Could a Coffee Maker Be Worth $11,000?

How the Clover is changing the way we think about coffee.
By Paul Adams
Posted Wednesday, March 5, 2008, at 6:58 AM ET

The New York Times used words like "cult object," "majestic," and "titillating"; the Economist called it "ingenious" and "sleek." The subject of these encomiums is, incongruously, a commercial coffee machine—the Clover 1s, an $11,000 device that brews regular coffee (not espresso) one cup at a time. Could the Clover represent that much of an advance in the state of the coffee art? I had to try it for myself.

I convinced the manufacturer, Coffee Equipment Company, to send me a demo model, but they didn't tell me, until the machine was already en route to my apartment, that it requires a fist-sized 30-amp commercial electric outlet. So that option didn't work out: The crated-up machine and a massive grinder sat tantalizingly unused in my building for a week, then went back. Fortunately, David Latourell, a company representative who flew from Seattle to meet with me, had pull at Cafe Grumpy, a Manhattan cafe that owns two of the machines. After hours, as the last customers finished their cups and left, the long-haired, fast-talking Seattleite and I wedged ourselves behind Grumpy's coffee bar, and I had my chance to play with a Clover at last.

The Clover is so eyebrow-raisingly expensive because it's not mass-produced: Each device is built to order by a small Seattle company. It brews coffee like a French press, but it's more dramatic to watch and much more precise. Unlike lesser methods of making coffee, which are no more reliable than their users and can't be counted on to produce the same cup twice, the Clover is equipped with a "PID algorithm" for regulating temperature and "programmable workflow modes" to help micromanage the brewing process. Latourell enumerates six variables that contribute to the taste of brewed coffee—choice of bean, grind, "dose" of coffee, brewing time, temperature, and amount of water. The first three, for better or worse, are in the hands of the barista ("Call me when you get a better grinder!" Latourell half-teases the Grumpy staff)—but the Clover can precisely regulate the last three.

The faceplate of the Clover is reminiscent of a high-end stereo and, with a gleaming stainless-steel surface and blue LED readout, is clearly designed to embody a similar tweaky-geeky aesthetic. A big, black knob allows me to navigate the configuration options and dial in each cup's specifications: I choose 16 ounces of water at 203 degrees Fahrenheit for 44 seconds—relatively brief compared with the few minutes a French press takes.

When I press the "Brew" button, a circular platform sinks down from the top of the machine into a steamy cylindrical operating chamber. I'm sure I'm not the first Clover user to experience a quick flashback to a vivid childhood memory—watching, horrified, as Darth Vader lowers Han Solo into his carbonite freezer. I have just a couple of seconds to pour a measure of coffee into the chamber before the built-in spigot activates and spurts exactly 16 ounces of hot water onto the grounds. The coffee steeps for the programmed 44 seconds, and then, like a French press in reverse, the platform rises, pushing the grounds back up to the surface. As it ascends, a vacuum separates the liquid from the grounds, sucking the brewed coffee down through a micro-perforated filter and into the hidden depths of the machine. By the time the platform returns to its original position (flush with the machine's top), all that's left on it is a tightly compressed puck of wet grounds, which I squeegee into a waste bin. A second press of the master button dispenses the coffee from the front of the machine.

Stationed at the Clover, I spend two hours and a $50 pound of good beans trying to make the coffee sing, to achieve the cup of my dreams.

The first cup has a muddy, dark taste with too much roasted flavor, although the butterscotch richness of the beans comes through. For the second cup, I keep the brewing time and the ratio of water to coffee the same, but I dial the temperature up from 203 degrees to 206 degrees. Immediately there's a difference: This one is far closer to perfect—resonant with floral and citric aromas and round, up-front sweetness—but it lacks a certain substance. I start to pick up the rhapsodic coffee-geek argot, bantering about brightness, notes, extraction. Latourell prescribes a coarser grind for the next cup, explaining to the baristas hovering near us that "counterintuitively, broadening the grind profile adds body!"

But this strategy doesn't seem to work: The third cup, brewed with the same parameters as the second, is thin, with none of the previous transporting scents. I recklessly crank the temperature to 210 degrees, and the coffee that squirts out is dramatically different—it could pass for a different bean. The complex jasmine notes that distinguished the cups so far are gone, replaced by a delicate wininess that reminds me of Kalamata olives. I wonder: Could I brew a cup with the jasmine and the olives side by side?

I'm becoming a Clover addict, just as I feared. It's not the tasty coffee itself that's drawing me in—although that caffeine euphoria certainly colors my mood. It's the joy of tinkering, really delving into the possibilities of a coffee bean in a way I've never considered before. After several more cups, each with their own quirks, it's time to go: The baristas have finished sweeping up around our feet and are clearly eager to leave. But there's one more cup I want to try: I dial in the same settings that produced cup No. 2, the greatest success so far. Forty-four seconds later, there it is, the exact same delicate, floral-scented brew I remember. That's the consistency you pay for.

The immediate consequence of the Clover and its precision isn't necessarily better coffee, but more attention to coffee. By creating this rigorous laboratorylike brewing environment, it encourages cafes to explore the nuances of different beans, where and how they're grown and dried and sorted and roasted. And the attention to nuance gets passed along to the customers: Grumpy's clientele can choose from a coffee menu listing several brews, including the Cruz del Sur, "punchy and bright with pear and green apple," and the San José El Yalú, "complex and crisp with butterscotch, grape, chocolate and plum."

The aspirational comparison of coffee to wine is obvious, and the passionate young Clover virtuosos at Cafe Grumpy indeed remind me of wine enthusiasts; they're seriously invested in their work, nothing like the sullen soy-foamers at Starbucks or even at other independent coffee shops I frequent. On the cafe's blog, barista Ed describes his recent visit to coffee farms in Panama.

For now, Latourell admits that wine may be "50 years ahead of coffee" technologically. "We're just starting to scratch the surface of what can be done with coffee, how we understand it." But that's changing fast. The world of winemaking is wracked by a tension between the old, individualistic ways, in which each wine tastes distinctively of its origin, and the new methods that produce best-selling wines in a uniform "global" style divorced from regional characteristics. The story of coffee is the reverse—until recently, coffees were blended and branded to suit a homogenous popular taste, and only now is there a rising interest in the expression of varietal and regional differences.

Is owning a Clover worth $11,000? Not for the individual—don't be silly. But even a smattering of Clovers in the right hands promises to broaden the way we think about coffee. The very fact that an $11,000 coffee machine is receiving such excited media attention seems like a clear sign that we're headed toward a "third wave" of coffee, an age of terroir, aided by technology that can give different beans the different careful treatments they deserve. In the foretold era, popular dark roasts, which obscure those subtleties, are scorned, and enlightened customers gladly pay exorbitantly for rare brews.

