the way we get there isn’t necessarily very logical. Human systems are full of human flaws and, in reality, any system to assess quality in the area of taste is going to be very biased. I’ve heard more and more that people struggle to score coffees these days, because the system was created with clean, fruity and sweet coffees being the best we can do and funky stuff being bad. So, a crazy carbonic double-jammy infused funky coffee, maybe has a lot of flavour but doesn’t really score well – and at the same time, people want to give it a higher score because it is flavourful… so the system fails.



As we go further and further with scoring in our industry it is getting less meaningful. What is also easy to notice is that if 80 points is specialty coffee and 90 points is a really incredible and exceptional coffee, then what you really have is a 10 point scale (not a 100 point scale). In this 10 point scale, anything below 80 points is a fail and anything at 90 points or above is a unique and brilliant coffee. When you think of it this way it makes a lot more sense actually. An 82 point coffee is fine, acceptable but basic. An 84 point coffee is also sort of fine and simple but maybe more interesting. 86, well that’s 6/10 so that’s above average and tasty but not super special. 8/10 or 88 points, now that’s a really nice coffee, special too. You get the idea.



In truth, what scores do help us to do is to say that X coffee is maybe basic and Y coffee is special. However, as a roaster scores won’t help you decide which roast profile is best or necessarily tell you which coffee to buy. If you want a basic coffee with chocolate and nut notes, then an 88 point special Gesha isn’t the right coffee. So, theoretically even if they were priced the same, you would go with the basic coffee.



Something to consider as you cup and taste coffees at the production table: is there a scoring system you use now? How does it work, how does it not? If you don’t score coffees can you establish your own internal system to evaluate quality? Questions like: Is this profile right for this coffee? Is this coffee clean or dirty tasting? Is this too acidic (sour) or is the acidity pleasant? This is also a way to score and evaluate coffee and can often be much more useful.

8th August 2024


I'm sending this month's full newsletter from Colombia (well the first half). Exciting to be here and see how the harvest is coming in.



Like many places in the world, climate change is very bad here. Six months ago producers saw lots of flowers on their coffee trees and expected a large harvest of high quality coffees. Fast foward to the harvest period and due to hot summers they are expecting a much reduced crop of lower quality. Climate change is 100% the driving factor.



What does this mean for our industry? Maybe some countries that are big producers will be smaller ones in the future? Maybe the 'coffee belt' (between the tropics of cancer and Capricorn) will be expanded to areas further south and north? If so, maybe places close to the equator (Colombia, Peru, Ecuador) will see big drops in production?



At present we don't know all the possibilities or all the factors. Certainly it will require more shade grown coffee (to keep the temperatures lower) and maybe the use of tougher, hardier varieties. World Coffee Research is hard at work trying to develop said varieties and see what has the best cup score and quality.



Trend: Pink Bourbon



Also a clearly large trend is the growth of pink Bourbon production. This is a high quality variety known for good cup quality, complexity and easy production. In the past this was a rare variety. Now, it is becoming very common in Colombia. In fact, it is maybe going to be the most common specialty variety available - more than Caturra or other older varieties. This is exciting because I've never tasted one of these coffee that cupped less than 85 points (which is very high). It does also mean that as more volume of this variety is available prices will likely fall also.



Record: Best of Panama



What you see below is a record winning price at the most recent Best of Panama. This is an exclusive auction of expensive Panamanian coffees and yes, this coffee went for $10,000 per kg. So, a 20kg lot sold for $200,000 or the equivalent price of a full container of coffee priced at 9,75 Euro per kg. WILD!







A question for you? Do you think coffee could ever be worth this much? Personally, I’d say no. But then again people spend huge amounts on artworks, old wine, whisky, fancy cars, is this such a bad thing? I am not sure but it certainly speaks to a side of our industry that feels very distant even for people like ourselves who sell, drink and enjoy specialty coffee everyday.


19th July 2024


Copenhagen!

Maybe you saw but many people were in Copenhagen recently for World of Coffee. This was the biggest World of Coffee Europe ever put on, which shows that people are more keen than ever to take part in festivals and meet up. As a contrast to that, while we were there the organisers of two smallers UK coffee festivals (Birmingham and Manchester Coffee Festival) announced they were bankrupt! So, maybe people want coffee shows but it’s hard to say if there’s any money to be made with these events.



