Good to the last drop

What makes a perfect pot of joe? Is Fair Trade really fair? "God in a Cup" author Michaele Weissman talks about the history, and our continuing love affair, with that divine drink -- coffee.

By Monica Bhide
for Salon.com

Jun. 30, 2008 | Journalist Michaele Weissman says she had her first real cup of coffee in 2005; everything before that was "hot water and Ritalin." The revelation came in the form of a double-shot 12-ounce cappuccino with whole milk made with specialty coffee purveyor Counter Culture's Toscano espresso blend. It was a concoction she remembers as tasting "as luxurious as cashmere, bringing mouth memories of caramel, chocolate and hazelnut." Baristas call this epiphany a "Godshot moment."

Now a self-described coffee obsessive, Weissman spent a year visiting coffee plantations around the world in search of "the perfect cup of coffee" and documented this enviable journey in a new book, "God in a Cup." Her book comes at a time when coffee is, well, hotter than ever. 2007 saw $12 billion in sales for specialty coffee -- defined by the Specialty Coffee Association of America as "the highest-quality green coffee beans roasted to their greatest flavor potential by true craftspeople and then properly brewed to well-established standards." Recent studies have shown that high coffee consumption may actually lower the risk of heart disease, and America's consumption of specialty coffee just keeps climbing. According to the 2008 National Coffee Drinking Trends Study, 17 percent of the adult population consumed a daily gourmet beverage in 2008, compared with 14 percent in 2007.

But what makes a cup of specialty coffee worth $5, or $8, or in the case of Hacienda La Esmeralda Special, the crown jewel of the coffee world, worth more than $130 a pound? Salon spoke with Weissman in Vienna, Va., inside -- where else? -- a coffee shop.

You say that while coffee is one of the most popular drinks it is also one of the most misunderstood or little understood beverages. How so?

Probably a billion people around the world drink coffee every day, and yes, for the most part, they know little about the contents of their cup. Coffee is damned confusing -- growing it is complicated, processing it is even more so. Coffee politics and economics are contentious and off-putting. And until the last dozen or so years, coffee markets were completely controlled by traders who had little interest in transparency.

Then there is the culinary aspect. Coffee has had few champions in the culinary world. Unlike wine, a beverage to which coffee is often compared, the professional culinary elite and foodies in general have paid little attention to coffee. If you don't believe me, check out the coffee at most high-end restaurants.

Maybe this lack of attention to coffee has something to do with coffee's relative newness. People have been growing grapes and making wine for thousands of years, but the coffee bean has been exploited commercially much more briefly -- coffee didn't arrive in Europe until the 1600s. Coffee doesn't really have a place in the culinary pantheon, but I strongly believe that is beginning to change. At least I hope so.

When did you get interested in coffee?

In 2005-2006, I had this sense that the post-Starbucks generation was demanding and drinking better coffee at work, so I did a piece for the Washington Post on the upscaling of office coffee. That's when I first heard the term "specialty coffee," and that's when I learned that the specialty sector of the coffee business generated a ton of money, was growing fast, and that it was run by a bunch of geeky young guys whose passion for coffee reminded me of Steve Jobs' devotion to computing.

So what exactly is specialty coffee?

Coffee grows in about 50 different countries strung along the equator. Before being sold, coffee is graded by professionals. Most of the coffee in the world is sold on the commodities market, the so-called C market.

Specialty Coffee is, however, not sold on the C market. It is sold by quality-oriented exporters to quality-oriented importers for prices that vary but are generally above the C market price.

Professional coffee tasters -- they're called cuppers -- grade coffee on a scale of 1 to 100. To be considered specialty, coffee needs to earn a cupping score of 80 or above. The best specialty coffees have cupping scores above 84 or 85.

But you were talking about the young coffee guys.

That's right. When I started reporting on coffee, one of the first things I noticed was that the high end of the specialty business was being driven forward by a bunch of young entrepreneurs and coffee buyers who had this amazing passion for coffee. Most of them were guys -- although there are a lot of terrific women in specialty coffee -- and they infuse the specialty business with an ethos that is brainy, smartassed and testosterone-charged.

