Hey Friends!
First the news, we’ve just put in all our paperwork for Coffee Service at the 2025 Methow Valley Farmers’ Market, and I’m pretty damn excited to start our second year in the business!
Last year we explored getting a brick-and-mortar space, but after running the numbers and taking a realistic look at what I like about the business, I realized that opening up a café wasn’t yet reasonable1.
One area that we are expanding this year is coffee bean sales and home delivery. I’ll update you via this newsletter next week.
I should probably also mention that coffee prices have risen in the past year, and most dramatically in the past few months. We’re tracking the pricing and hopefully won’t have to change our service prices at the market. You can expect the price of beans to go up by an average of a dollar or two. I’ll say a bit more about economics of this a bit at the end of this newsletter.
Thanks again for all your support. I can’t wait to see you out there!
Sean
Our Favorite Coffees Right Now
The Dark Roasts
Of course we’re still a huge fan of Lariat’s Papua New Guinea. That’s probably the best coffee roasted in the Valley right now. Dark and bold, but that hint of cherry that really makes it special.
Mela Coffee Roasting out of Wenatchee has a solid Costa Rican dark roast right now, although I haven’t yet seen it offered on their website. Last I heard it was going to be brought into the line up under the name “Columbia River Roast". So watch for that. Their French Roast is an excellent, precisely balanced offering worth trying as well.
The Light Roasts
Treeline Coffee from Bozeman has a great coffee from El Salvador out, “Snow Cap”. With tasting notes of Cherry, Chocolate Syrup and Cola, it’s great as a pour over but I’ve been really enjoying it brewed with an Aeropress.
Black and White Coffee Roasters in Raleigh, NC has a great conferment out, “Carlos Plazas Cinnamon Anaerobic”. From the Huila region of Colombia (of course), this coffee much more subtle than the other two coferements we offered you this summer. It was shared with us by the barista at Pine Coffee Supply’s outpost in Boise.
The Decafs
Fidalgo Coffee Roasters has a great “Decaf Horizon” offering out. It’s a water processed decaf on the medium-to-light side and well worth an afternoon pour or even in a French press.
“Cruiser” from Treeline is probably still our favorite. We poured some to the delight of some discerning trail runners at Rainshadow Running’s Orcas Island State Race a few weeks ago. It’s a light roasted sugarcane process decaf from Colombia.
Updates from the Coffee Commodity Market
The Coffee C Contract is the commodity future whose price benchmarks the global coffee market2. It’s running just above 4.00 USD per pound right now.
That’s the highest it’s been, for months we’ve been at levels not seen April of 1977, where it topped out around 3.23 USD per pound. For a broader context, you can check out the price of beans over the past few decades
This is all to convince you that the baseline price of coffee is going up dramatically. At this point last summer the index was around 3.25 USD per pound.
As of now my supplier’s prices haven’t changed much. Mostly this is due to the fact that I buy high quality - and hence higher priced - microlot coffees from craft roasters. Hence the light roasts are somewhat inelastic to the commodity price.
Of course, coffee beans aren’t sold in a vacuum. This price will impact big coffee businesses whose purchasing habits tend to affect other products that we all rely on: transportation, cups, sleeves, filters, etc. We’re tracking these secondary effects too.
Of greater concern is why the C contract price is rising. The market is finally recovering from the demand shock of COVID3, but now suffering a supply issue - shocked most recently by drought in Brazil - induced by the deforestation and the associated effects of climate change.
That sort of structural change must eventually impact speciality coffee roasters - and hence our wholesale partners - but there is also further specialization happening within this sector of the coffee industry, which could mitigate some of that pricing increase.
Let’s all just take this one day at a time.
If anything I prefer being outside!
For arabica beans at least, nowadays you can also get robusta beans delivered, for example by Nguyen Coffee Supply. While generally lower, their commodity prices have also experienced a similar rise.
Looking forward to being able to buy coffee from y'all if shipping is offered for us out of valley folks and all of this tariff chaos is furthering my curiosity about Hawaiian grown coffee.