Britt's President's Column

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0600

The Art of the Cup

People always wonder how they should make coffee. You know all those myths about how to make the perfect cup; how much to use.

Excuse me if some of you think this is really elementary, but a lot of these questions come up all the time.

In Miami, people always say the coffee is really strong and special tasting. Cubans make their own ultra-concentrated espresso. They use 21 grams – or about three heaping tablespoons – of coffee per every 1.5 ounces of water. That’s about three times the amount we use for our espresso. This is where coffee, the beverage, becomes coffee, the drug.

In the U.S. Midwest, people say you should be able to see the bottom of the cup if it’s good coffee. The Folgers of the world really took that to heart in the 70s, when coffee prices were high. For these mass roasters, it became something of a competition to see how little coffee they could recommend per serving. Some recommended as little as 7/8 ounce of coffee per 8 cups. That’s about 3 grams per cup! I guess you could call that coffee, but we think that 7 grams is an ideal.

At the other end of the spectrum, besides the Cubans, of course, is the Peet’s method. This is the one responsible for the U.S. gourmet coffee boom and the mainstreaming of espresso.

Gourmet roasters distinguished themselves from Folgers by starting with better quality coffee and overroasting it, to make it very strong.

Good coffee is one of the world’s great pleasures. Your own personal taste likely falls somewhere in between these three schools of coffee-making thought.

But this is what I recommend. The four components of a great cup of coffee are heat, grind, time and proportion.

The shorter the time the coffee comes in contact with water, the better. That’s why percolated coffee tastes so poor. Extended contact with hot water dilutes the flavor and extracts unwanted oils and other bad stuff from the coffee.

Don’t use a percolator, but if you must, use a coarser grind of coffee. It will better stand up to the aquatic assault.

The espresso machine is best as it exposes coffee to hot water under high pressure for only 20 seconds. The French press and filtered drip machine also produce superb coffee by limiting exposure to water.

The water used to make coffee must also be hot enough – just under the boiling point. When our service guys head out to the field to fix drip machines that "no longer make good coffee" their first and foremost tool is a thermometer. Water temperature is almost always the problem.

Proportion is more a personal matter. It’s interesting, all the philosophical ideas behind it.

We say the ideal proportion is one tablespoon per 5-ounce cup. If you have a standard, 8-cup drip coffee maker, you should add eight heaping tablespoons to the filter for a full pot.

Espresso is naturally stronger. Use one heaping tablespoon of espresso roast for every 1.5 ounces of water.

These proportions will produce a delicious cup of Café Britt. Give it a try. And tell me what you think.

Questions? Comments? Drop me a line at steve@cafebritt.com.

Crocodiles, Palm Trees,? and Chocolate-covered Oranges?

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Crocodiles, Palm Trees,… and Chocolate-covered Oranges?

Miami is called the crossroads of the Americas. It’s also known as the capital of Latin America. And for good reason!

This city is vibrant, multicultural and tumultuous. The population is only 12-percent “original Floridian”. Everyone else is Latino, black and a melting pot of world cultures.

Miami hosts international business, a huge tourist industry and the country’s third busiest airport for international travelers.

Pretty soon it will also be hosting Café Britt.

We’re opening three specialized gift stores at Miami International Airport. How we ended up there is a story worth telling.

We didn’t approach Miami, you see. Miami came to us. It came in the form of Carole Ann Taylor, a former New Yorker-turned-Miami businesswoman and tireless booster of all things Miami.

Carole Ann called our toll-free phone number one day. She said she had a concession called “Miami To Go” for three retail shops at the Miami airport. She’d seen our stores in Curaçao and loved their “sense of place” – how they blended local culture and products with our own gourmet coffee and chocolates. We’d be the perfect partner, she said.

Right out of the blue, she struck a chord – but maybe that’s fitting for this former jazz singer with Duke Ellington and community activist. Her timing was perfect.

Last year, The Moodie Report, a top travel publication, ranked our Peru airport stores best in the world for “sense of place.”

We’d become experts in sense of place! And with our usual humility, we knew we were ready for Miami.

Carole Ann had never been to Costa Rica or even heard of Café Britt. But this is a woman who owns “Little Havana to Go,” a gift shop smack-dab in the heart of Calle Ocho in Cuban-influenced Miami. And she doesn’t speak a word of Spanish.

We thought anyone one who could navigate all the cultural worlds of Miami would be an ideal partner.

Long story short, our three “Miami to Go” shops are now under construction. All three are beyond security checkpoints. One is in the D concourse and another two are in the H concourse in the new South Terminal.

A team of our marketing and retail experts spent a week traveling with a renowned Miami historian who showed them everything from Coconut Grove to Everglades National Park. We’ll build this unique sense of place into all three new stores.

Our shops will sell our signature Costa Rican and Peruvian coffees, our gourmet chocolates and crafts. But we’ve also created new products just for Miami.

A brand new chocolate-covered-orange is in the works. We’re also developing a special blend for Cuban coffee – that is, an intensely strong coffee that only tastes good when you make it super strong with four heaping spoons of sugar. Cubans and Latino wannabes love that stuff.

Look for tropical themes, crocodiles, artful crafts, Salsa, and lots of quality products.

So, here we are. We have a very good partner who’s on the board of the Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Arsht Center. She has a good relationship with the airport and the city. We have the expertise and enthusiasm. Miami, here we come.

Certifiable

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Certifiable

People today want assurances. They want to know that the companies they do business with protect the environment and pay their suppliers fairly.

That’s why certification programs like Fair Trade and The Rainforest Alliance have become household words in our business – brand names.

Potential customers have asked for certified products. Some have insisted. Others have wondered why our coffees don’t already carry one of these labels.

But these certifications present a dilemma – an interesting challenge – for Britt.

Why should we certify standards that we've lived by since long before either of these certifications existed?

Café Britt has always done business this way. Always will. All of our coffees, in fact, all of our products, our business model and our mission are based on the concepts of fair treatment and environmental protection.

We pay the highest prices in the country for top quality, environmentally sustainable coffee. The small and mid-size farmers who grow this coffee depend on their farms for their livelihoods. Our experts work with them to ensure sustainable yields.

Our roastery has an ISO 14001 certification for environmental quality – and that’s a hard one to get.

But people want certification, so we're going to give it to them.

Café Britt will soon offer an excellent coffee produced by a Tarrazu grower’s association certified by The Rainforest Alliance. These growers are old friends. They approached us in 2002 when they decided to create a local organization for sustainable production. We have been supporting them ever since.

The Rainforest Alliance works with farmers to bring their operations up to its standards for protecting wildlife and lands, workers' rights and local communities.

It will certify any grower, large or small, that meets its requirements. It's about education, not activism. Its approach is simple and holistic.

By contrast, the primary users of the “Fair Trade” coffee label are North American and European coffee roasters based far from coffee-producing countries who don’t have a direct relationship with growers, as a result, the label is used mainly for marketing purposes.

If the foreign roasters pay farmers more, they can make up for it by putting the “Fair Trade” label on their products and charging more for the coffee.

