Please Help With Pricing!

[miabbett]

Hey everyone!

I'm basically serving as a broker for very high-quality Ethiopian coffee. Here's a little bit about our coffee, taken from our mission statement:

Our 100% certified organic, shade grown coffee is from a family-owned estate in the highlands of Ethiopia’s Kaffa region. Having received UTZ and BCS-OKO certification, our coffee is both environmentally sustainable and socially responsible. Our facilities harvest, process, and ship the coffee, creating thousands of jobs for locals. Our estate provides hospitals, medical clinics, primary and secondary schools for our workers and families. Caring for our community remains one of our top priorities.
Our estate controls our coffee every step of the way, from the shade protected jungle floor, to the drying beds, to truck transport to our sorting warehouse in Addis Ababa, to final transport and the loading of containers in Djibouti. Our ability to control the process from beginning to end enables us to maintain strict quality control. As a result, we guarantee that every coffee bean purchased from us comes from our farms. We make very high quality organic certificated coffee in a way that fairly benefits workers and their families, cherishes our environment, and protects the genetic variation that blesses our homeland.

The coffee has various organic certifications, is certified Fair Trade, and scored an 85 in a recent cupping.

That being said, I am able to purchase coffee for $3USD/lb. Does anyone have any pricing suggestions (not including shipping) to retailers and roasters? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[eldub]

The suppliers we're working with currently offer fair trade/organic beans from Ethiopia at between $3.90 and $5/lb when buying full bags.

 

[miabbett]

The suppliers we're working with currently offer fair trade/organic beans from Ethiopia at between $3.90 and $5/lb when buying full bags.

Thanks for the quick response! Do you know how our coffee might stack up against the Fair Trade organic Ethiopian coffees you'e dealt with in terms of quality? I'm just wondering if our coffee would be closer to $3.90 or $5.00

 

[danfr2]

There should be something in Google.

 

[eldub]

I have no idea. Is the coffee dry processed or washed? If the beans are from kaffa, I'm guessing they would be considered to be Djimmah? The $5/lb beans I've come across were Yirgcheffe. I would guess that Harar and Djimmah would also be at the top of the pricing scale, but not sure.

Harar,
Sidamo,
Yirgacheffe (in Sidamo),
Limmu,
Djimmah,
Lekempti,

 

[eldub]

I have no idea. Is the coffee dry processed or washed? If the beans are from kaffa, I'm guessing they would be considered to be Djimmah? The $5/lb beans I've come across were Yirgcheffe. I would guess that Harar and Djimmah would also be at the top of the pricing scale, but not sure.

From sweet maria's web site:

A brief word about the grading of Ethiopian Coffees: The top grade Ethiopian washed coffees (Yirgacheffe and Sidamo, usually) might bear a Grade 2 or 3, dry-processed from the Eastern parts will be 4 or 5 by nature of the preparation method. Oftentimes, a Grade 4 will be marked grade 5 to save on taxes and duties. The whole system is a bit tricky, because you can now have a Grade 1 or 2 natural from Yirga Cheffe, but not from Harar, where the top grade will be Gr. 4 . But we judge coffee by cup quality via blind cupping: not the marks of the bag.Expect uneven roast color from even the best of the dry-processed coffees. Even roast color is not necessarily a mark of high cup quality. NOTE: Some Ethiopian dry-processed coffees are hand prepped and dried in the sun - so watch out for rocks! There can be small stones and dirt clods in the coffee that you need to cull out before roasting and definitely before grinding as these can jam a grinder. A ground up dirt clod can foul an otherwise lovely pot of coffee. (In wet processed coffees the stones fall out in the water channel but in dry processed coffees, small stones can escape detection and make it all the way through to the final bag.) Expect uneven roast colors from dry-processed Ethiopian coffees. In this image of Harar, there is one bean to cull out - pretty obvious.

 

[miabbett]

I have no idea. Is the coffee dry processed or washed? If the beans are from kaffa, I'm guessing they would be considered to be Djimmah? The $5/lb beans I've come across were Yirgcheffe. I would guess that Harar and Djimmah would also be at the top of the pricing scale, but not sure.

Harar,
Sidamo,
Yirgacheffe (in Sidamo),
Limmu,
Djimmah,
Lekempti,

After doing a little digging, I'm pretty sure that coffee from the Kaffa region is Gembo, Gewata, and Chena. Have you worked with any of these varieties?

 

[eldub]

Here's an ethiopian coffee guide I just came across on-line. He discusses coffee from the areas you mention above on page 20. (The system won't allow me to cut and paste the section in question.)

http://danielhumphries.typepad.com/files/ethiopian-coffee-guide-sm.pdf

 

[miabbett]

Here's an ethiopian coffee guide I just came across on-line. He discusses coffee from the areas you mention above on page 20. (The system won't allow me to cut and paste the section in question.)

That guide is actually where I found the Gembo, Gewata, and Chena info earlier. Coincidentally, the guy who wrote the guide lives a few minutes away from me, so I'm going to see him within the next week hopefully. I greatly appreciate all of the in depth help, and should you find anything else about Ethiopian coffee from the Kaffa region, feel free to send it my way! I'll post more question as they inevitably come up.