Archive for the ‘The Coffee Business’ Category

The coffee is black, the cigars may be strong and you can drink with the big boys, but how do you react if someone comments on your personal habits? Do you a) laugh it off; b) counter with an insult; c) run to the bathroom in tears; c) look at the offending body part and shrug or d) punch the critic in the face and wipe the blood on his/her shirt because that will teach them a lesson.

My observation at the cigar patio where I hang out, where females are in the minority (there are two), is that human behavior is more fascinating when the discussion is based on topics where the expertise and passions are heightened. Fortunately for us, the topics are usually cigars, religion, wine, coffee or old jokes. Imagine what must go on at the Pentagon or Captial Hill in Ottawa where testosterone is off the charts! Once in a while however, one of us slips in a  gesture of generosity to the other, meant to improve their experience, or perhaps the group as a whole.

“May I make a suggestion, Lisa, ” Marty, the patio owner shares with me. A fine cigar is not a cigarette. “You do not need to butt it out (and he makes a grinding motion with his hand). It will go out by itself if it you just leave it on the ashtray. It only has a leaf wrapper, not a paper one.” I am mortified but realize he is doing me two favors here. One he has taught me a great lesson and he has waited until the others have left.Others are not so kind. The higher the testosterone, the louder and more aggressive the lesson. And no e-mails please but Europeans, Israelis – the observation of a faux pas can come with a quick correction. “WTF ARE YOU DOING????”, then the look of doom. The point is, in pods of specialized activities, passions run high and the rituals that go with them have very high expectations.

The Specialty Coffee business is no stranger to this activity. The higher up the beanstalk you go, the specific standards become more scientific, sometimes to the degree temperature and hour of day. A lightweight in the coffee business should expect to get roasted about the way their coffee beans are sourced, packaged, brewed and even tasted. To be dismissed by this crowd in round one means you are just having coffee and talking about the weather or movies. They will not waste their time on you. And if you ask about a detail trying to gain entry, get ready to be straightened out and then shut down. This knowledge took months or years to possess, and the explanation would be too long to explain over one coffee.

The best thing about cracking a circle of experts in any discipline is the pain is so worth it. The secret is, (move in close so I can whisper in your ear), to deal in a subject that is so wonderful that the fruit of your labor makes the expert want to hang out with you. In my case, I have rare coffee. I trade fresh, expensive beans and a bit of ego boost for information. “Thanks for that, I never knew that, you are brilliant sir, here’s a bag of Kona.” Somehow I do not think this would work if I was in the plastic cutlery business. Oh and the occasional abusive slur about your greenhorn technique? Goes with the territory. Grin and bear it.

An interview with Lisa Rotenberg of Rocketfuelcoffee by GCPuffs.com

Cigars and coffee have been matched together as long as they have been making cigars and growing coffee beens. The rich taste of the cigar matched with a succulent cup of coffee starts the day for many as well as anytime of the day. One of the hottest brands out today is Rocket Fuel Coffee, owned by Lisa Rotenburg, and has a variety of coffees to fit every taste. Lisa took a moment recently to sit a chat with GCPuffs.



G.C. Thanks Lisa for taking time for us,how did you start in the coffee world?

L.R. As an illustrator and graphic designer, I was looking for a business I could run from home that would make use of my extensive portfolio of illustrations and paintings. I have been painting for about 15 years. Every painting is recorded as a high resolution scan and can be used as licensed property – cards, posters, you name it.  I saw a coffee company for sale but realized I did not have to buy anything I could start the site myself based on my experience as a graphic designer, a Power Seller on eBay and an entrepreneur. I found a supplier here in Toronto and went to CoffeeFest in Chicago to learn about the industry. My husband Matthew is a CEO and chartered accountant and fabulous mentor. We both happen to love coffee. The rest is pretty much learning as I have gone along and here three years later, we have http://www.rocketfuelcoffee.com/.

G.C. You often talk about cigars, how long have you enjoyed them?

L.R. About 4 years ago Matthew brought home a couple of cigars from a golf tournament. We tried them on our back porch and liked them but it was way too strong for me. We visited a shop near us and I tried a vanilla “thing” and we started being regular customers, moving into Cuban mild cigars, buying a small humidor. When I opened my coffee business, we became more interested in these premium topics such as Single Malt Scotch, cigars, and steaks.
Two years ago I became very active on coffee forums on the internet, even moderating one of them. I am very active on Facebook and Twitter, with literally thousands of contacts combined in these venues. Last year I figured it out that cigar folks might become coffee customers if I joined their forums. It is risky as they don’t much like a female in there too much – and I am the only one most of the time. But I am trying my best to hold my own and I am a good cigar customer on the
trade section so I think that is why they tolerate me.

