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. ABOUT THE MENENDEZ COFFEE FARM 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...

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...

I got on the plane in 2015, but I think this trip started for me sometime in 1996.   I was a senior in high school. I had a free period in the middle of the morning and a car to get off campus. So a couple of times a week I would drive four blocks to the donut shop. I would get a glazed donut, a cake donut, and a cup of coffee. The coffee was, of course, beige. It would shoot out of a spout whenever the donut-guy pressed the button on his automatic french vanilla cappuccino machine....

CREMA’S ORIGIN TRIP TO COFFEE FARMS IN COSTA RICA At Crema, our partnerships with the people in these countries are essential to our ethos. We rely on these expert farmers, processors and pickers to bring you the tasty coffees we offer. As you may have heard us say before, we are a small part of the larger journey of coffee from seed to cup.   As part of our benefits and well-being plan, Crema employees are eligible for an origin trip after 3 years with the company. After a two-year origin trip hiatus (Hmm, I wonder why?), a few of...