At World of Coffee I noticed a few things: (1) a big focus on EUDR, with many new companies and tech companies exhibiting to get customers for their sateillite mapping technology, (2) still some infused coffees but a definite push back and more standard washed/traditional natural process coffees than I’ve seen at previous shows, (3) more decaf stuff – this is a big trend and excitingly there are more people working on doing smaller batches of exceptional decafs. Overall though it was much of the same as ever before, lots of coffee, lots of the same big brands and people desperate not to be at the show but in nice coffee shops instead.



The Current State of the C-Market

The stock market is driving up coffee prices at the moment. Drought and dry weather in Brazil is causing some genuine fears around production volume. However, just in June the US governments analysis suggested the stocks will be good in Brazil and overall world wide stocks will be much higher this year than last. So, what might be happening? Well there is some fear that the same kinds of traders who pushed up the price of cacao/cocoa are doing something with coffee. If this is the case, don’t be surprised to see a bubble forming over the coming 2-3 months. I’ll dig into this more in the coming weeks but I think now is a bad time to book future coffees; only buy spot coffee (that will keep prices down).



East Africa – What’s happening?

You may have noticed that Kenyan coffees, Ethiopian coffees and others are all late. Basically, the conflict in Israel sparked violence in Yemen against global freight and ships as a form of ‘anti-Western’ attack. These attacks have put off ships and freight companies from sending volumes of business via East Africa. Month back this meant that there were no containers to find – for instance, Osito, where I also work, shipped all it’s Ethiopian coffees in doublesized containers (40ft instead of 20ft) because that was all that was available. Once people found containers, they then had to get bookings on fewer and fewer ships and finally the shipments went via the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of Africa instead of the Suez Canal. So, all in all, this one conflict has created multiple points of delay. East African coffees are just now arriving, but some lots may take months more to get here.


6th June 2024


It’s election day for the EU parliament. Why does this matter for coffee? One thing: EUDR.



This newsletter I’m going to unpack this crazy legislation and how it is creating a lot of challenges.



What is EUDR:

EUDR stands for European Union Deforestation Regulation. It is a new regulation that covers seven key crops that the EU believe are causing deforestation around the world. This includes: cow products (leather and beef), rubber, soy, palm oil, cocoa/cacao, tree products (wood and paper – by the way, how do the have wood and paper produced without cutting down trees is beyond me) and COFFEE! While many have criticized the inclusion of coffee into this list as very little of the world’s forests are being cut down to plant coffee (something that did happen a lot in colonial times but not any more), it is on the list and there’s nothing we can do about it.



What does the law say:

Basically it says, if you want to import any coffee into the EU it must have a due diligence statement that shows that it was produced in accordance with local laws and that the farm(s) where the coffee was produced have not caused any deforestation since 2020. If you can’t prove this, you can’t import it. If you import it anyway, they will fine you a whopping 4% of your revenue. For larger traders, commodity traders, who might be handling hundreds of millions of dollars in business, that’s a big and painful fine. The requirements are also that you prove that no deforestation has taken place by using satellite imagery.



Let’s unpack those expectations a little and why they are crazy:

It’s easier to explain how crazy this is when you take a real world example. So, for instance, let’s say you buy a Burundi coffee. This coffee was likely produced at a washing station where many farmers came and brought their coffee cherry. They might well sign a piece of paper or leave their name but that would likely be the extend of record keeping.



Let’s say Mr Bob delivers 10kg of coffee cherry. The cherry then get’s processed and weeks later, when the coffee is ready, the washing station will taste the lots and combine them to create similar qualities – or the dry mill might even sort the finished coffee based on the size of its beans (screen size 15, screen size 16, peaberry, etc, etc).

