Give a man a fish and he'll be hungry again tomorrow; teach a man to fish and you'll feed him for a lifetime - this is an old Chinese proverb which many wrongly attribute to the bible, much like I did before I started writing this blog post. You learn something new every day. This proverb acts as a great allegory for stumping, a practice in which farmers cut down their old, less productive trees, allowing them to return in a year or so with 2-4x more cherries than in the years before. For the past 3 years we’ve donated money...
Working closely with producers and understanding more about the agricultural context of coffee is one of the most important things we can do from our roastery in Amsterdam. Not being able to be on the ground where the coffee is grown can put a gap between us and the reality of farming, so conversations with producers and farmers are integral. El Salvador is one of our favoured origins and our coffees from here are boozy, funky, and some of our most sought after by you guys. For our El Salvadoran offering we work with Rodolfo Ruffatti Battle, the 4th generation...
You asked and we listened. Here’s the Friedhats go-to brew recipe. A la Lex Wenneker – one of the two men in charge. Dutch Brewers Cup Champ 2022 so you know it’s a good one. Ah, I can hear you now thinking, “a brewers cup recipe? But is that really something I can do at home? Every day?” yes! You too can brew like a champ, and it’s not even that hard. There are a few key elements to this recipe, the main one being a cold bloom of 62 degrees Celsius, the low temperature bloom extracts more sweetness while...
Coffee has a fraught history and it would be a lie to say that its present is clean of hardship. Corruption plays a massive role in the chain on the ground for farmers in some producing countries, and across our favoured origins producers are living in poverty; but change is possible, and importers are often the first steps to change. Trabocca’s work in bringing a fairer system to the farmers of Kenya is in its second inception, after a difficult ending to what was coined by farmers themselves as the “Kenyan Coffee Revolution.” For farmers in Kenya there can be...