It is with our absolute joy and greatest honor to announce that the 2021 Poaquil crops - Washed, Honey, and Natural - have finally arrived! While it is our SIXTH year sourcing coffee from the Co-Op, it has been quite a memorable one: months of port delays in Guatemala, days turned to weeks in customs, and finally… our Washed and Natural pallets were deemed “lost” in transit… yet, (very, very luckily) ultimately “found” and delivered exactly a week ago! (a special thank you to all those following our stories and sending us sweet messages of support and encouragement… we really think all of your good wishes had a lot to do with our ultimate “good luck”!).
I recently had the chance to be interviewed on a podcast (a 20-min listen on Spotify) by ‘Simply Creative’ - run by a fellow entrepreneur and one of our Miami-based Ethos fans, and one of his questions at the end was about how important was “having a mission”… and it made me realized that for us, it has always been and will always be everything - I truly can’t imagine our Ethos existing without going out of our way to champion opportunity and impact for those who need it - and want it - the most… without it, we would be just one more craft coffee roaster.
In that spirit, we’re planning to make this Holiday Season, our most impactful season yet! In addition to our full Poaquil lineup - and Black Swan being back! - you can look forward to the new “Amani” from D.R. Congo - another high-impact relationship and our SECOND year working with this Co-Op! (you may remember “Umoja” from last year? We decided to support a smaller group of farmers within their same Co-Op this year, and we hope you’ll love “Amani” - which means “Peace” in Swahili and is a perfectly fitting name!).
Finally, I wanted to offer our apologies for having had to raise our prices for some of our beans, and our “free shipping” threshold from $35 to $39 - it is mainly driven by higher shipping costs (inbound and outbound - which have increased 50-200% during the pandemic). We’ve been absorbing these and waiting - hoping - they would be temporary, yet they’ve proven very permanent. Sacrificing quality or impact would never be an option for us, and we also don’t want to jeopardize our ability to offer great jobs locally, remain sustainable, re-invest in the business as we grow, and keep supporting our farmers with advance payments that provide much-needed no-interest financing in the months before the harvest. We also want to source the most amazing, most impactful coffees we can find - and being able to pay the highest price really helps!
Also - we’re hosting a special Thanksgiving coffee pick-up at the roastery on Weds, Nov 24th, from 3-6 pm. We’ll add this pick-up option at checkout on Nov 15th if you’d like to place an order and come say hi and see your roastery! (Or just stop by and say hi… Jolian and I will be there and we’re always so happy to get to meet and share some coffee with our Ethos family!)
💛 Lisbeth