“Fair Trade” is selective about who it chooses to certify, preferring groups of the smallest growers. It wouldn't certify country-of-origin roasters, like Britt, until only recently.

We have been roasting coffees from “Fair Trade” certified coops for years, and we are now exploring a relationship with the Fair Trade labeling organization. Stay tuned.

So, we'll soon be offering certified coffees. But that doesn’t mean that we just woke up one day and saw the light of environmental protection and social responsibility. Those have been pillars of our business all along.

What do you think? Write to me at steve@cafebritt.com.

More than Just the First

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0600

More than Just the First

My father was from the town of Kovno in Lithuania.

He told me about a tailor shop he knew as a young man there called “Misha’s – The Best Tailor in Kovno.” One of Misha’s employees decided to set up his own shop. The employee put a sign on his new business, “Jacob’s – The Best Tailor in Lithuania.” A third tailor, with an apparently more confident opinion of his abilities, opened his own shop, “Haim’s – The Best Tailor in the World.”

Then along comes the son of Misha, the original tailor, who was still in business. The son opened his own shop. Over the door, he put a sign, “David’s – The Best Tailor on the Street.”

Pioneers are a celebrated lot, but let’s face it, we’ve got it pretty tough. We blaze the trail. Take on the unknown. Improvise and overcome. Set a standard. Brace for the onslaught of imitators.

Here at Café Britt our reputation as a pioneering, country-of-origin coffee roaster, chocolate maker and promoter of coffee tourism has brought us world recognition. Success. But we wouldn’t be here today if we hadn’t learned to see into the future and adapt with the times.

Take our award-winning CoffeeTour, for example. When we launched the CoffeeTour in 1991, there was absolutely nothing like it anywhere in the Americas. Costa Rica’s master theatrical producer, Dionisio Echeverría had a big hand in its creation. But even he, at first, couldn’t believe what we were asking him to do.

I’d often heard him say of the task, “A stage play in a coffee plantation? ¡Insólito! – “Unheard of!” Our on-site theater now bears my late friend’s name.

The imitators have come. Judging from signs and slogans posted everywhere; Costa Rica is now full of coffee tours. One claims to be a “true coffee experience.” Another, a “real coffee tour.” Yet another a “gourmet coffee tour.”

We’re well positioned to welcome them all, because we’ve worked hard to keep our CoffeeTour fresh. Our tour visitors – more than 700,000, so far – can today learn to “cup” coffee like the pros. They can visit our working coffee farm and mill, Tierra Madre. They can create their own, unique coffee blends or sample any coffee drink they can imagine.

Our CoffeeTour has evolved. Our coffees and product lines have expanded. We’ve grown to operations in five countries. Our creative young staff works hard to stay ahead of the game, and we’re doing that.

We’ve been in this business for many years, now. Each year we try to do something a little different, while staying true to our core values – quality, service, community support, respect, concern for coworkers and suppliers, creativity.

We’ve proven that you can be a pioneer – an old veteran with the help of my two sons– and still be the newest, most creative, most interesting kid on the block.

Got any ideas to help us stay fresh? I’d love to hear them! E-mail me at steve@cafebritt.com.

To Freeze or not to Freeze?

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0600

To Freeze or not to Freeze?

My parents in Florida have been ordering coffee from Café Britt since we began our mail-order business in 1991. That makes them our very first and still most devoted mail-order customers.

As go their coffee orders and satisfaction with Café Britt, so goes my own peace of mind – or preoccupation – with the service we’re providing.

So, you can probably imagine my reaction as I was sipping Café Britt in their kitchen over the Thanksgiving holiday only to discover that it tasted stale.

Surprised, and pretty embarrassed, I asked them what was going on with it. My mom said she’d just taken the coffee out of the freezer and made a cup.

As it turned out, they keep the coffee in the freezer after opening the bag. If any is left over, they then put it back in the freezer until the next time they need it.

This is a “no-no” in the coffee business unless it is tightly closed.

I thought, if the parents of a coffee maven don’t know how to store coffee, then surely plenty of our other customers are wondering as well.

So, here are the facts, from a chagrinned son, who wants his customers, and certainly his parents, to get the most enjoyment from their Café Britt.

Our coffee is packed hot, right out of the roaster in special, resealable bags with one-way valves. The valve lets coffee’s natural gasses escape as it cools, but it keeps oxygen out.

Oxygen, moisture and light are the agents that most quickly make roasted coffee age.

A factory-sealed bag will keep coffee fresh for almost a year and if you want to extend that time, you can put it in the freezer, BUT once the bag is opened, unless it is tightly resealed using the bags’ tin tie system, oxygen and moisture get in, and the aging process begins.

Once the bag is open, it’s best to brew and drink the coffee as soon as possible.

Never put an open unsealed bag of coffee in the freezer or the refrigerator. The cold changes the coffee’s molecular structure and causes an even faster aging process and the coffee also will absorb any odors it encounters.

You wouldn’t thaw and then refreeze fish, would you? Why do it with coffee?

Likewise, an open bag of ground coffee will go stale more quickly than an open bag of whole-bean coffee.

Grinding exposes more of the coffee bean to oxygen, light and moisture.

To get the most enjoyment out of your Café Britt for the longest period of time, do two things:

Store the open bag in a cool shaded, air-tight place, like a canister—if you put it in the freezer, be sure it is tightly sealed.
“Surprise” the coffee, and use a French press.

Surprise? OK. A whole coffee bean is the most peaceful, self-preserved state in which a roasted coffee can find itself

When you “disturb the peace,” do it quickly, for the best flavor.

Open the bag, grind the coffee, toss it in the French press, pour in the hot water, push down the plunger, drink it. That’s fast. It will produce the best flavor. An automatic-drip coffee maker with a thermal pitcher is the next best thing.

Percolators keep the coffee rolling around in the hot water – that’s no way to surprise anything. It won’t produce optimum flavor.

Poor storage and preparation will ruin even the finest gourmet coffee. I know, because I tasted it in my parents’ kitchen last month.

Treat coffee like a fresh, living organism. Treat it gently. Surprise it into the cup, and you’ll experience the full pleasure of a gourmet coffee. Do it for your enjoyment. Do it for me.

Comments?? Questions?? Write me at Steve@cafebritt.com

Multi-origin, multi-local

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0600

Multi-origin, multi-local

Café Britt now has operations in seven countries and employs over 900 people. A corporation we are. Corporate we’re not. If we had manuals and a central marketing department that dictated the every move of every one of our operations, we’d lose our soul.

That’s why we’re trying to follow another model. It’s a model we call “multilocal.”

I like to think of Café Britt Costa Rica as a sort of inspirational “uncle.” Our operations abroad are like our nieces and nephews – family, but adults, able to choose their own path and their own identity. They’re a collection of locally focused, culturally independent businesses united by Café Britt’s guiding principles.

Character, communication, creativity and commitment to our customers, our suppliers and each other – these are “the qualities behind the quality” of every one of our products. It’s about adding value to locally produced products and settling for nothing short of excellence. It’s more a way of looking at things than a fixed set of policies and procedures.

