Atsushi Yamamoto | TYPICA Lab https://lab.typica.jp/en Mon, 27 Mar 2023 09:33:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 Departure https://lab.typica.jp/en/el_salvador_guatemala/bagtown-coffee/4103/ https://lab.typica.jp/en/el_salvador_guatemala/bagtown-coffee/4103/#respond Sat, 18 Mar 2023 09:32:38 +0000 https://lab.typica.jp/en/?p=4103 I’m going to travel to Guatemala and El Salvador as a member of TYPICA Lab. Thank you TYPICA for giving me the opportunity to visit coffee farms for the first time.

As a coffee shop owner, my customers often ask me if I actually visit farms and buy directly. I wish I could, of course. But spending a lot of money on travel expenses and buying a few bags of coffee doesn’t make much financial sense. And for a business of our scale, it would be difficult to fill up a container alone. So naturally, we buy green coffee through trading firms. For a nano roastery like ours that we can’t even call a micro roaster, TYPICA is an interesting solution that connects us with producers on the internet. 

Despite all the restrictions, I still get the strong urge to see coffee production firsthand. Like people of old went on a pilgrimage to a faraway grand shrine, and The Galaxy Express 999 heads to the Andromeda, coffee shop owners want to visit coffee farms.

I’m excited to be able to share this trip with other roasters. I’m looking forward to sharing with you in this blog what I see in the farms and what I find out, learn and feel through conversations.

I’ll be off then.

]]> https://lab.typica.jp/en/el_salvador_guatemala/bagtown-coffee/4103/feed/ 0 About Me Wanting to Eat the Fruit of Fresh Coffee https://lab.typica.jp/en/el_salvador_guatemala/bagtown-coffee/627/ https://lab.typica.jp/en/el_salvador_guatemala/bagtown-coffee/627/#respond Mon, 22 Aug 2022 15:00:00 +0000 https://lab.typica.jp/en/?p=627

About Me Wanting to Eat the Fruit of Fresh Coffee

I have never been to a coffee farm.

I think this is true of every job, but I feel a bit ashamed of not having been to a place where the object of my work is being produced.

Of course, I do read books, talk with people who have been to coffee farms and watch videos on the internet.

A friend of mine who is a chef travels all over the place to see rice paddies, farms and ranches and buys ingredients he finds interesting.

Ingredients selected that way seem to have more power to get a message across. Customers also tend to enjoy eating a dish along with a backstory attached to it.

I feel envious.

Coffee, meanwhile, is grown somewhere so far from our city.

Our role is to source good ingredients and do a good job of processing them. I think I’m 100% focused on that. But at the same time, I’m always driven to get better at what I do.

I don’t think just getting a glimpse of coffee farms will necessarily help me to do a better job. But once, I applied for a tour of coffee farms organized by a coffee shop, hoping that it would be a good opportunity. Unfortunately, the tour was canceled. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic.

I received this offer from TYPICA just when I was hoping to one day visit coffee farms.

Other participants I will be traveling with are great roasters.

I wonder who I will meet at coffee farms, what scenery I will see, how I will feel when I return home.

What will I be thinking about when I do my job after this trip?

I’m very much looking forward to it.

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