Firstly, who is to say whether Mr Bob’s coffee ended up in the screen size 15, in the microlot, in the peaberry lot, or maybe all of them… so the only way you can be 100% truthful is to make sure you add Mr Bob’s details to every single lot you sell. But what happens if Mr Bob isn’t his real name, or maybe he is illiterate and on tax forms he wrote his name Mr Bobb, with two b’s. So, technically this person doesn’t exist. Now you are lying and if you’re lying, that’s fraud and the coffee is no longer produced in accordance with national law. Or what happens when you want to find out where Mr Bob’s farm is, for the satellite imagery, but Mr Bob can’t tell you where his farm is, because he doesn’t know how to describe it. Well, sure he can take you there, but Mr Bob is one of 1000 coffee farmers who deliver to your small washing station. So, are you going to go to every farm, take a photo of the farm and map a GPS location? Sound’s like a LOT of work. So.. how about you just don’t sell to the EU anymore. Or you just lie about it and leave off 900 of the farmers and only get the data for the 100 largest farmers you work with because that’s a lot simpler…



See how this is starting to get pretty ridiculous pretty quickly.



Fair criticism:

The other big and fair piece of criticism here is that Mr Bob in Burundi is one of the poorest coffee producers in the world, but he and the washing station he supplies are going to suffer most. Mr Rich Big Man Farmer, who has a massive estate in Colombia or Brazil, he can afford to map the farm, take aerial photos, correct any issues (he cut down a tree, he can put a new one in where it was, etc). So this regulation hurts the small guy and is an annoyance to the bigger farmers. Doesn’t really sound fair.



All the HOLES!

Now I mentioned one big loop hole already – lying! If an average farm in your country producers say 50 bags of coffee and on your container with regional lot coffee you have 320 bags, then you can just declare 7 farmers (7 x 50 bags is 350 bags). Doesn’t matter if there were actually 25 farmers, let’s just forget about those other 20, especially if you check their farms and they’ve cut down some trees recently.



Also, cutting down trees. Now if I cut down an ancient beautiful forest and put some cows on the land – screw you! But if you cut down one tree, because its diseased and would fall soon anyways; well, that’s just life. But from a satellite picture, you can’t tell the tree was diseased. What if some trees burn down in a forest fire? How does the system account for that?



Let’s get more mischievous and creative. Let’s say you know in the corner of your farm in 2021 you cut down half a dozen old trees because you want to put in some benches and a swing for your kids. So, when they come to map the farm, just leave that bit out – “oh no, that’s not my farm anymore”… okay no issue anymore. Or let’s say you want to expand your farm and cut down a forest to do so. Why not just have your brother (also sister, cousin, good friend, etc) buy the land, cut down all the trees, then sell it to you. “Oh me, no I didn’t cut these trees down, was the last owner, check the records.”



Overall, it’s very hard to see how this will all be implemented in a way that recognizes all these complexities or really stops actually bad players from cutting down trees and getting away with it.



Why does the election matter?

That was the start of this right? Well, the current EU administration is not going to stop or cancel this legislation. It would be too politically embarrassing to cancel it. However, after todays elections there will be a new group of politicians and they may well just say “this is a little crazy isn’t it; let’s not rush this through but take our time and adjust everything.” I think there’s a good chance this will happen, but we have to wait and see.



What are importers doing about this?

In the meantime, before we know if the politicians cancel or delay this or not, we are all trying to prepare. One way to prepare is to ship stuff to land into the EU before the end of the year. Any coffee that is customs cleared before the end of the year is good, doesn’t need to comply with the legislation. So, basically, a lot of coffee will come to the EU before then to avoid the stress. The other thing we are all doing is reducing the number of suppliers and farmers we work with, to make this more manageable. I’d predict there will be less diversity and range in coffees in 2025. Not a huge amount less, but many a noticeable decrease. Less farms to map and plan for, less work. I also think a lot of importers will be shifting their focus to larger estates and plantations which have the capital and skills to make sure all the maps and statements are ready. As I said earlier, this will punish the little guy.



What does Lehmus need to do?

Be prepared to keep a file of all the customs clearance documents for coffees you are selling that came in before 2025. Also, be prepared that you’ll have to ask every importer to supply you with a little document that proves the coffee met/cleared this new EUDR standard. You will need a paper trail for this stuff. It will be a little more work for Lehmus (and all roasters) but to be honest it’s exporters and importers who will be doing 90% of the work so you don’t have to.

