Page 85 - #57 English

UNFAIR ADVANTAGES IN GEOGRAPHY
So, if you do business in Asia, and you care about quality, what can you do about all this?
1 The first thing is to use a green importer with a 2 The second option you have is to take ownership

of the coffee as soon as possible after it is im-
great warehouse. They should be able to prove to
you that they are taking care of the coffee. Unfor-
have higher electricity bills from air conditioning,
tunately, there are very few traders in the Asian ported, and store it yourself. This means you will
region that are storing their coffee properly. but you have to decide if this is worth it.

Many businesses purchase very expensive espresso machines and roasters — worth tens of thousands of dollars — and
then they ruin their green coffee by trying to save a few hundred dollars in electrical costs. This is very foolish! You can
make your business stand out for quality by taking care of the storage conditions. I’ve noticed something interesting. For
various reasons, I often have extra sample material left in my home that I keep in storage. Occasionally I will sample roast
these coffees and cup them to track the quality. The samples that have been out of the climate-controlled warehouse for a
longer time always have a more faded flavor, and sometimes taste very old, despite being only a few months old. Converse-
ly, the samples that are fresh from the warehouse taste bright and fantastic, even if the coffee was harvested a long time ago.
Storage makes all the difference.

SHIPPING CONCERNS

Shipping containers are, essentially, just a big metal box. The only
thing between the inside of the box and the outside is a single layer of
metal. That means it can get very hot (or very cold) inside, and what-
ever humidity levels are outside will be the same inside. To mitigate
this, the best producers and exporters put a lining of craft paper inside
the shipping container. It may not seem like much, but that paper
liner can act as a sponge — a kind of barrier between the inside and
the outside, that “breathes” as the outside conditions change.
I’ve also begun to experiment with putting silica packets inside
the container and even inside the bags of coffee themselves. These are
the small packets you sometimes find with electronics, or with other
food products sometimes, whose purpose is, again, to soak up excess
moisture and act as a buffer. This is something you will see from qual-
ity exporters and importers more and more in the future.

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