The Blog

14. Coffee in Oaxaca: Cafe Brujula

2010-02-05 Comments Off on 14. Coffee in Oaxaca: Cafe Brujula
14. Coffee in Oaxaca: Cafe Brujula

I am in Oaxaca this week — life is good. I came back to Oaxaca in late 2008 for the first time in more than 10 years, and to my very pleasant surprise found some very nice coffee shops, including Cafe Brujula.

13. Photos: Dry mill details

2010-01-29 Comments Off on 13. Photos: Dry mill details

I visited a dry mill in Oaxaca last week just as the harvest is getting into high gear. The mill was primed and ready, but almost totally empty. And spotless. Unlike all my past visits to dry mills during the peak of the post-harvest period, there was no activity at all. No people. No coffee. No roar of elevators or sorters to shout over. Perhaps that is why I was able to appreciate lots of beautiful little geometric details that have escaped my notice on previous visits.

12. Drinking coffee in the coffelands

2010-01-22 Comments Off on 12. Drinking coffee in the coffelands

Sure, I know there is good coffee in the coffeelands. But mind-bending coffees are hard to come by. There are a few stars in the coffeelands firmament that I know of that burn brighter than most: Cafe Palo Alto in Cali and Ben’s Coffee in San Salvador.

11. Hunger in the coffeelands

2010-01-15 Comments Off on 11. Hunger in the coffeelands

I have been writing in recent weeks about the issue of hunger. You may be asking yourself what hunger has to do with coffee. Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the extraordinary advances made by the sustainable and certified coffee movements, hunger is still common in the coffeelands.

10. How sustainable is “sustainable coffee”?

2010-01-08 Comments Off on 10. How sustainable is “sustainable coffee”?

The “sustainable coffees” segment of the specialty market is more crowded than ever with certifications and concepts that advance different — sometimes competing — ideas about what constitutes sustainability when it comes to coffee. I believe that all these approaches generate benefits and move in the right direction. The question I struggle with is how much benefit they need to generate — and for whom — to be truly sustainable?

9. Coffeelands: 1, Blogger: 0

2010-01-01 Comments Off on 9. Coffeelands: 1, Blogger: 0
9. Coffeelands: 1, Blogger: 0

Payback time. Earlier this week I confessed to taking some pleasure in seeing a few national champion baristas roll up their sleeves in Sustainable Harvest’s Seed-to-Cup Barista Challenge, and get humbled in the process. Then, I got mine — on a visit with an association of smallholder farmers in Guatemala on Tuesday, something went terribly wrong after I carried a sack of freshly picked coffee cherries to the wet mill.

8. Season’s greetings from the coffeelands

2009-12-25 Comments Off on 8. Season’s greetings from the coffeelands
8. Season’s greetings from the coffeelands

What Santa really needs for Christmas — espresso!

7. Guatemala – Santa Anita celebrates sustainability

2009-12-18 Comments Off on 7. Guatemala – Santa Anita celebrates sustainability

Santa Anita de la Union, a community of families of ex-combatants in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, inaugurated a new ecological wet mill this week.

6. Why does hunger have to be so confusing?

2009-12-11 Comments Off on 6. Why does hunger have to be so confusing?

Last week I turned the basic concept of “hunger” into the remote concepts of “availability, access and utilization.” I appreciate why that might seem confusing. But these sub-concepts make it possible to target the specific sources of want with more precision in the design and implementation of anti-hunger initiatives. Here are a few examples of how this is being done in the coffeelands.

5. SCAA program highlights

2009-12-04 Comments Off on 5. SCAA program highlights

I have made my pre-conference picks for the highlights of the conference for anyone interested in the intersection between specialty coffee and development: lectures that seem to hold the most promise to illuminate some of the persistent challenges in the coffeelands — and some of the most promising approaches to addressing them. Biggest disappointment: nothing on the agenda about climate change and the threat it poses to specialty coffee.