Introducing Unblended
It was a hot, late-summer’s day on the East Coast; it’s the time of the year when the heat wedges itself into the concrete of the city and the humidity sticks around for just a little longer than you can bear.
I’m not the best version of myself at this time of the year. The heat has this way of sedimenting layers of moodiness in me, rendering feelings of being a dog that perhaps forgot how to wag its tail or a bear unable to find a tree to scratch its back on. Summer is usually a season of longing for the fall to arrive, yet this particular summer held an excitement for the horizon of new beginnings that were to come, and this particular day marked an exciting moment in the story of Preface Coffee.
My partner, Anna, was a week shy of her due date. Our bags for the impending day of going to the hospital were packed, placed in the corner of our apartment where they had been patiently waiting for a few months now. We had both started our paid family leave from our respective jobs, and our days were marked by games of Scrabble and making final touches to the nursery.
Between those moments, I took every opportunity I could to continue planning and working towards launching Preface Coffee. My desk was messy, with scraps of loose paper filled with notes on Preface often blown around by the blasting air-conditioner. One of those scraps of paper had the name ‘Unblended’, and next was something to the effect of ‘Colombia green coffee exporter//comes highly recommended//send them an email.’ Following my own prompts, I sent an email and patiently waited for a response.
Coffee and pleasure
“The coffee supply chain only improves when we provide reasons for the coffee drinker to find pleasure in a cup of coffee.” – Unblended: A manifesto
A central component of the allegory that Preface derives between books and coffee is that reading constitutes one of life’s small pleasures, and this is made all the sweeter with a good cup of coffee. The specialty coffee world is currently in a period of buzzing excitement. The pandemic, among other things, really prompted the industry to take seriously the proliferation of brewing education for ‘home baristas’ to make cafe-quality coffee at home. Since then, we’ve seen a wave of advancement and diversification of coffee equipment, with a new grinder or brewing device seemingly being released every other week.
What’s transpired is an embodiment of the journey being more important than the destination for specialty coffee drinkers; where the technical elements of brewing have become the central focus for many. Of course, how we evaluate the success of the brew ultimately comes down to how the coffee tastes; yet that first sip is made with a cursory glance towards the methodology – what came before it – often dissolving the experience of being present in the moment of drinking coffee.
One of my professors at college, while I was studying a masters degree in Biography and Memoir, provided me with an excellent metric for evaluating good writing. “As scholars and writers,” she told me, “our modus operandi is to read everything through the lens of critique. We’re constantly on the lookout for fallacies in the argument, or faults in sentence structure. But sometimes we have that rare fortune of reading a text where, by the time we reach its end, we realize that we’ve taken our lens of critique off a while ago. In other words, excellent writing compels you to lose your sense of self, to take off your editor's hat, and allows you that rare moment of enchantment.”
Indeed, some of the best literature that I’ve read has prompted this experience for me, and it’s only after I’ve finished reading it that I begin to wonder what made it such a compelling piece of writing in the first place.
This can apply to many facets of life, but in my case it continues to find resonance in the world of coffee. The coffees that I’ve enjoyed the most at coffee shops or at home have been those where I’ve lost my sense of self, and I simply forgot to evaluate them as a professional in the industry. It’s only after the fact that I began to appreciate them for their technical soundness and structure.
Now, this doesn’t mean that criticism or critical evaluation is the antithesis of pleasure. So often, criticism is necessary for improvement, and innovation in the coffee industry is responsible for so much of the more frequent cups of coffee that we find pleasurable these days. Yet, the instinct to critique might lead us to miss the adage that some things are more than the sum of their parts; or that sometimes we value other things like comfort or joy more than perfection. Other times, at the excitement of noticing how we have improved in our ability to taste coffee (and critique with knowledge of how to do better), we sometimes overlook the journeys that others are on and what that cup of coffee represents for them as baristas, roasters, and producers.
Of course, this is not to say that anything should go as far as sacrificing quality at the altar of relativism. Some baristas are better than other baristas, some roasters are better than other roasters, and some producers yield better coffees than others. After all, we frequent our local coffee shops not because we hope that the barista will improve at some stage in the future but because they make coffee in ways that we enjoy, and we find good value for our money there. Indeed, one might say that a good coffee shop is one that affords you frequent opportunities to leave your editor’s hat at the door, to save your critical faculties for your own job.
So, what, you ask, does this have to do with Unblended?
Unblended’s horizon
It has to do with the narrative that Unblended is constructing around their business model, and the stewards that they are of the producers they work with. It has to do with the reason they provide for us: finding pleasure in the cup of coffee we drink, which begins with the context surrounding the coffees that they offer.
