In this edition: six new coffees, an idea I have about sharing coffee with all of you and the story of a Clemson grad's MBA project that's turned into a powerhouse of Colombian coffee exporting.

Not in this edition: the woman who returned a 4th century BC relic to the Greek government fifty years after she stole it ("it's never too late to do the right thing.")

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I spent a few hours in Brooklyn on Sunday at the Aeropress championship (congrats to new subscriber Jorge!) and got to catch up with some new and old friends. Fantastic event. I also bought a bag of the competition coffee (an Ecuadorian bourbon roasted by Sey) before realizing that one had been set aside for me – so I gave it away on Instagram. And it got me thinking.

I want to give away more coffee. I'm going to introduce a new section of the newsletter that I'll tentatively call coffee leftovers. I'm very lucky in that I'm being sent a fair amount of coffee that I'm not paying for. To be sure, I'm also still paying for a lot of it (my wife will vouch). But one person can only drink so much caffeine, so I'd like to share the bags that have 20, 50, sometimes 100+ grams left inside with you. It's all still super fresh (and rested).

The idea is that every week or two I'll share a coffee here, and whoever e-mails me first to claim it (just reply to the newsletter) will get it. All I'll ask is you cover shipping, and that you drink it so it doesn't go to waste!

I feel like it's a win-win-win. You get great, essentially free coffee; I don't waste great coffee; and the efforts that went into producing it and roasting it aren't literally thrown in the trash.

Let's start here: I've got 28g left of this fantastic pink bourbon from Finca La Bohemia, roasted by Prodigal. E-mail me if you'd like to give it a shot. I'll probably throw in some of the Finca Nuevo Colorado gesha too.

Welcome to the seventh edition of the coffee index.

Over the past seven days, I added 112 coffees to the list. Total coffees tracked to date = 2567.

1. I've been lucky to cross a lot of roasters off of my "dying to try" list since starting this project. One of the remainders that I will check off soon is Thankfully, in Auburn, Alabama. Owner Alex Shotts loves mejorado coffees. This weekend he posted a partial list of the 52 he's tried in the past few years; his menu is often stacked with the variety. If you haven't noticed yet, I tend to pick the odd coffee out. The surprising choice. Which is to say this coffee is not a mejorado — it's Shotts' first Ethiopian offering of the season. Roasted in both a light and extra light profile, it's a washed coffee from producer Mustefa Abakeno and it sounds like a stunner. Tasting notes: Ripe peach, vanilla, grapefruit, lilac.​
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2. I have to admit, I'm a sucker for good branding. (Most of us are, right? We're not buying award-winning geshas out of brown paper bags.) Jeremy Bradford at Preface is taking it to a new level. His brand could best be described as "sumptuous bookstore." But it's not just the typeface and the colors — each coffee has a genre. The tasting notes describe literature. It's phenomenal. This sidra from Yessica & Diego Parra at El Mirador, which Jeremy roasted this week, is in the genre of "magical realism," with literary notes of "enticing, gripping and mesmerizing." As for the coffee itself, it's a thermal shock natural that Jeremy, when he tasted it, says "was different, and then positively shocking." Use the code TheIndex20 for 20 percent off. Tasting notes: Blackberry, white chocolate, rose syrup.
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3. The story behind this coffee has so many incredible layers I just can't get over it. Start with the fact that Carlos Fernández Morera has been farming coffee in Costa Rica for 65 years, on land his family has owned since 1895. Love that. And it's not often you find an old-school coffee farmer trying new-school things, but this blend of caturra and catuai is an anaerobic washed process coffee. It also, apparently, has such a distinct cinnamon flavor that in 2017, when the same lot placed fourth in the Cup of Excellence, the judges audited his farm to make sure he wasn't co-fermenting the beans with cinnamon. Seriously. The roaster here is Pettibone in Dayton, Ohio. Tasting notes: Cinnamon, peach, gingerbread, custard.
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4. The first Pacas variety I've featured — and the first coffee from Honduras — this lot is roasted by Camber in Bellingham, Washington. Nery Martinez is the producer and comes from a family of coffee farmers in the Santa Barbara region. Inspired by his brother, who planted a grove of pacas trees on the family's farm in 2012, Martinez started his own farm in 2018. From Camber: "The brothers share labor and knowledge, a partnership that strengthens their farms and consistently elevates the quality of their coffee." Tasting notes: Grapefruit, kiwi, and refined sugar.​
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5. As you'll read below, Prestin Yoder from Flower Child in Oakland, California was gracious with his time in speaking to me one day before I launched this newsletter. It's fitting that as I weave that discussion into the story below, I'm also featuring a one of his coffees for the firs time. This offering is a pink bourbon from third-generation Colombian farmer Wilson Alba. The methodical harvesting and processing that went into this lot (plus, obviously, Yoder's skilled roasting) tells me it'll deliver on what you'd expect from this variety. Tasting notes: Raspberry, hibiscus, ripe citrus.
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6. My guess is most everyone reading this e-mail prefers a lighter roast coffee. I certainly do. But I'm also nearly certain that we all have friends and family who may prefer more developed coffees day-to-day. So I thought it was about time to write about a dark roast coffee — from a roaster that simultaneously sells ultralight and light roasts. Moonwake in San Jose, California listed this naturally processed Costa Rican caturra/catuai blend for sale shortly after I sent last week's edition. As far as dark roasts go, this is one I'd be happy to recommend to my friends who don't want their coffee to taste like a grapefruit. Tasting notes: Apple jam, salted dark chocolate, almond.

