Roasted, part 1

Coffeehouse Five is excited to announce that we are now roasting our own beans! Boom, roasted!

For all those coffee nuts (or beans) like us out there, we thought we would provide a little more information on what we are doing. This is the first of two installments, first on how we source our beans and second how we roast them.

The first thing to know about coffee is that it isn’t technically a bean, it’s more of a seed. It comes from the red coffee cherry on a coffee tree. And there is a region of the world, called the coffee belt, basically between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, where conditions are ideal for these coffee cherries to grow.

Obviously that isn’t here in Greenwood, Indiana. So we have teamed up with some great people and farmers in those regions to get the absolute best coffee that benefits everyone involved, from the farmer to the importer to the coffee drinker here in Greenwood.

The coffees we source are, at a minimum, Fair Trade certified. The goal of Fair Trade is to create partnerships and terms of trade that will be financially and ethically beneficial to producers. In simpler terms, this means the beans we roast are bought at a fair price that allows the hardworking people actually farming the coffee to make a living off of their wages.

Additionally, we will refer to some of the coffees we offer as “direct trade.” While there is no international certification for direct trade, as there is with Fair Trade, the general concept of direct trade is that our importers purchase beans directly from individual farmers. Fair Trade beans are typically purchased through coops, where several farmers deliver their beans which are then combined for sale, so there is no direct traceability of the bean back to a particular farm. With direct trade we are able to tell you the specific farmer who produced the beans. These beans are typically of the highest quality and the farmer ends up receiving a higher percentage of the price you pay for your coffee here in Greenwood.
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Just like corn here in Indiana, coffee is a seasonal crop so you may notice different coffees during different times of the year. This is because we are committed to providing you the freshest and tastiest cup of coffee we can, and that means sometimes a certain type of bean just isn’t in season. But don’t worry, we promise to give you plenty of delicious options, since the farmers are working so hard to give us the freshest beans possible all year round.