In your book, you describe them as being part of the "third wave" of coffee. Can you explain this wave theory?

Well, this whole wave thing in specialty coffee is controversial, but here's the gist of it:

A bunch of very talented young guys who commonly refer to themselves as the third wave entered the specialty coffee industry in the 1990s at a moment when travel was cheap and technology was transforming communications. Being young and adventurous, they decided the way to buy coffee was to get their butts off the bar stools at the Intercontinental Hotel in Bogotá or Guatemala City, travel 10 hours over miserable roads up into the mountains to the farms and cooperatives where coffee is grown, meet coffee farmers and buy directly from them or their representatives. These travels were transformative for the specialty industry and for the coffee guys themselves.

The third-wave coffee guys, happily unfettered by degrees from Wharton, decided the only way to ensure that farmers earned a decent living was to change the way the specialty business is run. Instead of buying low and selling high, they decided the specialty coffee business had to run on a model that said: Buy high and sell high. These guys -- and many older people and women who operate at the high end of the specialty business -- are totally committed to increasing what quality-oriented coffee farmers earn. The only way to do this, they say, is to pay more and charge more.

What about the first wave and the second wave?

I am going to make this short. The first wave were post-War War II people who industrialized coffee, bringing us low-quality coffee in a can. Folgers. Maxwell House.

Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the second wave reacted against factory-made coffee and reintroduced ideas about locally roasted, high-quality coffee available in small shops. Interestingly, Starbucks started as a second-wave company, and then grew into a megalith. Starbucks created the market that enabled the third-wave guys to thrive. Now, however, Starbucks is copying third-wave marketing strategies, selling itself as a farmer-driven company.

You chose three specialty coffee entrepreneurs, Counter Culture's Peter Giuliano, Intelligentsia's Geoff Watts and Stumptown's Duane Sorenson, to be your guides for the book. Why these three?

After the story on office coffee, I wrote a piece on young coffee entrepreneurs and their impact on the specialty coffee industry for the New York Times. All the experts I interviewed named Peter, Geoff and Duane as the most talented, or among the most talented, young specialty guys in the industry, and the coffees they roasted topped all the "best coffee" lists, so I called them up.

One thing led to another, and I wound up traveling with Peter Giuliano and Geoff Watts to Nicaragua on yet another coffee story for the New York Times. Peter and Geoff's passion for, knowledge of and eloquence about coffee blew me away. Duane is a more elusive person than Peter or Geoff. I didn't travel with him, but I did spend close to a week visiting Stumptown in Portland, [Ore.].

What about Fair Trade? Does Fair Trade really help the small coffee grower, or is it just a marketing gimmick?

The answer is yes and no, or no and yes, or jeez, can we talk about something else?

What do you mean?

Fair Trade is probably the most contentious subject in the world of specialty coffee. Not because its goals are disputed but because the debate has been ugly and those who question how the Fair Trade program operates have been accused by Fair Trade advocates of Bhopal-style corporate crimes against humanity.

The irony is that, as a social justice program, Fair Trade ain't that great. To participate in Fair Trade programs, coffee farmers and coffee roasters both pay pretty significant fees. For example, TransFair USA, the American Fair Trade organization, collects a licensing fee of around 10 cents a pound for every Fair Trade coffee sold by participating roasters here in the United States. On the other end of the production chain, coffee-growing cooperatives pay between $2,000 and $4,000 a year to be certified Fair Trade by FLO, the international Fair Trade group.

In exchange for these fees, FLO guarantees coffee cooperatives a minimum price for their green or unroasted coffee of $1.21 a pound -- $1.41 if the coffee is certified organic. These minimums have not increased in 10 years, although they will inch up next year. Cooperatives also received a "social premium" of 10 cents a pound to invest in a community project such as building a school or medical clinic. In addition to setting payment standards, Fair Trade also certifies that living and health standards on coffee farms meet certain minimal standards. The Fair Trade designation does not address issues of coffee quality.