1st May 2024


Stock Market News

Maybe you saw, but over the last week Robusta and cacao hit record highs. These figures have dropped a bit yesterday and today but all these ‘soft’ commodities are having a bit of a moment with cocoa/cacao outperforming the best stocks: https://intelligence.coffee/2024/04/robusta-cacao-arabica-prices-high/



Instagram Account worth Following:
@kaffeinelondon this café has been running in London for 14 years. Bit of a classic location. They have begun posting videos about how they run their café and what they are trying to do, and WHY, really interesting if you want another perspective on how a café can be run and managed.



Fruit Added Coffee



So, producers have been doctoring or changing coffee with spices and other things for years. Way back, on a visit to Brazil I happened to see a green coffee sample labelled “cinnamon”. I asked what it was and the producer said “oh yes, we have some Asian buyers who like coffees mixed with cinnamon, so we take lower grades and add cinnamon to the processing and charge quite a bit for it.” The idea behind adding fruit is definitely not new, but it is suddenly very on trend. A few farms are really getting known for this, so how does it work. In essence, the idea is that during the fermentation stage, whether washed fermentation (pulping) or full natural (sun dried), fruit is added to the coffee and later removed. One of the most famous producers of these coffees is Rodrigo Sanchez of Monteblanco in Colombia. His process basically involves adding multiple yeast strains (these are like dried yeast that beer or wine brewers might use), then adding a sort of lemonade to the fermentation that includes the fruit being added but also SUGAR. That’s right, no wonder the coffees are sweet, there’s literally sugar added in the fermentation. Another important thing to note here is that the amount of fruit used is often eye watering. For instance, I’ve heard 100kg of Pineapple added to a single batch (10 bags) worth of coffee. The point of highlighting this is that these processes aren’t cheap. Interestingly, some producers are also just using fruit extracts; the kind of thing they might use to flavour candy or store bought desserts. This is also not cheap, but likely produces intense results.



Here are some comparisons that are interesting to think about with this stuff:
  • Craft beer? In the beer industry and especially the craft beer industry, over the last few years we’ve seen the growth of these fruited beers. Beer with lots of fruit added. There were always older beer styles – sours and things – with some fruit added, so this isn’t exactly new. But in the pursuit of the most extreme flavours, beer makers are getting very intense with this trend. Consider this Marshmallow Smoothie beer… which looks grey/purple from all the fruit that was added. Personally, I don’t like these beers but they are very popular and growing as a segment of that industry. Importantly, I think people know full well when they buy these and see them, these beers have fruit added. But sometimes with the coffee industry, there is some doubt to whether or not fruit was added or not (and the farmer doesn’t say) and that is a little more tricky.
  • Tea industry?  In the tea industry adding fruit in the form of dried pieces or puree is just normal. In fact, interestingly there are more and more teas on the market that contain literally no tea – its just dried fruit that you stick in hot water. I know many true fans of tea hate this trend as well, but at this point it is just accepted as part of the industry. Many people would consider this not controversial at all.



So, the big question is, will coffee go the way of craft beer or of the tea industry even? Or will people reject these options? Hard to say. There is likely to be a place for these coffees for a long time coming, but as the specialty part of the coffee industry, we need to more clearly decide if we are going to include these coffees in competitions and other events (more on that below). However, as with most things, this is a pandora’s box that when opened cannot be closed. I do not foresee fruited coffees going away.



Side note: Anaerobic vs Anoxic



You may notice more and more people and businesses (including Osito) calling anaerobic processes ‘anoxic’. What does this mean, what is the difference? In essence, anaerobic means without oxygen. But almost all fermentation takes place without the need for oxygen; the microorganisms that do the fermentation can live without oxygen and as such, called anaerobic fermentation anaerobic is like called water ‘wet’. It is just how it is and doesn’t really describe what’s going on. In contrast, anoxis is a word that means that the environment is free from oxygen. “While both 'anaerobic' and 'anoxic' essentially mean 'oxygen-free', in the field of microbiology it is considered more accurate to use 'anoxic' to describe an oxygen-free environment.”



Competition and fruited coffee?



This is possible the main reason this topic came up in this newsletter. Many of the winners of the filter competition and the winners of the decaf competition (at the Helsinki Coffee Fest) used fruited coffees. Is this fair? In a way the roaster hasn’t done anything odd to the coffee, but is it that much different from adding a syrup to the actual cup? That is honestly a big debate right now. What is also very controversial is that in Barista Competitions is becoming increasingly outlawed to use these coffees – but it’s hard to say which coffees are truly adulterated and which are not. Some coffees, like Geishas, are very floral without any strange fermentation or additives, some coffees a very fruity just from natural and other processing. So, as long as the roaster/barista doesn’t know the truth or chooses to lie, its always easy to say no fruit was added or no extracts.