We’ve found that our multilocal “nieces and nephews” have openly embraced it and draw inspiration from it.

A team from Costa Rica visits and thoroughly studies a country before we open an operation there. We then provide training and support, but leave plenty of room for local creativity.

In Peru, a coffee-producing country, our Peruvian coffees are now served on the tourist train to Machu Picchu. In Chile and Curaçao, where coffee isn’t grown, our Costa Rican coffees enhance local options. All our stores celebrate local cultures, customs, artisans and legends. That keeps things interesting and unique. All have different names and different themes. All are staffed by country nationals.

Staying multilocal is an ongoing process for us. We’re still trying to decide how to grow and how not to fall into the trap of having cookie-cutter subsidiaries that take their lead from Café Britt Costa Rica.

An impersonal bureaucracy will never produce an exceptional unique product. The people involved, working together, are the most powerful force in creativity. That’s the way we want to go.

The Wine of Costa Rica?

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0600

The Wine of Costa Rica…

…You may find that title a little odd for a column about the South American nation of Chile, but Chile is something of an anomaly today, anyway.

We set out late last year to create a presence for Café Britt in Chile. The project took on a life of its own. By July 10, we’d opened three coffee-and-gift stores at Santiago’s Arturo Merino Benitez International Airport.

To support our new stores, we set up a warehouse and logistics backup operation, hired 100 employees and began selling to some of the country’s finest restaurants and hotels.

Our first shipment of coffee there sold out in 10 days. We thought it would last a month.

We’re already planning a fourth store and an Internet-based virtual store that will sell only to customers within Chile – a first for us, but a necessity.

Chile measures more than 2,600 miles from its arid northern desert to its southern tip of ice and penguins. Yet, it spans only about 115 miles at its widest point. Great distances often prevent coffee lovers from just running to the nearest major city for a cup of Café Britt. Our Internet stores will allow customers to order from their homes and receive their coffee within a few days.

In only eight months we created a presence in Chile that is already larger than what was our flagship Costa Rica operation in 1999.

And I didn’t have anything to do with it.

My son, Philippe, led a team of about 40 people that set the whole system up before I’d even set foot in the country. I walked off the plane in Santiago to discover that we’d become quite a tour de force. Café Britt – our coffee – is right now becoming “the wine of Costa Rica” as far as Chileans are concerned.

True, the country was ready for us. With its long wine-making tradition, Chile should be a country of coffee lovers, but with no climate for local coffee production, 90 percent of Chileans drink instant coffee.

Globalization has opened markets. Former dictator Augusto Pinochet was as authoritarian as only dictators can be, but the free market-style policies he insisted on in the 1990s have transformed the Chilean economy into a Latin American powerhouse. Democracy – with a respected police force – is standard fare today.

Chile has free trade agreements with most of the world. Government rules are clear, phones and electricity work, people are well educated and the quality of employees is very high. Many have high-speed Internet in their homes, and carry Blackberries. This country works.

That’s a new experience for us in Latin America.

Chile is an anomaly, but we’ll take it. This country is living proof that the inefficiency, complexity and nerve-frazzling bureaucracy characteristic of Latin America can be overcome. And we’re right here, now, in the middle of it. A very proud moment.

The Finns and their Twins

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0600

The Finns and their Twins

The Finnish National Museum in Helsinki has an entire room dedicated to coffee. That would surprise just about anyone who hasn’t spent the last few decades working in the coffee business. But not those of us who know that Finland and its neighbor to the west, Sweden, are the “beating heart center” of world coffee consumption.

The Finns and Swedes collectively consume twice the coffee per capita as U.S. coffee drinkers and three times more than Costa Ricans.

Their collective thirst for the highest-quality coffee made the two nations a benchmark for us coffee brokers in the 1970s and 1980s. A top-quality, gourmet coffee was one we could sell to the Finns.

And was this great coffee destined for gourmet coffee shops? Nope. The Finns used it as their supermarket brands.

Finland and Sweden eagerly paid top dollar for the best coffee. They bought 15 to 20 percent of Costa Rica’s top export coffee back when I was trading. One of Finland’s top-selling brands is still called “Costa Rica.”

It’s fair to say that these two nations, who have been drinking coffee since the 1600s, were singly responsible for creating a gourmet niche market. In fact, Scandinavia was my inspiration for the name Café Britt.

That’s why it was so enjoyable to discover the National Museum’s coffee room, when I was in Helsinki recently for a tourism conference.

I learned there about a pivotal historic dilemma that occurred while both Finland and Sweden were still a single, united nation. In 1756, coffee was banned. A top trading house, the Swedish East India Company, wanted to increase market demand for tea.

A national outcry ensued. King Charles XII took a definitively monarch-style approach.

According to the legend, he demanded that the people bring him two identical twins. One twin was to drink only coffee, and the other only tea. Finland’s coffee-drinking future hinged on which became the healthier twin.

Imagine the anxiety that must have consumed the nation! Switch to tea?

A museum watercolor called “Coffee Ban,” depicts a woman hiding coffee in her kitchen, while police search for it in another room.

After all, this is a nation that even today drinks its coffee black. True, as a part of the European Union, Finland and its offerings have become a mainstream. In shops today, you’ll find espresso machines. You can buy a latte, a mocha.

But the Finns drink coffee for the taste of coffee – the taste that continues to inspire all of Café Britt’s gourmet roasts.

Switch to tea? All of Finland waited. Sipping coffee on the sly, until the fateful moment that secured their coffee-drinking future…

The twin who drank the tea died first.

The Darker the Better?

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0600

The Darker the Better?

Deep, rich, robust… These are words that we’ve come to associate with a quality, gourmet coffee that is, of course, dark roasted.

But did you know that a dark roast was once thought to be a sign of cheap coffee? It’s true. And how times have changed!

Coffee that is dark roasted stays in the roaster until the beans’ natural oils rise to the surface. Fresh dark-roasted coffee is a deep brown color and shiny from the oils. A light-roasted coffee, by contrast, stays in the roaster only until the beans’ natural sugars caramelize, creating a warm, lighter-brown bean.

Oils enhance the flavor and aroma of coffee, but when I got into the coffee business in the 1960s, all the industry’s true mavens drank light-roasted coffee – and with good reason.

Many subtle fruity and even spicy flavors may only be perceived in a light-roasted gourmet coffee.

And it never tasted watery. In fact, a cup brewed with the correct amount of light-roasted coffee – about 7 grams of coffee per cup – never will.

Back then, a darker roast was thought to be used in an attempt to disguise the flavor of a cheaper coffee.

In the U.S., we owe the national shift toward dark roasts to two sources – Folgers and Alfred Peet.

When coffee prices soared in the 1970s, Folgers started to market the idea that 13 ounces (of “flake”) were a pound and a good coffee was light—in fact, in Middle America people “learned” that a good cup of coffee could be made with 3 grams of coffee.

The reaction to watery coffee came from the home of the gourmet coffee and other lifestyle revolutions—Berkeley thanks to Alfred Peet – father of the famous Peet’s.