Watching the booming trade at Cafe Grumpy, the change seems inevitable: In certain circles, at least, the generic over-the-counter stimulant Latourell dismissively calls "brown liquid that costs a buck" will give way to increasingly common $10 and $15 cups of recherché coffee. At that rate, a small Clover designed for the home—"of course there's talk of making one," says Latourell—could start to sound like a smart, money-saving purchase.
Paul Adams writes about food and drinks. He can be reached at adams@pote.com.
this article was orginally posted on slate.com March 5th 2008
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2185655/

Ernesto Illy, Italy coffee giant, dies

The Associated Press
Article Launched: 02/06/2008 01:09:33 PM PST

ROME—Ernesto Illy, the longtime head of Italian coffee giant illycaffe SpA who traveled the world in search of the best blend of beans, has died at age 82.
Illy died Sunday in a hospital in Trieste, the port city in northeastern Italy where the company has its headquarters, company publicists said Wednesday. No cause of death was given.
A chemist and son of Francesco Illy, who founded the company in 1933, Ernesto Illy traveled extensively to select beans he hoped would yield a perfect cup of coffee. The company boasts it has an exclusive blend of beans from Brazil, Central America, India and Africa.
Illy is survived by four children and his wife. One son, Andrea, is chairman of the company, which distributes its coffee in more than 140 countries.

America’s hottest coffee houses

where the best espresso artisans are serving up their creations


By Rob Baedeker
Forbes Traveler.com
updated 8:05 a.m. PT, Wed., Jan. 16, 2008

On a recent rainy weekday morning in New York City, a man dressed in utility-worker garb stepped up to the counter at Café Grumpy, a cozy, brick-walled coffee house in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

“Just a cup of coffee,” he said.

The barista presented a menu of the café’s current selections: Tres Santos Dota Co-op, Cauca, Colombia; Mandheling Padang, Sumatra, Indonesia and several more “single origin” beans, which would be ground to order and then custom-brewed by the cup in a piston- and vacuum-powered machine called the Clover 1s.

In the new world of specialty coffee, there is no longer such thing as “just a cup of coffee.”

While Starbucks may have made venti non-fat lattes a staple of millions of Americans’ mornings (and afternoons, and evenings), a new wave of independent coffee roasters and cafes like Grumpy are re-focusing their attention on the art and craft of coffee selection, roasting, brewing and presentation. The post-Starbucks generation of coffeehouses have become both gathering spots for coffee connoisseurs as well as satellite campuses for educating newcomers about respect for the bean.

“Starbucks and [Berkeley, Calif.- based] Peet’s were trailblazers in the '60s and '70s,” says David Latourell of the Coffee Equipment Company, makers of the Clover 1s machine. “They were the first ones to say, ‘Let’s do specialty coffee.’ People hadn’t tried that before.” (And in case you were wondering, Peet’s actually opened in 1966, and Starbuck’s got its start in 1971.)

But the new independent coffee houses, says Latourell, “are focused on the smaller scale, and on de-commodifying the process. These smaller roasters are not buying coffee at volumes that efface the distinctions [between different places of origin]. They’re building direct relationships with coffee growers at the source. They’re also about bringing coffee out of the caffeine delivery mode and into the realm of culinary experience.”

“It’s about getting back to the basics,” says Eileen Hassi, owner of Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco. “There’s a real emphasis on the flavors and terroir of coffee, and on brewing espresso for the taste of espresso, not just as the base for milkshake or big, sugary, milky drink.”

Hassi opened Ritual in 2005, and almost overnight the café was inundated with coffee aficionados and neophytes alike, who were lured by the smells—and sounds—of lovingly handled beans.

So what does a well-treated coffee bean sound like? “That clacking noise you hear when you walk into Ritual is the sound of us dosing the espresso into the portafilter basket,” says Hassi. In layman’s terms, that means the barista is grinding and releasing the beans gram by gram into the cupped handle that holds the grounds during the brewing process. The reason it’s dropped in such small doses, explains Hassi, is that if you put it in all at once, “static electricity would cause the espresso to clump and then it wouldn’t extract perfectly evenly.”

She admits, “We're a little obsessive.”

What fuels this kind of obsession—beyond a steady diet of caffeine—is a passion for coffee, on multiple levels. Latourell explains that, in the new generation of independent coffeehouses, the true barista “is not just a fast-food worker. They care about all of the links in the chain, starting with the farmer who grows the coffee trees, and they can talk to you knowledgeably about all of those links.”

Connie Blumhardt, publisher of Roast magazine, agrees that the denizens of today’s specialty coffee world are much more informed than their predecessors. “Specialty coffee was in its infancy 20 years ago,” she explains. “Today, with internet blogs, industry trade shows, barista competitions and regional roaster trainings, education is passed from industry professional to industry professional with ease, and most are very willing to share their knowledge.”

Luckily for those whose vocabularies don’t yet include terms like “dosing” and “portafilter”—or for those who may need help discerning between a Tres Santos Dota Co-op and a Mandheling Padang bean—this new crop of coffee lovers are eager to share their knowledge with customers, too.

This is what happened to the unsuspecting gentleman who tried to order an old-fashioned cup of joe at Café Grumpy. The barista enthusiastically explained the characteristics of the different single-cup options on the menu. In the space of a few minutes, the customer’s order transformed from “just a cup of coffee” to a custom-brewed, medium-bodied roast with mild acidity, a blueberry fragrance and lingering chocolate on the finish.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22671955/

At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee

January 23, 2008
At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee
By OLIVER SCHWANER-ALBRIGHT

SAN FRANCISCO

WITH its brass-trimmed halogen heating elements, glass globes and bamboo paddles, the new contraption that is to begin making coffee this week at the Blue Bottle Café here looks like a machine from a Jules Verne novel, a 19th-century vision of the future.

Called a siphon bar, it was imported from Japan at a total cost of more than $20,000. The cafe has the only halogen-powered model in the United States, and getting it here required years of elliptical discussions with its importer, Jay Egami of the Ueshima Coffee Company.

“If you just want equipment you’re not ready,” Mr. Egami said in an interview. But, he added, James Freeman, the owner of the cafe, is different: “He’s invested time. He’s invested interest. He is ready.”

Professionals have long been willing to pay prices in the five figures for the perfect espresso machine, but the siphon bar does not make espresso. It makes brewed coffee, as does another high-end coffee maker, the $11,000 Clover, which makes one cup at a time. Together, they signal the resurgence of brewing among the most obsessive coffee enthusiasts.

Could this be the age of brewed coffee? “We’re right there at the threshold,” said George Howell of Terroir Coffee, a retailer of roasted and green beans. “Coffee has never been a noble beverage because the means to perfectly produce it haven’t existed,” said Mr. Howell, who is also a founder of the Cup of Excellence, an annual competition that seeks to identify the best beans in each coffee-producing nation.

But, he said, with recent advances in coffee-making technology, “now you can get perfect extraction.”