Browsing Unblended’s website, one immediately gets a strong impression of their philosophy and position in the coffee supply chain. “Terroir,” it states, “is the taste of the producer’s craft.” This is different from the typical definition of terroir, which so often equates taste variation in agricultural products to the earth. Here, Unblended begins with producers, placing front and center their labor in relation to the soil and land they work with and on. This does not downplay the significance of the earth. Instead, it shifts our perception of coffee as a product of labor by those who tend to the land that ensures coffee’s flourishing. So it follows that producers are central to the coffee supply chain.
My phone vibrates. It’s an email from Michael, a representative of Unblended. We set up a time to chat over the phone, hoping it works out between his travels and our anticipated visit to the hospital to welcome our daughter to the world. Finding a moment, I brave the heat of this late-summer’s day – I tend to speak better on the phone when I’m walking – and make the call. The first question Michael asks me – a stranger on the other end – concerns my partner’s well-being, and whether our daughter had been born. He tells me that Lucas, the founder of Unblended, recently had a child and conveyed that through Lucas he has garnered an understanding of the challenges that new parents face in the context of starting and running a business.
It was immediately apparent to me that Unblended is a team composed of special people, with an intentional embodiment of the notion of partnership. There’s a palpable sense that they care deeply about the people they work with across the supply chain. From producers to roasters, there’s an understanding that the supply chain is not simply predicated on monetary transactions but also a deep recognition that each person within the supply chain is on a journey, with unique aspirations and hopes for their businesses and personal lives.
All of this provided a preface, as it were, for a deeper appreciation of Unblended’s Young Producer Program that Michael started speaking about. This is a program that aims to cultivate the next generation of coffee producers in Colombia, providing them with resources from developing their technical skills as farmers all the way to developing their own brands and breaking into the US market.
This program is predicated on the glaring crisis that Colombia is facing with regards to an aging producer population. “The average age of a coffee producer in Colombia is 63,” Lucas states in an interview in 2022, “I mean, that’s already scary but only in 2019 the average age was 55. There has been almost no young people [becoming producers] since 2019.” For the average age to increase by eight years across three years if you were “to project that rate, we’re not going to have any coffee farmers in the not-too-distant future.”
The Young Producer Program is an attempt to address this crisis, and it seeks to make coffee producing attractive for young people. ‘The future is young, so make coffee farming exciting’ is the mantra for this program, and indeed Unblended have curated a program that not only makes coffee farming exciting, but also sustainable and supportive. While the future is very much front and center, Unblended is very much concerned with quality in the present.
Those interested, or who have been invited to apply by Unblended, effectively submit an application to be a candidate through a small lot of coffee. By evaluating the quality and taste of each of these applications, Unblended identifies those who would make good candidates for the program. Combining these ‘application coffees’ yields the Recruitment Lot.
“We also provide opportunities for young producers to learn and improve their experimental processing skills through the Development Lot,” Michael tells me. Here, producers are able to try their hand at innovative processing methods – that are becoming increasingly popular in the specialty market – in small batches. It slowly began to dawn on me that Unblended effectively functions as a business and agricultural school for producers.
“I’ll send you some samples from these lots, and other offerings that we currently have,” Michael says. “All the best to you and your wife for the birth of your child. We’re looking forward to working with Preface!”
Sample roasting and parenthood
On August 10th, we welcomed our daughter to this world. On August 12th, the samples arrived; the same day we returned home from the hospital. “Keep in mind,” Michael explained in an email, “if you want to have your coffee in the container arriving in late October, we need to know final volumes by [end of day] August 15th.”1 We were running on very little sleep, let alone the general feeling of terror that most new parents experience in the first few days with their newborn, but I had accepted the challenge.
If ever there was a moment for the ROEST sample roaster to shine, this was it. Its advanced technology and automation is a must-have for roasters who have just become parents. While Anna and her parents were focused on the baby, in the background of our small apartment I was roasting and preparing to taste all 10 samples that same day. It was slightly chaotic, with the gentle humming of the sample roaster bringing some solace.
Throughout Anna’s pregnancy, and while trying to get Preface off the ground, I had wanted to release a coffee that would effectively be an ode to our newborn daughter. Among the samples that Michael had sent me was one labeled ‘Transformation Lot – Women’s Lot.’ I tasted all of the samples in our kitchen, with the little one in Anna’s arms on the couch. Seeing them, the future felt different; for the first time I felt deeply invested in the future beyond my own life. Tasting the Recruitment and Development Lot in this context had greater saliency. Yet, when I tasted the Women’s Lot, its florality was invigorating, and looking across to Anna and our daughter, I knew this was the coffee for them.
Unblended has given me good reasons to find pleasure in their coffees, I hope you do too.
1 To be clear, Michael did provide alternative ways that I could receive the coffee but for this story leaving this out generates great suspense.