In my travels in the coffeelands, I hear a familiar concern echoed by coffee growers: relevo generacional. All over the Americas, aging farmers are watching their children leave the farm for the city to pursue higher education and employment opportunities. With the coffee leaf rust epidemic, volatile market prices, a changing climate, low productivity, limited […]
Last month I published a post under the snarky title “It’s the market, stupid” along with snide Tweets like this one: Hey, market: you want quality, heirloom varieties, water stewardship, farmworker rights? Create incentives for them. http://t.co/8mGFcRnJ2F — Michael Sheridan (@coffeelands) April 7, 2014 I suggested that the best way to understand what […]
SCAA’s 2014 Expo opens in a little more than a month, which means it’s time for the annual CRS Coffeelands Blog SCAA preview. After a careful review of the lecture program, I wonder whether this year’s Expo may the best ever for folks like me coming in from the coffeelands.
Stumptown Coffee yesterday released its first microlot from our Borderlands project in Colombia, comprised of small lots from four farms in Nariño. If you are interested in exceptional coffee, where it comes from, or both, we humbly suggest three actions: READ the post below for more detail about the amazing growers behind this amazing coffee; […]
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 […]
It’s that time of year again — the time we all make New Year’s resolutions that are destined to be broken. So here are three from the coffeelands: Generate more results-based evidence. Help the coffee sector navigate uncharted waters. Borrow a page from the microfinance playbook. Only we plan on keeping these.
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.
David Griswold, ex-President of the SCAA and co-founder of the innovative coffee importer Sustainable Harvest, asked a panel of coffee luminaries at last month’s Let’s Talk Coffee event in El Salvador if the coffee business is broken. The answer was a resounding yes.
