I realize that great coffee can certainly still be good 15 months off harvest assuming it is the right coffee with the right shipping and storage conditions. However, I would like to see a single viable argument that would demonstrate that same coffee wouldn’t be much, much better, 3 -6 months off harvest. The only exception to this might be wonky naturals that get better as they age because their negative characteristics fade. Seasonality, as in other heirloom produce and great vintages of wine or Champagne only serves to add value in terms of how the customer can perceive coffee. I realize it may be confusing for them at first, but shouldn’t we be leading our customers down the right path versus following them down the path of least resistance. The more we de-commoditize coffee and open minds, the better it will be for everyone for the grower, to the roaster, to the coffeebar operator and ultimately to the person that finally drinks a cup that is as delicious as it has been promised to be. As my Auntie once said, discuss.

DZ

Ever wonder about the training secrets of them crooked baristas? Here you go.

Enjoy,

DZ

Reposted from response to Huffington Post article here-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-burbo/intelligentsia-wins-natio_b_542311.html

Thanks for this piece. I wanted to clarify a few things as they relate to Intelligentsia’s official position. Firstly I don’t really think it is accurate to say that anybody really thought any sort of “fix” was in at any of the past United States Barista Championships. The past and current winners have gotten to where they are through a combination of carefully sourced, developed and roasted coffees, a lot of practice and hard work and even a bit of luck when all of these pieces come together on the day they need to-nothing more, nothing less. The competition has become increasingly difficult each year with many great competitors from a multitude of companies. I can confidently say, that on any given day, any of the top 10 competitors could win. The United States Championship, I would argue is as difficult to win as the World Championship in many ways. To date however, no one from the United States has ever won the World Championship. We do hope that this might be the United States’ year.

I think the entire Specialty Coffee community is keen to move to a model where well-trained and compensated Baristas are in a position not only to serve, but educate as well. We are firm believer that the United States and World Barista Championships serve to foster professionalism throughout the industry and move Baristas to a sphere that may not have been possible before.

Intelligentsia’s choice to not compete next year was announced before this year’s finals and was done for very good reason. Our hope is that in 2011 we can work with qualified Baristas from our wholesale customer base to help foster regional champions and perhaps a national champion that does not necessarily come from a roasting company. You can expect to see a number of folks from Intelligentsia become more involved on the other side of the table as judges.

Believe it or not, our long-term goal is to continue to push Specialty Coffee in any way we can. We think that the aforementioned efforts will help to do exactly that.

As for being the “Yankees” of coffee I don’t know if that portrayal is entirely accurate when you realize that the majority of our top competitors are home grown and not simply a function of hiring someone that already possesses the skill set to win the championship. I think Twins-like is probably less sexy, but more accurate. As I have stated before, we will continue to invest in things we believe in, including our Direct Trade, In Season model at source, as well as our Baristas and most recently by-the-cup and by-the carafe brewing. Presently, we feel each of these elements can benefit the industry in ways that are profound and long lasting.

As for what we will be doing next year with all of our supposed extra time, I am really not too worried. There is so much work to do. We’ve been at this for 15 years and I honestly think we’ve got at least 15 more years of hard work ahead of us to get Specialty Coffee to where it deserves to be. As I’ve said before, let’s get started.

Cheers,

Doug Zell
Founder/CEO
Intelligentsia Coffee

15 years ago to the day, on April Fools’ Day, 1995, I left San Francisco, heading east across the southern part of the US and finally toward Chicago with my wife, Emily to start Intelligentsia. Leaving was bittersweet and I swore I’d make it back that way some day. The world and coffee is so different now than it was then. Coffee has evolved. Coffee companies have risen and fallen. New characters have stepped on the stage; some have shined like the brightest stars, others have flamed out quickly. To burn brightly for a long time requires a great deal of cleverness, innovation and determination. One’s trajectory can be assaulted in so many different ways, that staying on course is among the most difficult things to do. So many changes in technology and global politics have transpired that it is almost hard to believe that only 15 years have passed.

6 months and 8 days after April Fools’, 1995, financed by everything we had saved and money I’ll finally pay back to my Dad this September, we opened the doors of the first Intelligentsia, having little idea of what we were doing or what we were getting into. Looking back on it today, there are a lot of things I would have done differently had I known then what I know now. But if you gave me back the 15 years, I’d gladly do it again. Here’s to another 15. I wonder what it will all look like then?