For much of 2008, commodities prices have been rising and the C-market price for coffee has surpassed the Fair Trade minimum. Bubbles have a way of popping, however, and coffee prices have a way of crashing precipitously, causing tremendous suffering. In the book I quote Rick Peyser, director of social advocacy for Green Mountain Coffee in Vermont. Rick sits on the FLO board and he says you have to think of Fair Trade as a kind of insurance policy for farmers that protects them when coffee prices plummet as they periodically do.

And the truth of the matter? Well, as I say, when it comes to Fair Trade the answer is yes, no and maybe.

So what steps do consumers take to help ensure that the coffee growers are compensated fairly?

I agree with Michael Pollan, who came to the conclusion at the end of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" that the thing to do is buy local. And, I would add, buy delicious -- meaning that high quality which takes an effort to achieve should be rewarded.

Coffee, of course, doesn't grow locally. More and more, however, it is roasted locally. So if you want to make sure that you are buying coffee that rewards farmers fairly, I would say get to know your local roasters. And you don't have to pay a fortune, by the way. In fact, you can purchase a great pound of coffee from which you can brew 30 or 40 mugs of coffee for, say, $13 or $14 a pound. Skip Starbucks for three days and you can afford to buy some of the world's best coffee. Compare that to a bottle of wine that two people polish off in an evening!

McDonald's has started to try to compete with Starbucks and other coffeehouses by offering premium coffee. Since they're so big, does McDonald's help or hurt coffee's image and specialty coffeehouses in general?

To the degree that specialty coffee is a high-end culinary product, McDonald's is more or less irrelevant. I can't imagine a consumer being split between buying coffee at a high-end cafe selling Stumptown's or Intelligentsia's or Counter Culture's coffee and McDonald's.

Who might be hurt by McDonald's foray into what I would call "alleged specialty coffee" is Starbucks. You'll notice, however, that Starbucks is working very hard these days to regain its reputation as the purveyor of super-high-quality coffee.

So why is a coffee like Hacienda La Esmeralda Special worth $130 or more a pound? What is it that makes it so expensive?

Coffee fans have paid crazy prices for Panama's sex queen of a coffee because there is an extremely limited supply.

Esmeralda, which is a very floral, very fruity, very clean bright aromatic coffee, was cultivated on Hacienda La Esmeralda in Boquete, Panama. It was discovered by Daniel Peterson on his family's farm. Esmeralda tastes nothing like other Panamanian coffees, nothing like other Central American coffees, and coffee cuppers flipped over it when it was entered in the Best of Panama competition.

It turns out that this Esmeralda coffee comes from a collection of coffee seeds gathered by a British diplomat in Ethiopia in the 1930s. Virtually all the other coffee grown in Panama and elsewhere in Latin America derives from two varieties of coffee, Bourbon and Typica, that were stolen from Yemen 500 years ago. Esmeralda comes from an entirely different genetic branch of the Arabica coffee species.

The story goes on from there but suffice it to say: The specialty coffee world went Esmeralda crazy. In the last few years Panamanian farmers have been ripping out other trees and planting Geisha trees all over the place. Will it taste like Peterson's Esmeralda? Will it drive demand for more and more Esmeralda? Or will the Esmeralda craze die out? Coffee trees take five years to produce their first crop, so we'll know in the next few years.

One other interesting note: Coffee guys have been trying to locate the forest in Ethiopia where that diplomat first stumbled on Esmeralda. So far, no luck at all.

What makes the perfect cup of coffee?

Perfection in coffee, like perfection in art, is sought, but it can never be achieved.

Philosophy aside, what makes the difference in coffee? Is it the bean? The roast? The brew?

It all matters. The genetic qualities of the bean. The agronomic skill of the farmer. The climate. The processing of the bean, which is multi-stepped and fraught. The way the bean is transported. The roasting. The grinding. The brewing. Each step either enhances the bean's potential or degrades it.

Think about wine grapes or olives that are pressed to make oil. You can begin with the most exquisite cultivars, but these products, fine wine, fine olive oil, only reach their potential when each step leading toward consumption is consummated skillfully and in a timely fashion. Same with coffee.

Only coffee is even more vulnerable to human error, because of the assaults to nature that occur when consumers take their newly purchased specialty beans home.

