Good bye Portland, Hello Chicago

Since Everyday Joe's first opened we have been buying our coffee from Stumptown Coffee in Portland Oregon. Over the past month or so we have made the transition to a new roaster. Drum roll please...

Intelligentsia out of the great City of Chicago is Joe's new roaster!

Why the change is probably your first question. Well for many reasons. The biggest being support and vision alignment. I will now tell you how the two go together.

Stumptown's vision is for their coffee never to have to travel more than 45 minutes from its roaster. Those roasters are in Portland Oregon. There is no human way possible to get coffee from Portland to Fort Collins in less than 45 minutes. Joe's was the exception to their rule. Every week after they roasted it they would ship it to us via UPS ground. It would take 3 or 4 days to get here. And since we are all the way in Colorado we did not get much attention from them even though we bought coffee from them every single week for over 3 years. Stumptown is great, some of the best coffee on the planet but they simply do not desire to sell their coffee to anyone outside of Portland so they have not built a system to support anyone outside of Portland. I have done buying for a lot of companies in my life and not having support from such a big vendor of Joe's was very frustrating.

Currently Intelligentsia is the Roaster of the Year according to Roaster magazine. (Stumptown was 2006 Roaster of the Year.) That is what caused me to start talking with them. What I found in Intelligentsia is the same quality of coffee which a far superior support system. Intelligentsia is ready and willing to help a coffee retailer such as Joe's sell coffee and grow its business. And on top of that they ship their coffee via UPS 2nd Day Air. This means our coffee gets here faster and fresher. Not to mention a guarantee that UPS Ground does not offer.

All the past posts relating to Direct Trade are in relation to Intelligentsia. We will continue to educate you the coffee drinker on our new roaster, helping you move into the 3rd Wave.

3rd Wave? What the * is that? We'll get to that soon.

P.S. You have been drinking Intelligentsia Coffee for the past six weeks. And no one has said a word in relation to change in taste or quality.