Pepe in the Bay

May 31

In December 2024, Pepe and Jose Jijon came to the Bay Area to visit local roaster partners, a reverse-origin trip if you will. It’s a unique opportunity for both sides - enthusiasts have up-close access to engage with the names on their favorite bags, an occasion typically limited to major coffee events like SCA Expo. At those events, producers may get to go home with a bag or two of their coffees roasted by partners and mingle with the landscape of coffee professionals, but this is different - the producer gets to see the reality of how their coffees are being handled and presented by the business, and witness the last layer of coffee - the coffee enthusiast.

*Rare imagery - New coffee cherry growth on top of a drought-starved plant*

This trip nearly didn’t happen. For a coffee producer, being away from the farm requires extra attention to their growing/harvesting season to have confidence that things won’t fall apart. Each producing country has its own production calendar that dictates their busy season. Some farms may have more than one person who can be trusted to hold down the fort for a short while, but major decisions and circumstances still fall on the producer to handle. This was the case here - Ecuador faced severe droughts, meaning not only daily 14-hour power outages due to lack of hydroelectric power, but insufficient rainfall potentially putting the coffee trees at risk. Just days prior to departure, the dry spell broke and regularly scheduled rainfall resumed; Miguelito could take it from there and Pepe was on his way.

Day 1: Meet & greet at Moonwake

Moonwake sectioned off a large chunk of their shop to host a meet & greet event for Pepe. Roughly 40 people at varying levels of coffee nerdery attended. For many, it was the first time meeting a producer and having matching visuals to fill in the blanks about what we’re told about or read about coffee farming.

You can watch the whole thing here

Folks could hear straight from a producer what concerns are on top of mind - topics such as climate change, inability to participate in the financial machinations that directly affect them, and the future of supporting producers. Pepe is undoubtedly a celebrity among producers and his coffees command a premium price, but the raised concerns apply down to the cheaper and high-volume commodity production scales.

As enthusiasts, we want to stitch together a story of how a producer makes decisions on varietals and processes,. We demand consistency and predictability while simultaneously craving something unique and new; to speak with a producer sheds some light on the external factors that results in variability and adoption of alternative approaches. For example, a predictable seasonal cycle would dictate when to patio-dry for natural processing, but out-of-season rain due to climate change can ruin a harvest and force a pivot into a hybrid process to take the existing fermentation then finish as a washed, assuming they are equipped with the right machinery at all.

On the other hand, Jose brings fresh optimism for the next generation - born and raised on the farm with an ingrained love for the plants, he seeks to carve his own niche in the coffee industry that isn’t reduced to being the son of Pepe Jijon. The highlights and lowlights of growing up in coffee shaped his formative years, and he now has the opportunity to leverage his experiences to materializing what he wants to achieve in industry; stay tuned and stay excited for Jose Jijon’s future.

By coming out to observe what coffee enthusiasts look like, not just coffee pros, Jose builds mental imagery of whom he may be designing farming and processing protocols for; something producers may go their entire career through without forming. The turnout and attention on them is plentiful and many questions come their way begging to dive deeper - there is appetite for more coffee information among the enthusiast population that remains unsatiated despite the rise of social media and seemingly everything visible and available online.

*Anyone with roasting experience expresses an extra bit of curiosity when looking at another roasting unit*

Day 2: Production day at Hydrangea

The next day, we went to CoRo roastery in Berkeley, where Hydrangea and Flower Child (and originally Moonwake) are based out of. There were two goals:

Show Pepe and Jose what roast production day looks like
Have Pepe pick the roast profile style to bring into production

Typically with inter-professional exchanges, you see professionals visiting producers at origin, or a bunch of pros gather at a shop; much emphasis is on tasting together and sharing information. As a producer-roaster partnership, we wanted Pepe to observe what it looks like on the ground from when we receive his green coffees up until they’re packed up with mailing slips. You can do rough napkin maths - 30kg of greens, down to 27kg post-roast, packed into 4 and 8oz bags, making somewhere in the ballpark of 150 bags of roasted coffee. But to see the number of hands involved to bring that to life is perhaps not too common to invite a producer to witness.

*Flower Child’s Prestin got in on the action too*

Secondarily, how often does a producer get to have say in how their green gets roasted? To have the name on the bag vote on the roast approach is a rare treat. Bill had roasted up some profile roasts (for the same green, different approaches to applying heat can result in different flavors, even if they appear identically light) of Pepe’s washed and wave natural typica mejorados, while Brian live streamed the occasion.

You can watch the livestream recording here

Hydrangea Pepe washed typica mejorado

Hydrangea wave natural typica mejorado

As mentioned at the start, producers don’t often get to see what happens to their crop once it gets handed off for export. At best, it’ll get shared back with them at major coffee events, if they can afford to make it to those shows. But here, we’ve got the guy a front-row seat to see the roast come to life, there’s a visible catharsis to the occasion.

*While roasting and production was in full swing, Pepe signed bags so that the folks who bought it could have something a little extra surprise.*

We raided the Hydrangea storage room of green coffees to have a little world tour of coffees. While it’s hard enough for a producer to get back roasts of their own greens, it’s even harder to obtain green and roasts from other origins due to costs, logistics, and import laws per country. It’s interesting to watch a producer look at greens - we enthusiasts stare hard at beans to observe roast levels, but the pre-roast state is what they’re used to and examine with a totally different set of eyes.

All in all, great trip for them, great time for us as hosts, leaving both sides inspired. Perhaps it’s our turn now to go back to Ecuador and take a look at the latest happenings in coffee.