What is the best home coffee-brewing device: percolator, French press or just basic Mr. Coffee?

Percolator -- never.

Mr. Coffee -- throw it out immediately. Most standard automated coffee pots don't heat the water hot enough or consistently enough. The water needs to be around 205 degrees F. as it pours over the grounds. Otherwise the grounds will be over-extracted and bitter or under-extracted and tasteless.

French press -- this plunger system makes very nice coffee but requires a certain deftness of hand and it produces slightly gritty coffee that some people like and others don't.

I prefer old-fashioned, inexpensive drip pots that use brown paper filters, such as the Chemex where you pour nearly boiling water over freshly ground coffee.

Oh, and always use filtered water.

The most important piece of home equipment: A burr grinder. Those little blade grinders most people use basically beat the crap out of the coffee. Not good.

What is it about the smell of coffee that makes it so intoxicating even to people who may not or don't like the taste?

Coffee has more aromatics than any other foodstuff. It's the aromatics people find so enticing -- cuppers actually are able to detect thousands of different aromas in coffees. No. 2, by the way, on the aromatics list is red wine.

Do you see a fourth wave emerging?

I have a hunch that the fourth wave will emerge where coffee is grown, as a new generation of young farmers who are bilingual and can speak English, guys like Daniel Peterson of Esmeralda fame, start to alter how they do business. A lot of these young growers have visited the U.S. and have seen how dynamic the specialty market is here and are eager to bring change to their end of the coffee chain.

How do you make your morning coffee?

Actually, my husband, the physicist, makes my coffee in the morning. He's much more of a fussbudget than I am when it comes to technological accuracy. He uses a one cup ceramic cone into which he fits a one cup brown paper filter filled with freshly ground coffee. The ceramic cone fits on top of a mug. You pour the water over the grounds and voila, a lovely cup of coffee.

-- By Monica Bhide

originally posted on salon.com june 30, 2008
http://www.salon.com/mwt/food/eat_drink/2008/06/30/coffee/print.html

US Coffee Giant Starbucks to Close 600 US Stores

By VOA News
02 July 2008

U.S.-based coffee chain Starbucks has announced plans to close 600 stores in the United States in the next year due to the weak U.S. economy.

The Seattle, Washington-based coffee seller announced the move on Tuesday during a conference call with reporters. The company says about 12,000 employees, or seven percent of its global workforce, will lose their jobs because of the closures.

It says it will open fewer than 200 stores in 2009.

Starbucks' Chief Financial Officer, Peter Bocian, said many of the stores being closed were located near other Starbucks stores. Because of the company's aggressive expansion practice, it is not uncommon in the United States to see two of the shops within blocks of or even across the street from each other.

The company also has been expanding worldwide, operating in 45 countries.

Coffee could help beat MS: study

WASHINGTON (AFP) — A strong cup of coffee may do more than just wake you up in the mornings. It could also help you stave off multiple sclerosis (MS), according to a new study.

Scientists in Oklahoma found that mice which had been immunized to develop an MS-like condition appeared to be protected from the disease by drinking the equivalent of six to eight cups of coffee a day.

"This is an exciting and unexpected finding, and I think it could be important for the study of MS and other diseases," said Linda Thompson, from the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation who worked in collaboration with Cornell University and Finland's University of Turku.

Caffeine prevented adenosine, one of the four building blocks in DNA, from mixing with its receptor in mice.

Adenosine is common molecule in humans and plays a large role in helping to control the biochemical processes for sleep and suppressing arousal.

When the molecule is blocked from binding with its receptor, the body's infection-fighting white cells cannot reach the central nervous system and trigger the reactions which lead to experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, or EAE, the animal form of MS.

The findings could have important implications for other auto-immune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, in which the body's own defense systems turn against itself.

But Thompson, co-author of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warned there was a lot more work to be done in fighting multiple sclerosis, a debilitating and progressive disease in humans.

"A mouse is not a human being, so we can't be sure caffeine will have the same effect on people prone to develop MS without much more testing," she said.

Further retrospective studies to track the caffeine intake of patients with MS and its effects might be the next major step.

