The Coffeelands blogs suffers from a few coffee prejudices, which we readily admit to. Our geographical base is in Central America and therefore our coverage tends to be towards issues that are of great concern in this part of the world. We’re unabashedly Arabica centric as well. You’ll find it in our daily drink and […]
The Borderlands project took place on two sides of the Colombian – Ecuadorian border. In Nariño we know about the hidden potential to produce high quality Arabica coffees. We’ve shared some of the stories from there previously on this blog. Less than 100 miles away, while the Andes mountains continue tracing the spine of South […]
Let’s Talk Robusta 2013 was by all accounts bigger and better than its predecessor. Here are 10 of the most memorable quotes from the event.
Over the past two years, CRS has partnered with Sustainable Harvest to create Let’s Talk Robusta, a workshop series held during the importer’s annual Let’s Talk Coffee event. After more than a decade of working almost exclusively in the realm of specialty Arabica, we have seen Let’s Talk Robusta as a kind of market intelligence […]
Manuel Díaz is an independent consultant who helped CQI create its new R standards, which aim to do for Robustas what the Q standards have done for Arabicas. His presentation on Day Two of the 2013 edition of Let’s Talk Robusta reinforced the central appeal of the brilliant keynote delivered on Day One by Ken […]
The Coffee Review co-founder and specialty coffee pioneer Kenneth Davids opened the 2013 edition of Let’s Talk Robusta with a tour-de-force keynote address during which he exposed “The Robusta Myth” in the U.S. specialty marketplace, offered his own “Robusta realities,” and advocated forcefully for more sensory exploration of a coffee we still don’t really know.
The CRS Coffeelands Blog published perspectives from the intersection of coffee and international development from 2009-2013. We launched the blog because we believe that despite a quarter-century of investment and innovation to get closer to the source of our coffee, “there are still real opportunities for discovery and growth in terms of our understanding of […]
Colombia’s Federación Nacional de Cafeteros is a most remarkable institution. Among the many achievements of which the FNC is justifiably proud is its long tradition of coffee research. The Federation’s first annual budget, way back in 1927, included funding for research into coffee production and disease. In 1938, Colombia established a National Coffee Research Center, […]
CRS has been working to support smallholder coffee farmers — both in the coffeelands and in the U.S. marketplace — for the better part of 10 years. For most of that time we have kept a low profile, working quietly to help farmers increase coffee productivity, quality and income at origin and expand the market […]
Over the past two days I have summarized recent contributions to the current debate over the appropriate role for Robusta coffees in the specialty market and provided some context for our promotion of quality-differentiated Robusta. Today, some questions about aspects of the great debate that left me scratching my head.
