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Bio

It all began with our retirement from the corporate world. We were looking for something to do, something we would enjoy. Following lessons learned from my father, we sat down one day and thought long and hard about what we would do out of sheer love, even if no one paid us for it. We had two options. One required a considerable investment, so we settled for the next one: coffee! Since my husband is from Venezuela and I am from Puerto Rico, you can pretty much say that we were born drinking coffee because from a very early age we were given coffee to drink (“café con leche” for us – now better known as “latté”). And so we started to taste and research coffee. We searched high and low for something new and fresh. We didn’t find many places nor products. Big companies sell you coffee from a variety of countries but you really don’t know how long that coffee has been sitting in those bags. Many of them have expiration dates of up to seven months and my husband thought that was a pretty long time for a product to be in a bag. I had to agree! That’s when we decided to roast our own coffee and send it fresh to the folks who order it. Not an easy thing, we know, and we are still learning about roasting, grinding and flavoring which, you might find hard to believe, has its own science. The most surprising thing was to see how people responded when we put the coffee out on sale. First we sold to local restaurants and only a little on the internet because those who apparently know about these things advised us against it arguing that the market was controlled by the large coffee distributors. My husband is hard-headed and persisted; the only thing we could lose, he said, was our time. Little by little, we grew our exposure on the net and less in the local markets. We particularly love buying coffee from different countries, bringing it home and brewing it for our personal delight. We taste, critique and weigh its marketability and possibilities. When we find something exceptional, our kids (both adults now!) serve as our guinea pigs. Not that they mind, of course. And then we put it out for our customers to try – and most of the time they agree with us! Female, Born on January 11

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