These last few months of launching Avalanche have come with a huge learning curve, from the intricacies of coffee roasting, to perhaps more importantly, sourcing.

Sourcing coffee properly is no joke. Trying to reconcile sensory quality with ethical buying is an extremely daunting and sometimes exhausting task. We have often found ourselves realising how much information there still is to uncover, how much we have to learn, how many questions we don’t even know we should be asking yet, and then, on top of that, figuring out how to break all of this down into something meaningful and digestible for the people drinking our coffee.

Because not everyone has the time, patience or interest to go through the effort of researching when choosing the coffee they’ll drink every morning for the next week. And not everyone sees coffee in the same way.
Some people see flavour notes. Some see years of work, relationships. Some see a cup score, a renowned producer’s name or or a recognisable roaster on the shelf and feel happy with their choice, and some just see a price tag. And there is nothing wrong with any of that. But we had to ask ourselves what kind of small cog in this big wheel we wanted Avalanche to be.

Through recent conversations with a new friend and partner, Takeru Nishi from This Side Up, we started to find some of the answers we had been looking for, or at least understanding a little better what questions to ask. Those conversations helped us get closer to figuring out what kind of roastery we want to become. In a way, we have always talked about wanting to simply carry the producer’s work forward through roasting. To interfere as little as possible and let the coffee speak for the work already done before reaching us.

Today, we know we can give producers a much bigger platform than what can be conveyed through the sensory qualities of the coffee alone. We also have our social channels, our shop, and our connection with the people drinking our coffee. We want to use those tools to build trusting relationships, and give space to the people who actually have something to say about this work and who deserve being heard. The people behind the enormous amount of labour, knowledge, and care required to make this delicious beverage possible in the first place.

Coffee can be your go-to drink sitting beside your breakfast at home. It can be the reason to meet with an old friend you haven't seen in ages at the local café. It can be a tasting experience in itself. It can become a workshop, a hobby, an obsession, or simply part of your daily routine. 

Coffee reaches people in completely different ways, and that is part of what makes it so interesting. But somewhere along the way, we also think it is important to start asking where it comes from, who has put in the work to produce it, what kind of system brought it to us, and how the people behind it are actually being supported.

In our conversations with Takeru, we had the opportunity not only to get to know each other personally, but also to understand much better how the coffee market works, what we mean when we talk about “specialty coffee”, and some of the difficult conversations happening within it today.

One subject we kept coming back to was the increasingly score-driven specialty market, and how easily the story, relationships and people behind a coffee can disappear behind numbers, competitions, famous names and marketability.

The economics behind coffee become pretty scary once you begin trying to understand them properly. And while we certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers, we know that we want Avalanche to have a positive impact somewhere within that system.

In a way, this is also where our name comes from. 
Trying to understand coffee can very quickly feel like being buried under an avalanche of information. Producers, varieties, processing methods, scores, prices, exporters, importers, certifications, traceability, farmgate prices, sustainability claims, fermentation techniques, relationships, marketing. There is so much to uncover that even knowing which questions to ask can become overwhelming. 

Our job now is learning how to make some of that information easier to digest without reducing it until it becomes meaningless. And ideally, the outcome shouldn’t just be that someone ends up choosing Avalanche as their coffee supplier. We would rather stir a little more curiosity. To make someone wonder where the coffee in front of them came from. Who produced it. How it was bought. Who benefited from its value. What the relationship behind it looks like. And to carry that curiosity with them, regardless of whose coffee they're drinking.

Yes, we are a business. We need to sell coffee.
But we would like our impact to go a little further than profiting off a sob story. Something that unfortunately can happen very easily when complicated realities are turned into marketing.
We're not even completely sure yet whether we are up to the task we're setting ourselves.
What we do know is that we are extremely curious, restless enough to keep questioning things, willing to correct our mistakes, and genuinely interested in learning how to do better.

The feeling I have now is of excitement and restlessness to learn as much as I possibly can. The same way a conversation with Takeru has this much impact in myself, I hope I can somehow carry that forward to the next person and push back on the huge corporations that are absorbing the specialty coffee market as we know it.
As a roastery, as buyers, and simply as humans trying to navigate the complexities of the world we live in.