What’s in a Name?

Rodomunho, Gatare, Nigusie, Rushashi, Gringacho…so many names!  Customers often balk at the pronunciation of some of these, and many people have questioned our motives in naming our coffees this way instead of the traditional “Brazil, Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Honduras.”  There is a method to our madness, however, which I will explain.

We divide up our coffee names into four categories:

1. Farm (Fazenda in Portugese, Finca in Spanish)
2. Washing Station¹
3. Cooperative
4. Estate

These are the main four ways that coffee arrives to OQ.  It’s either grown by one farm or one estate and shipped to us from them or it comes from several farms/estates and comes to us blended together at a cooperative or washing station.  Since we value transparency, we like to give you as much specific information as we can on a given coffee.  Thus, if we can give you the name of the farmer who grew and the farm it was grown on, we’ll do that and we’ll call it by that name.  If a cooperative or washing station is the closest we can get, then that’s the name we go with.

Not only does this increase transparency and traceability, it also has the potential to connect you with the coffee growers and the huge diversity of coffee possibilities from a single plot of land.  It’s not enough to say, “I like dark roasted Colombian coffee.”  Well what kind of Colombian coffee?  The kind grown in (the department/region of) Huila?  Juila grows lots of coffee!  ”Ah, well I like Miguel Augusto Ortega’s coffee, the farmer near the town of San Agustin.”  Oh ok.  ”Yea, his 2011 lots was awesome!”  You see?  There’s a bit more connection, more opportunity to compare, savor, and distinguish.

In short, we name this way so that from year-t0-year you can connect not only with a country, but also with a farmer, estate, coop, washing station and compare.  This year we’ll be bringing back a lot more coffee from places we’ve bought from in the past as we develop new friends, make new connections, and improve old ones.  While we expect to see a few other show up, here’s a tentative line-up of what you can expect:

Winter Arrivals

• Eco Cafe Station, Haiti
• Gatare Station, Burundi
• Fazenda Rodomunho, Brazil

Spring/summer Arrivals

• Jose Laris’s Farm, Honduras
• Finca Gringacho, Honduras
• Finca Coffees, El Salvador
• Coffea Diversa Jardin, Costa Rica

Fall Arrivals

• Nigusie Farm, Ethiopia
• Finca Regalo de Dios, Nicaragua

¹ a washing station (or beneficio in Spanish, is where coffee beans, after being picked from a coffee tree, are removed from the fruit they grow inside of;