As we continue to roll out our new Experimental Barrel Conditioned coffee, we want to take some time to put the spotlight on some of our amazing partners who are serving up this exciting new coffee. Today, we’re thrilled to be focusing on our good friends and champions, the amazing Sprudgie Award winning Café Regina in San Juan, Puerto Rico!

For those who may not know, Sprudge is an industry-leading coffee publication, and last year by popular vote they awarded Café Regina best new café. This marks THE FIRST Puerto Rican café to be awarded a Sprudgie! Let us all take a moment to congratulate Café Regina once again. Congratulations! (And just saying, they also have a producer category… ;-) ). This remarkable achievement is the result of founder and friend Kali Solack’s tireless work, work that gets its energy, like our own, from her powerful socially-forward agenda. Just to give one example, after Hurricane Maria, Kali, an “agro-activist” as Conde Naste Traveler notes, along with Xavier Alexander of Metric, and Stephen Hoppe of La Penultima, founded Beans For Puerto Rico to donate coffee after so much of the Puerto Rican crop was decimated. We’re so inspired by this kind of impact-driven community-building.  

That same love for Puerto Rico, high-level specialty coffee, and community engagement continues to characterize Café Regina today. Indeed, it’s part of why they were also mentioned recently by Vogue in their “Insider’s Guide to Puerto Rico” as devilishly responsible for “beautiful dishes almost too pretty to eat” (only almost!) and for working with local producers like Forgotten Forest! ;-) And it’s why they have in the past been covered by Bon Appetit, Vice, and more.

It’s no small honor to be featured at Café Regina alongside tremendous roasters like their great partner Metric and rotating roasters like coffee legend Scott Rao’s Prodigal and Brooklyn’s world-renowned Sey Coffee. And we won’t lie, we never hesitate at the opportunity to crush another plate of one of their absolutely decadent toasts! It’s been our pleasure to present Puerto Rican coffee at this level of the specialty coffee world.

And while we’re excited about the growing specialty coffee scene in Puerto Rico, including long-time veterans like Abner Roldan at Café Comunión, the amazing Habitante (where our coffee is available roasted by our friends at Filtrado), and our new partners Blac Flamingo, few know that for political and economic reasons it’s still relatively difficult, and very expensive, to commercially import roasted specialty coffee to the island. For that reason, most Puerto Ricans do not regularly have access to the diversity of specialty roasters and producers folks stateside take for granted.

That’s why recently after SCA Expo 2024 it was our great honor to co-host an event at Café Regina sharing a whole cornucopia of radical specialty coffee from around the world. The event took place May 9, and we were joined by a fantastic group, including folks from the Academia de Baristas de Puerto Rico Ponce eager to dive into this kaleidoscopic sensory experience. We shared coffee from the aforementioned excellent Prodigal and Metric roasters, along with an incredible Edwin Norena from Yellow Rooster, and coffee from Right Side Roasters out of Barcelona, Pichea, Perc out of Savannah and Atlanta, Cafe Imports, and more. 

On the one hand, the event was an incredible opportunity to taste such a wide variety of coffees in Puerto Rico, and we were so happy to help provide that experience. On the other hand, it was a strong indicator of the genuine and beautiful community Café Regina has been building, a community that we’re lucky to be part of. In Puerto Rico, coffee is more than just a community, it is part of the country’s history, culture, and identity – indeed, it is for many diasporic Puerto Ricans something they nightly imagine in their dreams. The island’s history is forever intertwined with coffee, and while that history has been to some extent interrupted by unfortunate economic policies, there is a new wave building on the island, thanks to Café Regina and others, a wave we think is part of a global movement of origin countries taking coffee into their own hands.

Certainly, Puerto Rico needs the quality to compete internationally (and, humbly, we’re well on our way: read about our 92 pt. Tanama Natural!). Because the goal, finally, along with fostering a renewed spirit of excellence in Puerto Rico, is to directly improve the lives of coffee farmers, by providing an avenue for higher prices, and thus better pay, something that starts by honoring authentic, delicious, and high quality 100% Puerto Rican coffee. Thank you Café Regina for believing in us, and for everything you do for Puerto Rican coffee culture and the world!