The U.S. Barista Championship gets underway tomorrow in Long Beach. The live broadcast of the competition will reach viewers in a place not accustomed to watching barista events. I’m not talking about Las Vegas, North Carolina. Or Holland, Michigan. Or even Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I am talking about Nariño, Colombia, where the farmers who grew Anna […]
The B in “Certified B Corporation” stands for Benefit. But the B Corp certification may be the best one out there for consumers who want a holistic assessment of a company’s Business model. .
Over the past six weeks, this blog has been devoted exclusively to the CRS Colombian Varietal Cuppings–a series of comparative cuppings of Castillo and Caturra samples from our Borderlands project involving leading roasters and importers in the United States, Europe and Australia. Even when I took a week off from reporting on the results of […]
When I read this article by Kenneth Davids in The Coffee Review assigning Caturra to the second tier of varietal quality, I thought immediately of Alejandro Cadena, whose pioneering Colombian exporter Virmax can stake a solid claim to intellectual and material authorship of the microlot model. Why did I think of Alejandro? Because when he […]
Tim Wendelboe is a former world barista champion and one of the world’s premiere coffee celebrities. When he is not busy roasting coffee, he may be serving it at the coffee bar that bears his name. Or sourcing it as a partner in Nordic Approach, the Oslo-based importer promoting transparency in trade. Or writing books […]
Readers of this blog will know that we have partered with World Coffee Research (WCR) and some of the brightest lights in specialty coffee, research and philanthropy on the Colombia Sensory Trial–a side-by-side sensory comparison of Castillo- and Caturra-variety coffee samples taken from farms in Colombia growing, harvesting and processing both under virtually identical conditions. […]
Last November, the pioneering Colombian exporter Virmax published these photos from Oswaldo Acevedo’s Hacienda El Roble and wondered whether there is a strand of yellow Maragogype out there despite the science that says Maragogype produces only red cherry. Does yellow maragogype exist? Or is this another variety? @HdaElRoble pic.twitter.com/U1xblfMX2v — Virmax Café (@virmaxcafe) November 6, […]
As an SCAA member, I receive every issue of the SCAA Chronicle. As an international aid worker based in Ecuador, I get my copy several weeks after everyone else, since it is sent first to our headquarters in Baltimore then batched and sent along with other mail every few weeks to our office in Quito. […]
The impacts of microlots on smallholder farmers has been a topic of discussion on this blog dating back to 2010. The research on the issue to date is largely inconclusive, and powerful critiques of the microlot model have been leveled by influential actors in specialty coffee who question the inclusiveness and impact of the Direct […]
