Willoughby's Coffee & Tea

This is a solid organic coffee from the Potosi farm. The farm produces 100% of it's own organic fertilizers from their own cattle which receive natural, balanced feeding. The Potosi farm is cultivated with a blend of varietals such as Typica, Caturra, Colombia and Castillo. All coffee plants are managed and certified by standards of the Rainforest Alliance, NOP, CEE and JAS seas, meaning that from cultivation to fertilization all processes look to preserve the environment and workers' health. Cafe Granja La Esperanza manages 3 farms: Cerro Azul, Potosi, and Las Margaritas in eight distinct microclimates located in three mountain ranges in Colombia, which gives the experienced agronomists behind Cafe Granja La Esperanza plenty of room to experiment with a number of variables, such as microclimates, processing methods, and varietals. The team at Granja La Esperanza is driven by a combination of science, business, and an obsession with quality coffee. The team creates milling and processing protocols tailored for each distinctive microclimate and varietal. The staff is so dedicated to quality and research that they recently spent two years studying the famous Geisha varietal in Panama before becoming the first producers to bring the varietal to Colombia at their Finca Cerro Azul in Trujillo. Their dedication to quality goes so far that coffee harvesters must demonstrate a level of excellence during a five month training period before being qualified to pick the Geisha cherries at the peak of ripeness.

For as much as we love tasting unique coffees from lesser known corners of the world, the familiar embrace of a great Kenyan brings us the comfort of returning home after a long trip. This month we’re thrilled to welcome Willoughby’s Coffee and Tea from New Haven, Connecticut to the Craft Coffee lineup with a dynamic offering from the Gaturiri Factori in Kenya. The Gaturiri Factory is one of four coffee processing mills in Nyeri, Kenya, a district with a long legacy of producing some of the country’s most expensive beans. Each of the four factories sets its own prices for unprocessed coffee cherries, and farmers, in turn, are free to take their crops to the factory that offers the highest price. It’s a competitive system that rewards growers for producing distinctive coffees. Once delivered to the factory the coffee cherries are carefully sorted by hand to ensure ripeness, then processed in the typical “Kenyan style” - an intensive process that takes over three weeks of labor to complete. This particular lot from the Gaturiri Factory was carefully selected to include only the finest beans from the dedicated farmers of Nyeri. Our expert panel is used to tasting a lot of Kenyan coffees, but we knew this one was special from the first sip. If there’s such a thing as an “instant classic” coffee, this is it.