Seven weeks ago I sat in my local library and started a video call with Prestin Yoder, the founder of Flower Child in Oakland, California. The moment the he popped onto my screen, he had a kettle in his hand and began making a pourover. The timing was impeccable and I wondered if he’d done it on purpose. It turns out, coffee people are just seemingly always making coffee.

My goal for the call was to introduce myself and tell Prestin a little about the coffee index, which I would end up launching the next day. But I first wanted to ask about the coffee he was making.

It was one of several chiroso samples he’d recently received from Lucas Cuadros at Unblended in Medellín, Colombia – an MBA-project-turned-profitable business bringing emerging production techniques and know-how to young and up-and-coming coffee farmers.

Two days later, I was on the phone with Lucas because I wanted to hear from him about how his MBA project at Clemson turned into a well-respected powerhouse that connects young farmers in rural Colombia with acclaimed roasters like Black & White, Methodical, PERC, the aforementioned Preface and over 100 others.

"We think of Unblended as an incubator for young farmers," Cuadros told me. "The average age of a coffee producer in Colombia is 58. So it’s not very common to get the sons, the daughters of these traditional farmers to be wanting to stay at the farm and work their family’s farm."

So how do they convince young people to do that?

"What we realized was making them excited about coffee was the possibility to experiment and innovate with what they were doing at the farm and then to build a brand that was recognized worldwide, or at least in the United States," he says. "Seeing their name on a coffee bag from a roaster that’s, you know, famous – there’s nothing like seeing your creation come to life in a product."

Unblended recruits new producers by guaranteeing the purchase of all of their green coffee.

"We're talking about small farmers," Cuadros says. "If they want to send to the United States 1000 kg of green, it's probably a consolidated lot from at least three months of work. Three months of every weekend, processing, and then they’re mixing it all, and then it gets milled, and then it gets exported as one lot. But in reality it’s 12 different batches. We cup individually all 12 different batches and we classify them."

Anything that scores higher than 86 points can be sold directly to a roaster. Anything lower goes into a "young producer training lot."

Once a "young producer" is in their system, they get assigned a mentor to work with – like 2014 Colombian CoE winner Carmen Montoya or carbonic maceration master Sebastian Ramirez. The producers work with their mentors to build development lots – experimental processing is usually involved – and Unblended buys all of it. They then work with their roaster partners in America to get the lots into your V60.

"The Federation, which is the [state] institution that buys the coffee in Colombia, only buys washed coffees," Cuadros explains. "They don’t buy honeys, naturals, experimentals – none of that. Only washed. So if a producer wants – which is key to their motivation – to experiment, they have to find the client themselves. It comes with a big risk. So we guarantee purchase, and we can only do it with the help of the roasters. By buying these lots, they’re sponsoring this program."

Now, back to Prestin Yoder. He doesn’t buy those experimental lots. Flower Child is known for super clean washed coffees. It turns out that Prestin was once roommates with Lance Schnorenberg, who co-founded another company that’s known for super clean washed coffees – Sey. Lance turned Prestin onto Unblended.

"Prestin called me, he’s like ‘Lance told me that you guys are very well connected in Urrao’ – which is the region where chirosos were discovered," Cuadros says. "[Prestin] was like, 'I like well-structured, clean, high acidity, bright, vibrant, fruity coffees that are washed.'"

"So us knowing our portfolio, we were like 'Okay. We should send you coffees from Urrao,' and he was like 'That’s exactly what I want.'"

So Unblended sent samples to Yoder and they used a Google document to pass notes back and forth in real time.

"[Prestin] gives us feedback and then we translate that into what may be happening at the farm," Cuadros says. "Following the feedback roasters were giving us, we implemented batch cupping so we could isolate the better quality coffee and group them together. We implemented controlled airflow in the dryers, shade drying, plastic tank fermentations and floating, which a lot of producers didn’t do in Urrao."

Coffee consultant and all-around genius Christopher Feran (seen above, blue shirt) recently spent some time with the Unblended crew and their producers in Colombia to share his wealth of knowledge. (You'll read more about Feran here in two weeks.)

I will soon personally reap the rewards of Lucas' and his team’s hard work. Degassing in my drawer right now is a chiroso Prestin roasted, grown by Martha Cartagena, one of Unblended’s mentees, in Urrao. Drinking it will be especially meaningful now that I understand the work that went into getting it into my cup.

Photos courtesy of Unblended.

Thanks, as always, for reading. If you have an idea for a future newsletter, want to talk coffee, or have any feedback whatsoever — you can reply to this e-mail.

Next week: new coffees as always, plus some decafs from my list that sound absolutely killer. What's the best decaf you've ever had? Share it here and I may feature it next week!

Thanks for reading.

Jeff