Jacob.

We spent Thursday collecting a ton of great gear that was loaned to us for the temporary shop. I have a Nuovo Simonelli Mythos on espresso grinding duty (along side a super jolly for decaf) and a three group La Marzocco Linea that runs like a champ. We salvaged two Zojirushi water boilers from the fire that will be boiling water for us and we were generously given a Ditting coffee grinder to break up the beans. Couple those with salvaged V60′s, French Press’, and Chemex’s and you have yourself a pretty tasty little slow bar.

All in all the space is great and we are very lucky that we are able to use it. We are opening tomorrow morning at 7am, one week to the day of the fire. We didn’t know that was going to happen. It almost felt like people were pushing us to open. The building was offerend to us first then the grinder, espresso machine and so on. We never had to search for this piece of gear or that it just happened and so fast that it kind of took us on an emmotional ride from open, closed and open again that we could have never done ourselves.

I don’t know if we are going to be busy tomorrow. I don’t know if it will take time for people to find us and decided to have a coffee but I can’t wait to serve people again. I have been served by so many people in this last week that making coffee seems kind of trivial but I need to do it. Every cup I make tomorrow will mean a little more than before the fire. Please come have one.

On another note there is a big event happening in London and you can read about it here.

I don’t fully understand what John Gordon has in store but its going to be a lot of fun! Thank you John, Square Mile, Hasbean, Extract Coffee Roasters, James Gourmet Coffee, Marco, The Kernel, KeepCup, East London Furniture, Puck Studio, Vespertine Press and Coffee Hit for everything you guys are doing!

Last but not least I would like to thank the amazing volunteer staff at Safehouse. These guys have been working non stop to get us back open. They have all driven many hours, cleaned some pretty gross stuff and given of their time so that our community could have coffee again. I am very proud of all of you guys!

Thanks coffee people, Griffinites, firefighters, police, local business people family and friends.

To donate to the relief effort online go here

To donate in person you can visit any United Bank location.

If you would like to speak to someone about a donation of skills or resources, please contact Michael Thurston at helping@safehousebev.com or call him at 770-584-4442

Thank you Griffin, our fire fighters, friends and family for everything.

We’ll Be Right Back.

beans.

vacuum bags

design

mock up

work

more work

waiting to be filled.

Jacob.

This is a once a year kind of coffee.

Mindblowingly delicious

Extremely hard to find.

This is the coffee epiphany kind of coffee and I have exactly 15 bags for sale. The only way to get it is to email jacoborriv@gmail(dot)com.

When you email me I will tell you what the coffee is, how it was processed, my experience with it the last time I had it and how much it will cost. Buy it right now or you are really missing out. This coffee will be roasted on Tuesday January 10th and then its gone until somehow I miraculously can get my hands on it again.

Jacob.

In case everyone has forgotten we here at Safehouse have set up shoppe in a tiny town called Griffin Ga. There’s not much around here to do. That why we saw the potential for a community focused coffee company and began with the goal of giving people somewhere to be all while enjoying a coffee that they didn’t know existed. This town has puttered along with us in this endeavor for 5 or so years and we have both grown tremendously here recently. So much so that our little town is now getting the mark of approval from Starbucks. While this doesn’t make me all that nervous it has drawn a line in the sand for the staff to get better even when we feel like we are doing this coffee thing very well. We’ve never had competition in what we do and now that someone is stepping up to the plate we are all finding ourselves striving to be better than we already were. So in the light of this change I have a promise to our local friends in Griffin. We here at Safehouse promise to give you a consistent beverage that we care about. We promise to serve it to you with more professionalism than we ever have and we PROMISE to not forget your names as we grow even more. Griffin is the next big thing in Georgia and we can’t wait to caffein-ate the people pushing this town to be huge.

As for the coffee Industry everything is still quiet, its almost sleepy in a way. From everyone that I have spoken with about this drowsy time, it seems that the loud ones are taking time to focus on their business, new projects, find their way to origin or transition into new, better roles within their companies. What I see happening from this is space to let the new generation type a little and ask questions, find responses and argue. While I can’t wait to listen and even respond to this, I hope that the new generation finds itself better than the one that came before it. A quote from Gwilym Davies sums up this same hope: “Hopefully in 2012 voices like mine will become old school with the new kids on the coffee block bringing fresh energy, ideas, action and change”. Thats my hope too. I can’t wait to see new folks emerge and try something new. The folks I have been following lately are @coffeecranium (Chris Ayers) of Knoxville (a slayer of dragons sometimes) and @collinamoody (Collin Moody) from Chicago (i think). I really like the way they think. I believe voices like theirs will be important in 2012.