G.C. How do you think the combination of cigars and coffee work as a pairing and is that something you try to promote as a cigar smoker?

L.R. Cigars and coffee are the perfect pairing and are part of what I call my “$25 theory”. This is before we even get to the perfect taste complement, which I will get to in a moment. Lisa’s $25 theory suggests that if you will spend $25 on a wonderful cigar (or 2), or a half pound of great coffee, a glass of single malt Scotch, a decent bottle of wine, delicious dessert for 2, a good rib eye steak… you get the idea where this list is going… you will buy the items interchangeably on the list. So to participate on these discussion forums or market to one will market to the other. So on my website it is very nice to list a coffee and cigar pairing. Everyone wins. And it is delicious!

G.C. With all your involved in with cigars and the coffee, what is it that you find gives you a get away from it, time to just relax?

L.R. It is with coffee and cigars that I do relax… at our log home in Feversham, north of Toronto.

G.C.What do you see for the future of your coffee?

L.R. We are working on a couple of very interesting projects right now where we are trying to sell larger volumes of Rocketfuelcoffee.com. One is getting involved on a Group Coupon site. We like the idea of roasting fresh Hawaiian Kona and Jamaican Blue Mountain Rocketfuelcoffee.com and putting together a one or two pound gift box and shipping it out to customers on these venues. A second project I have been exploring is called Raiserbean.It allows schools, churches, foundations or hospitals to use Rocketfuelcoffee.com for fundraising. They sell our amazing coffee and split the profit with us. We can even design custom labels for them. Of course the link with cigars is always on our mind!

G.C. You seem to really enjoy what you do. Is there ever a time it gets to be a little to much?

L.R. Interesting that you should ask that. This is not only a business for me. I am kind of obsessed about coffee, cigars and art. A good steak, a glass of single malt scotch and you have a great day for me. I can talk about these things forever. My husband has to shut me up. So it does not get to be too much for me. It is others that perhaps that I should be more worried about.

G.C. What’s next for you? Any new coffee coming out?

L.R. Right now I am very active in the art tours in my community where that log home is located. My paintings sell very well and I love painting up there. The coffees sell well and I love sitting on our back deck smoking special cigars. Recently I discovered Casa Fuentes, but they are hard to get up here! Trading for coffee is a good way to get them. New coffee? Folks seem to like the best ones we have. New ones don’t do as well.

G.C. Again thanks Lisa.

L.R. You’re welcome!!

If you have not tried Rocketfuelcoffee.com, you’re missing out on some of the best gourmet coffee on the market. Check out the web site and try some. If you’re not sure about what type you may like, ask Lisa, she loves to help!
G.C.

When Illustration and Coffee Come Together Perfectly!

Three years ago when I wanted to open a coffee company, there were two sides to the business that really excited me. As a coffee lover, the idea of sourcing specialty coffee and rare beans was intriguing, fascinating and made us salivate. As a graphic designer who spent years specializing in consumer packaging, this would have been a dream project, and here I would have the opportunity to have free reign on an entire line of products. Just WOW.

To visit the www.lisarotenberg.com artwork site shows original artwork for the owner and designer for www.rocketfuelcoffee.com. I am not sure if too many artist/illustrators can say that have opened online rare coffee companies, but many entrepreneurs change careers and bring wonderful skills with them. This is the magic of entrepreneurship is you ask me… and chameleons make for very inspirational and interesting business mentors!

Just One Night, Lisa Rotenberg

When it comes to holiday images, since the beginning of my painting career 15 years ago, I have been a success. The image below has been reproduced thousands of times on cards, mugs, coasters, magnets and key chains. At one point this image was even available as an edible chocolate bar! My folk art style, sense of color and humor, matched with Canadiana themes make for the perfect non-denominational holiday wishes. It’s a timeless no brainer.

Your Turn This Year

Starting last year, www.rocketfuelcoffee.com took this idea and brought it to the coffee labels with a Holiday Blend. Our Global Warming coffee, which is a blend of Jamaican Blue Mountain, Hawaiian Kona and Ethiopian Yirgacheffe is a hands down favorite coffee. So delicious and a great price too at $12/half pound. As a gift with a special edition label, perfect! So our customers can have a choice or give a pair, we came up with 2 designs. As well, we called one, “Welcome Home“. This is to inspire gifting in the real estate business as well as use for house warming gifting over the holidays.

Rocketfuelcoffee.com is working on extending sales activity with these wonderful holiday coffees as fundraising products for schools, charities or anyone else looking to sell items and raise money. A concept called Raiserbean.com is in the works, and input is welcome. At $10-12 per unit for a wonderful bag of coffee there is room to earn money for your organization, so contact us at lisa@rocketfuelcoffee.com!