I have had a number of meetings lately with people I haven’t seen for awhile, some for years, some for decades and have heard news of others I haven’t heard news of for similar stretches, people whose weddings I’ve attended, worked with, or were even distant childhood playmates. Perhaps as I approach my 44th birthday I am recognizing the commonality between these seemingly different people and that largely most everything is rather fragile, from people’s bodies, to their minds, to their relationships, to their lives. Each of these things is easy to neglect and can fall into disrepair in a very short time relative to how long each takes to build. In many cases most of these things were never built correctly to begin with. Happiness and wellness can be as elusive as you have heard. People may be getting older and I guess somehow I thought that all of the pieces would become easier to understand or that our ability to solve these issues would improve, but it just doesn’t seem to be case.

I suspect I am about half way through my life (a little more, a little less), and I don’t think about these things as much as I probably should as I guess I am used to focusing on the matters at hand and what seems to be the always exciting and seductive future. In an era when everything can move so quickly, might I suggest we tend to these things that are so fragile so they do not become more so and actually break. There seems to be a bit of tearing things down swirling around lately and as competitive as I may be, I think that energy could be better spent on building things up. I’m going to start working on that as soon as this plane lands.

So we are packing up for the 2nd Annual ECW in El Salvador. What does that mean? Well, we have a whole lot of coffee and coffee gear to bring with us for all of the brewing and tasting. About 20 of us will be hauling some part of these 1000 lbs of stuff. Customs is always interesting to navigate in this regard, but we seem to have greater success bringing everything in suitcases and boxes as opposed to shipping it on a pallet that inevitably gets stuck in customs if there is no one to usher it through. Some of the coolest stuff is what we are bringing for our grower-partners. We’d like to give a big thank you to the generosity of Chemex and Mypressi for providing one of their coffee making devices for every grower in attendance. We will be leading classes in El Salvador to demonstrate how to best brew on these devices. Last year the home brewing classes were among the best received. What could be better than a great cup of coffee or espresso in the coziness of your own kitchen?

More to follow. Stay tuned.

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

-Mark Twain

So there’s been a bit of controversy lately and I guess it’s fine. I am up for dusting off and moving on to what is next. Conflict ultimately brings progress as history frequently shows. Good works do seem to triumph time and time again.

I wanted to address what has been asked as it relates to where folks are and the size of companies and what is possible. I am intimately aware of what it is like to be resourced challenged. It really wasn’t that long ago, 14 years actually, when we were a fledgling roasting company with a 12 kilo Probat inside of our one and only coffeebar on the north side of Chicago. We (my wife and I) borrowed money from anybody that would lend it to us and tapped every bit of our tiny savings to start our company. We’ve gone through the typical gut wrenching challenges of growing a business and we’ve landed where we have through hard work, tenacity, and of course a good measure of luck. In fact, we finally retire the last piece of original debt this summer. So regardless of what you have heard or believe, the wolf has only recently backed away from the door, and believe me when I say, he still has a habit of knocking occasionally and almost always unannounced.

So, when I say the industry should push for delicious, meticulously prepared and carefully roasted Direct Trade, In Season coffees, I know it will cause a lot of folks to stretch. I realize that it will definitely take some time, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for it. It will probably take another 15 years to get the public to where we want them, so we should get started sooner than later. I know not everybody can move to complete adoption of these buying models. So I simply ask that we are honest with ourselves and our customers about what we are doing and take them along for the ride, pushing them to be part of the solution.

I remember when I was in college (I’m 43 now) a domestic beer cost $1.25 and Anchor Steam was $1.75. Now those same items are now $3.75-$4.25 and $5.50-$6.00 respectively. The cost of a great cup of coffee has remained more static over the years than it should. We need to move to by the cup and by-the carafe models where different coffees are offered at different price points and keep pushing the customer to value a great cup and abandon the free refills that occupied the past. There are no free refills on wine, beer, or cocktails, so let’s put to death forever these practices in coffee. If we can get our customers to pay $5 a cup and up and it is worth it, then the economics along the entire supply chain change. We need to dig in and figure out how to make this kind of transformation a reality, not a distant dream. The time to start is now. I don’t care if you are an industry giant or someone that just turned your roaster on for the first time. Anyway, it does seem like the smaller dogs have an awful lot of fight. I think that will prove to be very useful.

I must ask, how far off harvest is too far to be selling and serving a coffee? Is it 12 months, 15 months? I know some folks will step in here and say that vacuum packing can prolong this, but should coffee be presented as fresh produce or as a science experiment with a mountain of excessive packaging? Our own experiments have found that the re-useable Grain Pro works very well at maintaining green coffee integrity.

