The term “Direct trade” originated with the “third wave” of coffee, which we have already written about. This is a wave of development of the world coffee market, which brought with it coffee of spechelti quality - the highest quality, which progressive owners of KaBaRe establishments and roasters strive for.
This is the kind of coffee that is loved by true connoisseurs who are willing to pay good money for a cup of coffee in which unique notes of aroma and taste will be felt.
The term direct trade was popularized by Jeff Watts in the late 20th century. Mr. Watts was at that time a co-owner of one of the large companies in the USA, which was engaged in the purchase of various good coffees from all over the world for sale on the American market.
It was he who was one of the pioneers of direct purchase of coffee from producers (farmers) instead of the wholesale purchase scheme that prevailed at that time, when all coffee in a country or area was purchased in bulk at the lowest possible price by resellers (intermediaries).
To find specialty coffee, owners and other authorized representatives of coffee importing companies travel the world in person to find farms that grow the best of the best coffee. It is literally a search with many unknowns — sometimes purposeful, sometimes accidental.
The goal: to find flavors that people have never tasted before, new fruity and floral aromas of pure, high-quality coffee. These aromas contrast the old methods of blending and diluting coffee with the “average” homogenized product that was popular in the mid-20th century, and which is even now widely sold in supermarkets as ready-made ground roasted coffee without traceable origin or quality.
Here are a couple of examples of specialty coffees discovered in the late 2000s:
1) Coffee from Las Golondrinas farm by Marcio Benjamin Peralti Pagua in Nicaragua with unusual flavors of mango, peach, melon, and jasmine.
2) Coffee from the slopes of the Santa Ana volcano in El Salvador, from Battle Farm. Having visited this farm in person several times, one of the specialty coffee hunters noticed through trial and error that the desired sweetness in the finished cup was achieved only if the coffee berries were harvested when half of the berries were burgundy-red ripe and the rest were bright red. This coffee is now sold in several coffee shops in New York.
In addition to blind searches, roasters and coffee chain owners often find new farmers through tasting competitions. The most prestigious of these is the annual Cup of Excellence competition, held in 15 countries. This event is often called the “Coffee Olympics” or the “Oscars of the coffee world.”
These blind tasting competitions last up to 10 days, after which the organizers sell the best coffee from an online auction to bidders from all over the world, who fiercely compete for the beans. Here, prices for green beans from the most unique micro-lots can reach tens of thousands of dollars per 1 kg! Almost every year, some coffee breaks records in terms of price.
When a buyer of a new specialty coffee contacts a farmer to buy beans directly from him on a regular basis, he tastes the coffee harvested on the farm, sometimes dozens of cups, from different parts of the plantation, harvested at different times, to understand what quality suits him best.
And when he finds what he was looking for, he discusses with the farmer the terms of harvesting, processing, delivery and payment for this particular coffee. For such coffee, the buyer is willing to pay a high price (tens and sometimes hundreds of times more than the market price for the average coffee in the region).
Often, the buyer will require the farmer to improve the quality of the coffee through various methods in growing, fermenting and packaging. But there must be a financial incentive for the farmer himself to do this - after all, objectively, this is a new investment in the farm, equipment, coffee bushes, land, workers and skills to ensure a consistently high quality product. In addition, the farmer must learn himself and train his workers in new processes to guarantee high quality.
And that's when a mutually beneficial symbiosis results: the farmer receives a high price for an excellent product (and has financial incentives to improve further and invest in his own farm), and the buyer receives excellent, unique coffee that is not available from competitors, for which local specialty coffee lovers will be grateful.
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