We buy coffee we can trace. Every coffee we roast goes back to a farm, a co-operative or a washing station that we can name. That is the claim we make, and it is the one we can stand over.

We also pay considerably above the commodity price for it.

Organic, Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance are real and they are rigorous. They are also expensive. A certificate has to be paid for, audited and renewed, and for a smallholder working a few hectares that cost is often out of reach, however carefully they farm.

So a certificate tells you that a farm could afford to be certified. It does not tell you that an uncertified farm is doing anything wrong.

There is a harder version of this, and it is worth saying plainly. Some of the farmers whose coffee we buy cannot afford chemical fertilisers or pesticides at all. Their coffee is, in practice, grown without them. They will never carry an organic label, because the label costs money they do not have.

We would rather tell you where a coffee came from than show you a badge.

We want to be straight with you.

Most of the small farms that grow the coffee for our current espresso blend are environmentally aware and farm carefully. But none of them could survive without some chemical intervention to prevent crop disease and damage.

So no. We do not claim that our espresso blend is certified organic, or that it is grown entirely without pesticides. Where a particular coffee is certified, we say so on the bag.

If you want to know about a specific coffee — where it came from, how it was grown, what we know about the farm — email shop@coffeeangel.com and we will tell you what we know.

The Coffeeangel Online Team