We’re bringing you news from our friends at Daterra in Brazil. This eco-focussed estate is the source of our customer favourite coffee The Baron. They hold some of the best sustainability credentials in the industry, becoming the first coffee farm in the world to receive Level A Certification from the Rainforest Alliance.
Shirani Gunawardena and Christian Steenberg began Indochina Coffee in 2015 when living in Bangkok, redrawing the speciality coffee map to showcase South East Asian coffees in the UK and Europe. Building relationships with coffee producers through Myanmar, China and the Phillipines, we’ve worked with these two over the last few years to bring the best of the region's speciality coffee to Climpsons, including our most recent edition of The Fields - Ywangan from Myanmar. After working in equality, human rights and social justice, Indochina strive to ensure fairness and transparency across the supply chain, staying true to the Climpsons ethos of developing long-term, sustainable relationships with farmers and producers.
We’ve had the chance to pick Christian and Shirani’s brain on what it means to be an ethical coffee business in 2020 and what to expect from the region in the coming years.
As things ramp up here at Climpson and Sons and the new year begins to hit its stride, we're happy to announce the new coffees that will be appearing on shelves and in the webshop over the next couple of weeks. The start of the year is always an exciting time in the world of specialty coffee, as we start to receive shipments from many of our favourite coffee growing regions in Africa. As these begin to arrive in February and March, we will be introducing three incredible new coffees into our singles range.
Central America is a beautiful place blessed with a diverse array of coffee growing conditions. Luckily, as far as coffee buying goes, the region is also one of the most accessible allowing for relatively easy travel between farms, regions and countries. After a week spent in El Salvador a bus ride north to Guatemala bought with it an entirely different range of coffees. Where our El Salvador selections highlighted heavier cup profiles and different processing methods, our Guatemalan showcase is made up of only washed coffees.
Like many of the finer things in life, it is not just quality farming that contributes to an exceptional end product. Equal care and expertise must also be taken at each step along the process to ensure the quality and longevity of speciality coffee. Having only read and tasted the difference between processing methods before, my journey through El Salvador was a perfect opportunity to observe these different approaches first hand. This also influenced our buying decisions, choosing to represent nearly every processing method in the range we then selected from JASAL.
As we launch the new Fields, it also gives us the perfect opportunity to talk a little bit about how we source our beans, and the steps we go through to bring you some the finest and most delicious flavours you'll find anywhere.
In February this year I embarked on a two week journey through Central America to source coffees for the year ahead. My first week was spent in El Salvador with visits to the producing regions of Apaneca-Ilamatepec and Usulután to cup through this years harvest and gain insight into the work of producers and our import partners.