If you’ve joined one of our coffee sessions, emailed us a question or called the roastery, you may already know my brother Alejandro. You may also know that he can move from a conversation about coffee flavour to a spreadsheet without missing a beat.
I thought he deserved a proper introduction.
Alejandro works on several parts of Crickle Creek Coffee Roasters that you might not see when you open a bag: evaluating coffees, thinking through roasts, supporting our family farm in El Salvador and keeping a close eye on the numbers. Those jobs sound quite different. For him, they fit together.
How did Alejandro get into coffee?
Before coffee became his work, Alejandro worked in finance, including mergers and acquisitions. Then he moved back to El Salvador, and our dad asked him to get involved with our family farm, Finca Argentina.
He got curious about what happened at every step. Why did one lot taste different from another? What could we learn from a change in processing? How would a decision made on the farm show up months later in someone’s cup?
Curiosity turned into years of working with the farm team. Alejandro explored coffee varieties and processing methods, helped develop the farm’s approach to specialty coffee and learned how much care it takes to produce a lot worth getting excited about.
If you want to hear that part of the story from him, read Alejandro’s account of making natural process coffee on our farm. He tells it better than I could—including the moment he agreed to try it before he was entirely sure how they would do it.
What does Alejandro’s Q Grader training mean for our coffee?
Alejandro earned an Arabica Q Grader qualification. It involved training and evaluation in tasting coffee systematically: paying attention to aroma, flavour, acidity, body and the qualities that make one lot different from another.
That training gives him a shared language for discussing what’s in the cup. It matters when we taste potential new coffees or try to understand why a roast isn’t showing a coffee at its best. It doesn’t mean that you need to taste exactly what he tastes. Sometimes I’ll pick up one note while someone else notices another, and that conversation is one of my favourite parts of coffee.
We want our tasting notes to help you find something you’ll enjoy. Alejandro’s work helps us describe those coffees with care.
From Finca Argentina to your cup
Working on a farm teaches you that flavour doesn’t begin at the roaster. The variety, harvest, processing and drying all shape what arrives as green coffee. Roasting gives us another set of decisions to make.
Alejandro brings that farm experience into the way we assess and roast coffees at Crickle Creek Coffee. Our El Salvador Bourbon is a lovely way to taste the connection for yourself: it comes from our family farm and is one of the coffees we roast here in Calgary.
Of course, we also source coffee from other growers. Alejandro’s attention to what a coffee tastes like, where it comes from and how we roast it carries into those choices too.
And why the “numbers guy”?
Because it’s true. Alejandro still looks after the financial side of our family business, and I’m glad he does.
Working with family means a conversation can begin with a coffee idea and somehow grow into several more ideas before anyone has finished their mug. Alejandro is the person who can ask what an idea will take to make it work. There may be a spreadsheet involved. There is usually a spreadsheet involved.
I tease him about it, but that care matters. It helps us make decisions that support the people doing the work, from the farm to the Calgary roastery.
Away from coffee and numbers, he loves reading and getting outdoors—hiking, biking, cross-country skiing and camping. I don’t think he stops being curious when he leaves work. He just has more room to wander.
So, that’s my brother: a coffee person, a numbers person and a big part of the family behind Crickle Creek. The next time you have a question about a coffee, there’s a good chance Alejandro has spent time thinking about the answer.
Happy brewing,
Adriana