Lucky!

The text arrived at 6.30 am, “your coffee’s here”. That was from John informing me that a couple of pallets of coffee that we urgently needed had been tipped and were ready dockside.

It made me pause for a moment and reflect upon the elemental nature of our business that of coffee roasters. It’s a century’s old occupation and one of the few “commodities” left that is still handled by many micro-businesses and whose processes remain fundamentally unchanged despite all the ingenuity of modern technology.

In so many ways little has changed when it comes to getting our essential foodstuffs delivered to the Island. We’ve recently had a major storm pass through the channel which had delayed our particular sailing something we live with as many generations have done before. I can imagine the relief when the flags at Fort Regent were raised to tell the traders that the boat had successfully docked. Our particular sailing had set off from Portsmouth at 08.30 and was due in Jersey some 10 hours later due to the heavy seas. As I said the fundamentals really haven’t changed in centuries.

Then there’s the coffee itself that has travelled thousands of miles around the globe and eventually arrived on our shores. It’s an extraordinary exercise in logistics. Today we have received coffee from Sumatra, Colombia, Peru, Nicaragua, and India. The effort that has gone into its production and delivery is truly humbling and the price we pay is worth every penny.

We’ve become so used to having this amazing range of coffees available at our fingertips yet its availability is all held together by a very fine thread of hard work and co-operation, a thread we really must look after if future generations are to enjoy the privilege of drinking the finest coffees in the world on this small island we call home.