Roasters Guild Retreat, 2007

August 16–19, coffee professionals, including our roaster, Neal Wilson, gathered at Ruttger's Sugar Lake Lodge in Grand Rapids, Minnesota for the 7^th Annual Roasters Guild Retreat. This four day event brings coffee roasters together to learn more about coffee, discuss issues important to our industry, and have a good time. What follows is Neal's report on this event.

The Roasters Guild Retreat is always a great event, if only for what can be learned in conversations with others in the coffee industry, but the program was especially strong this year with some unique cupping opportunities, informative classes, and allowing enough coffee for the Roastmaster Challenge Cup competition to remove the influence of luck.

One of the great things about working in the specialty segment of the coffee industry is how willing people are to share information that can improve the quality of coffee instead of locking that knowledge away in trade secrets. One example of this was presented in The Cost of Quality: Economics on a Coffee Farm when K.C. O'Keefe related the results of an experiment he conducted with the cooperation of Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea. Unroasted coffee is considerably more stable than roasted coffee. This is fortunate as many places only harvest coffee once per year, but unroasted coffee does still fade over time. Most coffee, including all of the unroasted coffee we have right now, is transported and stored in jute bags. Could the quality of an unroasted coffee be preserved with better packaging? To answer this question, K.C. O'Keefe had a lot of coffee packed a few different ways and cupped the coffee several months later. He found that this coffee had deteriorated considerably when stored in jute. Coffee stored in a paper lined bag still faded, but not nearly as much. Two variations of foil lined bags had so little change in quality as to be insignificant.

Will quality coffees in the future be stored in this improved packaging? Perhaps, but there are some obstacles to overcome. Paper bags are readily available in most coffee producing countries, but there are reports of paper scraps causing roaster fires. Foil, while superior, is more expensive and less available. Another problem is that coffee bags are often punctured in transit and this will reduce the effectiveness of these bags. Random sampling of the coffees to verify quality would also damage these bags if new methods are not developed.

Two classes offered interesting cupping opportunities. In Cupping Workshop: Tasting Varietals, I was able to try five different coffee varietals from one farm grown next to each other at the same altitude and processed in the same way and three varietals from another farm, allowing a discrimination of varietal characteristics largely independent of other variables that influence the quality of coffee. In Cupping Workshop: Impact of Processing, three sets of Rwandan coffee were presented, each manipulating a different variable in processing such as fermentation time. While people have grown and consumed coffee for a long time and considerable research has gone into improving the yield and disease resistance of coffee, many lines of research into improving the quality of coffee are relatively new and unfinished. That makes this a very exciting time to work in specialty coffee.

Every year, the Roasters Guild Retreat features a team roasting competition for the Roastmaster Challenge Cup. This year, the challenge was the Grand Slam Challenge which involved writing a mission statement and producing four pounds of roasted coffee for each of three coffees in the competition: one from Costa Rica, one from Guatemala, and one from Ethiopa. Eighteen pounds of each unroasted coffee were available to work with.

I was on Team Los Guapos along with John Rapinchuk of Knutsen Coffees, Thomas Lussier of Equal Exchange, Ken Julian of Julian Coffee Roasters, Michael McGuire of K Bay Caffé Roasting Company, Jess Arnsteen of BuyWell International Artisan Fair Trade Roasters, Keith Tomlinson of Peace Coffee, and Mike Love of Coffee Labs Roasters.

With the large amount of coffee available to work with, we decided to bypass the sample roasters and instead use a roast discovery method very similar to the one I use normally. We started by identifying the production roaster with the largest sample trier. We then roasted each coffee, pulling samples at several points in the roast while maintaining precise records so our results could be duplicated. These coffees were cupped immediately. On the same day, we produced two batches of each coffee to select between. The next morning, we cupped these coffees and chose the better of each to submit for judging. There was enough roasted coffee available that we also tasted these coffees as prepared by a single cup brewer present in the cupping room.

During this cupping session I also wrote a draft of our mission statement, combining bits of conversations we had with a description of our method done in the style of marketing fluff. For example, a notebook and pen combined with a count up timer program running on my laptop computer is described as, "our state of the art manual data logger and the largest, most technically advanced roast timer available." This draft was passed around and suggestions from other team members were incorporated into a final copy.

This was a great team. We reached unanimous agreement on what we wanted to do quickly and we worked efficiently together. The results were fantastic. Team Los Guapos won a Best Cup Award for an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe which scored highest of all coffees in this competition with an average score of 89.7 out of a possible 100 points. Our Guatemalan came in second place, our Costa Rican was in the top five, and our mission statement came in fifth. With the highest average score overall, Team Los Guapos won the Roastmaster Challenge Cup. Our names will be added to the trophy along with all other past winners.

Team Los Guapos donated the prize for winning the Roastmaster Challenge Cup, a Probatino Tabletop Sample Roaster, to the cooperative Producers' Union Maya Vinic, a union of about 700 coffee farming families located in 36 highland communities in the municipalities of Chenalhó, Pantelhó, and Chalchihuitán in Chiapas, Mexico.