I cannot see how selling faded coffees from Central America or past crop coffees from parts of East Africa serve the purpose of impressing or developing the customer base that we are hoping to attract. The culinary world is moving decisively toward seasonal products and developing their menus around that principle. Why aren’t more folks in Specialty Coffee following suit? It amazes me that many roasters (including some of great notoriety) currently have menus that rest heavily on opaque blend formulations and single origin coffees that were harvested over a year ago. Often these coffees are dead in the cup, a shadow of their freshly-picked former selves. I challenge all of the industry to move from just listing roast dates somewhere on your bags (you are doing this, right?) to including the harvest month(s) and year for all of your single origin offerings. We will begin to do so companywide for coffee roasted Monday, February 8th, 2010 and thereafter. It’s high time we tighten the deadline from harvest into our customer’s cup. Are you in or out?

So I wanted to set the record straight on a few things. Not because I need to strengthen my ego (really it’s ok) and not to boast, but because we live in a world that at times seems to be controlled by the Ministry of Misinformation, full of those that actively wish to deceive and those that are well practiced at the sin of omission (deadly, right?).

Over the past decade Intelligentsia has introduced a number of ideas, concepts and practices to the Specialty Coffee Industry. It is my hope to illuminate when and where each of these things began.

Direct Trade

We were the first of any roaster in the world to codify the system of Direct Trade as a purchasing model with clear guidelines that reward quality and pay increasingly better prices to coffee growers around the world in a clear, transparent, traceable, model. Our first coffee purchased this way was La Maravilla from Huehuetenango, Guatemala in 2003. The vast majority of our coffee is now purchased this way. Other roasters in the US and around the world have adopted this model. Most of them call it Direct Trade too, some with good intentions and execution and others without (see Ministry of Misinformation above). We hope those doing it right continue to do so and those doing it wrong decide to do it right.

Seasonality

We first introduced our In Season initiative to the world of Specialty Coffee in 2008 at the SCAA show in Minneapolis. We were the first roaster in the world to have a clear set of parameters that defined green coffee seasonality as it relates to how far a coffee is off its harvest. Since that time a lot of other roasters have introduced seasonality into their offerings or are considering doing so. If this is done effectively, consumers will no longer perceive coffee as a commoditized “box of cereal” but rather as the marvelous, valuable, seasonal produce that it really is. This can only increase the perceived value of the coffee as well as the actual value of the coffee and will reverberate from source in the form of better prices to the producer all the way to the consumer who will be willing to pay for freshly harvested in season coffee.

The Micro-Lot

We introduced the term and the concept of the Micro-lot to the Specialty Coffee industry public for the first time in November of 2005 with our Colombia Cauca Almaguer Micro Lot produced by Alciabiades Garcia. This revolutionized the industry on many fronts from the specificity of lot separation, to the prices that a grower would be paid for a coffee to what the consumer would be willing to pay for coffee. Although Cup of Excellence offered this idea in the form of an auction, we pioneered it as an ongoing part of a successful Direct Trade buying model. Many roasters, exporters, and importers worldwide now offer Micro-lots on a regular basis.

Latte Art Throwdown

For a $1 entry fee on a rambunctious Friday afternoon in our lunchroom in Chicago the idea of the Latte Art Throwdown was born. Andy Wickstrom took my money that winter day. We sprung the idea of one pour, under pressure, for prize money during the SCAA show in Long Beach in May of 2007 at our Los Angeles Roasting Works amidst a lot of wine and beer and Taco Zone tacos. Since that time the concept of the throwdown has taken on many forms worldwide, but certainly hearkens back to an evening that is hard to forget in some ways and hard to remember in others.

Each of these except for the throwdown have the potential to change in a very positive way how growers are remunerated for their coffee as well as how the consumer perceives and values and in turn is willing to pay for coffee. Not a bad record for the past decade. Lookout next decade.

It has been awhile. In my attempt to actually do this more often, I will keep my posts shorter and more digestible.

So since you last heard from me, we’ve signed a lease for another coffeebar in Los Angeles and also for a spot in San Francisco for an impending Ecco move. More about these as they develop. Each should be operational in 2010 and both will present some clever twists versus what has been done before.

2009 ended surprisingly strong. I think 2010 will be a very good year and that the next decade will see great coffee gain its rightful place in the world. The start of the year is jam-packed for us. We have in-house and regional barista competitions and we will be involved in the TED conferences. These events are then followed by our 2nd Annual Extraordinary Coffee Workshop, which will be held at the end of February during the height of harvest in El Salvador. This year the attendees will include almost all of our Direct Trade growers from Central and South America as well as East Africa and the Pacific. We’ll have all sorts of information heading your way from El Salvador during the event.

And while I know it’s a bit late, Happy New Year!