  Tom takes on a few questions submitted by Sweet Maria's customers.  

Sweet Maria's Coffee

Five Minute Answers to Your Coffee Questions Ep. 2

Tom takes on a few questions submitted by Sweet Maria's customers.

Five Minute Answers to Your Coffee Questions

Tom, Dan and Ryan use a new exquisite corpse type format to share their opinions on the state of coffee culture and their personal coffee drinking habits.

Personal Brewing Routines & The Weirdness of Coffee Culture

This is a recording from a presentation we hosted at our warehouse in June 2019. Tom had recently returned from a trip to Africa and wanted to share his thoughts on the global coffee market and small holder farmers in Burundi. Watch the video to see the slide presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWWkAVSxLvg

Burundi & Global Coffee Market Issues

Okay, this is a "podcast" with zero edits, just a voice recording basically. It's a December early morning in the origin of coffee origins, which is Kafa, Ethiopia, near the town of Bonga. I talk slow as molasses about various experiences and thoughts from the last couple weeks in Ethiopia. Maybe this is super boring. It's not like I am really into these monologues, but when I am jetlagged and inspired (odd combination), my resistance to rambling on is particularly low.

Kafa in the Morning, Ethiopia

The inventor or the Bullet R1 coffee roaster, Jonas Lillie visited Sweet Maria's for our Bullet meet up event. He was also in town to show Tom and Julio some details about the internals of these awesome machines. One day, we hit the record button during a conversation/repair session in hopes of it turning into an informative podcast episode and Youtube video.

Talking With Jonas About Aillio and The Bullet R1 Roaster

 Thompson and Alistair Sequeira talk about coffee and lotsa other stuff in this 2017 conversation in rural Mwakiro, Burundi. The conversation starts off with Alistair explaining how he transitioned his career from mechanical engineering to the coffee industry. Just so you know, there are more than a few F-bombs dropped during this conversation!  Alistair lives with his family in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi and has helped us find good Burundi coffees for several years. He was director of a large coffee export office there before heading off to do his own thing in the coffee sector.   

Burundi Conversation with Alistair Sequeira - Part 2

 Thompson and Alistair Sequeira talk about coffee and lotsa other stuff in this 2017 conversation in rural Mwakiro, Burundi. Alistair lives with his family in Bujumbura, the capital, and has helped us find good Burundi coffees for several years. He was director of a large coffee export office there before heading off to do his own thing in the coffee sector.  The conversation starts off with Alistair talking about growing up in Kenya and the bias he found in UK boarding schools. Just so you know, there are more than a few F-bombs dropped during this conversation! 

Burundi Conversation with Alistair Sequeira - Part 1

Part 1 of 2 A while back we had Mary Maina Manyeki visit us in Oakland, and had a great conversation about her experiences as a Kenya coffee farmer. This transitioned into a more general conversation with Wycliffe, a trader and agronomist from Kenyacof, and Kat, a trader from Sucafina USA, about the coffee market in Kenya. I split that generally into Part 1 and Part 2 as the conversation was quite long! This is (again) just a lo-fi recording of a conversation about coffee, but there are many good details in here about how coffee is grown, traded and marketed from the tree to the retailer overseas. Please give it a listen, despite the lack of great production! -Tom

Kenya Coffee PART 1: Growing, Trading and Marketing

Here is the audio from a video that Tom shot on a trip to Colombia. "This is a long form talk with Leo and Jenni Henao at the farm in Urrao Antioquia, Colombia. Maybe of interest to farmers and gardeners more than coffee. Leo and I are friends and I'm trying to get him to laugh in this video. But the topic and his use of micro-organisms in composting is very interesting!" -Tom CLICK HERE to watch the video.

Coffee and Microorganisms: Los Palomos Colombia

This starts with music buy the Indo pop group The Steps, and ends with a long informative conversation with Daniel Shewmaker of MTC coffee traders, who sources coffee in Indonesia. He also grew up in Sulawesi and speaks Bahasa! While in Timor and Flores we were having good conversations about Indonesia coffee processing and quality, and the way it relates (or doesn't) to current coffee trade trends. So I wanted to capture some of that in a recording. Sadly, its probably the worst recording I have made, with wind noise, vehicles, dogs, pigs and airplane noise. But still I wanted to share it, because I feel there's some good information here. Plus, everyone keeps telling me to post more recordings. So here it is, for better or worse.  -Tom

Indonesian Coffee with Coffee Trader, David Shewmaker

John Karuru is a Kenyan agronomist who works in Rwanda, and a person of wide-ranging knowledge. If you want to know how to escape a charging hippo, John's your man. In fact our conversation veers away from coffee quickly, but John's stories about growing up in East Africa are so entertaining. Where do they smoke coffee leaves? John knows. Hope you enjoy this one ... -Thompson

A conversation with John Karuru - Kenyan Agronomist

During his trip to Nairobi in Dec. of 2015, Tom had this casual conversation with Mette-Marie "Mia" Hansen about the confusing Kenyan coffee world and what it's like being a woman in this financial end of the coffee trade.  Mia works for C. Dorman Coffee Exporters as a buyer and trader that also buys coffee from Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopa. 

Kenya Coffee with Mette-Marie Hansen

PART 2. This isn't really a podcast. It's a recorded Skype conversation. The quality is pretty low. But if you are dying to know details of the issues facing coffee farmers in Colombia, there's some nuggets of wisdom in here (if you can hear them over the car alarm in the background, ha ha). Leonardo Henao occupies a unique position to discuss Colombian coffee. He has training in agronomy and business, works with many small farmers around the country to source and export their coffee, is a confident cupper and roaster, and now is planting a farm in the Urrao area of Antioquia with unique (and technically forbidden) varieties of coffee like Moka, old Caturra, Gesha and Bourbon. The first part deals with cultivation temperatures for arabica in a warming climate, while the second part is a discussion of coffee varieties like Caturra and Castillo. For most, this is dull stuff. Not for me, and maybe not for you.

Coffee Cultivation in Colombia PART 2

Tom's recordings about coffee from regions abroad and at home in California's SF Bay Area.

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