There was a morning in Colombia when I almost did the wrong thing. It would have saved me a lot of money, and no one would have known.

Let me back up.

Most Colombian coffee is a blend. You’re rarely drinking one farmer’s work. It’s a few of them, sometimes dozens, mixed together. For years we bought from an exporter who had, in my experience, the best cupping coffee in all of Colombia. Then the owner retired. His partner, a subsidiary of a big multinational, took over, and from that day on, the quality declined. We were bringing in five containers of Colombia coffee a year at that point, so this was not a small problem to say the least.

We tried to fix it. We worked with the importer. We worked with the new owners, first here in the States and then in Colombia, trying to get everyone on the same page. The quality kept slipping anyway. Eventually I had had enough.

Around that time I met a cupper from a cooperative in Huila. We had judged Cup of Excellence together, and we always agreed, the same coffees in the same order, best to least. When someone tastes the way you do, you don’t forget it.

So we built something with the cooperative. We scored each farmer’s coffee before it got mixed in with anyone else’s. Four levels, and the higher the level, the more we paid. And we paid in Colombian pesos, on purpose, because it was the transparent thing to do. The farmers loved it. If we bought their coffee they got a real premium, and they got it right away instead of waiting a year, and there was always the chance to score higher next time and earn more.

So I flew down with one of my staff. Into Bogota, Colombia, then to Neiva in Huila, and then hours of driving to actually reach the farmers.

One morning, in the middle of a trip, the dollar dropped. Paying the same pesos I had agreed to pay was suddenly going to cost me a lot more. I was sitting in the co-op manager’s office and I took out my calculator to work out how much I’d need to lower the farmers’ payment to keep my own cost from climbing.

I started doing the math, and I stopped. I had given my word. If I paid them less the moment it got expensive for me, I would just be like everyone else who takes advantage of farmers. So I kept paying what I said I would. The coffee cost me significantly more, and I had to come up with that cash long before I could roast it or sell any of it.

I don’t know that I’d call myself an example. Just that I do what I say I’m going to do.

We ran that program for a number of years, until I couldn’t make the trips anymore and the staffer who worked on it with me moved on. A year or two after it ended, a roaster I know sought me out at a conference. He’d been in Colombia buying coffee, and he told me the farmers had asked him to use “the Oren’s program”, the whole thing, especially paying more for the better coffee.

That’s one of the proudest moments I’ve had in this business. Maybe one of the proudest I’ve had.