Now onto dirtyCup in 2012. Im not quite ready to let myself walk quietly into the night, not just yet anyway but Ive learned one thing in the past three years that I want to put into practice right now. I don’t want to promise something and then become to busy to do it. I will tell you what I want to do though, thats the easy part. I want to have fun in coffee again. I want to loosen up a little and just talk. I don’t want to focus on being correct as much and ask stupid questions. I want to start some arguments and learn. All in all I want to make videos again and tell you more of what we are up to. In 2011 Hunt and I decided to put DC on the back burner for while and focus on building our team to meet our growth and we did that. We were very successful in managing our growth and now we are more confident than we have ever been. I can’t wait to see whats next and if everything goes the way I want it to you guys should be able to click play on a few videos every now and then.

Last but not least I want to get back to Honduras and meet needs. Our trip to Linares put a whole in me. I want to make a difference and by george I am going to try. If you haven’t been to a coffee growing country you should make it a priority. It really changes the whole thing. I won’t talk anymore about that now but I’ll certainly blog it when I feel the need.

Im not good at summing up posts but this is my attempt. Thank you Griffin for giving our coffee a shot and coming back. Keep that in mind when the mermaid swims in next year. Thank you coffee industry for being awesome. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

If you want to buy our coffee we are slowly becoming more lax in our rigid purchasing policy. If you want to give our coffee a try email me (Jacob) at jacoborriv@gmail(dot)com. I want you to taste it because its great and I am proud of it. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Follow us here:

safehousebev.com

@jacoborriv

@safehousebev

Jacob.

For the first time Safehouse Coffee and Tea will be opening up ordering for one roast day only. In the past three years Safehouse has never opened coffee purchasing to the internet. We have worked diligently on our wholesale base and haven’t strayed far from that but we will open sales from now until Monday (December 19th) at midnight. Your order will be roasted on Tuesday morning and shipped Tuesday evening. There are a limited number of spots for this roast day. The only way to order is by emailing Jacob directly at jacoborriv@ gmail.com (without the space after the @ symbol).

The coffees we are offering are:

Finca Himalaya El Salvador 100% Bourbon Wet Process

Jimma Wakito Madulla Ethiopia Heirloom Arabica Wet Process

Please make your orders quickly as these limited spots will fill up in no time.

The cost will be $16 for a 428gram bag plus shipping.

Jacob.

Three years ago their was a genuine ignorance on my part of how coffee worked. I had to scrape and fight on the forums to find an answer. I watched the pros debate on twitter. I watched hours of videos to find a chemex technique. I saved money to buy the new thing that promised me better control over this variable or another and I always had jimseven.com, theotherblackstuff.ie and tampertantrum.com to make me think more and get better. I did get better. My staff was more consistent and my customers became more and more addicted to good coffee.

This all started with a new staff member I took on here at Safehouse to cover me on my recent trip to Honduars. She had to learn to make all of the drinks to our standards in two weeks in order for us to be covered for the trip. This meant she couldn’t go through our internship program which is six months long from beginning to end. I think any good trainer can get someone to make a great drink in a day and in a week you have someone that can be consistent. In two weeks you can get latte art but thats not what I want on my bar. I want someone that loves coffee. I don’t want someone that loves latte art. I don’t want someone that likes the atmosphere of coffee or getting to pick the music… I don’t want someone that wants to work here because they want to dress however they want or because you get 4 smoke breaks an hour if you want. I want some one that loves coffee and that loves talking to people. Someone that understands that its all about relationships. Whether its the farmer to the buyer, the roaster to the retailer or barista to the customer. I care about that so much more than latte art throwdowns. So I decided to teach her to extract coffee with the mojo and give her a long list of links that I learned from when I started out.

While compiling the list I watched the videos again. Gwilyms performance for the World Championships was the first thing that came to mind. Watching that guy make coffee perfectly and connect with the judges was inspiring all over again. Next on the list was Stephen Morrisseys World Championship performance. Its a special moment to see a crowd of people cheer when a grown man carries four espressos in one hand. The moment he melted that blue berry muffin thing was exciting and timeless as far as coffee goes.

Of course on that list was everything on jimseven.com. There isn’t a man on the planet more deserving to champion coffee from behind a keyboard than James. Ive only met him once but he is the kind of guy that breathes progression of coffee and I can’t imagine anyone working on my bar that doesn’t have the answers to the questions that he has asked and answered over the years.

Dave Walsh was on that list. I just don’t know how to introduce someone to the theory behind coffee extraction without his name coming up. Sure most of it went over her head and some of it still goes over mine but every time I try to explain under extraction to someone I use the boat analogy that he put together on this very blog.

The opening of Intelli Venice was on that list. I hope it wasn’t only me but I watched every video of that era. The first one was of Chris Owens training the staff there. I couldn’t have imagined training a staff to that caliber at that time. Tasting fruits then finding it in coffee and tasting different phases of espresso extractions where are all things I learned from those times and have become second nature now. The videos after that were of a redesigned La Marzocco by espressoparts and that video of Venice’s opening party that seemed like the Super Bowl of coffee. That taught me how exciting coffee could be.