Peet went to the other extreme. He bought gourmet coffee, dark-roasted (“deep roasted”) it and prepared each cup using three times as much coffee. This recipe became the gold standard of the gourmet coffee industry.

In fact, three of Peet’s coffee roasters later went off and started a little coffee business of their own – Starbucks.

At Café Britt, our Dark Roast outsells all our other coffees two to one. But that shouldn’t diminish the experience of a well-prepared cup of our Light Roast blend or our excellent Poás Volcanic Earth. Both have a wonderful complexity that make for a different coffee experience – pure and surprising; equally deserving of the words “deep,” “rich” and “robust.” All you have to do is use enough coffee and enjoy!!

Food, Glorious Food

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0600

Food, Glorious Food

We’ve had a restaurant at our roastery headquarters here in Costa Rica for years. Our early goals were to provide well-prepared, creative Costa Rican cooking to our guests who worked up an appetite doing the CoffeeTour.

But that goal has evolved as we’ve come to give people more reasons to visit. Today, the CoffeeTour is still a huge draw, but we’re also producing our own plays at our on-site Dionisio Theater. Our roastery gift shop and other shops in Costa Rica, Peru and Curaçao are also big attractions. They’re luring shoppers and hooking up talented local artisans with markets they never had before.

Our dining area got a big makeover about 3 years ago, and our “Don Próspero” restaurant was born. With an award-winning young chef and a strong desire to show off the bounty of this beautiful country, we refocused on the dining experience.

A good-enough-tasting, filling meal is as easy to come by as a cup of strong, cheap coffee. You’ll feel full after eating and may notice the kick of caffeine after drinking.

But you don’t really want go to a restaurant for that. You go to a restaurant to be surprised, to be delighted, to go beyond the notion of food as fuel, and coffee as a drug.

Taste is an easily satisfied sense. Give it sugar, grease, salt and it’s happy. The art of cuisine is moving beyond those baser desires to a more complex, discriminating level that includes smell, texture, color and sensation.

You won’t find red meats at Don Próspero, only fresh fish, chicken and a cornucopia of tropical fruits and vegetables, both wild and garden-grown. Local farmers produce most everything we serve. Our seasonings are fresh-ground herbs and spices, little salt and lightly sprayed olive oil.

Have you ever tried stuffed chayote squash, or mashed tiquisque with sweet potato? Ever sampled coconut milk, fresh pejibayes and palm heart?

Just as we’ve come to surprise you with the subtleties of coffees grown in different parts of the country, we want to surprise you at Don Próspero. That’s why we serve selections that aren’t only fresh, high quality and nutritious, but also innovative.

We’re always looking for new ways of preparing old favorites, using this incredible bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables. Our selections will exercise all your senses, not just taste. Because that’s what being human is all about.

And isn’t that why you really go to a restaurant?

Coffee Beyond the Drug

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0600

Coffee Beyond the Drug

Our customers know a lot more about coffee than they did 20 years ago. The whole world does.

The espresso revolution has made household words out of “double shot,” “latte” and “barista.” It’s also led to a greater understanding of what makes good coffee great.

Most of our visitors at Café Britt now know that arabica coffee is the good stuff. They’ve learned that it grows in large plantations, and that “shade-grown” coffee provides habitat for birds. They want the farmers who grow gourmet coffee to get their fair share.

Our customers no longer need us to explain the difference between our gourmet coffees and the mass-market brands. They expect more from us – a more sophisticated approach.

We’re starting by rethinking the way we talk about ourselves and our coffee. Its flavors and aromas are as subtly diverse as its many growing regions. We want our customers to appreciate these differences as we do.

We want our customers to understand why we insist on traditional sun drying and milling, how Costa Rica and Peru have developed national identities around their gourmet crop, and how the care that farmers give their plantations enhances quality.

This is about coffee beyond the drug. It’s about the qualities that make drinking gourmet coffee a sensory experience – wholly enjoyable.

We have a new Web site and a coffee museum in the works for those who want to delve deeper into the world of gourmet coffee. Our award-winning Coffee Tour is the first glimpse of this world for many of our visitors. We’ve already enhanced the tour with tips on great coffee making. Tours of our new Tierra Madre wet mill also go deeper to satisfy our customer/technophiles.

We’re training our sales staff on how to satisfy our customers’ more sophisticated tastes and curiosity. But we’ll be careful not to lose sight of our basic role as educators for those who have a newly acquired interest in our business.

These are exciting times. It’s a whole new world. The next 20 years will have their share of surprises. We’re doing what we need to do today to prepare for them.

A Whole New World

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0600

A Whole New World

Those of us who’ve spent decades in the coffee business are still here because we’ve had some ability to gauge our customers’ wants and satisfy them. It’s business 101 – find a market niche and fill it better than anyone else.

But few of us could have predicted the monumental changes we’ve witnessed over the past two decades.

Twenty years ago, who’d have imagined that:

Starbucks, a small Seattle-area coffee company, would take espresso mainstream with a roaster of coffee drinks that show how versatile a shot of this intense roast can be.
People would buy more coffee on the run than they make at home?
Coffee would become a trendy, hip drink with teens and young professionals?
New energy drinks, like Coca Cola Blak^tm, would create a whole new market for coffee?
The industry, once high-yield driven, would move towards the “best practices” of quality, health and environmental protection?
Nestle, the world name associated with instant coffee, would become the inventor of the high-quality gourmet coffee pod?

Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall and Communist-bloc countries were off limits to the world’s fine coffees. Today, they’re emerging markets. And what if the Chinese awaken to the flavor of coffee? On its own, the “sleeping giant” could consume 50 million bags – half the world’s production.

As co-organizer of this 20th anniversary of Sintercafé, Central America’s premier coffee industry trade show – I urged my colleagues to adopt a forward-looking theme – Sintercafé: 20 Years, 20/20 Vision.

The Nov. 11 to 15 event will fill Costa Rica with some of the industry’s top names. Together, we’ll hammer out a vision of the future and strategies to take advantage of the changes ahead.

“How much coffee could you sell, if you could predict the future?” Today, this question is the catch phrase of Sintercafé 2006. Tomorrow – a couple decades from now – we’ll know if we found the right answers.

Coffee country blooms in Curaçao

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0600

Coffee country blooms in Curaçao

Café Britt has opened three, sparkling new coffee and gift stores at the Hato International Airport on the Caribbean island of Curaçao.

We’ve opened stores in Perú and all over Costa Rica. But these Curaçao stores are really worth talking about.

They’re proof that our creative, Costa Rica-based staff can “parachute” into an entirely alien culture to design, build, stock and staff stores that mirror this curious Caribbean island and introduce Café Britt’s own “plantation to cup” identity. The stores are named after three indigenous flowers from the island: Flamboyan, Kayena, and Tuturutu. The sounds tell you something about the culture, don’t they.

Agriculture – coffee culture – is totally foreign to this island of dry desert scrub. Nature reveals itself only to divers and snorklers, who travel to Curaçao for its coral reef and colorful sea life.

