I’ve been writing about coffee since 2011. I maintain the articles in a blog format, which is simply a collection of discrete articles organized by date, category, tags, etc. As of this writing, I have over 100 articles about different aspects of coffee.

What I hope to accomplish with the information presented on this site is to help others to make sense of the complicated world of coffee. Because a majority of coffee is produced by smallholder farmers who farm roughly 2 hectares, coffee production has socioeconomic importance that makes it unique from other commodities such as oil or wheat, which are largely produced by wealthy companies, global conglomerates, or industrial-sized farms—not a subsistance farmer with a family of five.

Because of the socioeconomic impact of coffee, it is important to have a true and honest understanding of what the coffee industry is and how it functions; how the money flows, what the various stages of production are, how the product flows, etc. All of that affects how we perceive, react to, and ultimately support the system.

I have two grand narratives that permeate my world-view of coffee and serve as the backbone of many of the articles I write:

  1. Getting coffee to your cup is a very complicated process that involves several production phases that physically transform the fruit of a coffee tree into coffee beans. That process often takes a lot of intermediaries and all of those intermediaries add value that must be compensated and that compensation is ultimately borne by the end consumer: the coffee drinker. I call this idea the central dogma of coffee.

  2. Improving operations is one of the most effective ways a smallholder coffee farmer can improve their performance in the industry. This means treating the family farm as a family business; tracking profits and loss, tracking the cost of production, formalizing production processes, and so on. The ability to produce a consistent product, at a profit, year after year is foundational. Producing an exceptional product without that foundation is luck.