Friday, February 28, 2014

Meanwhile, back at the mill...



The milling season is back in full swing and that means I have to leave Oku a few times to visit Bali. We haven’t moved our organic coffee from the village storehouses yet, so there isn’t too much for me to be paying attention to down here, but I’m using the few days I’ve been down here to introduce Jude to the place and make sure that all the improvements we settled on following our inspection are in place. It’s actually pretty minimal this year since we took care of all the problems noted during our first inspection over the past year. Maybe the most notable change is that we added a polisher to our milling line, so when the coffee finishes having the parchment taken off, it is run across a flat screen that rubs off the silvery skin you find on unroasted coffee. There are a few benefits to this:

1. It’s a little bit prettier for wholesale customers
2. There is a little less debris left over after roasting as the silvery skin becomes a bit of papery fluff during the process
3. Sorting is easier

Number 3 is definitely the most important to me. Removing the silver skin gives the coffee more uniformity and makes identifying defects simpler. Thus, our coffee is going to be cleaner and our sorters are able to get through a bag of coffee a little quicker than they would otherwise. Since they are payed by the bag that translates directly into more money per day (not necessarily more money though, since that depends on how much total coffee we process).

I shouldn’t underplay those first two benefits, though. They represent a commitment to quality that makes me proud to be working for Mocha Joe’s and our partner Alpine Coffee, Ltd. This is the third year I’m seeing this mill operate and it has gotten better and better. Whether you’re in Cameroon or the US there’s a lot to be said for a business that doesn’t get complacent with being ‘good enough’. In the long run, good enough never stays good enough for long and that is going to be more and more true in buying and selling coffee from Cameroon as the profile of the region grows (which it is doing). We welcome the competition.

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