Do you have any recommendations? I’m currently buying from Axil/St. Ali
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Seven Seeds.
Not that I would be that desperate to change from Axil if that’s what you’re buying.
We’re going through about 1kg from 7 Seeds every 3-4 weeks. They’re always fresh (max 2 weeks old) when purchased, do need to get a vacuum sealed canister though.
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Chop is on the money. Seeds and Small batch would be the razors edge so to speak and to a fair degree market lane as well. Axil are good, so are Padre, Maker, Wide open road, Code black, Clark St, Dukes, Omar, Proud Mary, A coffee, St Ali/Sensory Lab, Rumble coffee, Reverence, Criteria, Cartel, Square One, Industry beans (I’ve seen Dys in here a bit for what ever that’s worth). There’s also a bunch of places that don’t fit the model I’ve described, but pay to use other people’s equipment and their overheads would be higher, but they only produce for themselves so no wholesale overheads. They pretty much all sell beans too, places like Patricia, Every day coffee/All are welcome. I’m sure I’ve missed some, but this is a fair whack of the places I’d be happy to receive coffee from in Melbourne.
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Know anything about Rubia mate?
I’ve never tried their coffee before, but there’s a couple of things that stick out to me. I can be pretty confident in saying they’re purchasing coffee that from one of the largest commodity importers in the country and a bunch of it (Brazil, Col, PNG) coming from this importer is typically used as the cheaper part of blends. That’s not to say it wouldn’t meet the 85+ cupping score for it to be specialty or that this importer imports bad stuff. They do import a lot of commodity coffee though. The other thing that sticks out is that they have a lot of blends with no indication of what’s in them. I get a bit suss when I see things like that. I wonder if they’re selling some typically blend grade beans as single origins and using lower grade commodity coffees in their blends. With all of that said, they could be doing a great job of roasting their coffee and that would put them in my back up options, happy enough to buy it if I get caught out, but would probably be craving something better by the end of the bag.
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Cheers.
I’m not really keen to step away from Seeds but it’s pretty damned pricey, especially if we switch it down to the 250gm bag subscription set up, which I’m inclined to do to ensure we’re getting the freshest beans. Fortnightly deliveries and a vacuum canister FTW!
Gotta get an Aeropress for work, been using these stainless reusable capsules my old man gave me for christmas and it feels like a ■■■■■■■ travesty putting seeds beans in them then running through the capsule machine at work…
Yeah my wife seems to like what i’m buying at the moment, but expensive at $60/kg!
Although with @Koala 's latest FB post, I better keep serving it up 
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Coffee is life. What price on quality life?!
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There’s no doubt Fair Trade has serious, possibly terminal, problems but if the introduction of in house self regulating ethical labels is the answer you have to cynically wonder what the question is and who’s asking it. Nestle has instituted its own ethical logo, Coco Plan - try running that sentence through the ethical wringer. If nothing else Fair Trade has helped to tweak the consciences of first world consumers, and corporations can’t stand that. If its bureaucratic weight and unwillingness to adapt to market contingencies have rendered it ineffective I hope something changes or replaces it because I for one have no faith at all in Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
About $40 a kg apparently
Nah I’d agree re: self reg, but argue COE (cup of excellence) is probably the best program out there in terms of providing the most transparency in all aspects and largest return to growers.
My gripe with FT is that for the amount of money they take for admin costs, they only benchmark the price against the C twice a year at best. The C has gone above the FT price very quickly for many many years, meaning that the smartest farmers/co-ops dumped the worst of their coffee into FT to get a guaranteed price and sent the better stuff to brokers. But not all farmers thought about it as though FT was ripping them off, and pooled good coffee with stuff that wasn’t great, particularly in Ethiopia until the gov started to regulate coffee trade more heavily there.
My understanding is that Fair Trade’s certification requires meeting standards that go beyond the price to the grower and include labour rights and land management issues eg minimum wage levels for workers, no child labour, reducing use of pesticides and minimising greenhouse emissions. Hopefully other ethical schemes address these issues too but I can’t help feeling the plethora of schemes is an example of the divide and rule principle.
This is somewhat true, but the fact that it financially disadvantages growers shouldn’t be ignored. This is the type of thing that while portraying itself as helping communities it can also help to further entrench generational poverty. As far as I’m aware there is no work they do re; pesticide use and most of the communities they deal with conveniently couldn’t afford to buy pesticides if they wanted to. I’d also question how they deal with green house gasses, given that uncontrolled fermentation is a big part of processing coffee and produces significant C02. Again these communities are not in a position to run generators for processing coffee and tend to use very manual practices. They’d use these practices regardless of FT’s involvement. I supported FT for a long time in my opinion and when it continually ignored requests to explain why they couldn’t allocate resources to accurately behaving the way they describe, in terms of providing better returns for farmers, I stopped. That was about 5 years of paying to maintain a FLO ID and supply coffee from multiple FT co-ops. It’s a great concept it just doesn’t do what it says it does and often achieves a worse off over all outcome for farmers.
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I bought some imported Japanese matcha last week - caffeine at $1 per gram.
I’d add that as a roaster/retailer, the only standard FT were interested in, in regards to my business was that I paid them on time.
placed an order of the crompton road blend. Looking forward to giving it a whirl…
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Just going through a batch of Five Senses filtered blend and it is excellent.
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Cleanskin Blend only for me.
For those trashing Robusta over Arabica, most coffee in Vietnam is Robusta and it is some of the best coffee I have had. It can depend a great deal on the roast, and Vietnam coffee is roasted in a very interesting way.
Most robusta is not grown with a great deal of care or attention. Vietnam and Brazil are the two largest producers of coffee in the world with majority of it being robusta for instant.