Right in the build up to the SCA, there popped up a bit of news out of Honduras that caught my attention. Like the villain in the in a cheesy horror movie, coffee leaf rust, better known as la roya, just won’t go away. Initial reports in late March said that there was an outbreak […]
This review is for those of you who were not able to make it to the lecture a few weeks ago. There was a lot of competing lectures held concomitantly with really interesting content. There is 0 chance of me getting to hear all the ones I want to be at. Yet when the Expo comes, […]
SCAA Preview in Depth: The Coffee Variety Conundrum: Does Breeding for Disease Resistance Come at the Expense of Flavor? Friday, April 15th, 9AM Room B407,Spanish translation available About this time last year, my first post for the Coffeelands Blog introduced this idea- the coffee variety conundrum – namely, how difficult it is to be a […]
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 […]
Greek mythology is full of mythical beasts that are created from a fusion of two distinct entities. Some great examples are the centaur, a half-human, half horse warrior and the harpy, a bird of prey with a woman’s face and chest. These are extreme examples of hybrids – the offspring of two very distinct […]
I have been writing here about the Colombia Sensory Trial for more than a year. With presentations of the findings coming up at Re:co Symposium in Sweden and the Nordic Roaster Forum in Denmark, there will certainly be more to say in the coming months. For now, however, I will let this topic rest, leaving […]
Over the past six weeks, this blog has been devoted exclusively to the CRS Colombian Varietal Cuppings–a series of comparative cuppings of Castillo and Caturra samples from our Borderlands project involving leading roasters and importers in the United States, Europe and Australia. Even when I took a week off from reporting on the results of […]
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 […]
I had the honor during this year’s SCAA Symposium of facilitating a panel discussion on the coffee leaf rust epidemic in Central America–a panel featuring some big names in coffee. In the end, some of the most memorable contributions to the conversation were made by folks not on the official agenda, including World Coffee Research […]
