Why I love Colombian Coffee (aka, is there a difference between an origin trip and a sourcing trip?)
Eduardo, his brother and Chuck. The hills of Cauca, Colombia circa 2007/8.
My first ever Origin Trip happened to be to one of the most famed of all coffee-growing countries: Colombia. I think this was perhaps 2007/8. When Bird Rock Coffee Roasters opened its first true retail location in 2006, we quickly developed a buzz but I knew we needed to source better green coffee to really take things to the next level. At the time, I depended on green bean exporters and brokers for all our coffee but I was well-aware that if I wanted to set Bird Rock apart from all the other roasters who were all buying from the same companies, I needed to learn how to source coffee effectively at origin and to hopefully develop Direct Trade relationships.
Around this time there was a company based in Colombia called Virmax who were courting third-wave coffee companies with good coffee they sourced from farms all over Colombia. I was able to get in on an Origin Trip they were hosting with the agreement I would buy a large (for us at the time) amount of green coffee. Volume-wise the coffee would be more than we needed and represented a significant financial investment but I needed to to figure out how the coffee business worked from farm-to-cup so even though I was nervous about the deal, I agreed.
Now, even though none of you asked, I am going to stray from the main topic and explain that, in my mind, there is a difference to what coffee people call an “Origin Trip” vs. what we call a “Sourcing Trip”?
Sorry if you disagree but it won’t be the first time I have said something about the coffee business that people disagree with. I remember one time a trade publication published a video we made about how we defined Direct Trade. The point of the video was to explain that DT is not just about a grower and coffee buyer — as some in the industry want you to believe — but that there are a collection of partners that are needed to make a Direct Trade relationship work. A Direct Trade partnership does not exist in a little bubble. And, yet, some in the industry whined that I “defined” Direct Trade even though no one else was really attempting to deconstruct the concept for their customers.
The point of defining things like I am about to do is to avoid mis-leading the customer. My over-riding issue with some coffee-people is that they promote misleading terms/ideas for their own advancement/image/ego and given that the average coffee consumer knows very little about the coffee industry, the more we can contextualize terms, phrases and concepts, the better.
This post won’t be as controversial and again, no one asked me to make this distinction so welcome to the inner workings of my mind….
I believe there are two different types of trips a coffee business can make to origin. Because no one has really defined what is what, I am going to do so using terms that the coffee industry has used for decades as interchangeable. I will argue that if we separate these terms and give each proper definition and treat them as different things, our customers will benefit.
An “Origin Trip” is often used by companies to describe a trip to a coffee growing country when they will choose coffees from a current harvest season. I don't think this is an accurate description of an “Origin Trip.” An Origin Trip is more like a field trip that can be light on actual coffee-sourcing. But…an Origin Trip happens at origin. And once you are in a coffee-growing country, the purpose of your trip can evolve.
A “Sourcing Trip” is as it sounds: a trip to find coffee and in some cases collaborate with a growing partner. On a Sourcing Trip, a good green bean buyer may cup 100s of day-lots during a short in order to find what the roasting company needs— this does not happen on an Origin Trip.
In my opinion, an Origin Trip is a trip to origin to learn how that country processes, moves, and sells coffee and/or an Origin Trip can be used to make connections, even Direct Trade partners, for future Sourcing Trips.
Sometimes a Sourcing Trip can turn into an Origin Trip: Once, I went all the way to Sumatra for a week with the hope of “sourcing” coffee but found nothing. But, hey, I learned a lot about how coffee is processed and harvested in that country so not a loss. And sometimes an Origin Trip can turn into an actual Sourcing Trip but at their core, the trips are two different things with two different objectives.
An Origin Trip is more like coffee tourism: a trip to origin to see coffee stuff so you can tell your customers you have “been” to origin. These are great trips to send employees on who had never been to origin before. A great barista who has been to origin can talk to your customers about the experience is better than a great barista who has never been to origin. It’s value-added type of thing.
As is often the case with Origin Trips, a company, usually a company that buys green coffee from farms to re-sell them on a retail level to roasters, hosts multiple roasters to the country for a few days and everyone will cup coffee together, visit farms together, eat meals together, drink some beers together and then go home to tell your customers about how you were the Indiana Jones of coffee. It can be sort of a coffee-centric vacation.
A “Sourcing Trip” isn't really about group fun. I have done many sourcing trip with one or two industry friends but 80% of my well-over 50 sourcing trips were solo missions. On a sourcing trip there is less tourism. (The sole purpose is not to learn how coffee is processed, for example. You already have a bank of knowledge yet I never went on a sourcing trip where I didn't learn something new. Coffee is vast.) In short, a coffee buyer travels to origin on a Sourcing Trip may cup coffee at a milling partners facility, will visit farming partners and cup harvested lots with these farming partners. There most likely will be negotiations of coffee-cost and planning for logistics to move the coffee. These trips are more straightforward business trips with little time wasted. A good Sourcing Trip is as efficient, cost effective, and as short as possible.
Any “sourcing” that happens on Origin Trips has already done by the host company. Sure you have access to different coffees but the lots one has access to have already been chosen by the host-company. This does not mean the coffee is bad by any means; it is just that one does not usually have access to broad range of lots, farms etc. Also, if you are a new customer to the host company, you won’t be getting the “best” lots the host company has sourced because they have other older customers who logically are way ahead of you in line for the super good stuff. Additionally, the host company has worked out all travel and accommodations requirements for all their guests prior to arrival.
