My office in London was in the office of a friend who owned a coffee trading company. Every day I could wander into the tasting room where they were brewing up batchs of Kenya AA or equally high quality coffee for tasting and testing. As a coffee drinker it was like being in heaven.
One weekend I decided to fly to Zagreb to visit an American couple who had just moved there and started a business shipping Yugoslav products to the US. On Friday before I left I mentioned the trip and one of the traders ground up a half kilo of their latest coffee sample. I threw it into my suitcase and soon forgot about it.
Dan met me at the Zagreb airport and we headed home. Joyce had prepared dinner for us. Dan was a conservative straight shooter type of guy and Joyce was a competent, quiet and very reserved midwesterner. After dinner and a nice chat to get caught up I was shown where i'd be sleeping and started to unpack my suitcase. The smell of fresh roasted, fresh ground coffee drifted out from under some clothes.
I casually stolled into the kitchen and dropped the bag of coffee on the table. This quiet, reserved woman Joyce lept out of her chair, threw her arms around me and virtually danced around the kitchen. Oh my gosh, what have I done, I thought to myself. Dan said "you don't understand". He walked to a kitchen cabinet and pulled out a tiny bag. On it was printed 'coffee 200 grams'. He said "if we can get coffee, when we can get coffee, we can only buy one bag like this and it's not very good". "You have made us rich"
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