The best of the coffee internet world for me has always been the personality of Stephen Leighton. His charisma is enthralling and he makes me feel like he has known me for years on every episode of In My Mug. The tamper tantrums with Colin Harmon were a lesson in what to do. He made his customers feel connected. He made other coffee people feel like friends and he made coffee appealing and fun for everyone. He is also still at it. Every week a new video. I can’t say that for anyone else. He is constantly pushing his episodes to be better and finding ways to get people to drink better coffee. He also gives coffees a chance. Most of us stand on small sets of standards that our coffees have to measure up to. He has high standards but he gives coffees I wouldn’t normally look at a chance and everyone of them that I have tasted were great. Period.

The internet is more quiet now. Did everyone grow up? I think they did and thats a good thing. If I look at my own growth I see a little more perspective. I don’t even run bar now. I head up our company’s wholesale department. dirtyCup got pushed to the back burner as my responsibilities here grew and I guess thats what has happened to everyone else. That era made everything better and our companies became successful through the learning of that time. Now we are all too busy because of it. That seems like a good thing but I want my staff to somehow get a taste of the excitement of that time. I’ll always look back on those days as coffee at its peak. That doesn’t mean coffee won’t be better than it was back then. It just means that for me, it was exciting and perfect.

Why Linares? Because we had contacts there and we became aware of their need. Isn’t that how people get involved with anything? We have wanted to get connected at coffee origin in a meaningful way for years and this was the first legitimate opportunity to do so that we felt good about.

In this life, I have come to grips with the reality that there is often a marked difference between what I think needs to be done and what actually needs to be done. This most certainly holds true in our endeavors in Linares. Here are a few cases in which my perception of how we can help clashed with what would be truly beneficial to the sweet families of the village. I will list them as “SM”: Stateside Mindset and “HM”: Honduras Mindset. The Stateside Mindset is not bad or without value but when the reality of the ground in Honduras is observed with an open mind and a desire to do real good, one should end up with an augmented perspective, ergo, the Honduras Mindset. Hopefully, this will bring some clarity to our work there in a few different categories.

WATER

SM: The water in Linares will make you sick. It is ‘clean’ by most Honduran standards but could be cleaner, therefore, they need our help in getting the water purified to US standards. After all, if can be done better, it should, right?

HM: The water coming into Linares is from a system that is fed by mountain stream headwaters and is not contaminated with any parasites. Some bacteria and algae build up in the holding tank over time but the villagers have learned how to clean it with natural items they have at hand in order to keep the water potable for them. North Americans would likely have some gastro problems if we were to drink it but Linarens’ bodies are conditioned to it so they do not get sick. In reality, if we were to install a purification system, it would of course be very clean but the villagers would then get sick from any other community’s water. In effect, we would be creating a solution in search of a problem – what’s more, this could easily produce further isolation for them since they would not be able to spend much time in another village or town: exactly the opposite of what they need.

FOOD SECURITY

SM: We could purchase seeds on this trip and introduce several high-yield food crops that can be grown in small plots for each home, ensuring both a wider, more nutritious diet and greater stability in the food supply.

HM: Many vegetables and foods that we think of as indispensable staples have never even been seen or heard of in Linares before. Consider for a second this:

This is a common fruit throughout Honduras. It looks and feels like some kind of alien food out of Deep Space Nine. When you crack through the rind, it’s fruit is like a slimy whited-out eyeball. No kidding. However, it is mild and sweet (the red ones are fully ripe and sweeter, the yellow ones tangy) with a wonderfully appetizing texture and these little guys are basically one of nature’s multi-vitamins. Faced with this “food” having never encountered it before, one would not be very likely to eat it – most would be dubious even after having it explained to them. This is a food that Linarens eat regularly. Amaranth, on the other hand is a highly productive grain that is grown in tall bush-like stalks – packed with dietary goodness and easy to grow, but they have never seen it before. How is it helpful to introduce foods that no one is likely to eat or even be able to sell at this point? Nothing is more culturally ingrained than an indigenous diet, so no, we did not foist a bunch of new crops on them so we could put a tally mark in the good deed column. Introducing new crops will have to be systemic and built up to over time. In the meantime, some simple agricultural techniques for growing yucca better fits the bill. More info on the implementation of an agriculture program in Linares will be in the next post.

COFFEE

SM: The villagers have not been tending or harvesting their coffee farms since Hurricane Mitch flattened them in 1998. We are a specialty coffee company so in light of our “knowledge base” it makes sense to help them start over from scratch with varietals of coffee that are suited to specialty grade quality. It will make them more money than they’ve ever made from a harvest before and help elevate awareness of their efforts and product.