The capital city of Willemstad became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997. It’s yellow, orange and blue, Dutch colonial buildings welcome the approximately 200 cruise ships that glide directly through downtown and tie up at the city’s busy port. The island’s cosmopolitan residents are multicultural and multilingual. Most speak four languages – English, Spanish, Dutch and their native Papiamento.

Curaçao was once a staging post for shipments of African slaves headed to the new world. Today, much of the shipping traffic revolves around the oil refining industry, which is second only to tourism as an income earner.

But coffee? That was the challenge, and our staff really came through. Café Britt’s stores are the talk of the town.

With Curaçao open, Aruba may be next. About 40 miles away, Aruba is less than 40 miles long and six miles wide, but it receives 800,000 tourist visits each year. Or maybe we will try some other territory, the opportunities for our Company are open, and we at the Board level, are intensively trying to chart the course of our future developments.

The challenge to meld our differing cultures will be the same. But tourists love our coffee, chocolates, nuts and gifts. It’s going to be fine.

Let?s Hear it for the National Parks

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0600

Let’s Hear it for the National Parks

Have you ever felt the steamy embrace of a virgin rainforest? Or observed from a pristine beach as scarlet macaws peer down at you inquisitively from atop a stand of almond trees? You can still do that in Costa Rica.

We want to make sure you’ll always be able to.

Our small country has deservedly earned world attention for setting roughly one-quarter of its national territory aside for parks and protected areas.

But history has proven that setting the land aside has not been as big a challenge as preserving its protected status from the likes of illegal loggers and poachers.

The government has yet to pay original landowners for some lands that are now protected. Visitors centers are rare, and park rangers are often poorly paid caretakers with little formal knowledge of the amazing flora and fauna they’re responsible to protect.

Café Britt and a collection of other environmentally conscious businessmen and women intend to change that.

Our new association, ProParques, seeks to ensure that Costa Rica’s parks and protected areas not only survive for future generations, but are enhanced through stable sources of funding and education to improve the visitors’ experience – whether you come for sun and sand, or to learn about our amazing ecosystems.

We hope to find creative ways to create a permanent and renewable resource pool to expand conservation efforts and create a professional corps of park staff.

We’ll get communities and nature lovers involved creating money-making opportunities that will put them to work for the parks, instead of unlawfully exploiting the parks’ riches for temporary, and very short-sighted gain.

We intend to use our business savvy to make ProParques the catalyst for positive, noticeable change. We all have too big a stake not to get involved.

Chocolate ? A View from the Train

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0600

Chocolate – A View from the Train

Plenty of tourists visit Costa Rica’s verdant Caribbean coast every year for the beaches, the national parks, the Jamaican influence on local culture and the unique “mom-and-pop” brand of small-time tourism.

But few visitors ever gain any understanding into how the once-mighty cocoa bean molded the Caribbean identity and served as the pillar of the local economy. Beginning this fall, Café Britt will give them their first glimpse.

The Café Britt ChocolateTour will build appreciation for this fascinating region much the way banana baron Minor Keith did – by train.

We’re developing a new ChocolateTour in the tradition of our award-winning CoffeeTour. We’re working with the national railroad authorities to “adopt” an old train car and refit it to comfortably transport guests from the Caribbean port city of Limón to an historic, 120-acre cacao plantation and processing station in the jungle town of Penshurst.

There, on the banks of the Estrella River, an association of native Bribri Indian cocoa farmers will ferment and process their cocoa beans as our ChocolateTour visitors observe. The native Bribri Indians of the Talamanca mountain range today cultivate the same varieties of cocoa grown by the ancient Maya and Inca. These are prime varieties of organic chocolate, valued for the high quality cocoa butter they produce.

Our train visitors will stroll through a chocolate plantation, enjoy plenty of fresh, Caribbean-style home cooking and local Calypso band. Our expert guide/actors will tell the fascinating history of chocolate in “show style” that blends humor, information and fun. They’ll view the chocolate-making process, take short nature hikes or find a shady spot and enjoy breathtaking views along the Estrella River.

They’ll ride back to the port in the same narrow-gauge, specially fitted train car that brought them, rolling over tracks also used to transport another important Caribbean crop – bananas – to port.

When the ChocolateTour starts rolling late this fall, it will be a story some 30 years in the making.

One of my first business partners – 30 years ago – sold cocoa beans out of Ecuador, while I did the same for coffee out of Costa Rica. For years, we were the region’s largest cocoa exporter.

Today, Café Britt’s Costa Rican and Peruvian gourmet chocolates are among our top sellers. Our long history with chocolate is present in every package. And it will give us a special satisfaction to share what we know about this remarkable industry, later this year, when the first ChocolateTour train car rolls into Penshurst.

The Year of the Cocoa Bean

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0600

The Year of the Cocoa Bean

That’s right, cocoa. True, we’ve made a name for ourselves off the coffee bean. But you really love our chocolates, too. And we’re about to give you more of them.

In fact, 2006 will be the “Year of the Cocoa Bean” at Café Britt. In the works is a certified-organic version of the dark-chocolate-covered coffee beans we introduced in 1998. We’re also working on some amazing new additions to our growing family of chocolate and tropical fruit creations. We’re pretty excited about it. How about chocolate covered banana??

Café Britt is no newcomer to the gourmet chocolate business. My first export partner was based in Ecuador, a country that remains a leading exporter of fine cocoa. I was married in a cocoa producing town in rural Ecuador in the zone of Arriba cocoa.

Thirty years have gone by, and now we’re producing our own gourmet chocolates in both Costa Rica and Peru. We’ll also buy from Ecuador as our product line expands.

Costa Rica used to be a big exporter of cocoa, a funny looking crop produced inside pods that grow curiously along the trunks of cacao trees. It’s a tropical crop that thrives on torrential rainfall, heat and humidity, but in most cocoa-producing counties, the pods are harvested during the dry season.

In Costa Rica, cocoa is a rainy-season crop. It’s harvested when the country’s rainy season is in full swing.

Now, that’s just fine for the mosquitoes like mites – that’s right, mosquitoes – that pollinate cocoa. But all that moisture created a prime breeding ground for a fungus that attacks the pods just as they ripen. The fungus wiped out entire cocoa farms, which were replanted with another crop that thrives in moisture and humidity – bananas.

Today, most of what little cocoa is still produced in Costa Rica grows in the south-Caribbean Bribrí region. And it’s pretty special stuff.

Bribrí tribal growers cultivate the some of the same varieties grown by the ancient Maya. These are prime varieties, valued for their nutlike flavor and strong aroma. These are the varieties used in both our Costa Rican and Peruvian chocolates.

We carefully ferment the beans, grind them finely, add plenty of rich cocoa butter and just enough sugar. The result is a creamy, flavorful chocolate that melts in your mouth.

But, you know that already, because you’ve tasted it. And wait ‘til you taste what’s coming.

Coffee and the Berlin Wall

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Coffee and the Berlin Wall

An unexpected effect of German reunification came to me last month, as I sipped a terrible cup of coffee in a Berlin pastry shop.

