Drinking good coffee can become an act of civil disobedience. We believe that choosing the fast & the cheap over quality & consciousness is wrenching the heart out of our communities and tearing the soul out from our land ecology.
Resisting bad coffee means being selective in your purchasing and consumption of coffee. It means bypassing coffee at the gas station, knowing where your money is going behind each bag of coffee, and drinking coffee that is fresh rather than coffee that has been sitting ground up on the shelf for months.
Equally important is embracing good coffee.
With each cup of coffee comes a distinct region of the world: get to know your world through the coffee it produces! Become familiar with the different variety of taste notes between an Ecuadorian Medium Roast and an East African Dark Roast. Smell the whole beans, look at the appearance, take it to your palette intentionally, analyze the brightness, establish the mouth feel, distinguish the flavors, and allow for time to experience the aftertaste.
Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy!
We want you to know the story behind the coffee you consume and to learn how buying locally roasted coffee benefits YOU. We want to encourage you to think about the gas we can save, the community we can create, and the freshness that should be experienced.
Challenge us as we challenge you! Let us be a community of open dialogue! Let’s do this together!!!
Ask us what price we are paying to the farmers with whom we work. Ask us to take you to the farms. In a business shrouded with secrecy, our model is founded on total transparency. Ask other coffee vendors and roasters how much they are paying for their beans and how that money is being distributed. We want you to understand what happens in small farming communities when vendors and roasters approach coffee as a commodity rather than an artisan creation. We think you’ll find out why we are trying to do what we are doing.
Resisting bad coffee is an act of what the poet Hakim Bey would call “overcoming tourism”. We demand that you overcome the passive distraction of bad coffee. We demand that you overcome the cheap representational living that comes with drinking bad coffee. We demand that our fellow Athens citizens embrace good coffee!!!
Keep your brewing equipment like your dojo; clean and ready for action. Use freshly drawn filtered or bottled water. Coffee peaks within a week of the roast, so try to get it within that time frame. Use the right grind setting and for god’s sake, grind your coffee just before brewing. do not buy ground coffee!
If you are using a natural paper filter, rinse it with hot water before use. Use the right amount of coffee, two tablespoons per six-ounce cup. Brew your coffee at 195-205 degrees Fahrenheit. Store brewed coffee off the heat, as it will burn. Don’t reheat coffee; return cold coffee to the earth. Store a week’s supply of coffee in an airtight container and keep it room temperature and out of direct contact with the light.
Don’t use the fridge!
Don’t use the freezer!
Coffee is one of the most complex substances we ingest. It has more than 800 distinct flavor characteristics, whereas Red Wine has only 400. With this in mind, we urge you to treat its enjoyment as an art form. Awareness of some simple tasting approaches can enhance your daily experience. Here are some basic gustatory awareness skills to bring to your table.
The back of the tongue discerns the bitterness. The sides of the tongue discern the staleness. The tip of the tongue is the axis mundi, here you can discern specific flavors unlocked by the artisan roast. Explore how coffee meets your nose with its aroma and it’s fragrance. Understand how the coffee sits in your mouth with its body or mouth feel.
When it comes to quality coffee, acidity can be a enjoyable phenomenon. Unclean brewing equipment and over-roasting have given acidity a bad reputation. There is little worse in life than rancid coffee. The truth about acidity is that green bean buyers pay top dollar and travel deep into the farthest regions of the world seeking the holy sparkle of acidity. Please don’t think of acidity as something like the ph balance or something that elicits heartburn and stomach pain. Acidity in coffee terms is the brightness. It is the champagne of the coffee, how alive the coffee is. Look at your coffee while it brews. Coffee should bubble with joy rather than lie flat in lethargy.
We have created a green fundraising alternative to the crap our children are being asked to peddle. This model has been backed for two consecutive years now by the Environmental Chairperson of the Georgia PTO/PTA as a great way to teach our children about conservation. Schools can raise money and awareness now by selling our high quality and environmentally sound coffee direct from the rainforest communities of Ecuador. We demand that our children be sent the right message when it comes to consumer responsibility and we have developed a fundraising model that can adapt to your needs. We also offer tangible ways to use the profits. We have connected with non-profits both locally and around the world with options as diverse as funding environmental stewardship programs in coffee regions or by actually purchasing rainforest for conservation purposes. To learn more visit the FUNDRAISING section of our website.
Our primary goal is to inspire a coffee revolution in our hometown that becomes a positive influence across the world. We want to work with others interested in developing partnerships that expand positive economic opportunities while embracing the full spectrum of culinary possibilities.
We know our coffee is good; we work all day at that. We want, moreover, to make sure that you are brewing it correctly and people are getting it the way it should be got. Whether you are opening a café for the first time or have been in the business for years and are looking for a rejuvenation, we are open and ready to meet with you to discuss using 1000faces at your establishment.
Our model is very simple-we have no contracts or hidden charges associated with our sales and each client is an individual relationship with our services tailored to their individualized needs.
We look at each one of our retailers as partners in a greater project. It should be clear from the beginning that working with 1000faces is a choice to invest in both environmental and social conservation. You are making the choice to support local business and sustainable development. It should be clear that you are doing your part in making this world a better place.
Direct Trade is a new model in the coffee industry which we are embracing over “fair” and free trade models.
Direct trade means working directly with people associated with the production and delivery of coffee. This means farmers and other roasters working with farmers.
We obviously can’t be in every country doing the work we are doing in the rainforests of Ecuador, so we hit the road and found other roasters to trade with. Diversified portfolio with a capital “D.” Direct trade is the cleanest mode of getting the framers the highest economic return for the best quality beans.
We feel that fair trade has neglected quality in a way that will ultimately provide a negative feedback loop for both social and environmental conservation and improvement.
To learn more about this model and our trade practices, please visit our Foot Print Page.