The Extraordinary Coffee Workshop

For Intelligentsia, Direct Trade has grown to mean more than a model for sourcing or corporate best practices flexed in marketing materials. Direct Trade is a community—a global tribe of like-minded coffee professionals who share both a vision of extraordinary coffee as a product of great culinary significance, and a commitment to make coffee, well, extraordinary.

Our community of growers, green buyers, roasters, baristas, and coffee obsessives gather every year at the Intelligentsia Extraordinary Coffee Workshop, a multi-day exploration of what makes coffee truly extraordinary. The event travels to a different country every year, meaning participants can learn about coffee innovation from the host country’s unique point of view. Previous Extraordinary Coffee Workshops have taken place in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Los Angeles, and Brazil.

And while the location changes, the formula for ECW has endured. At every ECW, green coffee buyers and growers visit coffee farms, tour coffee processing facilities, taste coffees, and participate in presentations led by coffee experts detailing the latest research and innovation in coffee. Topics covered in these sessions tap into the zeitgeist, and include everything from improved agronomic and crop science of the farm, the evolving microbiology of the mill, advances in chemistry of the cupping lab, and the ever-shifting economics of the marketplace. The four-day workshops are equal parts coffee field trip, colloquium, and family reunion. After all, we have been convening ECW annually since 2009. By now, our Direct Trade partners are old friends who look forward to sharing with and learning from each other every year at ECW.

Since 2017, ECW has also been the site of the Extraordinary Coffee Competition, a global coffee quality contest featuring the most decorated coffee growers in the world.

Beginning in 2018, we re-formatted the Extraordinary Coffee Workshop and launched ECWx. ECWx is to ECW as TEDx is to TED—a scaled-down, more intimate version of the original that plays by the same rules as the big event, but differs in a few significant ways.

ECW is global in scope, convening a community of growers and other key members of the Intelligentsia coffee supply chain from more than a dozen countries around the world. On the flipside, ECWx participants are drawn from the host country, is invite-only, and open only to members of our Direct Trade network.

ECW includes existing Intelligentsia partners and growers of all types—from smallholders with tiny coffee gardens in Ethiopia to owners of sprawling mechanized estates in Brazil—and everyone in between. ECWx is open only to smallholder growers and their representatives, creating for them the same kinds of opportunities we create for our partners at ECW: farm visits, mill visits and demonstrations, expert presentations, and sensory analysis. Only unlike ECW, where we work to make the coffees we are already buying even better, at ECWx we are working mainly with potential Intelligentsia partners to help foster new commercial relationships. In 2019, we began committing to purchasing coffees from the most promising participants in ECWx, using the event to catalyze new trading relationships.

This is part of Intelligentsia’s commitment to use coffee quality as a tool to create economic opportunity for smallholder coffee growers who need it. We partnered with Root Capital to host the first ECWx in Colombia in 2018, with additional funding from USAID. Since then, we took the initiative to Central America, partnering with Root Capital again in Honduras in 2019 and Catholic Relief Services in 2020 in Guatemala. Our sights are set on Central Africa for 2021.