Mr. Freeman is not trying to end the era of espresso. He still starts his days with a cappuccino, and his cafe serves drinks mostly from espresso machines, including a lovingly refurbished San Marco from the 1980s. But he’s excited by the possibilities of brewed coffee.

“Siphon coffee is very delicate,” he said. “It’s sweeter and juicier, and the flavors change as the temperature changes. Sometimes it has a texture so light it’s almost moussey.”

A professionwide interest in brewed coffee has driven the stealth spread of the Clover. Introduced less than two years ago, it has become standard equipment at some of the country’s most progressive cafes, including Intelligentsia in Chicago, La Mill in Los Angeles and Caffe Vita in Seattle.

Stumptown, of Portland, Ore., recently installed four Clovers in its location in the Ace Hotel. New York City now has five of the devices, two of them at the Chelsea branch of Café Grumpy, which has used them to dispense 60,000 cups in a little over a year.

So far, the Clover is still something of a cult object, with just over 200 machines scattered around the world. But it might soon become a common sight: Starbucks has just bought two.

Designed by three Stanford graduates, it lets the user program every feature of the brewing process, including temperature, water dose and extraction time. (It even has an Ethernet connection that can feed a complete record of its configurations to a Web database.) Not only is each cup brewed to order, but the way each cup is brewed can be tailored to a particular bean — light or dark roast, acidic or sweet, and so on.

The Clover works something like an inverted French press: coffee grounds go into a brew chamber, hot water shoots in and a powerful piston slowly lifts and plunges a filter, forcing the coffee out through a nozzle in the front. The final step, when a cake of spent grounds rises majestically to the top, is so titillating to coffee fanatics that one of them posted a clip of it on YouTube.

“There is some gee-whizness to it,” said Doug Zell, a founder of Intelligentsia. “But hopefully the focus goes back to the cup of coffee.”

At the Stumptown Annex in Portland, the focus is entirely on the cup of coffee. As many as 35 different coffees are on the menu at the small cafe, and unlike the six other Stumptown locations, it doesn’t have a single espresso machine.

The Annex first brewed individual cups with cone filters, but now everything is made with a Clover. “You get more of the delicate and floral flavors, the subtle sweetness, the notes of perfume and citrus,” said Duane Sorensen, the owner of Stumptown. “The delicate, pretty, sexy flavors show in a Clover.”

“A Clover gives you greater control over the variables,” Mr. Zell said. “It’s a clean, crisp cup, and it tends to play better to coffees that are higher toned, brighter. Like the coffees of East Africa, or the more intricate coffees of the Americas.”

It is those brighter notes that excite serious coffee drinkers as they take an interest in single-origin, micro-lot and direct-trade beans — those from specific regions, even particular growers, that are prized for their distinctive characteristics.

“Steep coffee in water, and you’re going to taste gradations of flavor you’re simply not going to find in espresso,” said David Arnold, director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute in New York. Though he is an espresso partisan, Mr. Arnold allows that brewing highlights the more subtle flavors of single-origin and micro-lot beans. “Especially if it’s roasted fresh,” he said. “The differences are astounding.”

Where the Clover is a workhorse, and its genius is in its programming, brewing coffee with a siphon bar is a fickle art and takes patience to master.

The secret is in how it’s stirred.

A siphon pot has two stacked glass globes, and works a little like a macchinetta, that stove-top gadget wrongly called an espresso maker by generations of graduate students. As water vapor forces water into the upper globe the coffee grounds are stirred by hand with a bamboo paddle. (In Japan, siphon coffee masters carve their own paddles to fit the shape of their palms.)

The goal is to create a deep whirlpool in no more than four turns without touching the glass. Posture is important. So is timing: siphon coffee has a brewing cycle of 45 to 90 seconds.

“The whirlpool, it messes with your mind,” said Mr. Freeman, the owner of the Blue Bottle. “There’s no way to rush it.”

Mr. Freeman said he practiced stirring plain water for months to develop muscle memory before he brewed his first cup of siphon coffee. Even now he starts every day with a five-minute warm-up. The evidence of good technique is in the sediment: the grounds should form a tight dome dotted with small bubbles, the sign of proper extraction.

Mr. Freeman keeps pictures of his domes on his iPhone. “It’s active, sucking out the air and foam,” he said about one of them. “I love the kinetic energy, the aliveness. That’s my best dome.”

Even if the siphon bar turns coffee making into a spectacle, the biggest difference is in the flavor it extracts from prized beans like Gololcha, a dry-processed Ethiopian with long jammy berry notes that turn floral as the coffee cools.

“It’s kaleidoscopic,” Mr. Freeman said. “It’s forcing you to pay attention to every sip, because the next one is going to be different. I feel like when we serve it we’ll have to ask people to just pour it in their cup and smell it for the first minute or so.”

Rugasira’s coffee wins $50,000 prize

Sunday, 2nd December, 2007
By Emmy Olaki

GOOD African Coffee Company owned by Andrew Rugasira has won a $50,000 prize in the tightly-contested race in which only six finalists were awarded.

The other winners were Enterprise URWIBUTSO, of Rwanda, Kencell, of Kenya, Tele-10 of Rwanda and Virtual City of Kenya, each of which received a $50,000 prize during the inaugural Legatum Pioneer of Prosperity Awards in Kigali Rwanda.

There are awards are an initiative of Legatum, a private firm that invests in capital markets and in initiatives that support human and social development around the world. They were jointly organised with the OTF Group, a firm that helps build competitiveness in emerging economies by providing analytical tools to design and implement innovation based strategies, and the John Templeton Foundation.
They are designed to reward small-and-medium enterprises business leaders in East Africa. AAA Growers of Kenya emerged first winners from 450 competitors who took part in the event.

They pocketed $100,000 in prize money. Rwanda President Paul Kagame, who officiated at the awards over the weekend said employers who consider their workforce as cheap labour had no place in Africa.

“Effective companies must put a lot of value in their workforce, and then they will be welcome in Africa,” he said. The President said African entrepreneurs should be role models and responsible citizens who should have respect for the environment and good corporate citizens who should pay their taxes. “The old mindset that the environment must be exploited at all cost no longer works because we know better. We must renew these resources and not recklessly destroy them.

“ And this must be the mindset of both the Government and the private sector,” Kagame insisted. Alan McCormick, the Legatum managing director, said: “Each of the finalists is a shining example of flourishing enterprise and the wards unequivocally demonstrated that these entrepreneurs have earned their place alongside the very best in the world. “We hope they will inspire a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs to follow in their footsteps,” said. He said Africa is full of success stories not yet told in the West.

“They are creating their own futures through enterprise and bringing a dramatic improvement in quality of life, something a tenfold increase in aid can’t achieve.”

The criteria for choosing the winners was based on innovative products and services, sustainable profitability, employee compensation, training and work conditions and environmental consciousness.

