Quick coffee update

Dear Bro,

As I type I know that Melody is shaking her head wondering what has happened to the person that at one point in time passed for her husband. I have now been roasting my own coffee for over a month now after trips to our favorite grocery store Jungle Jims to buy the one pound bags of green coffee beans from the limited supply they have available. So far we have tried Columbian, Tanzanian, and some Brazilian strains, but after that the well has run dry. So far the Columbian is the best roast, but more experimentation is in the future.

And now I have discovered the "Holy Grail" of green coffee sources. During my wondering on the net I found the "Green Coffee Cooperative" , a group of home roasting enthusiasts who have a group of individual distributors who buy in bulk from either coffee importers or directly from the growers all over the world. They then sell it to the members on a "first come, first serve" basis. I had been watching this site for a while and since there is no fee to join I signed right up. After a couple of weeks it appeared that one of the distributors was preparing to put out an offering, so I checked in to see when it would become available and set my calendar for that date.

The offering was to begin at 6:00 pm, but dinner was ready so I left the computer to eat. As the distributor was going to list 400 lbs each of three different coffee beans with a max order of 15lbs per bean type I figured I had plenty of time to finish dinner and order some of this fine product. We ate dinner and cleared the dishes in about 35 minutes, at which time I went down to look at my computer. The coffee offering was listed for an Ethiopia Longberry Harrar Horse and Colombia (South Huila - Isnos and Temana).

Now between you and me the closest wall available, the book of knowledge I previously experienced regarding coffee pedigrees was whether it was regular or de-caf. Now we are confronted with not only a country of origin but a region! Wow.....

I put in my bid for 10 lbs of the Harrar as soon as I sat down. The "bins" with the quanities of coffee showed 300lbs of this crop available so I typed in 10lbs and hit the add button on my cart. The remaining quantity now showed 55lbs. I then added 10lbs of the Columbian, which still showed over 170lbs available at that time. But all of the Ethiopia was gone. I processed my order, which with shipping and a co-op fee came to about $70 for 20lbs of coffee, thus I paid about $3.50 a pound when Starbucks charges $8.99 . Gotta like that!

Found out after that the harrar all sold out in 3 minutes. Guess I got lucky on that one as I had no idea that it would be like the day after Thanksgiving at Walmart.....