If you care about coffee, you should meet David Griswold, a young man whose Portland-based businesses are dedicated to bringing you the best of this beverage, while directly contributing to the welfare of  the folks who pick the beans.  Griswold’s success with his coffee import business, Sustainable Harvest, has subsidized his Roast Your Own Coffee internet marketing enterprise.  The latter, at www.roastyourown.com, encourages customers to buy some of the world’s best beans and roast them at home for the ultimate taste experience.

“You just haven’t experienced the best that coffee can be, unless you roast, grind and brew your own,” Griswold declares.  No argument with that premise is offered here, after tasting the richness of a roast accomplished with a small countertop machine Griswold markets on the internet.  Coffee connoiseurs long ago learned that buying roasted beans and grinding them at home as needed produces a superior cup of Joe. (OMED: "Joe" is a WWII moniker for coffee. "Moniker" is an early 20th Century term for "name.")

Griswold explains that while green coffee beans retain their taste potential for many months before roasting, once roasted, beans should be ground and brewed within three days for optimal flavor.

Residual economic benefits

Griswold’s Sustainable Harvest buys beans directly…”from small family farms with a real concern for quality,” and thus, he avers, sells quality at a consumer-friendly price while providing a maximum return for the farmer.  That is not the case with the majority of trading on the world coffee market, where volume growers sell to the middleman.(Photo is a link to a BBC article about economic problems of small coffee  farmers.)

And coffee is a very, very big business.  It is the most important legally traded commodity in the world, next to oil.  Over 70 countries (all located in a band around the world between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn) cultivate commercial coffee crops, and an estimated 20 million souls derive a living from this enterprise.  Well over six million metric tons of coffee beans arrive annually on the world market.  A majority of producing nations are members of the International Coffee Organization, a London-based cartel that controls pricing.  This is not the source cultivated by Griswold, who
seeks caring farmers growing a product that qualifies for both organic and fair trade certification (21 countries currently produce fair traded green coffee).  The latter production segment returns up to $1.41/lb. to grower cooperatives, whereas only a 38 cent/lb. remuneration is realized by farmers from ICO middlemen.  (Wall St. Journal article about small coffee farmers.)
http://oregonmag.com/Coffee0502.htm
Brazil dominates

Juan Valdez is a link to his Cafe Columbia page.

No other nation threatens Brazil’s domination of coffee production at over 28 million bags (100-130 lbs./bag) per year.  Vietnam, a latecomer, is runnerup at 12.6 million.  Rounding out the top 10 are Colombia (11.5), Indonesia (6.2), Mexico (5.5), India (5.3), Guatemala (4), Ivory Coast (4), Ethiopia (4) and Uganda (3.2).  (Story: Chinese Yuppies Slurp Ugandan Coffee)

We should note that there are two basic species of the coffee plant: Robustico and Arabica.  The latter, which is dominant in Latin America, the Carribean and to lesser extent in Asia, is the highest quality resource, while the video-advertised canned brands inhabiting our supermarkets rely upon African growing of the former.  The nuances of climate and soil in any particular coffee-growing site create a vast variety of taste characteristics, equivalent to the terroir factor the French ascribe to wine grape growing sites. (OMED: that is "terroir," not "terror."  It is not a reference to emotional distress.  It is a French term which  describes geo-climatological combinations that cause a region, or even a single hillside, to produce an agricultural product with very specific qualities.)

Surprisingly, the countries tops in coffee production rate low on the world consumption scale.  Scandinavian nations are atop per capita coffee sipping (three times the U.S. rate).  The European Union and U.S. combined import two of every three bags of coffee produced on this globe.  The U.S. population includes 107 million daily coffee drinkers (of these, an estimated 29 million consume the specialty coffee category which includes
Starbucks, et al, and the organically-grown beans Griswold peddles).

