Blog — Direct Trade

I've been in love with coffee from the Adame Garbota Cooperative for many years. Actually I've loved their coffee before they were even called Adame Garbota. You see I first tasted their coffee in 2006 when the Coop was called Kelo, and the Kelo Cooperative had just won the Africa Taste of Harvest Competition. I worked for a roaster that bought their winning lot, and I never forgot about it. After the competition, the cooperative received some loans and big financing that sadly organizationally they were not prepared for. In 2008 the Coop defaulted on loans and closed. In 2011...

2016 will mark our most serious year working in Ethiopia. Ethiopia tends to be our most popular Origin we source from. Customers and Baristas gravitate to it, I believe because of it's easy to identify flavors. The coffees of Ethiopia are totally unique to Ethiopia, no other origin could be confused with it in terms of flavors. Typically flavors lean to the fruity and floral side of the coffee descriptions.  Over the last six years we have been purchasing through two very large Cooperatives which represent thousands of small holder farmers. All our coffees are Certified Organic and Fair Trade....

Wine Spectator Article: Bespoke Processing     First off, this November's issue of Wine Spectator Magazine features an excellent article about our Direct Trade sourcing program.     This article shines a bright light on our world exclusive processing and varietal specific lots from at Finca La Pastora in Costa Rica, and Finca El Aguila in El Salvador. Both of these coffees are built from the ground-up for Olympia Coffee's customers. It isn't often that an article written from outside the coffee industry gets so many things right, but we think this one really hit the nail on the head....

  Before January 1st, back in November of 2012 it was announced that we were Roast Magazine’s 2013 Micro Roaster of the Year. Naturally, we celebrated by throwing a huge party at our roastery on the November 15th our 7 anniversary of being in business. Our party was covered by the Weekly Volcano, and featured excellent coffee, organic beer, tamales and live music by Lazer Zeppelin and The Maxines. Capitol Boulevard build out By the time the first of the year rolled around we had just signed a lease on what was to become our Capitol Boulevard Coffee Bar. This...