In the past week, lots from the 2016 Borderlands harvest starting hitting stores in a big way. The Borderlands lot is the featured coffee on Counter Culture’s landing page, which is a mixed lot from two different communities. https://counterculturecoffee.com/ Just a few days later, Intelligentsia celebrated the opening of a roasting and training facility […]
We’re pleased to announce that the Coffeelands team has added some new faces to the team to help the Coffeelands program work towards a more equitable coffee sector in which coffee-dependent populations earn a living income, natural resources are conserved, protected, and regenerated, and coffee communities are resilient and empowered. Let’s start at the top. […]
A few weeks ago, some exciting and hopeful news came out of Colombia. You might have missed it, as It was predictably lost in the news cycle which was dominated by the horrific mass shooting in an Orlando night club; the permissive gun laws in the US; the Brexit and its global economic ramifications; the […]
Two days ago I announced our USBC Origins Project, an initiative designed to honor the growers behind the extraordinary coffees that will be served by the country’s best baristas at the USBC Finals in Atlanta in April. Today, I pause to celebrate the growers behind four coffees from our Borderlands project in Colombia and four […]
Over the past two days, I published this summary of a peer-reviewed study based on data from our Borderlands project in Colombia and this interview with the study’s lead author. Today, I extract its key insights on farm labor, which include a characterization of farmworkers in the coffeelands as poorer and less educated than certified […]
Yesterday I summarized the key findings of a study in the current issue of Food Policy that is based on data from our Borderlands project in Colombia. Today, I discuss the content and implications of that article with its lead author, Wytse Vellema, a Ph.D. candidate at Ghent University in Belgium. The highlights of my […]
Our Borderlands Coffee Project in Nariño, Colombia, includes a research partnership with our friends at CIAT, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia. The collaboration allows us to use the project as a platform for field research, generate results-based evidence, and support decision-making at multiple levels: on the farm, in the policymaking process […]
Over the past year and a half, I have done some reading about two related and complementary disciplines: horizon-scanning and scenario planning. The first refers to intentional and systematic efforts to gather and analyze information about threats and opportunities that loom; the second to how we use that intelligence to identify likely future scenarios and […]
I explained here last week that we subjected the Castillo and Caturra samples we collected for the Colombia Sensory Trial to two different kinds of sensory evaluation: two cupping panels at Intelligentsia Roasting Works in Chicago that applied the CQI’s Q protocols and two sensory panels at the Sensory Analysis Center at Kansas State University […]
The first part of the Colombia Sensory Trial featured coffee buyers and quality control experts from some of the most important coffee organizations in the Americas. During two cupping panels at Intelligentsia Roasting Works in Chicago, they scored pairs of Castillo and Caturra samples collected from 22 farms in Nariño, Colombia. The second part enlisted […]
