Stump Town Coffee

Since our beginnings, Stumptown has searched the world for the best coffee out there. That coffee grows in mountainous regions of the tropics—farms perched at high elevations with warm days, cool nights, and distinct rainy and dry seasons. Microclimates, soil composition, coffee cultivars, and post-harvest processing methods can each contribute distinct dimensions to the cup.

Our coffee team spends about half the year in producing countries, meeting directly with our producer partners on their farms, at their mills, and in their cupping labs.

The effort is worth it. We’re not doing it the easy way by buying bulk, mid-quality beans anonymously from a trading house. Instead, we go right to the source of the best coffee—that farm atop a hill in Ethiopia, for example. We hike through fields, stand among coffee drying decks, and sit down to share a meal and talk about the crop with producers we’ve met many times.

We routinely pay producers well in excess of what they could receive on the commodity market, but we understand that our coffee demands more work—hand-picking each cherry at ideal ripeness and processing it with great attention to detail.

Direct Trade
We’re proud to have pioneered the Direct Trade model of sourcing green coffee. Since we started buying coffee directly from producers in 2002, the industry has changed dramatically and lots of other folks have adopted similar-sounding approaches. For clarity’s sake, here’s what we mean when we say Direct Trade.

Direct Trade is built on three principles: pay higher prices tied to quality, not the commodity market; work with producers we know, so we have transparency into their side of the supply chain and they have transparency into ours; and maintain those relationships over many years, striving to build truly collaborative partnerships. These pillars support Stumptown’s vision of what a coffee experience should be, and that vision permeates every level of our business.

Price Incentives
Stumptown pays price incentives directly linked to a coffee’s quality, which we determine based on the internationally accepted Specialty Coffee Association’s Cupping Form and Q-Grader protocol, which provides a framework and transparency to both parties.

Producing great coffee is expensive. We don’t take that for granted and we never expect to get great coffee on the cheap. We don’t set prices based on the “C” (commodity market) price because we don’t buy commodity coffees. We pay outright prices guaranteed across multi-year partnerships. Divorcing our decisions from the unpredictability of the commodity market allows everyone along the supply chain to focus on what’s important: producing, roasting, and serving the best coffees on the planet.

Know the Producers
From the beginning, it’s been critical to us that we know where our coffee is coming from—the farms, the people, and the regions. Stumptown founder Duane Sorenson pioneered this approach in 2003 when he began our foundational direct relationship with the Aguirre family of Finca El Injerto, whose coffees are, to this day, vital and beloved menu offerings. Other early Direct Trade partners include Los Delirios (Nicaragua), El Puente (Honduras), and Bella Vista (Guatemala), and we’ve steadily grown our relationship network over the last fifteen years.

Every region and producer is different. And when many producers come together to form a community lot, as in the case of farmer associations, we negotiate with a representative of the producer group; such is the case with perennials like Colombia El Jordan and Ethiopia Mordecofe. This level of transparency allows us to negotiate prices, whenever possible, directly with producers. And in all cases, our coffee team aims to visit the producers every year to walk the farms, choose the lots, and focus on our common goal: high quality, delicious coffee.

Long Term Relationships
Direct Trade is also our way of saying “we’re in it for the long run.” We don’t call a coffee Direct Trade until we have sourced it for at least three consecutive years with the intention to continue purchasing from that producer.

We invest in relationships with suppliers who produce exquisite coffees. We both get better results as we invest and grow together over many years. In 2019, 91 percent of all the coffees Stumptown purchased were from relationships where we’d sourced coffee for three or more consecutive years.