We’ve had a busy start to the spring with lots of happenings over the last few months!
In April we were pleased to join Ecoffee Cup at their stand at the London Coffee Festival. The festival was on for four days at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, London. We joined Ecoffee Cup on the two trade days and while making coffee and general chit chat, we got to talk to a lot of café owners about our experience in moving over to reusable cups. It was fun! There are more programs for reusable coming out and it is an exciting time.
Also in April we went to Guatemala to visit Pedro Echeverría from Santa Catalina and Capetillo in the Alotenango region, and also Teo Engelhardt at Finca La Bella in the misty Sierra de las Minas. It is coming to the end of the harvest there and we tasted through the new crop samples and confirmed our containers which should start shipping soon.
Visitors to our Covent Garden shop will have noticed our new outdoor seating area. During the Covid times, the local council relaxed outdoor seating rules around Seven Dials and since then we have been able to make our area more permanent. The new area was installed a few weeks ago and as the weather gets better it is a lovely spot to be!
At the end of April our latest delivery of pods arrived. We have appreciated the feedback we have received and have made a couple of adjustments which has improved the flow rate of the capsule and the mouthfeel. We have sent some new coffees to Dualit for trials, and we hope to have the next batch in soon. Capsuling coffee is an interesting endeavour. Not unlike other brew methods, some coffees take to the process better than others, so we are experimenting which of our single origins work well.
At the beginning of May we had our organic audit. We have talked before about the importance of this certification to maintain integrity in the organic label and the process. We have noticed over the last few years though that more farmers are beginning to decertify their farms. Most of them continue to grow coffee organically but can no longer afford some of the more stringent policies such as extending the required land barrier at their farm borders which restricts the amount of land that they can have production. We continue to support farms we have bought from for many years, regardless of their certification choices, but we also hope to see changes in the rules which could help farms struggling to continue with the program while maintaining organic standards.
Now onto the truffles, let’s not forget them. We hope you have all managed to have many of them! Thank you to everyone who responded to our plea, and we have enjoyed a lot of samples over the last month. We hope to have something on the counter again soon!
And lastly, we have also returned from a trip to Huila, Colombia. While we were there we had our delayed end-of-event lunch with the farmers we buy from. It was wonderful to see everyone we have been working with over the last few years and meet new farmers as well.
Enjoy the sight of the sun and its promises for summer,
Monmouth x
