Microlots may be the exclusive domain of quality-obsessed roasters who are willing to pay top dollar for the finest coffee a grower or group of growers has to offer. But that doesn’t mean that microlots don’t generate benefits for those roasters who aren’t. Microlots may help farmer organizations be better trading partners for everyone in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In conversations with roasters and importers, I have often referred to farmer organizations as “special.” The term is spectacularly imprecise, since the sources of “specialness” can be so diverse. It is important for cooperatives to articulate clearly just what makes them so special, however, since roasters are not just searching for quality coffee, but quality […]
Yesterday I shared some good news: Counter Culture Coffee is now offering a Direct Trade Certified coffee from 5 de junio, a cooperative we work with in Nicaragua under our CAFE Livelihoods project. The cooperative has been working hard over the past few years to improve the quality of its coffee, and we are delighted […]
Counter Culture Coffee on Friday announced it is now offering a single-origin, Direct Trade Certified coffee from 5 de junio, a cooperative participating in our CAFE Livelihoods project. While this may not be Earth-shaking news in the United States, it represents the culmination of years of hard work in a handful of coffee communities in […]
