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 […]
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 […]
The 5 de junio cooperative sees organic specialty coffee as the key to the development of its communities. Its confidence in this vision reflects its belief that its coffee embodies the best its communities have to offer, from the terroir of a coffee origin emerging as one of Nicaragua’s finest, to the generosity, hard work […]
Back in May, Counter Culture Coffee owner, SCAA President and all-around coffee guru Peter Giuliano took me to task for some pretty lazy reporting. Today, I settle in for a heaping plate of crow.
Several dozen of the most influential and quality-obsessed people in the coffee industry are gathered this week in College Station, Texas, for the Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI) Symposium — the first step in launching a massive, five-year collaborative research project involving industry, bilateral donor agencies and research institutes and designed to increase the availability of high-quality coffee. Here are some links to very good real-time coverage of the event from people who are participating.
Monday’s photo essay on my holiday coffee-drinking adventures featured only some of the great coffeehouses I visited during my holiday. Here is the complete list with some notes on each.
In the tradition of the back-to-school composition on the theme “What I did this summer,” here are some images from a few of the cafés that kept me plied with extraordinary coffees at each of the many stops on my whirlwind holiday.
Counter Culture Coffee made a stir recently when it released its Direct Trade Certified Transparency Report — a worthy accomplishment that broke new ground among Direct Trade roasters. The only thing I have seen that compares to this level of transparency is Fair Trade Proof — a radical approach to transparency developed by Fair Trade pioneer Cooperative Coffees.
The price paid to smallholder farmer organizations is often the primary point of comparison different trading models. Unfortunately, a lack of precision can make these comparisons miselading.