That all said, Origin Trips are very important. They present opportunities for people new the coffee businesses to learn about coffee and to see first-hand processes they had only read about. But contrary to Sourcing Trips, the Origin Trip is easy and very much like Bud-lite: sort of like beer but not really.
These trips can be thought of, then, as foundation trips: trips on which to build a database of information for your company’s future sourcing trips. And, that is exactly what my first trip to Colombia was like — I took in a ton of information that I would build on in the years to come and, most importantly, I learned learned how a coffee-buying transition can change the lives of people who grow it.
Now, back to this Colombia trip and to answer the question why Colombia will always have a special place in my heart when it comes to coffee-growing countries.
Popayan, Cauca
My Colombian Origin Trip started in the beautiful town of Popayan, the capital of Cauca. We kicked off the trip with a big cupping with all the roasters in attendance, each roaster cupping the lots they had agreed to buy and then we all got to cup each others’ lots. At the time it wast he biggest cupping I had been a part of and a bit overwhelming.
One of the lots we agreed to buy on that trip was from a grower named Eduardo (I sadly cannot remember his last name.) and we already had a plan in place for Virmax representatives to take me, and a couple other of the other roasters in attendance who wanted to go, to that farm. But in order to get to his farm, we needed to take a short flight from Popayan deeper into Cauca, drive up bumpy, windy dirt roads for at least an hour or two and then set out on foot a good 45 minutes to reach Eduardo’s farm. To this day, it is still the most remote farm I have been too; far from any real infrastructure or roads, the only way to get coffee —or any supplies for that matter — in or out of that farm was by horse and burro.
The start of a long walk.
The harvest was long over by this point. My coffee was already at the mill in parchment awaiting processing but Eduardo greeted us with a smile and showed us around his farm which was solid but looked in need of some updates. The drying beds in particular looked to be on the verge of collapse and I remember wondering if they would make it to next harvest. He lived in a small one-room home with his wife and three daughters. The home was meager; dirt floors and a makeshift open kitchen with buckets for sinks and a wood-burning stove and… well that was it.
We stayed for about an hour and then started our trek back to Popayan. The whole way back from Eduardo’s I could not help but reflect on the day. On one hand I felt thrilled to be able to visit a farm from which we would sell coffee to our customers, on the other hand, I could not get over just how rough Eduardo’s life in the coffee must be, an incredibly difficult job for very little reward. Basically, he was working just to survive it seemed.
A couple days later I approached Virmax about adding a bonus for Eduardo if the coffee arrived in San Diego in good condition. I would pay out I think $250-$500 in cash to Virmax to give to Eduardo so he could make some farm improvements by the next harvest. No, that does not sound like a lot of money but it would be enough to help on some level — to at least construct new drying beds.
Fast forward, the coffee arrived in San Diego later that year; it was good and our customers loved hearing about the farm. I certainly would not call this “Direct Trade” coffee today but I did call it that at the time, not knowing any better. (More on Direct Trade in the next post.)
A year and a few Origin and Sourcing Trips later, I returned to Colombia. This time in hopes of actually securing Eduardo’s coffee again. Virmax was still acting as the go-between and had samples ready for me to try and during that trip, as planned, we made the journey to Eduardo’s farm again.
Upon my arrival to the farm, my heart sank a bit. I was expecting to see some improvements at the farm — at the very least I hoped to see new drying beds but everything looked exactly as it did on my previous visit. Huh?
I immediately questioned the Virmax team if they had been clear with Eduardo about how the bonus was to be spent. I was a little pissed. And that was when I learned a valuable lesson about how I could use coffee to make change. Eduardo took me by the arm excitedly brought me over to his house to show me something.
To my surprise, where there was one bedroom there were now two, and where there dirt floors a year earlier, there were now raised concrete floors. The make-shift open kitchen had been enclosed and the buckets replaced with an actual sink. Next to the wood-burning oven, sat a propane stovetop. And all these improvements done with the bonus I had paid Eduardo for which he thanked me repeatedly. The harvest that season was so small, and sadly the coffee was not of the quality we could by, that farm improvements were not needed so the money was spent of quality-of-life changes for his family. The bonus made a difference; not in the way I expected but in the way it was needed.
I was humbled. For me to see first-hand how easy it was to enact change on a deep level, altered the course of Bird Rock Coffee Roasters. From that moment on, it wasn’t just about the coffee. Sure, we would continue to source some of the greatest coffee grown in the world but we always kept an eye on opportunities to help or to elevate those who grew that coffee and the communities from which that coffee came.
I went back to Colombia every year since and my Origin Trips turned into Sourcing Trips. Some years I would make two trips a year. We bought a lot of coffee from Colombia and by sponsoring various projects and contributing to initiatives on the ground along the way, I believe we made a bit of a difference for some. And this is really the beautiful thing about being in the coffee business: there are so many wonderful opportunities to make a lasting impact beyond the coffee. The story I told here has been repeated 100s of times by conscious coffee roasters all over the world. Coffee can indeed lead to profound social change.
Drinking our current offering from Colombia brings back a lot of fond memories from that country, micro-moments with growers or with sourcing partners I traveled there with over the years, like sharing a beer at a corner bar in Neiva with sourcing friends watching the late afternoon traffic hustle by or eating chicken and taro root with a family of coffee growers in the hills of Huila while being completely off the grid, happy and content.
Great times, great people, and great coffee. I would not have been able to do with Bird Rock Coffee what I accomplished without my experiences in Colombia. Cheers!