Caravela's Coffee Talks Caravela Coffee

'Minga' is a South American term which means "coming together for the common good", whether to finish a harvest or build a house. This spirit is what we are always striving to cultivate at Caravela: working with producers to help them improve over time, and helping roasters find better coffees, cultivating long-term relationships that will help us all thrive over time.
Since the novel coronavirus drastically changed the world we live in, we have been encouraged and inspired to see a minga mentality emerge all over, from producing countries to roasteries and cafes around the globe. In this episode, Caravela's Relationship Building team discuss the impact of Covid-19 at origin, as well as hearing first hand about the amazing things that are happening in response.

The logistics of moving coffee is by nature a complicated process, so how is it now in the Covid era?
At origin, just moving coffee from farms to warehouses to ports has become a matter of jumping hurdles, while moving coffee across oceans and then on to the final destination has other very specific difficulties.
In this episode we speak to Grant Tennille, Caravela’s North American logistics coordinator. Grant offers an overview of the steps and pitfalls associated with exporting and importing green coffee, and then goes deeper into the challenges - real and potential -facing the movement of green coffee and logistics in general.

For many roasters, visiting origin is just one important part of the job. However, it is currently a moment when not only is it impossible to travel, but to do so would indeed be irresponsible. This inability to visit the producers one works with has created much discussion regarding the importance of these trips.

What are the potential ramifications of not being present at origin? Would the coffees you want become harder to get? Should producers worry that roasters not visiting them could cause a breakdown in their relationship, and that their coffee will no longer be bought? 

In this episode the Relationship Building team will talk about what we are missing out on and what we can do about this, even if we can only be at origin in spirit!

In this episode we delve deeper into what makes a good roaster-producer working relationship. Stephen Leighton and Pedro Claros both share their side of the story, telling us what this relationship means for them and how they have arrived at this point.  
Steven is the founder of Hasbean and has been working with producer Pedro (from Pitalito, Huila) since 2011 but their relationship was not always what it is today. Listen to find out how they have made such a success of working together. 

In this episode we look at the traditional varieties that we most commonly work with at Caravela. The traditional varieties found all over Latin America can all be traced back to either Typica or Bourbon. That is to say that many of the traditional varieties that we see today are either mutations or hybrids of these two original varieties, but what does this really mean? To understand some of the terminology and to help us tell the story, we speak with research technician for World Coffee Research: Julio Alvarado.

Added yeasts can dramatically affect the taste of coffee, and this all happens during the fermentation step. This step, which once was simply a means to remove the mucilage is now understood as key to flavour development. There are many microbes responsible for this and the types of naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria will have a huge impact on the taste of the coffee. 

If these yeasts and bacteria already exist and can be found everywhere, why would you add a different stain of yeast to the mix? In this episode we speak to Roberto Vazconez, from finca @lugmapata who uses added yeast strains to direct his fermentation, to obtain certain profile results. With the help of Camila Khalifé, Ecuadorian quality analyst and café owner, we interview Roberto about his fermentation experiments. 

Listen to learn more about what is going on in the fermentation tank when yeasts are added and a case study success story on how yeasts can be used with desirable results.