HM: When we finally arrived in Linares, we found that having taken so long (over a year and a half) to get there since it was first proposed, two of the families had gotten to work on their own. One of the men had walked to several coffee farms in the region until he found someone that would give him a sack of coffee seeds in parchment. He then built two nursery beds out of bamboo, discarded irrigation hose and banana leaves and propagated 10,000 – yes, that’s ten thousand –  coffee seedlings, all of them a local catimor varietal called Lempira (of the same name as their money, a department of the country, and an indigenous hero).

Catimor has a portion of robusta in its genetics, the rest being arabica (the genetic lineage is a bit tedious – another time perhaps), which makes it more disease and pest resistant than many other varietals. It is also an overbearing varietal, meaning that it pumps out coffee cherries in copious amounts for 5 to 10 years and then slows down in production. This is the coffee that they are accustomed to growing (from years ago) and they already know how to handle it fairly well. Another aspect of this is that educational resources for specialty coffee in Honduras are still in development and can be hard to come by, especially so far in the back country of the Olancho department. In the case of Linares and at this point in time, practicality wins. We have garnered resources for the farmers that will boost their production of Lempira greatly but will also progress into specialty coffee a few years down the road. Again, more on the implementation of this in the next post. It is important to note that another aspect of “coming up” in Honduras is that becoming known as a small remote village that has suddenly sling-shotted into money is guaranteed to bring the kind of attention that they do not need right now – and we’ll leave it at that.

HEALTH CARE

SM: We expect to find some serious problems with the water supply (refer above on that) that need to be addressed and perhaps a resurgence of intestinal worms, especially in the children. We will assess the situation and put together a medical group for the next trip.

HM: We’ve covered how the water is not a problem for them at all. There has been no resurgence of worms or parasites of any kind. What we did find was a fungal infection in the skin of the feet of some of the children stemming from water that stands stagnate around the pilas (large sink-like structures that serve as the bathing, washing and kitchen sink station for a family) or washing rocks of many homes.

Treating the fungal infection makes no difference unless that standing water is taken care of so on the next trip we will be installing concrete around those areas and digging drainage ditches and then treat the medical need (hopefully all in one trip). This standing water also plays a role in another health concern: dengue fever. They have not had a problem with this mosquito-borne virus also known as breakbone fever in a long time but here it is. The mosquitoes pupate in standing water and emerge on the wing to spread this feverish and stiff jointed illness. In some cases, it can also lead to its life-threatening forms: dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome in which the blood platelets are progressively shredded, ending in death. There is no vaccine for Dengue and removing the mosquitoes’ breeding areas of stagnate water is the only course of action.

So why are we here in Linares? Well, there are a lot of answers to that but the only one that remains the same both pre- and post-trip is that relationship is a force for good and the only way that any of us change and grow.

Relationship - the basis for everything.

What is the Idea of Coffeeland Honduras and Where Did it Come From?

As a coffee professional, I have always wanted to “get to origin” and see how coffee is grown, processed and shipped. As a perpetual student this occurred to me as the natural progression of study for the purpose of understanding. I never did very well in school and found its structure counter-productive in both public and private institutions. My personal learning style is a process of interest leading to study, study leading to deeper research, research leading to people that are more advanced then myself and finally to personal experience with the subject. As a man of faith, this carries over naturally into my spiritual path – essentially, all true growth occurring beyond the intellectual plane and in experiential proof in relationship with people. For me, what I do and who I am (spiritually) is inseparable and exists simultaneously in daily life. Therefore, every time I learn a new concept and it matures into a new skill with my hands, what I can do and who I am expands.

All that culminates in a compulsion, more than just a desire, to get to origin and expand. Honduras became the focus of this first experience because a dear friend and regular customer at the shop has worked in rural Honduras for almost 14 years and asked if we could help in the area of coffee.

We here at Safehouse started working furiously to put together a plan that would be highly educational and highly profitable to the small village in which we would be working. Educational, not just for us but for as many other people as possible, whether that be through our pages online or actually coming along with us on future trips. With this in mind, we decided that a documentary series would be the highest impact medium to transfer the experience and content to others. We have made some videos in the past with very positive response from our friends and colleagues. Those videos ranged from the mildly educational to the outlandish but they were fun to make and served as a great creative outlet. They also happened to elevate awareness of our company in the specialty coffee industry, so that doesn’t hurt either and we have made a LOT of friends from it all. Nevertheless there is a chasm of difference between making tongue-in-cheek product reviews and shooting a documentary. We are not documentarians but we have yet to meet a subject we could not master. Documentaries are a particularly difficult format of film to achieve at a high level, as we are now learning. In the purpose of the series, one does not want to imbue the doc with dogmatism or make the story about one’s self (blogs are a much better venue for that). Sounds simple, but in the States we have all grown up in a society that relates everything in first person, making this project even more of a learning experience – but that leads us into the next post:

Coffeeland Honduras: Why Here?