Good morning,

It’s getting harder and harder to talk about this market. Another week, a new low, and it continues toappear like we’re going to test the contract lows.

First notice day for Sept will come this Thursday.

Let’s talk about something more fun to discuss. Armenia Coffee Corp has the distinct honor of beingappointed the “Exclusive Green Coffee Sponsor” of the Roast Masters competition at the New York Coffee Festival
(information here: https://www.newyorkcoffeefestival.com/WhatsHappening/Roast-Masters )

and we are thrilled to be a part of it.

By way of process, we discussed enthusiastically, how we were going to pick the green coffee we’dsubmit to the roasters who would be a part of the competition. We wanted to give them something worthy of their skills.

It’s not an easy task as we are an 8-member team of coffee professionals, each with our own likes and dislikes, ready to defend them, to the death if need be. After days of discussion, heated at times, we decided finally to have a competition of our own to pick the coffee that we would submit. We trade in over 15 different origins, but we felt for this competition, there were 5 that we would select as our best of the best. Those origins are: Papua New Guinea, Colombia, Ethiopia, Brazil and Indonesia. We selected our most trusted suppliers to submit 3 samples each of the coffees they felt, represented their best efforts. The winner of the competition would send us 3 full export bags of fresh fresh coffee by air that we could then forward to the competing roasters.

Now, you would think this is a great enterprise, right? We were going to cup 16 (our friends in Indonesia sent 4 samples, 2 from Sumatra and 2 from Java) of the best coffees we can find and pick the one coffee we found to be the best of the best!

Not as easy as you might think it would be. We could have sent virtually any of these coffees out to the roasters and would have been proud of the coffees we had sent out. For the most part, all of them were outstanding! Everyone had something to recommend it. Not easy to pick and it was clear from our faces at the end that we had a really hard time doing it.

The first part was the easier of the 2 parts to this competition. We first picked the best of the best from each country. All 3 samples from each origin were roasted by our QC chief Izwandi to bring out their best qualities. Each of the coffees would compete to make it to the final round and represent their country in the final blind tasting. Interesting that in this part of the competition we were near unanimous on the choice of each of the 5 coffees that would make it to the next round.

So, the throw down was set. We decided in this next phase, we’d cup blind. 6 of us were available for the final leg. Now was the sweet agony of selecting the “best of the best” We went round and round (we have 2 round cupping tables) in the end some of the cups barely had any anything but the grinds left in them. Time for our final votes were at hand. We’d place our spoons by the coffee we felt was the best of the best. In the end there were 4 spoons at the winner’s spot, and 1 each in two other

origins. All of us agreed that any of the 3 could have been the winner and we wouldn’t have felt badabout it at all.

I’m not going to tell you which coffees were which, I’m mean like that.

Soon the roasters in the competition will receive from us the coffee and some information regarding the coffee and why we picked it. If you’d like to know which coffee was picked, along with the 2 runners upplease come visit us at the Coffee Festival in NYC from October 11-13. If you can’t come, we’ll announcethe winner in that week’s blog, as well as make available samples to send to our friends who’d like to tryit. We’d love to know if you agree with us on the selection, once you’ve tried it.

We have a new SHB Panama Bouquete “Indian Baru” in Continental, ready for sampling. They join our fine coffees, Brazil 17/18, Colombia EP and Supremo, SHB Guatemala and Antgiua, Costa Rica Tarrazu, PNG Sigri AA, and FTO’s from Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Sumatra. We’d be very happy to sendyou samples of any of them, just ask!

The Armenia Team