Hello. I went to visit my friend Jamin today at Cafe Imports ... thats where he works! He's quality control over there. It's quite a place! Think of all the coffee you could think of and then think of some more. There's a lot of coffee here, um probably in the millions of dollars worth. He gave me a tour and then we cupped seven different Guatemala's and one Nicaraguan. Then we cupped two others to find specific faults. There was word flying around about a certain coffee that had a distinct petrol taste. Starbucks had rejected a lot because it was bad, and another roaster said he felt nervous lighting a match near it it smelled so much like kerosene. Well, we didn't really have that much of a reaction, one cup tasted like vaseline but only slightly - still, not a good flavor and wouldn't be sold.
All in all it was a really interesting afternoon. I found out a little bit of how Cafe Imports started, it was by mistake partly. About fifteen years ago a guy from Minnesota had a couple friends in Brazil who had a coffee crop, they decided to buy a little and see if they could sell it here in MN. While the shipment of coffee floated and bobbed from Brazil to the US of A, Brazil had a horrible frost that killed nearly all coffee crops in the country. Thats when VietNam became the largest exporter of coffee in the world and those little beans on a boat to Minnesota tripled in value! Whoa, they said, maybe coffee's the way to go? And thats the loose story of how Cafe Imports came to be. And the moral of the story is: always be prepaired for the unexpected... or go with the unexpected or frost ... kills. Or something like that.
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