Griswold points out that specialty coffee consumption is the coffee growth market (nobody would get any argument on this point from a Pacific Northwest resident viewing a “gourmet” coffee outlet on every urban corner), with a 3 cups per day per adult drinking rate.  However, the overall per capita coffee consumption in the U.S. is one cup per day, a distinct fall from a 3 cup per day adult rate in 1962.  The traditional, ground canned coffee that has dominated our grocery shelves is taking the brunt of the downturn in Java gulping by the general populace.  Tasting Griswold’s select beans treatment indicates why.

Griswold’s bean resources include growers in Yemen, that remote Arab nation we’ve always envisioned as largely desert.  Not so. The mountainous interior ( to 8,000 ft.) includes green clad slopes ideal for coffee shrubs.  The Yemeni lay claim to being coffee’s birthplace (the shrub is native there, and to Ethiopia just west) and it was in these lands, at the start of the 16th Century, that Portugese sailors embraced the beverage and subsequently  introduced its brewing to Europe.  The Yemeni (Red Sea) port of Al Mocha was history’s earliest coffee export hub, and its name lives in today’s specialty coffee culture. (OMED: "Mocha Java," with the "ch" pronounced as a "k," is a term that combines the Yemeni port, near the mouth of the Red Sea in the map to the right, and an Indian Ocean island growing region.  It is a very early moniker for coffee.  Fans of W.C. Fields will hear it used in the Hollywood cafe scene in "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break." The map is a link to a page about Yemen.)

Griswold’s affinity for those who grow coffee was born while he was working for a non-profit foundation in Washington, D.C.  In 1989 he met a Mexican coffee importer who related the plight of small farmers growing the wakeup bean.*  Griswold went to Mexico, actually picked beans and was inspired to create Aztec Harvest, a grower-owned entity.  Seeking bean customers, Griswold met the Ben & Jerry ice cream owners, an ecologically-sensitive management who embraced buying direct from organically-guided growers…to the extent that they named their coffee-flavored ice cream Aztec Harvest.

Griswold led the Aztec operation for five years and “became convinced that profit vs. non-profit was my calling.”  Now, capitalism had a firm grasp on this creative mind, and Griswold founded Sustainable Harvest to exploit his knowledge of gourmet coffee as a resource.  He and his wife Marie (active in the family business) determined that Oregon would be a welcoming base for the ecologically, environmentally-friendly endeavor they envisioned.  As we write, Sustainable Harvest and Roast Your Own operate from a modest office in Portland’s (aptly named for this enterprise’s quarters) Ecotrust building.

The timing is right.  Griswold is profiting from our nation’s newfound love for all things organic and environmentally correct.  The organic growing principles that eschew use of chemical growth enhancements can be profitable for farmers whose product is purchased and promoted by such as Griswold (a communications major from L.A.’s Occidental College).  There’s another element to certifying the ultimate in creating fine coffee…the practice of “shade grown.”  This refers to the cultivation of coffee shrubs amidst taller trees that coexist naturally at the growing site…in direct contrast to high volume coffee plantations created by clear-cutting large swaths of land for maximum density and growth rate for the coffee plants.  Birds, animals and insects native to the coffee climate endorse the shade-grown promotion.  (Illlus is a link to an audubon site.)

The Market is there

Griswold’s primary business is supplying green beans to volume roasters, and he has some prominent customers.  The Allegro coffee division of  the nationwide Whole Foods supermarket chain which recently arrived in Portland, relies upon Sustainable Harvest as a supplier, as does the Peets Coffee, gourmet coffee retail and wholesale system…also Portland’s Stumptown Roasters, a major Northwest restaurant supplier.  This, Griswold admits, is where the money is, “but I’m really having the most fun communicating directly (and selling to) the individual consumer.”  That’s what his Roast Your Own web site is all about, and it demonstrates his personal dedication to educating all of us on the ultimate enjoyment of an agricultural product that spans the planet.

* According to modern science, a myth.  Orange juice, scientists say, is a better wakeup tonic than coffee.

Text © 2002 Oregon Magazine   Graphics are links or  from the coffee man's website.