10th April 2024


I was at Amsterdam coffee Festival last week and I’ll be in London this week for London Coffee Festival. I did notice last week in Amsterdam that the number of anaerobic or funky coffees was a lot less than in 2023. The year before you almost couldn’t find a clean washed coffee, now there was a range of processes from most roasters on their mini stands. Tracks with what you are seeing too right? I’ll let you know how it is in London.



In lieu of a full answer to Jussi’s question – I have an experiment for him to do:
  1. Create three ikawa profiles one that runs for 4mins at 210’c (flat profile), one that runs for 6 mins at 205’c (flat profile) and one that runs 7 mins for 200’c (flat profile).
  2. Roast the same coffee on each profile.
  3. Visually compare how dark they are and taste them, which one is the preference?



I think in general, longer roaster profile with less development are possible by just keeping overall temperature down. However, this can lead to a defect people call ‘baking’. This is an article about it by Scott Rao – I, personally, however do not think that baked coffee is such a big issue. It isn’t unpalatable and is just a different profile that isn’t to everyones taste. It’s often low sweetness and light. But like, dark roast isn’t a defect, it’s a choice. So personally I think this could be marketed as a very mild coffee with low acidity, low sweetness but also not so much dark/roast notes either. I’m sure some people would love that. PS. Also I think that coffees have to taste very ‘baked’ in order to really taste they are baked.



Interesting thing going on outside coffee: Cacao prices! They’ve gone mad. The cost of a kilo of raw cocoa/cacao has gone up 3x in the last year. It’s currently around $10,000 for a ton. As a comparison I think this is kind of like a $5/lb C Market.







New Blog worth Checking Out:Behind the Scenes by Scenery Coffee

https://scenery.coffee/blogs/behind-the-scenes



Alex, the author of this blog, is an old friend of mine and I’m really enjoying some of his upfront and challenging writings on coffee buying, the industry and other trends.



Another Blog that’s causing a stir: https://christopherferan.com/2024/03/31/the-cost-of-quality/

This is a really nice blog about how much time and effort goes into improving quality at a farm. How you can spend literally hours and hours and a bunch of money, to take a 84 point coffee to a 87 point … and still no one wants that, they want the fancy Gesha variety instead. Very interesting read.



Update from Origin: Ethiopia! There is a serious container shortage out of Ethiopia and this will likely cause some decent delays this year from East Africa (likely some impact in Kenya, Tanzania and other smaller origins).



Currency Prediction: Take this with a grain of salt, but I am going to predict the Euro will go up in value over the year. Basically the US interest rates will definitely fall this year, their central bank (FED) has said as much. When this happens US bonds and other US investment options will be less valuable, this will likely drive people to put more money into the Eurozone. Or rather, it will stop European investors putting so much money into the US, which is I think part of the reason why the EU hasn’t gone over 1.09 EURUSD for quite a long time.

2nd March 2024


Interestingly January was quite a busy month for importers from what I hear; and from one large importer I hear February was also quite good. This goes against the normal patterns of business in our industry and suggests that overall coffee is doing well (or at least specialty).



Crop in Brazil –

I just spent a week in Brazil and it’s warm. Areas that are typically quite cool are hotter than normal. This has lead a lot of people to predict that the harvest may be early. I did see one or two ripe cherries already at a farm I visited just outside Pocos de Caldas, Minas Gerais. Overall the volumes look to be bigger, which will likely mean prices drop for coffees you’ll be using end of the year early next year.



Inflation and Coffee Economics –

This is a really interesting topic. We see that all around the world, it’s hard to hire people and the cost of everything is up. That’s definitely true in coffee producing countries as well. It’s not just Finland or the USA that’s struggling with this, costs in Brazil, Colombia and world wide are up. Noticeably since the Ukraine war the cost of fertilizer is up. Most fertilizer came from Russia; the boycotts/trade sanctions and also trouble with handling freight in the Black Sea has pushed up the cost of these fertilizers 2-3 times on what they were 5 years ago. It’s a weird reality that Colombian coffee (over the last 2 years) has been more expensive than ever, but the farmers aren’t reporting a significantly improved income.