The coffee had little aroma and less flavor, as it is just about everywhere you go in Berlin, outside of a few trendy coffee shops that sell many of the world’s fine coffees, including Café Britt.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Before the Wall fell in 1989, Germany was the temple of fine coffee.

Back then, all of us who exported Costa Rica’s gourmet Arabica coffee followed a similar formula. You chose the best coffee to sell to Germany and Scandinavia. What export-grade coffee was left over went to the U.S. and the rest – the dregs of the harvest – stayed in Costa Rica for local consumption.

Then the Wall fell. Germany reunified, and the western part of the country, already economically strong and flooded with consumer goods, absorbed the poorer eastern part that hadn’t seen true commerce for decades.

All of a sudden, anyone who was packaging any consumer good, including coffee, was confronted with a huge, very price-conscious part of the market.

The big German roasters responded by changing their blends to cheaper coffees including large quantities of lower-grade Robusta beans. They invented a steaming system that "neutralizes" the Robusta taste. They used the system to process up to 30 percent of the consumer-brand coffee, increasing profits, but stretching the weak flavor and aroma even more.

Their smaller competitors did the same. Now, the whole county is awash in mediocrity. But where did the good stuff go?

Just as the Germans were working through the euphoria and challenge of reunification, U.S. coffee drinkers were beginning to discover coffee. Thanks to Peets, Starbucks and others, U.S. consumers were learning that the best coffee didn’t come in cans. They began seeking out better blends and became willing to pay for quality.

The U.S. market is today the world’s strongest for coffee. It’s the one that receives most of Costa Rica’s gourmet crop. Those few, trendy coffee shops that now exist in Berlin were inspired by U.S. gourmet coffee shops from Seattle to New York.

Café Britt further added to this market "up-side-downness" by roasting Costa Rica’s best coffee here at home and selling it to Costa Ricans eager to discover what the rest of the world already knew – that their country produced some pretty fine coffee.

The good stuff is catching on again in Germany. Young Germans who’ve sampled great coffee abroad are looking for gourmet blends at home.

But it amazed me as I sat there in that pastry shop in Berlin, how much the world has changed since the Wall came down. Germans now have a word they now use to refer to the time after the wall. The word, "wende" means "turn around," or "turning point."

A perfect word, I think, for what happened not only in Germany following this historic milestone, but also in the Costa Rica coffee market.

Good Coffee, Good Health

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Good Coffee, Good Health

I spent a week in May at a yoga camp in Tolum, Mexico, south of Cancún. Amid a large group of others there for peace, nutritious meals and exercise, I came to realize how health-conscious many have become.

And when it comes to the health effects of a certain favorite beverage, coffee, they’re concerned.

In my 35 years in the business, articles of varying credibility have always come out saying coffee was good for this or bad for that.

Coffee’s good for your heart. Coffee’s bad for your heart. Coffee drinkers are less likely to develop liver cancer. Coffee drinking can lead to kidney stones. Coffee can help in the disease-fighting process, but it allegedly may also be linked with osteoporosis and gastritis. Coffee helps to protect against Parkinson’s disease, colon cancer and diabetes.

The reality is more a matter of logic. Coffee is a natural drink that’s been around for 1,000 years. It has no additives, no sugar, no calories. The human body reacts well to caffeine, which, in moderation, gives energy, gets the metabolism going and can contribute to sharper thinking.

A cup of Café Britt has less caffeine than a bottle of Coke, without the sugar, artificial flavor and color.

True, too much caffeine – I’ve heard more than six to 10 cups of coffee per day – can be harmful. So, if you drink coffee, drink gourmet coffee.

Mountain-grown Arabica coffee tastes better than low-elevation Robusta coffees, but it also has a lot less caffeine. The natural wet-milling process also reduces caffeine content and the surface residue that can contribute to stomach irritation.

If you have a delicate stomach, try decaffeinated coffee or a blend of half and half.

Until the 1970s, only the lowest-grade coffee was decaffeinated as the decaf factories were producing caffeine—coffee was a by product. That’s changed as more concerned coffee lovers have switched to decaf. In fact, the Germans who decaffeinate Café Britt’s own arabica decaf call their process “stomach friendly” – the steam and washing produces a coffee that is very mild for the stomach.

And, just in case you were wondering, an Internet Google search with the words “coffee, dangers” produces 688,000 sites; a search with the words “coffee, benefits,” produces almost eight times more “hits” – 5.5 million.

That may not be a scientific way to judge the coffee in your cup, but it’s certainly as scientific as most of the reports out there.

Green? or Red?

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Green? or Red?

“You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black.”

Henry Ford’s infamous quotation about his revolutionary but monotone Model T wasn’t too far off the mark at Café Britt about 10 years ago.

A visit to our Web site or to one of the many Costa Rican supermarkets that sold our coffee back then would have revealed a plentiful supply of coffee to buy – as long as it was in a red or a green bag.

Our trusty Light Roast and Dark Roast premium blends were about all we offered in those days.

Today, that same visit presents a 21st Century dilemma. Which coffee to choose? Our traditional Light and Dark roasts now share shelf space with a growing line of remarkable regional coffees, such as Tres Ríos and Tarrazú from Costa Rica and “Sacred Valley” coffees from the heights of the Peruvian Andes.

The earthy, fruity flavors and aromas of these regional coffees reflect a character molded by optimum growing conditions – the altitude, soils, rainfall and sunlight that nurtured them during their time on the coffee bush. But the flavor produced changes, ever so slightly, depending on variations in weather, harvest time and roasting.

That’s the surprise. No two harvests of an unblended premium coffee are ever quite the same.

Consistency is the art of the blend.

Our blended coffees are every bit as premium as our regional coffees, but with one unique characteristic – consistency.

We know how to combine premium coffees grown in different regions or on different farms to produce a flavor and aroma that hold up, cup after cup, month after month, year after year..

And our customers continue to endorse our roasters’ artful skills. Even in this time of increasing options, Café Britt’s green Dark Roast blend still accounts for almost half our coffee sales.

We encourage you to try all of our coffees, but when puzzling over which to choose, think of it this way. The surprising but variable regional coffee is the one you want to flaunt, serve to a roomful of special guests, be seen with.

The trusty blend, with its irresistible, but steadfast flavor and aroma, is the one you want to wake up to every morning. And our bag colors are still red or green. How’s that for consistency?

Some Welcome Good News for Arabica Producers

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0600

Some welcome good news for Arabica producers

After five years of very tough times, the world’s producers of high-quality Arabica coffee are starting to make money again.

We’re considerably smaller and leaner than we were five years ago, when a worldwide surplus of green coffee drove prices down.

In a country like Costa Rica, where an estimated 85 percent of all coffee growers are considered “small to medium sized", the crisis was acute.

Farmers here weren’t able to get enough for their crops to cover production costs. Some got out of the business altogether, hoping for government aid to cover their debts. The majority retained their land, but let maintenance slide on their plantations. A generalized drought in much of Central America added to growers worries, further diminishing crops. The result, here and world over, is a reduced supply.

