Origin Trips

We find inspiration in a lot of places. We’re continually inspired by our community, the faithful friends and guests at the shop, the community of creative folks around us in our city.   But nothing inspires us more than walking the hills of the Menendez family farms in El Salvador. Don Miguel, the over-half-a-decade veteran of the coffee world and patriarch of the Menendez family, loves watching people taste his coffee. He watched us cup -- our co-owner Rachel, and fellow coffee sojourners Jess and Abby -- and beamed with a pride you could’ve read by. We all have our...

Yemeni coffee exporters Mokhtar Alkhanshali and Andrew Nicholson couldn’t have known what would befall them on their voyage to Seattle for the SCAA Expo in April of last year. Upon attempting to leave Yemen’s capitol city of Sana’a, the two friends found themselves in the midst of an airstrike, unable to fly anywhere. Determined to present their coffees on the industry’s largest stage, Alkhanshali and Nicholson committed to drive seven hours to the city of Mokka, where they then convinced a fishing boat captain to tote them and 100 kilos of coffee across the Red Sea; all this, only to be...

There is little argument that Panama produces some of the world’s finest coffee. Industry gurus praise Panamanian geshas as the best coffees out there, avowing rare floral qualities, tea-like body and extraordinary drinkability. We at CREMA are happy to have recently served several Panamanian productions, one of which was a gesha from last fall, and if you’ve been in the shop at all in 2016, you’ve probably seen an offering from Elida Estate on our menu. This coffee came to us from Wilford Lamastus, renowned coffee producer and the most gracious host of CREMA folk in Boquete, Panama. When we...

We Crema folk spend a lot of time with the coffees in our shop. We get to know what each one looks like – the size, the color, the shape. We can distinguish many of them by sight. But this fruit  that we take such pride in, that we feel we know so well, have a past life. Four consecutive years of travelling to origin, this time to Costa Rica and Panama, have shown us this. Varieties, strategically selected by the farmer to both grow well and be tasty, are planted and nurtured into bloom. They grow up in the...