About the coffee

Gilberto with his family

We participated in the Mexican Cup of Excellence (COE) auction 2013, bidding on Lot 15, from Finca Tres Tetas. The coffee comes from an allotment established in 1978 and that originally belonged to Gilberto Garcia Romero’ parents. When he got married, in 1992, his parents gave him this land. Since then he has been managed the coffee plantation in a traditional way. There is no agro chemicals applied in the coffee plantation, the soil remains intact and the coffee is shade grown. Pruning, shade control and soil are all owner managed, and have been improved as and when they can.

Receiving the Cup of Excellence is acknowledgement to Gilberto’s hard work and it has meant a lot to him. The great price achieved for the coffee (U$D6.6 per pound, over U$D4 per pound more than the speculative sector would pay) has provided the opportunity to improve the life of his family and pay the people that work for him and his family better.

So what did it cost us Quaffee, to bring it all the way to Cape Town South Africa? Well we partnered with Virmax / Caravela in the auction and they charged us $1.00 a pound to represent us on the auction. We therefore paid 7.60 USD per pound. We bought a total of 120kgs, which is 264.55 pounds of coffee

Breakdown for Raw Costs

Here below, is a total of breakdown of the costs to get the coffee here, in raw green form:

First the USD price in total:

Rand pricing

Rand Dollar exchange paid 10.42, so in South African Rand:

So that means that a total price was R31,488.92. We had a total of 120kgs but it has taken us 6.5 kgs to identify a roast profile so we only have 113.5 kgs left.

That brings the total price per kilogram to R 277.44.

Further considerations

On average we lose about 19% in weight when we roast. We anticipate that the average weight will will roast is 4kgs. Each roast we use about 800ml of gas, at the moment, when we have our afterburner installed I suspect this will triple. This means we have a total of about 28 roasts left of this coffee and then it will be gone.

We calculate our roast cost per kilogram on this coffee we anticipate to be about R35 / kilogram including gas, labour and operating costs. This means with lose and roasting cost it will cost around R350 kilogram to produce the coffee.

Question to Coffee Lovers

We want our client’s to purchase this coffee, so that we can bring other remarkable coffees in of this standard. So we are asking the clients how much they are prepared to pay.

We are running a survey to let the coffee lover choose a good price.

To vote or contribute, then please compete the survey here:  www.surveymonkey.com/s/XC99S5L