“We were looking for a world-class business led by a strong and ethical management committed to not only upholding the highest standards of corporate behavior but also growing their businesses aggressively.”

This article can be found on-line at: http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/220/600142

Seattle restaurateur spills the beans on the coffee industry

By KATHERINE SATHER
Saturday, November 17, 2007
KING5.com staff


SEATTLE – Michael Hebberoy is known in the Pacific Northwest for his underground dining projects.

He operates One Pot, a roving restaurant of sorts that operates away from the eyes of health inspectors and serves meals in unexpected places, like abandoned Seattle garages and glass studios.

But a project with Seattle coffee roastery Caffé Vita is taking his dinner events as far away as Guatemala, Ethiopia and Brazil.

He's accompanying Vita on buying trips where the roastery is forging relationships with coffee farmers. Along the way, Hebberoy cooks for the locals, and gets them talking about the state of coffee in their country. He is documenting what he learns in an online media project that's just getting started. Through photos, video and journal entries, he aims to help coffee-drinkers learn a little more about where their favorite beverage comes from.

"For me, it's the opportunity to tell stories that aren't being told," he said. "(Coffee) is this great thing, well appreciated and a lot of us need it daily. It is also the second most valuable commodity traded on the planet next to oil … It comes from very war-torn, controversial, conflicted areas on the planet."
Caffe Vita has decided to buy its beans directly from the source, eliminating all coffee brokers and middlemen. This is important because, "there's sometimes anywhere between 10 and 15 hands that touch the coffee before it gets to final consumer," Hebberoy said. "It does a number of things in regards to quality."

Vita employees say the trips allow them to see the actual farms where the coffee is grown, how the workers are being treated, and whether the farmers are socially and ecologically responsible.

"We're able to pay them what they deserve without any money going to any other exporter or importer," said Daniel Shewmaker, a Vita employee who went on the trip to Guatemala.

Besides the Web site, Hebberoy plans to produce small books to distribute in coffee shops to tell the story.

The highlight of each visit is a dinner party he throws together, inviting all the players in the coffee trade – from writers and bankers to fair trade organizers, politicians and farmers. Once he rounds them up at the dinner table, he cooks with them. During the meal, he gets them talking.

In his journal, he describes the dinner party in Guatemala this way:

"The table erupted. the exporter had much to say. So did the Yale-educated granddaughter of a coffee baron, as did several of the more flush estate owners – the actual farmers were mostly quiet. The “vocal set” as we will call them ripped into the side of fair trade – denouncing it as a corrupt system, a flawed system, where often the “premium” price does little more than line the pockets of such and such cooperative manager.

"The exporter had much to say about the quality of the fair trade beans he had received in the past, uneven and dodgy, and the lack of accountability with ever changing management structures. The more vocal diners raised voices in a passionate disgust at how the “developed world” uses their countries impoverishment as a marketing tool."

The drying porch - where coffee is put after it's harvested - at a farm called Finca Nuevo Viñas in Guatemala.

Hebberoy, 31, dove into the project knowing nothing about the coffee trade. For this reason, he calls his project "An Unprofessional Study of Coffee."

Vita employees met one of the farmers they're doing business with at the Guatemala dinner party.

"It's doing business in a very – manner that's so much more human," Shewmaker said. "Sitting down at dinner enabled that to happen."

The project is ongoing. Once back in Seattle, Hebberoy hosts a dinner to present what he learned on each trip. Guests eat the same dish he cooked in that country (in Guatemala - a Mayan stew), drink the coffee they acquired and view video footage .

A trip to Ethiopia is planned for January, and in February the group heads to Indonesia.

"We are in a global economy," he said. "The more of a relationship we have to the products we consume, I think the more the world will change."

Coffee 'reduces the risk of skin cancer'

By Nic Fleming Science Correspondent
Telegraph.co.uk
12:01am GMT 09/11/2007

Drinking coffee can cut the risk of skin cancer by more than a third, scientists say.

Woman drinking a cappucino. Coffee 'reduces the risk of skin cancer'
A good healthy dose: scientists believe caffeine could stop skin cancers spreading

Researchers found that people who drank more than six cups of caffeinated coffee a day reduced their chances of developing the most common form of skin cancer by 35 per cent, while those who drank two or three cups were 12 per cent less likely to have the disease.

Scientists believe caffeine could stop skin cancers spreading by stopping cells dividing, or by acting as an antioxidant.

Cases of skin cancer have quadrupled for men and tripled for women over the past 25 years in Britain, partly because of the increase in holidays in the sun.

Around 75,000 cases of non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC), the milder form of the disease, are diagnosed each year. Dr Ernest Abel, whose study was published in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention, said: "The decreased prevalence in non-melanoma skin cancer associated with daily consumption of caffeinated coffee was dose-related and consistent with other studies.
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"Among the possible explanations for caffeine's protective effect on NMSC are an antioxidant effect and/or inhibition of DNA synthesis and cell division."

Dr Abel, of Wayne State University, Detroit, and colleagues compared rates of NMSC among more than 77,300 white women aged 50 and over. They excluded women of other ethnic origins as they reported much lower rates of the disease.

The researchers said the findings should apply equally to men and women of all ages. Drinking decaffeinated coffee had no effect on participants' chances of developing skin cancer.

Coffee condoms promote safe sex in Ethiopia

David Batty and agencies
Friday November 2, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Doctors have long argued over the health effects of coffee, but its reputation looks set to receive a boost thanks to a new flavored condom that aims to encourage safer sex in Ethiopia.

Around 300,000 of the coffee condoms were sold in one week when they were launched in September, according to the US charity DKT International.

It hopes to tap into Ethiopia's coffee mania as a means to tackle high rates of HIV in the country, which is said to have invented the drink.

Article continues
The charity said that with 2.1% of Ethiopians infected with Aids - and more than 7% in the capital, Addis Ababa - the flavored prophylactic was more than a novelty.

"Everybody likes the flavor of coffee," says a DKT spokeswoman.

The condoms are sold in packs of three for 1 birr, or about 5 pence - about half the price of a cup of coffee in Addis Ababa's cafes, and much cheaper than most other condom brands.

The dark brown condoms smell like Ethiopia's popular macchiato, an espresso with a generous amount of cream and sugar.

"It is about time to use an Ethiopian flavor for beautiful Ethiopian girls," said Dereje Alemu, a 19-year-old university student.

The product was developed after complaints by some users about the latex scent of plain condoms.

DTK has previously introduced flavored condoms in other parts of the world in an attempt to appeal to local tastes. These included condoms scented with the infamously stinky durian fruit in Indonesia, and sweet corn-fragranced condoms in China.

The charity's latest condom has attracted some criticism in deeply conservative Ethiopia.

