HELLO
Ray: I’m Ray.
Kandace: I’m Kandace.
Ray: This is Unpacking Coffee. This week …
Kandace: This is our holiday special, Ray.
Ray: Holiday special.
Kandace: It’s like a big family show here.
Ray: Right.
SAY HELLO-OH-OH-OH TO ROYAL COFFEE
Kandace: Yeah. It’s a little bit of a departure from the norm, Ray. We are talking about Royal Coffee.
Ray: Right. Make more of a full story of coffee, I guess. Starts with these importers.
Kandace: Royal has been around since 1978. They’re in Oakland, California. They just started this kind of awesome new program, the Crown Jewel. These are 22 pound boxes, and they sent us one.
Ray: To roast. Oh boy!
Kandace: To roast. Laurel Wirth came by. She’s one of the green coffee traders at Royal.
Laurel: Crown Jewels are 22 pound boxes of unique green coffees that are specially selected by Royal traders and the Crown team.
Over the last 38 years, Royal has developed relationships with a wide network of producing partners from about 30 different countries. This has allowed us to keep our customers’ shelves stocked with some of the best green coffees that there are.
ROASTING WITH ROSELINE
Kandace: You have beautiful coffee. What should you do with it?
Ray: I’m going to venture to guess …
Kandace: Roast it.
Ray: … You’ve got to roast that coffee.
Kandace: You’ve got to roast that coffee. Our friends at Roseline here in Portland roasted this coffee for us.
Laurel: The Crown Jewel being featured is Ethiopia Wenago Zelelu Ararso Double Washed. This coffee is produced by Zelelu Ararso who is part of the Addis Katema Cooperative.
This double wash coffee is an heirloom cultivar, grown between 1700 and 2,000 meters and is a great example of one of our exclusive single farmer lots through the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers’ Cooperative Union, or YCFCU.
COFFEE BRINGING JOY TO CHILDREN
Kandace: Royal got together, Roseline got together and we created this package for the Children’s Cancer Association for their gala and auctioned this package off. We design the bag as Needmore.
Ray: Baratza and Clive Coffee went in on a …
Kandace: The Vario Grinder …
Ray: … The Vario Grinder.
Kandace: … Which is a beautiful grinder.
Ray: You’ve got to grind the coffee.
Kandace: Our friends at La Marzocco gave us some mugs and one of those aprons that we like so much. Roast Magazine gave a year subscription.
Ray: This is like a coffee lover’s package here. This is kind of amazing.
Kandace: Coffee lovers package, and we raised almost $2,000 forChildren’s Cancer Association for that.
FROM BEAN TO BAG
The people who ended up picking up that package are Lynn and Ron Penner-Ash of Penner-Ash Wine Cellars here in town.
Ray: Right. The occasion that they requested, which was …
Kandace: 60th wedding anniversary.
Ray: 22 pound bag is amazingly convenient for just in our case we basically will walk away with like 40 bags to give out as gifts, things like that. A home roaster, this is great for someone who’s just getting started, a hobbyist.
Kandace: I feel like it aligns really nicely with what we’re trying to do here at Unpacking Coffee, which is kind of talk about small and larger roasters. This is this really cool entry point for somebody that might be just getting started.
CLIVE HAS HEART
Kandace: Mark Hellweg from Clive Coffee really stepped up and helped us put together that package. He was kind of the driving force behind the grinder that was given. He talked to us a little bit about why that was so important to him.
Mark: I’m Mark from Clive Coffee and Ratio. I have three beautiful, healthy kids. Just watching them every day, you think about every little thing that they’re doing and are they safe. When I think about children that have cancer, I can’t even get into that space to know what that’s like.
Then when we got the news that our friend’s one-year-old was diagnosed with liver cancer, by the time they got it all figured out it was a significant event, a big surgery. We experienced it remotely through them. The people that are going through it, especially the children, it’s awful. I think whatever we can do to make their lives easier, we should do.
Ray: The reason that we are so interested in what the Children’s Cancer Association is doing is because they’re super cool and what they try to do is bring joy to children with cancer.
They have tons of really cool programs. They have one where musicians will go in and make music with kids when they’re in for treatment. They have a Caring Cabin where families can stay to just kind of get away from it. Really cool organization so it couldn’t have gone to a better cause.
Kandace: Happy Holidays.
Ray: See you next year. Right over the box, right over the box. Oh my go- …