Who we are
The faces behind the brand belong to two young men with lots of common ground, one being a love for good coffee. I discovered what a good cup of coffee tasted like on a camping trip in Northern Minnesota years ago. A friend in our group was a green coffee buyer at a specialty importing company, and he brought along a freshly roasted bag of coffee from Ethiopia. I can still remember how delicious our food pack smelled the entire trip and how the delicately sweet and fruity Ethiopian coffee opened my eyes to a world I didn’t know existed. Its caffeine fueled our expedition, but its flavor drove my passion to learn and share specialty coffee with people around me.
What we do
BVI Coffee Company is a specialty coffee roaster located in Road Town, Tortola. We bring in specialty grade green coffees from around the world, expertly roast it in our gorgeous 1Kg Mill City Roaster, and sell our product wholesale and retail. Our goal is to do more than just roast and sell coffee. We are trying to introduce a quality coffee culture to the BVI that doesn’t fully exist. We want to build relationships with our customers so they can understand what makes coffee good, and what makes coffee average. We want to educate local baristas and at home coffee brewers alike on proper extraction techniques in order to get the most out of their beans. We also want to build our business as a model for others on how to practice corporate social responsibility on a small scale. I am an environmental engineer by trade and feel that creating a local business is an awesome platform for displaying how a business can operate with a cradle to cradle mentality. This means being aware of all the pieces of the puzzle that make your business work, and designing your practices to not only minimize, but offset negative impacts that happen upstream and downstream of your operation.
Our Beans
To understand what makes our coffee special, you need to understand specialty coffee: great coffee starts with the producer. Grown in select altitudes and climates and nursed for years before first harvest, the producers who create specialty coffee devote their lives to refining and perfecting the highest quality coffee on the planet. Only coffee free of defects and picked at their peak of ripeness will continue on to market. That’s what we buy.
We buy our green beans from Café Imports whose mission is “To bring to the global market the highest-quality green coffees in the world by sourcing, developing, and innovating at origin, while providing sustainable economic development for small-holder farmers with price premiums, traceability, and long- term partnerships.”
By empowering producers through long-term partnerships, participating in producer-empowerment initiatives and investing in special projects at origin, utilizing comprehensive sensory-analysis data, and following a buying model that rewards quality by modulating price, Café Imports actively tries to foster improvement in green-coffee production for the good of every single hand that touches this global product, all along the way.