“…and then she served, get this, store-bought, national brand coffee!”

Recently I had the pleasure of reading an entire series of articles by the wonderful authors at Cigars International, an online quality cigar retailer. This took me the better part of a whole morning, about two pots of coffee and a whole cigar on my back porch. It was so compelling that I felt I had to write them and thank them, since I am not a customer yet. Seems they do not ship easily to Canada, as is the case with most of the American cigar retailers online. Oh well.

The amazing thing is, the depth of detail is so similar to the obsessive behavior to that of those of us in the coffee world, that we should just set up coffee and cigar shops everywhere and it is actually shocking to me that this is not already so. At my local cigar shrine they do sell stale, Cuban coffee, but the identical product is for sale on the counter at the variety shop where you can buy milk, cigarettes and lottery tickets next store.

In one of the articles at Cigar International, a topic that particularly caught my eye discussed cigar bands. Should smokers leave them on or remove them when smoking their stogies?

• One country does still take a rather strong view with respect to the band – the British. They still consider it “bad form” to advertise the brand you are smoking – as you wouldn’t want to embarrass another gentleman smoking an inferior brand. No matter whether you decide to remove the band before, during, or not at all be prepared to support your choice.

Coffee drinkers and roasters are exactly the same. and not just about the beans! About the grinder, the water, the brewer, anything that you can think of that comes in contact with the sacred liquid or process.  But one difference I have found in these two groups is the conversation that comes up in the room when the product rolls out:

^Coffee & Tea Show Canada after dinner 2010^
Some of the greatest coffee minds in the world talk about coffee
I understand about 30% of what they said but they seemed happy

^Sitting with fellow cigar smokers who just smoke for 4 hours^
Marty is the owner of the Chez Tabac Cuban cigar shop. Talk was not technical,
but it was hilarious. Will go back tomorrow.

Seems both cigars and coffee have the ability to make folks sit still and contemplate the goings on the the world, but cigars, like alcohol, have the limitations of government intervention. So we cannot enjoy them inside like a coffee shop, only on an outdoor patio or rooftop. Just a whiff of this will get a group started for a whole afternoon of social cigar talk! Or an election, a nasty neighbor, a change in the weather that may move the patio action out of commission.

On the coffee side, fair trade is a popular issue, but those in the know, know that this is debatable topic that is more fashion than passion. Companies in the U.S. like Inteligentsia Coffee are working with their own process called Direct Trade to afford a more modern approach to help communities and farmers. The same level of conversation is happening on the cigar topics of Cuban cigar as God, since most of the finest cigar makers left Cuba in the early 1960′s just before the embargo*.

• Most Cuban families that owned or operated the cigar industry fled, with the remainder fleeing when President Kennedy initiated the embargo in 1961 which prohibited the sale of Cuban cigars (among other items) in the USA. Just before signing the embargo, Kennedy had his press secretary Pierre Salinger procure 1000 of his favorite Cuban cigars (H. Upmann Petit Coronas). Production and quality took a nosedive, with many plantations that formerly grew tobacco turning to other staples of life such as sugar or rice. Today, the Cuban cigar industry is merely a shadow of what it once was.

And if we really want the best social gossip about a cigar, well there is always, Monica L.

Lots of things there that you can drink, but stay away from the kitchen sink.
The breakfast garbage that you throw in to the bay, they drink at lunch in san jose.  -Tom Lehrer, 1965.

Recently at a Coffee and Tea trade show in Toronto I witnessed a passionate discussion by a group of coffee geeks much more experienced and knowledgeable than me about the importance of filtration of water. These people served coffee in cafés to the public and to each other in competition, as well as tasting coffee for a living.

The primary issues about water quality were whether the clear liquid touching the sacred harvested grounds of joy altered the taste before it hit the cup. End of story. If the H Two Oh could be improved on in any way, at any cost, it should be done. They did not grow the Lord’s beans to have them wasted by some municipal bureaucracy who did not know about a portafilter or when one sneezes. For someone who is either not tuned into the lingo or is a home brewer like me, these guys might as well be talking Vulcan:

“The system is intriguing–it has an adjustable bypass, and uses a bed of hydrogenated resin (rather than salted resin) to soften the water by reducing the alkalinity as well as the minerals, solving (at least on paper) most of the problems with more traditional softening setups. Of course, there are weaknesses to this system as well, in particular that it’s a proprietary system with potentially expensive replacement filters.” – homebarista.com

The wonderful owners of Mavis Bank Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee Factory (Senator Norman W. Grant, CEO pictured here) explained to me that they were unhappy with the very expensive coffee filtration system at their retail outlet at the Jamaican Airport in Kingston. They then changed to a system where every day before the store opened truck loads of bottled water arrive at the store. Poul Mark of Transcend Coffee offered similar water expertise to the text above. My own roaster and coffee supplier added that your coffee prep equipment can turn on you, adding oils to the water from previous brews and tap water is disgusting, what with fluoride, hard/soft water and who know’s what else is in there!