A December report by the London-based International Coffee Organization (www.ico.org) shows that many of the world’s big producers, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Columbia are expected to produce about 4 percent to 8 percent less coffee during the 2004/2005 harvest than they did during the 2003/2004 harvest.

Unfavorable weather conditions in powerhouse Brazil have reduced that country’s hopes for this year’s harvest.

We can see the effects of the reduced supply in last year’s price rebound. The ICO’s composite price history – a cross-variety average of coffee prices – shows that the per-pound value of coffee increased from $0.59 per pound in January 2004 to about $0.78 per pound in December 2004.

Prices have increased, but no so much that lovers of high-quality coffees have stopped drinking. The ICO reports that world coffee consumption was up last year over 2003.

These are good signs for a period of returning prosperity.

Experienced coffee growers and brokers have come to expect this roughly five-year cycle. Farmers who see that prices are rebounding are already now planting new coffee and investing in their neglected plantations to cash in on the anticipated boom.

But in their zeal to cash in, they are already sowing the seeds of the next cycle of bust. A coffee bush planted today takes five years to produce its first coffee cherries. That first crop will coincide with first crops everywhere, adding to anticipated bumper crops in about five years.

Café Britt and our suppliers reduce our vulnerability to the “five-year cycle” by focusing on quality and growing practices that are ecologically sustainable. High-quality Arabica and organic coffees continually fetch higher prices at market. It’s good business. And it tastes a lot better in the cup.

Of Wine and Coffee

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0600

Of Wine and Coffee

Coffee tasters, aka “cuppers” have a specialized vocabulary which works very well when they communicate among themselves.

For example for a cupper—“highly acid” is a good thing. “woody” is bad. Words like these sustain the coffee industry and help expert cuppers distinguish good coffees from great ones.

But they say very little to average coffee lovers – those who care enough about what they drink to order Café Britt, but who can"t be bothered with industry jargon.

And why should they be bothered? Beginning this month, we at Café Britt are reinventing the way we talk about our coffees.

Different growing regions, soils and weather conditions produce subtle flavor differences that we can liken to flavors and sensations that occur in nature – grapefruit, allspice, chocolate, figs, nougat, cloves.

Sound a little touchy feely? The French wine industry’s been doing it for generations, as I discovered on a recent trip to the Bordeaux region, where I took a class in wine tasting.

Using descriptors that really speak to people, French wine makers have educated their customers and enticed them to sample and appreciate new varieties.

By applying these principles to coffee we hope, for the first time, to provide Café Britt lovers an insight into our coffees" subtle differences and the fun of sampling and discerning these subtle differences for themselves.

We"ve spent the past several months subjecting all our coffees to guided taste tests, first among our sales staff and baristas and then later to our expert cuppers. We"ve reached a series of “real world” flavor comparisons that will become part of our “real world” coffee descriptions.

“Acidity,” “body”. These are industry standards that will forever define great coffees. But what would you rather drink, a coffee with high acidity, or one whose dark roast brings out a flavor that hints of figs and dark chocolate?

I"d go for the dark chocolate. And I"ve been cupping coffee for 33 years.

By Steven Aronson - President Café Britt

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0600

Café Britt South

Beginning in February, Café Britt will begin roasting coffee and manufacturing chocolate in the South American city of Lima , Perú. We decided on our Peruvian venture when we won the contract to run three gift and coffee shops at the city’s Jorge Chavez International Airport .

This really interesting opportunity will give all lovers of Britt the chance to buy and enjoy some of the coffees hidden away in the high reaches of the Andes, as well as fruits and nuts not produced in tropical Costa Rica .

It will also allow us to export our gourmet brand and marketing model to a country that’s rediscovering itself after bringing the infamous “shining path” terrorist organization to justice in 1992.

I spent most of August in Lima and Cuzco ironing out details. Alterra Partners, the firm that manages Costa Rica’s Juan Santamaría International Airport , is also a shareholder of Lima Airport Partners (LAP), the firm that runs the International airport in Lima. Café Britt relationship with Alterra dates to 2001, when we won a bid to operate the Juan Santamaría airport shops.

The rest of the time I spent exploring coffee-buying opportunities in northern Perú and through a farmers cooperative near the town of Quillabamba, about a three-hour walk from the ruins of the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu. Quillabamba has a special significance – my wife and I spent our honeymoon there in 1973, while I was doing a coffee survey for the Peruvian government.

The Arabica coffee I found in the region of the Valle de la Convencion is pretty remarkable, grown at 1,500 to 2,000 meters. The plants are traditional shade-grown varieties. Farmers’ distance from major commercial centers obliges them to use “best-practice” growing techniques – more natural fertilizers and materials at hand. The region’s harvest season, from June through August, complements Costa Rica’s November through January harvest, allowing us to better use our resources and provide our customers with freshly harvested coffee during more months of the year. We’re happy.

And we think you will be too, buying the coffees and chocolates of Café Britt Perú over our Web site. This will be one of our interesting new additions for 2005.

CoffeeTour Raises the Bar

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0600

CoffeeTour raises the bar

The fifth edition of the World Barista Championship, the “Olympic Games” for baristas or coffee bartenders, took place in Trieste, Italy June 18-20.

The now yearly competition rewards the art, creativity and showmanship of a craft once hidden from view behind the bulk of a commercial espresso machine or the confines of a drive-through coffee cabin.

So, when Café Britt set out in June to celebrate the 12,000th performance of our award-winning CoffeeTour, we could think of no better way than showcasing the barista’s art in pure CoffeeTour style – with fun and education.

The tour’s 11 a.m. edition, now dubbed the “Cappuccino CoffeeTour,” features a new barista show and open coffee bar at our on-site Don Próspero Restaurant.

The event was a resounding success with the nearly 100 tourism professionals and special guests we tested it on June 24. The general public got its first sampling July 1.

Fitted with a wireless microphone and camera, our expert, on-staff barista explains and shows how to brew a perfect espresso and cappuccino. A viewing screen displays every step for all to see.

After the demonstration, visitors drink their fill of coffee and specialty coffee drinks, including our new guava iced coffee cooler. Our barista remains at the coffee bar – any fantasy our guests have in specialty drinks, we’ll prepare for them.

The show, set amid a wedding party feast, is hosted by our two CoffeeTour protagonists who “marry” during each tour performance, making the barista show a natural extension of our already famous tour.

We’re proud of our CoffeeTour’s continuing success, but it needs to keep evolving to remain fresh and successful.

The barista show plus the expansion this year of our restaurant and our new coffee bar are part of Café Britt’s efforts to continue improving, building on the success of our past. We want to ensure that the 24,000th edition of the tour, when its time comes, will be an important a milestone as the 12,000th performance was in June. Stay with us.

Capitalist Opportunity in Communist China

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0600

Capitalist Opportunity in Communist China

Brash and ready for western-style business, China feels it can do anything, and I’d have to agree with it.

I observed this invincibility for myself during a March 27 to April 3 trip there to explore introducing Café Britt to this nation of 1.3 billion people and its Asian neighbors beyond.

The China of my travels – Peking, Beijing , Dalian , Shanghai and Hangzhou – gives an aggressively capitalist impression: billboards, neon, lots of American advertisement, and NO communist slogans.