"If you found a correlation between caffeine intake and reduced MS symptoms, that would point to further studies in humans," Thompson said.

Some 2.5 million people worldwide are thought to suffer from MS, a disorder of the central nervous system which leads to loss of muscle coordination.

T-Mobile Sues Starbucks Over Hot Spots

June 7, 2008
Business Briefing | Legal Matters
T-Mobile Sues Starbucks Over Hot Spots
By BLOOMBERG NEWS

T-Mobile USA sued Starbucks, saying the coffee chain breached a contract by allowing AT&T to supply in-store customers with free wireless Internet access using T-Mobile’s lines and equipment. T-Mobile, which said it agreed to provide Wi-Fi service at Starbucks in 2002, accused the largest American coffee chain of secretly developing a plan to let AT&T provide free Internet service at more than 7,000 Starbucks stores in the United States. T-Mobile said it is bearing the cost and burden of the free Wi-Fi service offer because it provided equipment and technology at thousands of Starbucks stores. Valerie O’Neil, a spokeswoman for Starbucks, did not return a voice-mail message left at her office seeking comment.

The true brew

May 20, 2008

Australian coffee drinkers are embracing new tastes, writes Leanne Tolra.

THE tour-bus passengers are on a high - animated by a crisp, clean caffeine hit. "I've never tasted anything like it," says one. "I don't normally like black coffee," says another heading out the door, "but that was amazing."

A third trailing behind marvels at the "fruity and smooth" flavour lingering on her palate: "It was almost like a glass of wine."

Exit St Ali, one of Melbourne's modern boutique roasters, and this small sip of La Montana (winner of the 2007 El Salvador Cup of Excellence) has opened the way to a new world of coffee drinking for a busload of already passionate foodies.

They're part of Allan Campion's Melbourne Food Tours. It's a Saturday morning in April and 24 participants from suburban Melbourne, regional Victoria, NSW, Tasmania and New Zealand are on the road for the day to experience Melbourne's gastronomic bounty.

Campion, a chef, food writer and cookbook author, selects St Ali to show his tour groups the city's growing number of boutique roasters who are doing more with coffee than serving prettily etched cafe lattes.

Selling single-variety and single-origin coffee isn't new - some of Melbourne's leading roasters have been doing it for more than 20 years. But in recent years they've been joined by boutique cafe owners roasting their own green beans and boosting coffee drinkers' appreciation of taste according to region, variety and growing conditions. The comparisons with wine, wine tasting and wine marketing are inevitable.

Over at The First Pour in Abbotsford, Peter Wolff, president of the AustralAsian Specialty Coffee Association, has been running coffee-tasting courses and conducting experiments using Riedel specialty wine glasses.

Wolff says the tasting sessions have combined chocolate, liqueurs and coffee: "We served fruity, aromatic dessert wines and showcased them with really bright, acidic, dry processed Ethiopian and Yemen or Somali coffees," he says.

"We wanted to find out whether the glasses did the same thing for coffee as they do for wine, in terms of flavour delivery on the mouth. And we found there were some differences to drinking out of a normal ceramic cup. There are some issues - the glass is too hot to hold and it cools too quickly, but it certainly gets you thinking."

The Coffee Academy at William Angliss Institute ran its first Palate Training for Coffee Drinkers course during the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival earlier this year. Academy manager Jill Adams enrolled in a wine-tasting course at La Trobe University to develop her own palate "because the coffee industry offers nothing like that".

"I was so impressed by what it taught me that I felt we needed to offer something similar for the coffee industry. It made me see that there is a science behind what we are tasting."

Adams approached the university's Lindsay Corby, a master of wine and wine appreciation, to run the academy's course and challenge coffee industry professionals' perceptions of what they were drinking (see story right).

Corby says the way to increased markets and understanding of coffee is in educating coffee drinkers that there is a huge difference between good coffee and bad, and in teaching industry professionals to learn to recognise bad coffee from its source. "Where and how it was grown? Did the green bean have transport problems? How was it stored and roasted? This all matters, long before the coffee is finally presented in the cup as a filter coffee or an espresso," he says.

