The premiere of the After the Harvest documentary at last week’s Symposium was followed by a breakout session joined by everyone interested in further exploring the issue. The participants — more than 20 in all — included well-known importers and roasters, celebrity estate farmers, non-profits working on coffee, and others more difficult to characterize. Most […]
I have been reflecting this week on some of what I considered to be the highlights of last week’s SCAA event. One of them came unexpectedly, during the Coffee Kids reception. Mike Ferguson from Batdorf & Bronson, the pioneering specialty roaster and longtime Coffee Kids supporter, offered some perspectives on the lived realities of coffee […]
There was some engaging plenary discussion on sustainability at last week’s Symposium. During one session, the facilitator broke us into small discussion groups to revisit some of the critical assumptions we make about the sustainability movement in coffee — what we think we know about the issue that may not be true. I particularly appreciated […]
Counter Culture Coffee may have scored the show’s biggest hit with its brilliant Pop-Up Café, a full-on mobile coffee shop the crew erected outside the Expo. While everyone else serving coffee was slogging it out in the scrum on the show floor, Counter Culture was staying cooly out of the fray, doing its thing with […]
The issue of seasonal hunger in the coffeelands is one that I have been addressing on this blog dating back to my first posts in late 2009, generating little apparent interest. Last week at SCAA, however, following the world premiere of the powerful documentary After the Harvest, it seemed to be all anyone wanted to […]
This was the first time since CRS started participating in the SCAA Event back in 2004 that we have had a booth on the show floor. It was a decidedly modest affair — a 10′ x 20′ booth with five round tables where farmer organizations participating in the CAFE Livelihoods program could meet with current […]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I participated this year for the first time in the SCAA’s annual Symposium. I realized what a coffee geek I am when I felt mildly star-struck by my contact with such luminaries as James Hoffman, Peter Giuliano, Geoff Watts, Aida Batlle, and others similarly positioned in the industry’s stratosphere. […]
I had the enormous privilege last week of providing some brief commentary at the SCAA‘s annual Symposium following the world premiere of the After the Harvest documentary, which focuses on the issue of seasonal hunger in the coffeelands. When Hal Hamilton of Sustainable Food Lab gave the keynote to open Symposium, he encouraged participants to […]