I met my Chinese host, Ming, in Costa Rica . A trader in what appears to be anything that moves, Ming has what looks like a dynamic organization staffed by young professionals. He bought a freight container of Café Britt that he hopes to serve in a new coffee house Peking .

The northern port city of Dalian, on the Yellow and Bohai seas, is an hour away from Japan and Korea. The Russians used it as a military base during WW2 and stayed during the 1950’s. The architecture is pure Stalin.

A call center here that can handle Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English could be a springboard for introducing Café Britt to a region that appears to be ripe for fine coffee.

The classy coffee shop in town had an extensive menu that included Blue Mountain, Sumatra and Colombian coffees. The cappuccinos were super sweet and expensive – we probably spent a week’s wages on four cups of coffee there.

Per capita consumption of coffee in this tea-dominated nation is barely a gram per year, but a coffee culture is catching on, driven by the urban rich and wealthy middle class. Analysts predict the Chinese will follow the lead of the Japanese, who today yearly consume more than 3 kilos of coffee per capita, compared to barely 300 grams per capita per year in 1965.

One of Ming’s distributors, whom we met in the eastern port city of Shanghai, said the local supermarket chain – an empire of 1,600 stores – could be a good vehicle for our chocolates and macadamia products.

This country is open for business. Internet and cell phone service works well. Major construction is everywhere. There is undoubtedly poverty here, but I didn’t see much of it. The Chinese revel in their mighty nation and seem immersed in enormous possibility.

I’ll keep you posted on how that possibility will translate to potential for
Café Britt.

Free Trade

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0600

Costa Rica has joined its Central American counterparts in signing CAFTA, a free trade agreement with the U.S.

If the agreement remains true to its entrepreneurial spirit, it could become a final phase in regional development – the home stretch in a marathon race away from the devastating civil wars and projectionist policies that hobbled Central America in the 1970’s and 80’s.

Those of us around back then remember the subsidized prices paid only to those suppliers who agreed with western ideology. The result? Decades of high-priced mediocrity.

As a roaster and packer of fine coffees, I welcome CAFTA. It’ll improve the standard of living by increasing opportunities, consumption and choice.

Nicaragua still places a 60-percent surcharge on Costa Rican coffee sold in its hotels, and Guatemala holds up Costa Rican coffee in customs. Under CAFTA, these barriers should fall, opening up a region-wide market of 40 million Central Americans eager to pay fair prices for top-quality products.

The shift from price and market controls to independent economies with clear, agile rules for doing business will attract new investors, create jobs, improve education and boost spending power.

People who have more money and are better educated drink more fine coffee. CAFTA nations will observe an influx of foreign goods – goods that possibly won’t reflect national culture; the national idiosyncrasy. Local consumers will choose to embrace these products or reject them. But fears of culture-diluting globalization are better resolved in the marketplace than on the picket line. And they will be.

Café Britt has proved that Central America can be about more than just supplying raw materials to sophisticated northern markets. We have the workers and expertise to add value and go head to head with the world"s best. CAFTA will bring out the best in us.

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 00:00:00 -0600

Adding Value to More than Coffee Close

A gradual transition is taking place in Costa Rica toward a freer-trade-based, more complex economy that’s adding value not only to coffee and other agricultural products, but to people as well. It’s pretty exciting.

Thirty years ago, when the country produced and exported only unfinished commodities or raw materials, a coffee picker’s son or daughter probably couldn’t have hoped for much more than to continue in the family tradition and become lifetime coffee pickers, themselves. But a shift to freer trade encouraged grassroots companies to work hard to rewrite the trade rule books, add value to fine local products and do something really crazy – sell them to local consumers hungry for home-grown quality. It worked for us here at Café Britt.

Adding value and selling locally creates a demand for qualified workers at home to control quality, run the machines, fix the computers, serve the customers, and sell the product here and abroad. Today, the sons and daughters of coffee pickers are eagerly “adding value” to themselves to fill these positions. They’re getting educated, learning a language and honing their skills.

Café Britt has many examples on our staff. We have Alex, who was born on a coffee plantation, but who today speaks English and travels around the region teaching hotel and restaurant people how to set up and use espresso machines. Antonieta, the manager of our on-site coffee store, was formerly a coffee picker and cleaning woman. Several members of our sales staff are sons and daughters of small-scale farmers. They’re all success stories.

The opportunities of a more complex economy are making it happen here. Trade pacts like the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), once approved, will help the opportunities spread throughout the region.

According to experts who attended last month’s edition of Costa Rica’s premier coffee trade show, Sintercafé, if each person in coffee-producing countries consumed an additional half-kilo of coffee each year, worldwide demand would increase some 50 percent.

Imagine the possibilities of Central America’s further shift from a region of producers to consumers. Imagine the opportunities we could create with enough “value-added” people to help us do it.

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0600

Southern Comfort -- SmallGrowers
Confront Crisis

On a recent coffee-buying trip through Costa Rica’s remote Southern Zone I came across two dynamic examples of growers’ cooperatives whose “can do” attitude, focus on quality and hard work is cultivating a profitable, promising future despite their commodity-focused industry’s five-year-old financial crisis.
Coopeagri of the southern hub-city of San Isidro de El General and Coope San Vito, a little farther south, unite more than 11,000 mostly small-scale growers who’ve abandoned their generations-old “commodity mentality.”

These farmers are going after their share of the gourmet coffee market by working together to become more efficient, grow at higher elevations, modernize their mills and develop forward-looking, professional management. They’re giving high-end customers what we want, and we’re making it worth their while.
I bought coffee from both of them.
World commodity coffee prices haven’t covered Costa Rica’s production costs since 1999, and the tough times have generated something of a “poor us” mentality both here and in other coffee-growing countries. Yet, coops like Coopeagri and Coope San Vito are thriving. Unwilling to simply bow their heads and accept their diminished commodity profits, these groups are changing with the times and aggressively pursuing new customers. The crisis is making them stronger.

Costa Rica’s coffee-industry watchdog agency, Icafé, estimates that as much as 40 percent of Costa Rica’s high-quality, Arabica crop is now destined for higher-paying specialty markets like Café Britt.
And it should be. The country’s geography, climate, know-how and infrastructure are capable of producing a world-class, stand-alone product too valuable to be traded as a commodity. The crisis is forcing Costa Rican growers to awaken to that reality.
Crisis is often necessary to weed things out; clean things up. Some of the big guys have gone broke here, but the more agile, adaptable cooperatives are coming into their own. The coops’ ingenuity, and the strength of their many, small-scale associates, may just help preserve coffee’s reputation as “Costa Rica’s most democratic crop.” And that’s really good news for Café Britt and our quality-conscious customers.

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0600

Sun, 01 Jun 2003 00:00:00 -0600

Volume: 5, June 2003

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:00:00 -0600

Volume: 4, April 2003

Sun, 01 Dec 2002 00:00:00 -0600

Volume: 2, December 2002

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 00:00:00 -0600

Volume: 1, November 2002