LHS grad partners with local roaster in coffee quest
Goal: Identify and sell high quality coffee from across the globe
SHIRLEY >> ASIXTH founder Abu Bakarr Jalloh prefers his coffee brewed as an espresso, usually from Costa Rican coffee beans and sometimes with a milk base.
Jalloh’s coffee preference is called his “typology,” a term that refers to the method one prefers their coffee brewed in and the region one prefers their coffee beans to be from. A Class of 2015 graduate from Lowell High School, Jalloh originally was not much of a coffee drinker until he discovered the ultimate gateway drug for drinking coffee: studying for pharmacy school exams.
“Just by trying to stay awake to study for my exams, I fell in love with coffee. I wasn’t a coffee drinker, but I became one during school,” said Jalloh.
Over time, Jalloh began to wonder if there was a better way to try higher quality coffee. He saw the regulars like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts as “utility coffee,” that serve an important purpose in waking you up, being cheap and easy to make, but to Jalloh, there had to be higher quality coffee out there.
“I started talking to different roasters and farms, and that is when I saw a lot of the broken systems that determine coffee quality,” said Jalloh. “A lot of it was just based on bias, and someone simply saying it was good coffee.”
That bias, Jalloh said, stemmed from the fact that a lot of farmers and roasters would have their own in-house “Q-grader,” who would naturally carry some bias in favor of the quality of their own coffee beans. He decided to take a few years to gather data from across the country and the globe, talking to different roasters about how they determine the quality of the coffee they get from farmers.
“The answer I received throughout was simply that the importers say it is good quality,” said Jalloh. “It begs the question, where if you are from a region like Costa Rica, will you always be biased to say that Costa Rican coffee is better?”
So last year, Jalloh began to put together ASIXTH, and partnered up with Union Coffee Roaster owner Jesse Medley. The pair now share the space in Shirley that Medley has been using for nearly a decade.
They developed a global network of Q-graders, some from the U.S., the U.K., Australia, South Korea and other countries around the globe. ASIXTH sends samples of the coffee beans they purchase from importers to each of the Q-graders, who individually grade the coffee. When all the grades are submitted, ASIXTH simply calculates the average, and displays that grade with the coffee they sell. Coffee is graded by Q-graders on a 0-100 scale, with 80 being the mark to hit to have your coffee designated as “specialty coffee,” a mark the utility coffees like Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks typically do not meet, Jalloh said.
“If we have a coffee that has been graded about 120 times, and it gets an 86.4, that is backed up by facts and data,” said Jalloh. “The coffee we buy usually falls within the outstanding or exceptional grades.”
If they send out samples of a coffee and it receives a grade below 85, ASIXTH does not purchase those beans.
“We do that because we want to stay true to providing the best coffee,” said Jalloh.
ASIXTH buys the coffee beans in bulk from different farmers from places like Costa Rica, Uganda, Kenya, Colombia and other regions where coffee beans can reliably grow. They then roast them, package them and ship them out to people who will order bags of coffee online. When they receive coffee beans at the roastery in Shirley, they look a little different than the average person may expect, almost like pistachios, because they receive the beans raw and roast them in their industrial roaster.
Each bag of coffee will come with a QR code that provides a list of all the people who graded that coffee. The name of the company is a play-on-words of the term “a sixth sense,” which Jalloh said comes from the fact that coffee is an inherently sensory experience, and the company is meant to be a sixth sense for customers to find high quality coffee with little worry.
The idea is similar to what Cup of Excellence does, Jalloh said, but it is meant to be more affordable for the average person who just likes good coffee.
The plan, Jalloh said, is to officially launch the website and begin selling bags of quality coffee later this month.