Anaerobic Trends –

Anaerobic processed coffee, that is coffee processed in a sealed container with reduced oxygen levels, is definitely here to stay. It was quite a rarity 5-6 years ago and now is very common. Even countries that were typically slow to adopt specialty trends – like Ethiopia – are fully on board with offering these coffees. That said, the general interest in these coffees is waning. They were very special, now maybe they aren’t. My personal experience is that a lot of people got into craft/specialty coffee at the beginning of the pandemic. They couldn’t go to their coffee shop so easily, so invested in a nice home set up (espresso machine, filter brewers, etc) and found coffee to be a hobby. I know many more hobby-ist coffee drinkers now than I did 5 years ago. These people were most excited by anaerobic coffee because (like Ethiopian coffees of 10-15 years ago) they taste nothing like normal coffees. However, at a certain point, people get tired of fruity/funky coffees and want normal coffees that are just higher quality regular coffees. As I say, I don’t think these kinds of coffees will go away but I do think the level of excitement will go. I also think maybe the price point may drop over the coming years – they’ll remain expensive because they are expensive to make, but they will be more common, less exciting and therefore cheaper.



Decaf – the new thing?

Interestingly you are the second person to comment on this, this week. There is a belief by some that this video by popular Youtuber and coffee Celeb James Hoffman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYTSdlOdkn0) has pushed up demand. That said, I think there’s a trend for alcohol free beer and the decaf coffee thing is along the same lines for some. Trying to reduce how much stimulants we take in and put health as a priority. I think decaf quality has improved over the last few years. It was pretty normal a few decades ago that all importers just took old crop and decaffeinated it; as a way to offer it like a new product. So, low quality old green coffee was decaffeinated and therefore always tasted terrible. Nowadays that is a lot less common and people are using more and more expensive coffees in decaf. I even saw one from a fancy Colombian producer who is very hyped. Nonetheless, I think often decaf tastes a little odd or strange. It’s my experience that in milk drinks it can be good enough to work well but as a black coffee isn’t necessarily ever going to taste the way you would expect quality coffee to.

7nd February 2024


Interesting Article: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-the-algorithm-why-every-coffee-shop-looks-the-same

Quite a long read but this is exploring how Instagram is making cafes and restaurants look more and more similar.



As a side note, it is a consistent complaint I hear from people in the industry that wherever you go in the world you see cafes that look like one another. It’s quite tired and makes the experience fairly flat and boring. Typically designs are either (1) cheap and lots of wood (original rustic hipster), (2) slick Danish style or (3) lots of pastel colours and clean, modern but bland. Bag design was also criticized by a friend of mine from the US recently, who said “why is it that every roaster has the same pink bags!?!?” (attached are some examples). Not only this but we see the same coffees time and time again wherever we go. Makes me wonder if exclusivity in terms of coffees will grow in interest over the coming years as roasters look to make themselves more distinct.



Instagram Account: https://www.instagram.com/coffee.with.carly/

Carly Green is a really great coffee professional with a lot of experience in the industry. But, her Instagram is more funny than anything else and makes fun of the silly things in our industry.#



Big Topic: Where is the C-Market going?



I’ve spoken to a few people in the industry about this question and the range I am getting is $1.40-1.90 per lb. So, somewhere between where we are now and around 50 US cents less. So why is this?


On the positives it looks like production in Brazil and Vietnam are good. As the two biggest producers of coffee (arabica and robusta) it matters a lot what happens here. Good production years always typically bring prices down. Here’s the comment from my colleague and friend Thiago: “lots of rain in good timing, nothing looking bad, crop will be big again, and price will 'normalize'.”