Corby says there are many similarities between the wine and coffee industries in terms of marketing and education, but that much of the wine industry's success has come from its technical base and its willingness to co-operate. "We are not sharing next week's secrets, but we are sharing last week's," he says.

Wine marketing expert Professor Larry Lockshin from the University of South Australia says the Australian coffee industry doesn't have the financial clout, the history or the production volumes to market coffee like wine. Australia produces about 600 tonnes of coffee annually and imports more than 40,500 tonnes. Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, grows an average of 3 million tonnes a year.

He says the bulk of the wine industry's promotion is funded by wine-marketing companies. And in the coffee industry "it's not the growers who will be funding the promotions, it's got to be the importers, the distributors and the roasters grouping together".

The specialty coffee industry is making headway, says Wolff. Northern-hemisphere specialty coffee markets have traditionally been tough for Australian importers but coffee grown in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea or Java is more accessible. "We are seeing roasters going directly to the farmers in these areas for coffee," he says.

Wolff is upbeat about the trend to expand the market at its top end: "Some of the leading cafes in every major capital city are really pushing specialty coffee and putting it directly in front of the consumer and saying, 'Here, try this coffee it's a Rwandan Golden Cup of Excellence coffee, this coffee is extraordinary'."

For Australian growers, this is a double-edged sword. Growing consumer interest in locally produced coffee is positive but there are better returns to be made from selling it overseas, says president of the Australian Coffee Growers Association Ian McLaughlin.

"It is a very hard thing for us as growers to connect with consumers. Mostly, our sales are made through brokers," he says.

Australia grows about 750 hectares of coffee in parts of Queensland and NSW. About one-third of the coffee grown in Australia is exported. McLaughlin says Australian green (unroasted) coffee sells for about $10 a kilo, which compares with average world coffee prices of $3 a kilo: "But to make the industry viable I think we need to make $30 a kilogram.''

Two years ago, he built a $4 million restaurant at his plantation in northern Queensland, "so I could serve and display my coffee at its best and lift the price of it to where it needs to be".

"A lot of people come into the coffee business because of the romance associated with coffee. But there has to be a way for them to make their businesses cost effective," he says.

That's exactly what Andrew Ford, owner of Mountain Top Estate, a coffee plantation in northern NSW, did. His is the country's highest-priced green coffee, selling for more than $20 a kilo.

Four years ago, Ford took his coffee to the "micro spec" of the world market that would pay a premium. "But if I had gone to the Australian roasters without the international buyer paying a premium, they would not have paid for it.

"The consuming public is absolutely ready to pay a premium for high-value coffee,'' says Ford. ''It's evident in our attitude to wine, olive oil and vinegars.''

The Coffee Academy's Jill Adams says coffee training courses, barista courses and industry competitions raise people's awareness and the industry's credibility.

Australia's national coffee competitions were held in Melbourne earlier this month. David Makin (Victoria), our barista champion, Habib Maarbani (NSW), our cafe latte artist and Catherine Ferrari (WA), our coffee cupping (tasting) champion, will all compete at the world titles in Copenhagen in June.

To win, Ferrari, a third-generation coffee professional (her grandfather began roasting coffee beans in 1936), tasted her way through 24 cups of coffee.

"Coffee, like wine, is very personal," she says. "It's not just about taste; it's about colour and aroma and viscosity.

''With wine, consumers are confident of their ability to say what they like and what they don't, and they are not necessarily loyal to a label.

"But people tend to be brand loyal with their coffee," she says.

Ferrari says it is time to break away from that and try new things.

Words that work

"You can't have sweet acidity," Erika Winter says. "And what is funky forest floor?" These are words and phrases that coffee roasters and tasters commonly use to describe coffee flavours, but Winter, co-author of Winegrape Berry Sensory Assessment in Australia - a tasting "vocabulary" for grapes - says the coffee industry needs its own official language.

"We have taught growers and winemakers to use the same language. What we have done for grapes is so transferable to coffee,'' she says.

''A number of international organisations have lists of descriptors but these are used as descriptive terms and the language is still subjective.''

