Our Coffee

Timor-Leste, a small nation nestled in Southeast Asia, has been making waves in the coffee industry with its unique and diverse coffee profiles. Over the years, Timor-Leste has embraced innovative processing techniques, leading to a wide array of flavors. From the crisp and vibrant fully washed coffees to the sweet and syrupy honey processed beans, and the aromatic and fruity naturals, Timor-Leste offers a coffee experience like no other.

Guatemala as a coffee landscape has a certain mystical charm unseen elsewhere in Central America. Guatemala's coffees bring layers of sweetness, precise acids, subtle aromatics, and, when good and fresh, a brisk herbaceousness that to the experienced portends a slow unfolding of simple sugars over many months in production.

Uganda is East Africa's largest coffee exporting country by volume. The country exports an annual average of more than 6 million bags. Uganda's hugely ambitious government has plans to more than triple this number in the coming years. The central Africa region holding Uganda's fertile lowlands was the evolutionary source of the caffea canephora. This is the "robusta" species of coffee, and Uganda is one of its only modern indigenous sources. Today, robusta remains almost 80% of Uganda's trade. However, arabicas of a wide quality spectrum are some of the sweetest and creamiest coffees in east Africa. Their snappy naturals are also on par with the best from Burundi or Ethiopia. This is a huge accomplishment from historically underserved smallholders producing a minority species. The best Ugandan coffees can easily stand against those from anywhere else in East Africa. They are bright, layered with enzymatic and fresh fruit juice complexity, with uniquely caramel-like sugars and soft textures. We buy a small variety of centrally processed smallholder coffees from Mt. Elgon each year. These are stunning examples of arabica's potential in Uganda, which is still relatively unknown to many. We can offer more traceability for Ugandan coffee beans than ever before. They come from an incredibly gifted and water-rich land, often with certifications. We find it shocking that no Uganda coffees have Good Food Awards stickers on their labels!

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is NOT part of Indonesia, nor is its coffee similar in almost any regard. The country is half of the larger island of Papua, whose other half does belong to Indonesia, but which produces scant amounts of coffee of any kind. PNG's modern colonial history begins with both Germany and the United Kingdom arriving simultaneously in 1884, and dividing the region into northern and southern occupied territories. The British-occupied half, in the south, was held for 20 years and then granted to the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia in 1905. The separate colonies would remain side by side until World War I, when the southern Australian forces overtook the northern German territory and occupied it until Germany's defeat in Europe, after which the League of Nations authorized Australia to administer both territories. The northern "New Guinea" and southern "Territory of Papua" remained separate administrations until World War II, after which the regions were combined as "The Territory of Papua and New Guinea", and finally, "Papua New Guinea".

Sumatra is the second largest island in Indonesia, the sixth largest island in the world, and perhaps the most famous origin for Indonesian specialty coffee. This island is the leader in world production of wet-hulled coffee (Bahasa Indonesia: giling basah), a process with a hallmark herbal flavor profile that sets it apart from all other coffees. Coffee production stretches across the entire island, from Arabica in the mountainous interior to Robusta at lower elevations. Just for a sense of scale, a drive North to South across Sumatra is a little longer than the drive from Vancouver, Canada to Tijuana, Mexico.

To most coffee drinkers, Ethiopia as a place feels forever on the other side of a tantalizing gap. The coffees themselves, when made well, can be mind-alteringly complex and overwhelmingly fragrant. They taste different from all other countries' coffees and are never convincingly interchangeable with any other washed or sun-dried arabica on Earth. From Ethiopia's landscape comes some of the best-known flavor descriptors in the coffee world (blueberry, jasmine, bergamot) that are considered global benchmarks of flavor. The source of Ethiopia's allure as a truly sovereign and ancient culture of coffee is its imperviousness to so much of the industry that cash-cropped the coffee belt around it.

Honduras is Central America's powerhouse. The origin is utilized primarily for its large volume of washed milds reliably available each year. Honduras' output mostly comes from a system of cooperatives focused on the needs of smallholder farmers, providing training in best farm management practices and post harvest tools to bring consistent certified coffees to the international market. Fair Trade and environmental certifications are abundant here and cooperatives tend to be well-managed and sophisticated. While the cooperative system may be the strongest trait of Honduran exports, there is of course an ever-growing trend toward individual expression among coffee producers with the means to innovate, often realized in single producer micro-lots with a spectrum of post harvest processing techniques that go beyond what we have come to expect with traditional washed coffee.

Nicaragua has limited highland territory to support specialty production, but the natural resources it does have are formidable and provide the world with an impressive volume of delicate, citrusy profiles. For a majority smallholder coffee producing country with a concentrated growing region, it manages to export 2-3 million bags of coffee a year, more than double that of Costa Rica, its neighbor to the south, and almost as much as both Guatemala and Mexico.

Peru is most certainly a part of the South American coffee powerhouse, along with Brazil and Colombia. It's estimated that more than 200,000 farmers contribute to Peru's exports, which often hovers around 4 million bags annually, including one of the world's largest supplies of certified organic and Fair Trade coffees. Certifications alone could explain how critical Peru coffee is for so many roasters; but the origin's harvest timing, its hefty sweetness in the cup, and the affordability of most export grades combined make Peru's coffee practically indispensable for its buyers. Royal buys a significant amount of coffee from Peru, for ourselves and on behalf of our customers, and we are constantly impressed by the range of quality available and the precision achieved by most exporters, most of whom are managing extremely complicated supply chains of often thousands of small farmers fermenting and drying coffee at home.

Top coffees in Mexico can be a world unto themselves. Which is no wonder given Mexico’s southern highlands unique terroir, its high latitude, and the bourbon and typica cultivars that growers have kept alive for generations. Each year, we receive coffees luxuriously caramel-like with cacao nib complexity, citrus and stone fruit flavors, light florals, fresh cream and nutmeg. Royal has been buying coffee in Mexico since the country’s heyday of output in the 1980s, Finca San Carlos in Oaxaca being one of our company’s longest contiguous relationships anywhere. Many of our tried-and-true cooperative offerings have been annual inventory for us since the 1990s when the coops themselves were formed. More recently, Royal has deepened a relationship with one of the most fearless and inspiring independent smallholder representatives we can think of: Rosalba Cifuentes of Mayan Harvest in Chiapas.

Colombia is the country most synonymous with coffee production. For decades the federal government has invested strongly in the national coffee sector. This includes the development, stability, logistics, and marketing of its coffee around the world. The government also invests heavily in the representation and dignity of Colombia’s coffee farmer families. Colombia is home to over half a million of them, most of whom grow coffee on less than 5 hectares of land. Colombia is firmly at the top of the producer country food chain. Colombian coffee beans are famous for good reason: they make excellent coffee. This producer’s food chain is so well built, in terms of quality, small-farm logistics, plant revitalization, productivity, are the best in overall quality. These factors, among others, work together very well, to produce delicious, full-bodied coffees with diverse flavor profiles.