You probably by now know that the plastics that go into bottled water are bad for the environment, and perhaps even not so good for you if it’s just nicely labeled tap water. Add to that the possibility the bottle contains BPA and they’re not such a healthy choice after all. – Paul Smith | January 15th, 2010, www.triplepundit.com

Here is where I sat on my hands as I did not have the verbal ammo to state my case. I sell my wonderful, fresh coffee online and I do not get to see what water my customers put in their coffee machines. The address labels on my packages are to all over the world, from major urban centers to one horse towns. For all I know, they may go down to the local river with a bucket to to get the water. I tell them to use one scoop of coffee for each cup of water and when they run out of beans I want them to buy more. They spend seconds on my website to see the coffee, hopefully minutes to read information about how wonderful the beans are and how to order them. At this level and price point, they have some depth of coffee machine or preparation knowledge or they would go to their local shop and not wait 7 days for $50/lb coffee. Adding expense, science or negative information because of water will not sell my coffee.

There, now I have done it. My picture now has a big red “X” on it at the Specialty Coffee Association of America and I am off the list at the next coffee cupping swap meet. Rats. But if the lowest water common denominator in Armpit, Ontario uses tap water with traces of moose poop in it can’t enjoy my wonderful coffee stress free, who can? The taste can only get better. Telling the public on the www to buy subtronic anti microfibrial neutron filters (ok I made that up) to clean their water for coffee brewing is not going to work. Especially when coffee prices are going up daily and you are trying to get $20 a half pound for it.

First, limescale is a trivial problem in brewed coffee makers, so there’s no reason to use soft water when brewing coffee. Second, in good espresso, crema, mouthfeel, and balance play a much larger role than in brewed coffee, so results from a brewed test may not apply to espresso. -Water for coffee FAQ, by Jim Schulman with numerous contributions by others.

My last point I would like to make about the water issue is about what happens after the horse leaves the post, so to speak. You choose your coffee, you send the water through the machine (perfect or otherwise) and you have your paper filter. Fine. The water, coffee and paper have worked their magic, as well as the heat. What about the microns of stuff on your cup from your dishwasher? Or what is in your mouth from smoking, eating, kissing your sweetie or dog? And God forbid, adding milk, sugar or sweetener?

Bite your tongue!

Now I know what cutting diamonds feels like (well, sort of).

The rare coffee, cigar, steak or diamond businesses have a few things in common. The product is of the highest standard, the customers know what they are talking about and compare notes, the selection is often worldly and expensive, and learning about these items is fascinating.

However, the risk accompanying selling these items is high. If there is an error in the order, on the part of the supplier or the vendor, the loss of revenue can be heartbreaking, not to mention unsold inventory if the product does not capture the imagination of the target market. Once in a lifetime Panama Hacienda Esmeralda coffee beans sold at auction at a split section in May requires the marketing power to sell the coffee while the fever about it is high. I imagine the same holds true for the newest Porche or solar technology. A mentor of mine once told me, “Lisa, sales is sales. The rest is romance.”

One of rocketfuelcoffee.com‘s jewels in our line-up is Kopi Luwak. A most wonderful rare bean at $220 per pound, this is the legendary coffee in the movie, “The Bucket List”, where Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson vow to drink it before they die. Made from the found droppings of Asian Palm Civets, the coffee is the most expensive and rarest beverage on earth. And it tastes damn good too. Read about it here.With the money and legend of course, comes carpet baggery, forgery and tall tales.

After 2 years of learning about rare coffee and having all kinds of coffee suppliers call on us to sell all kinds of weird beans, we found two Kopi Luwak bean farmers of repute. Trusted for authenticity, freshness and taste, these guys delivered consistent KL at the agreed price and in packaging that was at rocketfuelcoffee.com standards. Great. However, turns out, like unique, handmade rare products, one day is different than the next and constant supervision of anyone that came in contact with the beans was essential. A day of lighter roasting changed product. One batch, though not 100% proven, appeared to be stolen off site and replaced by an inferior bean and shipped to us. Espionage in rare coffee! Who knew?

We have a supplier who takes care of us on a personal level locally who we can look in the eye and ask what’s what. George is my rock in the coffee business and without him I would be nowhere. But Toronto, Canada is not exactly in the coffee belt. Venturing further in the world has been the secret to my great coffees but at what risk and cost? Learning lessons the hard way (ok, the delicious way sometimes) is just something they cannot teach you in business school.

Cheers!