"It's inappropriate," said Bedilu Assefa, a spokesman for the Ethiopian Orthodox church, whose millions of followers are encouraged to abstain from sex outside marriage. "We're proud of our coffee."

But even those not sold on the idea of coffee condoms recognize the importance of safe sex.

"I hate coffee-flavored condoms," said Tadesse Teferi, a 37-year-old mechanic. "But I use ordinary condoms when I have sex with ladies other than my wife."

Fair Trade in Bloom

VARGINHA, Brazil — Rafael de Paiva was skeptical at first. If he wanted a “fair trade” certification for his coffee crop, the Brazilian farmer would have to adhere to a long list of rules on pesticides, farming techniques, recycling and other matters. He even had to show that his children were enrolled in school.

“I thought, ‘This is difficult,’” recalled the humble farmer. But the 20 percent premium he recently received for his first fair trade harvest made the effort worthwhile, Mr. Paiva said, adding, it “helped us create a decent living.”

More farmers are likely to receive such offers, as importers and retailers rush to meet a growing demand from consumers and activists to adhere to stricter environmental and social standards.

Mr. Paiva’s beans will be in the store-brand coffee sold by Sam’s Club, the warehouse chain of Wal-Mart Stores. Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s and Starbucks already sell some fair trade coffee.

“We see a real momentum now with big companies and institutions switching to fair trade,” said Paul Rice, president and chief executive of TransFair USA, the only independent fair trade certifier in the United States.

The International Fair Trade Association, an umbrella group of organizations in more than 70 countries, defines fair trade as reflecting “concern for the social, economic and environmental well-being of marginalized small producers” and does “not maximize profit at their expense.”

According to Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, a group of fair trade certifiers, consumers spent approximately $2.2 billion on certified products in 2006, a 42 percent increase over the previous year, benefiting over seven million people in developing countries.

Like consumer awareness of organic products a decade ago, fair trade awareness is growing. In 2006, 27 percent of Americans said they were aware of the certification, up from 12 percent in 2004, according to a study by the New-York based National Coffee Association.

Fair trade products that have experienced the biggest jump in demand include coffee, cocoa and cotton, according to the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations.

Dozens of other products, including tea, pineapples, wine and flowers, are certified by organizations that visit farmers to verify that they are meeting the many criteria that bar, among other things, the use of child labor and harmful chemicals.

There is no governmental standard for fair trade certification, the same situation as with “organic” until a few years ago. Some fair trade produce also carries the organic label, but most does not. One important difference is the focus of the labels: organic refers to how food is cultivated, while fair trade is primarily concerned with the condition of the farmer and his laborers.

Big chains are marketing fair trade coffee to varying degrees. All the espresso served at the 5,400 Dunkin’ Donuts stores in the United States, for example, is fair trade. All McDonald’s stores in New England sell only fair trade coffee. And in 2006, Starbucks bought 50 percent more fair trade coffee than in 2005.

Fair trade produce remains a minuscule percentage of world trade, but it is growing. Only 3.3 percent of coffee sold in the United States in 2006 was certified fair trade, but that was more than eight times the level in 2001, according to TransFair USA.

Although Sam’s Club already sells seven fair trade imports, including coffee, this will be the first time it has put its Member’s Mark label on a fair trade product, which Mr. Rice of TransFair called “a statement of their commitment to fair trade.”

He added, “The impact in terms of volume and the impact in terms of the farmers and their families is quite dramatic.”

Michael Ellgass, the director of house brands for Sam’s Club, said the company could afford to pay fair trade’s premium because it has reduced the number of middlemen.

Coffee usually passes from farmers through roasters, packers, traders, shippers and warehouses before arriving in stores. But Sam’s Club will buy shelf-ready merchandise directly from Café Bom Dia, the roaster here in Brazil’s lush coffee country.

“We are cutting a number of steps out of the process by working directly with the farmer,” Mr. Ellgass said.

Some critics of fair trade say that working with thousands of small farmers makes strict adherence to fair trade rules difficult.

Others argue that fair trade coffee is as exploitive as the conventional kind, especially in countries that produce the highest-quality beans — like Colombia, Ethiopia and Guatemala. Fair trade farmers there are barely paid more than their counterparts in Brazil, though their crops become gourmet brands, selling for a hefty markup, said Geoff Watts, vice president for coffee at Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea, a coffee importer.

But in Brazil, a nation with little top-grade coffee, the partnership between small producers and big retailers is a better blend, Mr. Watts said.

Fair trade coffee farmers in Brazil are paid at least $1.29 a pound, compared with the current market rate of roughly $1.05 per pound, said Sydney Marques de Paiva, president of Café Bom Dia.

Most coffee farmers are organized into cooperatives, and some of that premium finances community projects like schools or potable water.

Like most of his cooperative’s 3,000-odd members — and three-quarters of coffee growers worldwide — Mr. Paiva, the coffee farmer (no relation to Mr. Marques de Paiva), farms less than 25 acres of land. He produces around 200 132-pound sacks for the co-op, with 70 percent of that sold as fair trade to Café Bom Dia.
New World Times
Andrew Downie

The company would buy more if there were more of a market for fair trade coffee, it said.

The fair trade crop brought Mr. Paiva about 258 reais ($139) a sack, compared with about 230 reais for the sacks that were not fair trade. For the latest crop, that meant an additional 3,920 reais ($2,116) for him, a huge sum here in the impoverished mountains of Minas.

“It’s been great for us,” Mr. Paiva said with a huge, toothless grin. “I call the people from the co-op my family now.”

Mr. Ellgass, the Sam’s Club executive, said the chain hoped to expand its fair trade goods.

So do Brazil’s farmers. “Everybody is doing their best to come up to standard so we can sell our coffee as fair trade,” said Conceição Peres da Costa, one of the co-op’s growers. “Everybody wants to earn as much as he can.”

CITIZEN BEAN DEBUTS IN TIME FOR HOLIDAYS 2007

Organic, Fair-Trade Coffee-Of-The-Month Club
Featuring “COFFEE WITH A CONSCIENCE” Launches Today

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – September 27, 2007 – Citizen Bean (www.citizenbean.com) an online subscription coffee-roaster-of-the-month club offering the best sustainable and complex roasts from small-batch “specialty” roasters throughout the country, goes live today, in time for holiday gift-giving.

Each month, the Citizen Bean subscriber will receive an award coffee from one of the country’s foremost micro-roasters, delivered just days after it has been roasted. Along with a monthly coffee selection, subscribers will be treated to specially sourced surprise gifts and coffee accoutrements, all exquisitely hand-wrapped and packed with care.

Dubbed “Coffee with a Conscience,” Citizen Bean celebrates the artistry of the independent coffee roaster. As the specialty segment of the coffee industry grows in power and sales figures, it has become apparent that the niche marketing of “specialty” roasts can be a tool to help coffee growers, many of them subsistence farmers, improve their lives and lift themselves out of poverty.

