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freshcup.com | May 2014 31 thing for me everyday is to serve my coffee with a sense of gratitude for the people who brought it to me," she says. That trip in 2012 has been a catalyst of her success and a driver of her ongoing coffee education. Visits to origin used to be the realm of importers alone because there was just no obvious reason for anyone else to go. Then head roasters, even from small operations, began to make treks around the world, turning direct- trade into a hallmark of third-wave. Origin trips are so common now it's hard to track down master roast- ers during harvest months. They're usually bouncing around Central America, maybe even Africa. At many shops, travel budgets have been set for the rest of a roasting team and sometimes even baristas. As the stories about coffee become more important to cafés and roaster- ies, it behooves owners to provide themselves and their staff with closer connections to the people, places, and processes that make up the story of a cup of coffee. A major obstacle to persuading customers to pony up for direct-trade coffee is the difficulty many have understanding why it's more expensive, and sometimes taste alone isn't persuasive. Stories bridge that gap, but a story is only as good as the telling. While it's nice when a barista can say where a coffee came from, it's something entirely winning when that barista can tell her story about being at this coffee's farm. For roasters, a trip to origin pro- vides an invaluable insight into how different process affect green beans, giving a deeper understanding into the final profile of a roast. Joel Pollock, the owner of Panther Coffee in Miami, says a trip to origin can turn abstract ideas like natural or washed process into something tangi- ble and nuanced. " There are so many different ways to process coffee that the few phrases we use to describe the processes don't really show how varied they can be," he says. Joel had roasted coffee for more than a decade before making his first origin trip and he says, "It was the first time my eyes were opened as a As the stories about coffee become more important to cafés and roasteries, it behooves owners to provide themselves and their staff with closer connections to the people, places, and processes that make up the story of a cup of coffee. May14_magazine.indd 31 4/18/14 10:42 AM