All coffee ships in clear plastic zip bags except 20#s which ship in a cotton bag you can use to store the coffee. Cotton Drawstring Bags are available for 2 and 5 lb. quantities (see here for more information on coffee storage).
CoE means award-winning Cup of Excellence lot . DP means Dry-Processed. FTO means Fair Trade and Organic Certified. WP means Water Process Decaf. And (farm gate) means this coffee is part of our farm gate™ direct trade price program.
20 lb Bulk is intended for our hardcore home roasters or small commercial roasters. We do not recommend buying a 20 lb Bulk pack of a coffee you have not tried before! Bulk orders ship in cloth drawstring bags. Remember, we cannot accept returns on green coffee orders.
With very
few exceptions, all our coffees are the top grade produced by the
exporting country and are current crop if it is available yet. We
buy coffee continuously and our stock is fresh! No coffee we have
is "past crop." If I sometimes do not include the grade
(SHG, SHB, Gr 1, Gr.5 -Ethiopia DP, AA, etc) or the crop year in the
description, it's safe to assume it is top grade and current, because
I always include the grade if it isn't! Grading can be very confusing; HG is the top Mexican grade but HG is the 2nd grade in Nicaragua.
Grade 4 dry processed Ethiopians are the top grade available, but
Grade 4 is often labeled Grade 5 to avoid higher export taxes ...
email me, Tom, if you have any specific questions. See Coffee Cupping
Review links below... and also check out Tom's
Cupping Log of incoming samples.
There is a lot of information of the Sweet Maria's Forum - especially the Technical Roasting Discussions and Choosing Coffees, Cupping Reviews, Coffee Storage sections.