Company Founder Malcolm Stearns states “ Citizen Bean is inspired by the well known movie character John Foster Kane, a generous and idealistic champion of the underprivileged. At Citizen Bean, our goal is to advance the ideals of fair trade and sustainable products and foster sustainable development in as many coffee-growing communities as possible. We want our customers to feel that when they purchase a monthly subscription to Citizen Bean, for themselves or as a gift, not only will they be receiving a superior product, they will be contributing to a cause they can feel positive about supporting.”

Citizen Bean’s commitment to the environment and social responsibility continues beyond our product offerings. Each of our roasters designates a portion of their sales to donate back to a charity of their choice. Additionally, whenever possible, we use post-consumer and recycled materials for our packaging, shipping and collateral.

Contact: Beth Ellen Keyes 646 485 7330 bekeyes@citizenbean.com

Fair-trade coffee price unchanged after 10 years

Kathryn Young
National Post

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Coffee drinkers who prefer a shot of social justice with their morning java might be surprised to learn that the minimum price paid to fair trade coffee-growers hasn't changed in 10 years.

"It's like not taking a raise in 10 years," said Monika Firl, producer relations manager for Cooperative Coffees -- a group of 22 small coffee roasters in Canada and the U.S. who import only organic fair trade coffees.

"Everything is slower than it should be," said Robert Clarke, executive director of Transfair Canada, which certifies Canadian businesses who sell fair trade products.

Coffee producers are assured a minimum price -- US$1.19 per pound of Arabica coffee beans or US$1.21 depending on what part of the world the coffee is grown -- even when the volatile market price drops below that, as it has for most of the past seven years.

"I wish it was $20 a pound," said Mr. Clarke, who considered unilaterally offering a higher price, but was told that wouldn't show unity with FLO -- Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, which monitors and certifies the coffee-growing co-ops to which farmers belong, as well as sets the minimum price. Transfair Canada is one of 20 FLO members along with three producer groups representing Africa, Asia and Caribbean/Latin America.

The Caribbean/Latin American group proposed a nominal increase in the minimum price last year. Canada and other countries supported the increase, but FLO said it wanted to overhaul the entire process for evaluating how and when minimum prices are set for all fair trade products, not just coffee, Mr. Clarke said. FLO also wanted to consult with the African and Asian groups.

FLO's answer on a price increase is expected in early October during its annual meeting in Bonn, Germany.

"In my eyes, it shouldn't impact the consumer," he said, citing the example of VIA Rail, which moved last year to offer only fair trade certified coffee. The per cup increase in price would have been only 1.2 cents, so the company opted not to charge consumers more.

"The demand will hopefully drive down the pricing," Mr. Clarke said, acknowledging that some retailers will probably try to raise prices.

Fair trade coffee pricing is complicated. On top of the minimum price, coffee growers receive a social premium -- increased in June from five to 10 cents per pound -- that helps communities build schools, health centres and other improvements. And an organic premium -- increased from 15 to 20 cents -- is paid to organic coffee growers since their costs are higher.

Meanwhile, Cooperative Coffees -- which includes five Canadian coffee roasters in Toronto, Whitehorse, Chicoutimi, Montreal and Almonte, Ont. -- went ahead two years ago to increase the minimum price they pay for their coffee. Subsequent increases mean they now pay US$1.56 (including the two premiums) and propose increasing that to $1.61 at its annual meeting in two weeks.

"It ultimately didn't affect our price [to consumers]," explained Craig Hall, president of Equator Coffee in Almonte. Although the cooperative pays more for coffee, it also eliminates the middleman by dealing directly with coffee producers.

Fair trade coffee sales in Canada have risen an average of 52% a year since 2002. By volume, they've risen more than five-fold from 425,000 kilograms in 2002 to 2.2 million kilograms in 2006, while the estimated retail sales value has risen from $12.8-million to $67.2-million in the same time period.

This article was originally posted on September 17th, 2007 by canada.com
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=08e60811-889f-4c4b-a353-563c7a4a2be6&k=37832

Specialty Coffee Names Due Next Year

13 September 2007
Posted to the web 13 September 2007 by allafrica.com
Kigali

Major coffee producing countries such as Ethiopia and Brazil have coffee brand names that Rwanda had not developed yet. Now the government coffee agency, the US aid agency and a local university are targeting to have the first specialty brand name 'KIVU' out on the market very soon, RNA reports.

"I'm sure the first one to emerge will be KIVU since Rwandan coffees coming from the Kivu Lake region are very unique, complex and exceptional in flavor profile and balance", said Dr. Tim Schilling, director of the US government funded project - SPREAD that has been working with thousands local coffee growers.

Ethiopia has specialty brand names such as 'Sidama' and 'Yirgachefe' that have been at the centre of controversy between the Ethiopian government on the one hand with coffee giant Starbucks and the US government - on the other.

Dr. Schilling told RNA that OCIR CAFE, the National University of Rwanda and the SPREAD project will be producing a Coffee Appellation scheme for Rwanda this year based on taste data collected on over 140 Rwandan coffees.

"We will correlate the taste profiles of Rwandan coffees with Rwandan geographic data like altitude, soil types, rainfall.", said Schilling. Then we will develop an Appellation Map showing the different unique taste profiles of Rwandan coffees by region in Rwanda, he added.

$55 for a kilo!

He said this will lead to international Specialty Brand names like Sidama, Yirgachefe, Harar and many more. "For us (Rwanda) it will be like, KIVU, GANKENKE, HUYE, BUKONYA, BICUMBI." Schilling explained.

Rwanda's reputation as a producer of top-quality specialty coffee took another leap with the results of its first-ever Golden Cup national competition held August 28-31.

Coffee may be selling internationally at less than $30 a kilo but the competition rated a Coffee from the north region-based SDL Muyongwe washing station at a record $55 for the same quantity.

American companies Intelligentsia Coffee and Stumptown Coffee bought the coffee at that price. Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee has been selling ZIRIKANA coffee from Northern Rwanda on its shelves.

A new cupping laboratory, a facility for assessing coffee taste and quality in Southern Rwanda, served as the venue for the 2007 Rwandan Golden Cup. An international jury of 18 coffee experts scored the coffees using a strict protocol, eliminating coffees with the lowest scores until only 10 coffees remained.

Five of the 10 winning coffees earned a score of at least 90 out of 100 for quality and taste as evaluated by the jury. These five coffees also received the competition's presidential award.

The coffees were evaluated for taste and quality by highly trained national and international juries. The entire process was monitored by consulting firm - Ernst & Young - in order to ensure fairness and transparency.

Community Coffee, Groundwork Coffee, Thousand Hills Coffee, Counter Culture Coffee, Howell Select Coffees, Union Coffee Roasters (London), Intelligentsia Coffee, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Starbucks Coffee are among the approximately 30 wholesale roasters now buying Rwandan coffees.

