A few weeks ago, Starbucks made an incredible announcement. They were going to have nitro cold brew in their cafes!! I think this definitively answers the Symposium question, is cold brew a category or craze? OK, OK. I’m joking. The real earth-shaker is that Starbucks has issued the first US corporate bond for sustainability. The […]
In less than one month the gavel will sound to open The SCAA Event. That means it’s time for the annual Coffeelands preview of The Event’s best “origin content.” In my 2012 SCAA preview post, I divided my picks into three “streams of enlightenment”—“downstream” presentations that push knowledge of origin toward the marketplace, “upstream” presentations […]
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 […]
Nariño, Colombia, strikes me as a coffee origin that everyone in coffee knows, but very few people in coffee know well. . . I have had the extraordinary good fortune to get to know Nariño better than most over the past four-plus years as director of our Borderlands Coffee Project there. When I first started […]
Yesterday SCAA Symposium organizers posted a video of my presentation “A Simple Question: Castillo or Caturra?” Watch it in its entirety here. .
Earlier this month I was scheduled to faciltate a panel during the The SCAA Event titled “Sustainability in Practice”–a conversation with five women who are among the best thinkers (and doers) on sustainability issues in specialty coffee: Sarah Beaubien Vice President of Sustainability FARMER BROTHERS COFFEE Tracy Ging Vice President of Sustainability and Special Initiatives […]
Yesterday I had the honor to present the preliminary results of the Colombia Sensory Trial at the 2015 SCAA Symposium. The Colombia Sensory Trial is a cross-sector collaboration with allies in the research community (the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Kansas State University and World Coffee Research), industry (Counter Culture, Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, George […]
When we published our 2014 New Year’s resolutions back in January, at the top of the list was this: “enlist industry leaders and research institutes in a comparative cupping of two leading Colombian coffee varieties, Castillo and Caturra.” That public commitment set off nine months of frenetic activity during which we collaborated with the International […]
Kimberly Easson has been present at the creation of lots of noteworthy efforts to make the coffee trade more equitable. She was part of the original team that brought Fair Trade Certification to the U.S. coffee market in 1999 to create new market opportunities for smallolder farmers. In 2003, she co-founded the International Women’s Coffee […]
