The Coffee Collective handlar inte bara om ruskigt bra kaffe, detta mikrorosteri med fyra caféer i Köpenhamn står för något större än så. 

I denna intervju har du chansen att få en inblick i Coffee Collective och deras kreativa och härliga insatser.

Coffee Collective, how did it all start?

Casper, Klaus and Peter began Coffee Collective after a few championship titles. Casper won the World Tasters Championship and Klaus won the World Barista Championship. Peter was always involved in the preparation of both and so the Collective was born 13 years ago! 

You have been going on for a while now, what was your vision when you started? 

The vision was to create a roastery that focused on creating a more transparent value chain. Coffee is a commodity that is traded through a stock market. This is a very outdated and irrelevant model as it doesn't take into consideration anything to do with farming costs or logistics. It's a system that is rooted in colonialisation and exploitation, therefore we needed to adopt a new model that could start to fundamentally change this. We took inspiration from a few notable US based roasters that were already working long term and direct with producers. Eliminating any of the work done behind curtains and allowing us to understand all the moving cogs in the wheel. Fast forward to today and we are still very much focused on pushing this agenda and hope to inspire other newcomers to do that same. On top of this our vision has always been to present the coffee in the most clean and untampered way possible through adopting a lighter roast philosophy. This allows all the work done at farm level to shine and brings customers closer to the craftsmanship of the producers. 

The Coffee Collective name, what does it represent? 

It highlights the main players responsible for coffee quality in the supply chain - coffee producers, coffee roasters and the baristas or home brewers who brew the final cup. We are all responsible for creating exciting and engaging coffee experiences. It's a collective effort. 

How did you started trading directly with producers and what was the most challenging part about it? As well as the most rewarding?

As per above, the biggest challenge was that there wasn't a lot of others using this method of trading and we relied a lot on our connections to establish relationships with producers. Luckily through competitions we grew close relationships with the producers who we began working with at the beginning and then it evolved from there. The most rewarding is the fact that you have direct contact and involvement in the success of a coffee producers work. Tasting crops year after year really allows you to understand how things evolve, quality improves and logistics become easier (or sometimes harder). Every week is a new adventure as we are solely responsible for all the logistics that most companies avoid through using importers.  It' a lot of crossing fingers during these more uncertain times haha. 

The way you trade coffee and reward quality is very interesting, could you tell us more about that? 

Coffee Quality should be the discussion of price point. Not how bonds are being traded on the stock market. 

We adopt this approach, start discussions with producers based on cup quality and their production costs. We then work forward from there. Every origin is complex and there are lots of hands that produce the final quality so we need to take that into consideration too. 

To showcase the price we paid vs the stock market price at the date of contract we label the 'Quality Bonus'. This is the percentage over market price that Coffee Collective paid  for this coffee. In simple terms 'What we could have paid' vs 'What we did'

Since you have been trading coffee for a long while now, how have producing countries been changing? 

Everything has changed haha. Contracts, producers pursuit of quality, flight times for us to visit them and for them to visit us. We also know there is a lot of work being done on the environmental front by lots of producers we work with. The introduction of Agronomists into the coffee landscape is becoming more common and producers are gaining a deeper understanding of how the environment impacts crop quality. Experimentations in all sorts of processing and growing is also far more advanced so we are continuing to learn on a daily basis here at the Collective. 

Every time we have visited your cafés, the quality has been outstanding. This might be a complex question, but how do you ensure quality from producer to cup? 

Simple. We cup every batch of coffee we produce and sign it off as quality approved. We train the baristas who work in our shop in extraction theory and taste quality so they are the real heroes there. Farmer wise everything that is sourced is approved prior to us receiving it and again upon arrival. There is a lot of tasting done behind the scenes here haha. 

What would you like to say to the people drinking your coffee? 

We always try and find balance in our coffee. Balance in coffee for us is where sweetness, acidity and bitterness adds up to make a complete cup of coffee. Brew it with some clean water for a more pure coffee experience. We use anything that sits below 50 PPM. You can usually find this detail on the back of any bottled water!

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