Independence soon

The US aid agency may have invest $16 million to put the Rwandan coffee sector into shape but Dr. Schilling says a time when local growers will be working independently is "approaching very rapidly". USAID/SPREAD will transform itself into a completely Rwandan project in 2009, he said.

Local companies like RWASHOSCCO, RFCA, HORIZON, MISOZI, and others have sprung up to assist the grower groups promote, market, and export the Specialty Coffees.

"Scores of relationships between Rwandan coffee producers and US or European coffee companies have been established and it is these business relations that will continue with no need of 'expatriate' assistance to make them happen or to keep them going", said Schilling.

The American expert says Rwandans will grow the specialty coffee sector from about $5 million in total foreign exchange earnings today to well over $25 million by 2011.

"The ability of Rwandans to know and understand their own coffees, their taste profiles, and the true market value of their coffees is Paramount to Rwanda's success so far and will remain Paramount as Rwanda continues its climb to the top of the International Specialty Coffee Industry as a prized, world class coffee that apologizes to no body", he said.

There are 17 wholesale and 9 retail roasters from the US, Canada, Britain and The Netherlands that are importing Rwandan coffees. There are also 9 companies that import green coffee beans straight from farmers.

Dr. Schilling says the list is not exhaustive but largely represents most of the companies that have direct relationships with local companies. (End)

To Burundi and Beyond for Coffee’s Holy Grail

The New York Times
September 12, 2007
By PETER MEEHAN

DUANE SORENSON had planned to fly to Yemen, rattle up dirt roads in dusty four-by-fours and dart through the Arabian sky in prop planes as he toured the country searching for open-minded coffee growers. Mr. Sorenson, who is the owner of Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland, Ore., intended to offer the farmers more money than anyone ever had before in return for a promise to improve their crops.

But a mix-up with his passport left him stuck in Washington. Disappointed but undeterred, he boarded a plane for Guatemala City instead. When he arrived, he ate tortillas, beans and tilapia with the owner of Finca El Injerto in the western Huehuetenango department, one of the most celebrated coffee farms in Central America.

It was a roundabout way to go for a meal. But Mr. Sorenson and a few like-minded coffee hunters around the country will go almost anywhere, do almost anything and pay almost any price in pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee. For people at Stumptown and friendly competitors like Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters and Tea Traders of Chicago and Counter Culture Coffee of Durham, N.C., long trips to remote farms for meetings without immediate payoffs are necessary steps in a much bigger goal: reinventing the coffee business.

“These people have an almost unbelievable ability to source exquisite, unique coffees,” Mark Prince, senior editor at the coffee appreciation Web site coffeegeek.com, wrote in an e-mail.

Connie Blumhardt, publisher of the coffee magazine Roast, concurs: “They are certainly the leaders right now. Some smaller roasters just worship them, like they’re these coffee megagods.”

“Direct trade” is the most popular name of the style of business practiced by these coffee companies, known as roasters. It means, most simply, that the roasters buy their beans directly from the farms and cooperatives that grow them, not from brokers.

The term was popularized by Geoff Watts, director of coffee and green coffee buyer for Intelligentsia. (Mr. Sorenson’s air miles last week paled beside those of Mr. Watts, who flew to Burundi with another coffee roaster to consult with groups who want to revive that country’s once-great coffee tradition.)

Direct trade — which also means intensive communication between the buyer and the grower — stands in stark contrast to the old (but still prevalent) model, in which international conglomerates buy coffee by the steamer ship, through brokers, for the lowest price the commodity market will bear.

It also represents, at least for many in the specialty coffee world, an improvement on labels like Fair Trade, bird-friendly or organic. Such labels relate to how the coffee is grown and may persuade consumers to pay a little extra for their beans, but offer no assurance about flavor or quality. Direct-trade coffee companies, on the other hand, see ecologically sound agriculture and prices above even the Fair Trade premium both as sound business practices and as a route to better-tasting coffee.

By spending months every year visiting farms, these roasters seek to offer coffee that is produced as well as it can be, bought responsibly and roasted carefully. They aim, simply, to sell the best coffee possible.

“It’s an exploration of coffee’s flavor, really” is how George Howell explains his mission. Mr. Howell, who runs George Howell Coffee Company, a roaster based in Acton, Mass., has had a hand in practically every lurch forward in the quality coffee scene since he started out in the business in 1974. “We’re finding flavors we’ve never ever tasted before, different fruit and floral flavors from really pristine, clean coffees. These are flavors that have been lost or diluted in the old methods of blending coffee down to an average product.”

In many ways, the direct-trade roasters are building on the foundation laid by companies like Peet’s and, later, Starbucks, which went outside the commodity system to find superior coffee. But, Ms. Blumhardt said, those companies are too big to comb over every bean in every sack the way some direct-trade companies do. Starbucks bought more than 300 million pounds of coffee last year; Intelligentsia, the biggest of this group, bought 2 million pounds.

Sometimes roasters find coffee farms through serendipity. Peter Giuliano, co-owner and director of coffee for Counter Culture Coffee, spoke with palpable excitement about stumbling upon a Central American farm planted with geishas, a plant known to yield especially high quality beans. (This year, Esmeralda Especial, a Panamanian coffee produced exclusively from geisha beans, earned the highest price ever paid in a coffee auction.)

More often, roasters connect with growers through tasting competitions. The most prestigious of these are the annual Cup of Excellence competitions, now organized in eight coffee-growing countries by a United States-based nonprofit group, an event Mr. Prince of Coffeegeek calls “Coffee’s Olympics.” These blind-tasting competitions take as long as 10 days, after which the organizers auction the coffees online to bidders around the world, who compete fiercely for the beans.

Mr. Sorenson recently spent more than $100,000 for a batch of coffee beans that took top honors at this year’s Nicaraguan Cup of Excellence competition. The coffee, from Las Golondrinas, Marcio Benjamín Peralta Paguaga’s farm in Nicaragua, sold for $47.06 a pound, just shy of $40 more than the winner earned last year. But for Mr. Sorenson, who said the unusual “mango, peach, cantaloupe and jasmine flower” flavors made it the finest Nicaraguan coffee he had ever tasted, it was worth it.

Counter Culture started buying from Finca Mauritania, Aída Batlle’s farm on the slopes of the Santa Ana volcano in El Salvador, after the farm’s coffee won attention at the 2003 Cup of Excellence in El Salvador. After working with Ms. Batlle for a few years, visiting the farm regularly and sampling beans produced under a range of conditions, Mr. Giuliano has asked her to pick the coffee berries when “half the fruit is at a burgundy red ripeness and the rest when it’s bright red,” a mix that Mr. Giuliano says yields just the right sweetness in a finished cup. (Counter Culture supplies the house blends for two of New York City’s most highly regarded cafes, Café Grumpy and Ninth Street Espresso.)

