Here’s our journalistic point you should minimally come away with: if you as a consumer support Fair Trade or Direct Trade coffee on principle, then buying coffee through these roasted coffee brokers works directly against your cause.

By adding additional middleman costs to the supply chain, you are effectively cutting into the coffee roaster’s capacity to pay top dollar to their coffee farmers.

We’ll even add a quote in the post above if you prefer sound-bites.

As for Citizen Bean, yes — they’re the “wine-of-the-month club” analogy that I mentioned. But it doesn’t sound like you even read the post above. Yes, they don’t charge a higher price to consumers. But as we mentioned above, they must cover costs and make payroll — so they must increase the costs to the coffee roasters. (Hence the travel agent analogy.) As far as priority shipping is concerned, we noted that they have on-demand relationships with their roasters.

So I’m not sure what you’re stating here that hasn’t already been said. Other than mentioning “food pairings with each month’s coffees.” We’ve long thought of coffee pairing as one of the most ridiculous manifestations of the shoehorned wine analogy placed on coffee. As we said back in 2006, “Coffee pairing integrated into a meal plan makes about as much sense as pairing cigars with each course.” Learning just now that Citizen Bean offers food pairings with their coffee actually makes us suspicious of the quality of their offerings.

One difference I see is that the offline retail bookstore was an established business long before the Internet came around. In contrast, the aggregating retailer of roasted coffees is a wholly new concept — whether offline or online. (Given the time-sensitive need to conveniently support just-in-time roasting, it probably could only realistically exist in an online world.)

Another major difference concerns consumer brand loyalties towards roasters versus publishers. If To Kill A Mockingbird were to change publishers, few would bat an eye. But at least here in SF, for example, you have “blind” loyalists who believe that it’s Blue Bottle or nothing. The market for coffee explorers seems all that much smaller.

I’m not entirely surprised, since in that exchange the roaster was nothing more than a middleman themselves.

Coincidentally, they are the employer of the newest Western Regional Barista Competition champion, Pete Licata, who was announced over the weekend. (The Honolulu Coffee Company.)