About Moka Joe
Our Mission
We have made the deliberate decision to acknowledge that our choices matter, and to act accordingly. The benefit to the customer is that our premium gourmet coffee is not only a rewarding experience to sip and ponder, but the coffee purchase contributes to Fair Trade practices and is Sustainably Grown.
We are a socially and environmentally dedicated business with the mission to bring Fair Trade, Certified Organic and Sustainably Grown coffee beans to the Northwest and beyond. We carefully roast them to order in small batches so that they are always fresh and always aromatic.
Our customers receive personalized friendly service, quick delivery, good prices, and the best coffee around!
All About Us…
From our Bellingham location we create custom blends of coffee to suit our many devoted customers as well as being on the shelves of grocery stores, restaurants, offices, and delis. We often take beans from one location – called a Single Origin coffee, and roast it in a specific way for a particular kind of coffee experience. We work hard to entice the hundreds of natural compounds found in coffee beans into wonderful roasts and blends to suit every taste and preference.
We have had great fun building our business and really do believe we have the best beans available, the best people to work with, and provide the best product to be found. After all, we only roast the world’s best coffee!~Trudy and Joe Scherting, Owners
Use Only the Best…
<Photo Courtesy of Jennee Payne
Arabica beans grow best in altitudes from 2000 to 6000 feet. This species has the most flavor and aroma of all coffee beans. At these higher elevations the beans grow and develop more slowly, leading to more complex and enhanced flavor characteristics. These are the beans we search out to purchase and roast into specialty premium gourmet coffees.
Moka Joe is proud to be one of a handful of coffee roasters in the nation who purchase and roast 100% Fair Trade Certified beans. This means that the beans come from farming cooperatives and small farms of less than 15 acres.
All of these superior Arabica beans are shade grown using traditional farming methods to preserve biodiversity and bird habitat. In most cases, that means hand pruning and weeding, thinning and harvesting. Only organic compost and fertilizers are used to encourage the well-being of the plants. As an understory crop, the coffee beans mature more slowly than those raised in full sun as a plantation crop, and several pickings are done to catch each bean at the height of its flavor capacity.
It is always an exciting time when the big burlap bags arrive at our Roastery with exotic markings… As orders come in, our roastmaster selects the combination of beans and roasts them in small batches using our state-of-the-art Diedrich drum roaster. This roasting process uses less direct heat so the roast is more gently controlled, ending with a consistent product with consistent taste – batch after batch.