So, why not a lot cheaper. Well that’s harder to say but here are a few reasons:
  1. The Brazilian currency is strong. When this is the case, the coffee price also stays strong because as the currency improves it also means more USD is required to offer the same amount in Brazilian currency to producers there.
  2. This is one from me, but basically, at the end of this year the new European Union Deforestation rules will come into effect. This is a really big piece of complex legislation which is going to radically change how business is done in coffee – we aren’t talking about it nearly enough but buying and selling coffee will be very different next year. The key thing is, all coffee that’s delivered to Europe before the end of 2024 does not need to comply with this legislation. SO – lots of people will be trying to buy early in the harvest seasons, deliver on time into the EU and roasters as well (especially the big ones) will buy up all this coffee quickly before they need to start complying. Think about it, if you can buy all your coffee for say the first half of 2025, in the end of 2024, then you can put off doing a bunch of paperwork and hassle for 6 more months. Sounds small, but really it isn’t. And in some origins, like Ethiopia, Kenya, etc, where there are lots of small holders and these requirements will be hard to fulfill, you may see a real undersupply of coffee in 2025. So, certain coffees in particular will be in hot demand in the last quarter of 2024, and I think of all of this will keep the coffee market high.
  3. It’s boring but US interest rates are still high – 5% or more – and so cash is expensive. Therefore everything is expensive. Therefore commodities stay expensive. As an example of this, I’ve seen over the last few days since the US Federal Treasury stated that it would be unlikely to lower interest rates for a few months, the British Pound and the Euro lost value. But, all commodities I know of – coffee, cocoa, robusta, etc – are all higher than ever.



So yeah, don’t expect coffee to be a lot cheaper than now. I think if the market gets down as low as $1.40/lb it won’t go lower. Personally I doubt it will dip below $1.60/lb this year but I can’t say that with anymore confidence than an educated gambler.


4th January 2024


Let’s kick this year off with some news for the team.



If you have hours to kill, then you can read through this massive new coffee guide that’s just been released: itccoffee4threport20210930webpagespdf (intracen.org)



If you don’t have hours to kill, here are some highlights:


  1. Coffee production has gone way up despite there being not much increase in the amount of land used for coffee growing:







The report does not say why grow in volume has been achieved but I’d assume it’s a combination of better equipment, fertilisers and use of higher yielding varieties and more robusta being planted. The report does note that coffee lands will likely not grow, but more likely shrink because of climate change. So, maybe we are approaching the limit on coffee production?


  1. Really interesting graph showing how Fairtrade compares with basic coffee commodity pricing:







What I love about this it is notes the moments when pricing when up a lot. This doesn’t go all the way to 2023 unfortunately, so missing the last peak. But you see, how concerns over Brazilian production are almost always the thing that drives spikes in price. However, oversupply is only half of the cause of low prices, which include economic crises. Interestingly aggressive speculation drives pricing both up and down, which shows how coffee as a item of commerce is at least as important as coffee as an actual agricultural good.


  1. Coffee is being drunk more and more in countries that produce it – the report highlights one attempt to drive up coffee drinking in Colombia called Toma Café (Drink Coffee) and it’s results:
    “The longest lasting and most successful of these was Colombia’s Toma Café (Drink Coffee) programme. Coffee consumption in Colombia grew by 36% in volume in 2009–2017, more or less wiping out the 40% decline that had occurred over the preceding two decades. The Toma Café programme used the recommendations of the ICO guide wisely, adapting them to local conditions and innovating beyond them.”

    This is also supported by the data showing grow in all coffee drinking markets:


  2. What is specialty and how big is it?
    One other thing that stood out was the below section – this stood out to me because clearly it shows growth in the specialty industry but also points to the truth that no one really knows what we mean by the term specialty:

    “Specialty coffee continues its ascent Specialty coffee describes the emphasis on quality and origin – two defining features of third-wave coffee. These coffees usually command higher market prices due to the superiority of the beans, most of which are Arabica, although it is important to note that not all Arabicas are specialty coffees. While both ‘specialty’ and ‘certified’ designations allow producers to access higher-value market niches, there are pros and cons to each approach. Certification is often expensive, but certifying agencies may offer technical assistance. Although specialty coffee does not require costly certifications, it needs a certain level of human capital so that growers can produce high-quality beans and effectively access specialty markets. Estimates of the size of the specialty market in the United States range from 5%–38% of the market for green coffee, depending on the definition of ‘specialty’.”


  1. Two nice infographics to show where coffee is grown and where it is consumed:













Thank you Finland for doing your part in ensuring that Europe remains the main destination for coffee consumption 😉