One of the most effective methods of encouraging change turns out to be as simple as sharing a few cups of coffee with the people who grow it. Obvious as it seems, this was far from common practice until about 10 years ago.

Mr. Watts said that cupping (coffee lingo for the formal, multistep tasting process used to evaluate quality) can help growers understand what a buyer is looking for. “There has to be a real financial incentive for every incremental improvement in quality, but it can’t be mysterious,” he said. “It has to be objective. The grower has to have every reason to believe that his investment in his farm is an investment in himself, not just him doing what some crazy American wants him to. And when they have the same evaluative skills that we do, they can taste their coffees and know what they could be worth.”

Direct trade relationships typically mean that the roaster guarantees to pay well more than the going Fair Trade price for coffees that meet an agreed-upon standard based on a cupping scale. If the coffees score above that standard, growers earn even more.

Cuppings also help roasters select the best of the already very good coffees they will offer their customers. On his most recent visit to Finca El Puente, a coffee farm in the mountainous southwestern corner of Honduras, Mr. Giuliano tasted his way through 68 tiny batches of coffee. The beans were separated by the section of the farm on which they were grown, the way a winery might segregate grapes by vineyard, and by when they were picked.

The cupping gave the Caballero family, which owns Finca El Puente, a look into the qualities Mr. Giuliano values in a finished cup so they can trace those qualities back to a particular patch of land, or a type of coffee shrub, or a degree of ripeness at picking time. For his part, Mr. Giuliano got the chance to pick the best lots for this year’s El Puente blend. Any batch that was particularly exceptional he would pay more for, roast separately and sell at a premium as a “micro-lot.”

Mr. Howell recently cupped through a selection of beans with Alejandro Cadena from Virmax, a quality-minded Colombian exporter. Mr. Cadena had brought beans sorted by size to explore the effect of bean size on a finished cup. Mr. Howell has found that smaller beans from Brazil have brighter acidity than larger beans. But bean size had no discernible effect on Mr. Cadena’s Colombian coffees, a finding Mr. Howell attributed to the mixed varieties of coffee plants used by the tiny farms Virmax represents.

Cupping is also a way of pinpointing where in the production or importing chain even the most extraordinary coffees can be damaged. At a recent cupping at his headquarters in Acton, Mr. Howell demonstrated some of the dangers. Coffee that had spent too long in a jute bag, for instance, was contrasted with some that was stored in plastic.

Sometimes simple conversation ends up making an impact on the finished coffee and on the people who grow it. On a trip to Rwanda in 2006, Mr. Sorenson asked one of the farmers in the Koakaka Koperative y’Abanhinzi Ya Kawa Ya Karaba — a cooperative that supplies him with the Rwandan beans he sells as “Karaba” — what Stumptown could do to help him improve his coffees.

“He — his name is Innocent — said a bike would help him with transportation of ripe cherry to the mills,” Mr. Sorenson said, using the term for the fruit that contains the coffee bean. “Which would improve the coffee’s quality, since coffee needs to be milled within hours of picking.” Coffee berries that sit in the sun can ferment, yielding off flavors that can taint a batch of beans.

After returning from the trip, Mr. Sorenson started a nonprofit group called Bikes to Rwanda. This April, 400 bikes specially engineered for carrying heavy loads of coffee over hilly Rwandan terrain were delivered to the cooperative just in time for the harvest.

Though altruism played a part in that effort, Mr. Sorenson said he sees paying high prices for beans and treating his growers as partners as the only way to get the quality he wants. “It’s not charity,” he said. “Our producers invest back into their workers, coffee shrubs, equipment and land. We know this is happening because of all the time we spend with them throughout the year, on their farms and in their homes.”

But it’s not a point he feels the need to argue stridently, because the proof — for anyone to taste — is in the cup.

For all sorts of great images and videos that support this article visit http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/dining/12coff.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

Gourmet coffee guru Alfred Peet dead at 87

Sat Sep 1, 2007 3:36PM EDT

By Dana Ford

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Coffee legend Alfred Peet, creator of Peet's Coffee & Tea Inc., a forerunner to Starbucks Corp., has died at his home in Ashland, Oregon, his company said. He was 87.

Peet, known as the grandfather of the specialty coffee movement in the United States, taught the tricks of the trade to the founders of Starbucks and sold them their first year's supply. He passed away on Wednesday.

"He had this great love of coffee," said Jim Reynolds, roast master emeritus of Peet's Coffee & Tea, who worked with Peet in his early years.

"He was so helpful to many people in the business. When Starbucks was getting going, the founders of the company really needed help. He let them work in his store and taught them about coffee," said Reynolds on Saturday.

Peet was born in Holland, the son of a coffee and tea merchant. He learned the trade in Amsterdam, London, Indonesia and New Zealand before moving to the United States in 1955. Peet opened his first shop in 1966 in a rundown neighborhood in Berkeley, California that was later dubbed the "Gourmet Ghetto."

The store flourished and Peet soon opened additional shops in the San Francisco Bay area. Peet sold his business in 1979 but stayed on as a coffee buyer until 1983, and as a consultant after that.

"Up to the time he started, the quality of coffee in the U.S. was really poor," said Reynolds. "But he developed a market for those types of coffee."

The gourmet coffee trend in the United States started on the West Coast and moved east. Peet was known for using high-quality beans and a roasting method that produces a distinctively deep flavor. His company, which went public in 2001, continues to use his techniques today.

Although a company spokesperson declined comment on the cause of death, Reynolds said Peet died of cancer.

He is survived by a daughter, two grandchildren and a sister.

Peet's Coffee & Tea is a specialty coffee roaster and marketer. It operates 151 stores, about 90 percent of which are in northern California.

James Bond-inspired coffee blend takes top award

12:57PM Thursday August 30, 2007


A James Bond-inspired coffee blend from an Auckland suburb has won the gold medal at the New Zealand Coffee Awards.

Toasted Espresso, a roastery in Auckland's Takapuna, took the top honour with a blend titled AA7, inspired by James Bond's 007, at this year's New Zealand Coffee Festival in Auckland.

AA7 received the highest number of points from judges who tasted more than 200 coffees, in a record number of entries.

The blend also won the gold medal in the flat white category at the fourth annual awards.

Toasted Espresso owners Chris Innes and Stuart Cross have tasted success before, winning a bronze medal in 2004 and a silver in 2006 before taking gold and the supreme award this year.

Mr Innes said the blend was developed from coffee beans, including some from Kenya with a premium AA rating.

"Then James Bond somehow came into the picture so we called it our AA7 blend."

Mr Cross said he wanted to produce a coffee which everybody would like.

Toasted Espresso supplies its coffees to customers mainly in Auckland but has spread to include places in Matakana, Whangamata, Mt Maunganui, Taupo, Rotorua and even flies coffee to supply a Sydney cafe.