The flavour of a coffee brew

AROMAS

Ashy

An odour descriptor similar to the smell of an ashtray, smokers' fingers or the smell one gets when cleaning out a fireplace. But it is not used as a negative attribute. Generally speaking, it indicates the degree of roast.

Chocolate-like

An aroma and flavour of cocoa powder and chocolate (including dark chocolate and milk chocolate), sometimes referred to as sweet.

TASTES

Acidity

A basic taste characterised by the solution of an organic acid. A desirable sharp and pleasing taste particularly strong with certain origins as opposed to an overfermented sour taste.

Sweetness

For coffee characterised by solutions of sucrose or fructose, commonly associated with sweet aroma descriptors such as fruity, chocolate and caramel. It is generally used for describing coffees which are free from off-flavours.

MOUTHFEEL

Body

This attribute descriptor is used to describe the physical properties of the beverage. A strong but pleasant full mouthfeel characteristic as opposed to being thin.

Astringency

Leaving an aftertaste sensation like a dry feeling in the mouth, undesirable in coffee.

Source: International Coffee Organisation, London

Sustainable coffee program seen booming

Fri May 16, 2008 10:09pm BST

By Marcy Nicholson

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Rainforest Alliance has nearly doubled the amount of coffee sold every year from its program that certifies coffee as good for the environment and beneficial for farmers, a representative of the conservation group said.

Companies in the group's sustainable coffee program have been making "commitments over time to scale-up the volumes of coffee that they're sourcing and help farms that already supply them, get certified," said Sabrina Vigilante, senior manager of marketing and business for Rainforest Alliance.

Vigilante spoke on the sidelines of the organization's event in New York Thursday.

New York-based Rainforest Alliance, an international nonprofit conservation group, certifies farms that meet specific criteria aimed to produce what it calls "sustainable" agricultural products. The process is designed to benefit the environment, farmers and their communities.

Coffee purchases from Rainforest certified farms has grown by an average of 93 percent annually since 2003, when the figure sat at 7 million lbs. In 2007, 91.3 million pounds of certified coffee were bought, Rainforest Alliance said.

In January 2007, McDonald's UK began sourcing all of its coffee from Rainforest farms. Since then, the unit of McDonald's Corp has reported a 22 percent increase in units of coffee sold, Rainforest data showed.

"It will continue to grow at that rapid pace for some years to come because the world is a huge market and it's like a snowball effect," Vigilante said about.

Italy's leading coffee roaster Lavazza buys about 2 million 60-kg bags of coffee annually and was accredited by Rainforest Alliance in 2006. In the United Kingdom, 30 percent of the coffee Lavazza purchases is Rainforest Alliance certified, said Barry Kither, Lavazza sales and market director in the United Kingdom.

"The U.K. is particularly keen on ethical products," Kither said, noting the trend moves at different paces in different countries.

"For the U.K. it's a lifesaver because you can hardly talk to a company now without ticking that box, 'Do you have an ethical product available?' We needed it desperately, defensively," Kither said.

The company's overall Rainforest purchases, however, is a small 1 percent, said Mario Cerutti, director of supply chain in Turin.

The trend is global. Privately held Gloria Jean's Coffees International, based in Sidney, Australia, has 850 stores operating in 32 countries with more in the works, said Executive Chairman Nabi Saleh.

Gloria Jean's buys "several millions of pounds of green coffee" and aims to make 85 percent of these purchases Rainforest certified by 2010, up from the current 45 to 50 percent, Saleh estimated.

Minneapolis-based Caribou Coffee purchases more than 60 percent of its coffee from Rainforest farms, exceeding the company's 50 percent goal for 2008, said Chad Trewick, Caribou's senior director of coffee and tea.

"It's fostered a spirit of partnership, and a slow and gradual transformation in the mind-sets that these producers and communities think about the environment," Trewick said.

Caribou Coffee has eight permanent blends and three seasonal blends bearing the Rainforest seal, he said.

"We really believe that sustainability ... really resonates with a lot of the consumer base and more and more mainstream people are looking for people to make an impact with their purchasing power," he said.

(Reporting by Marcy Nicholson; Editing by David Gregorio)

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."