Sustainable Harvest - Changing the way coffee business gets done

Whenever you buy something, it is easy to forget that your transaction goes beyond the store where you purchased it. Whether you think about it or not, what you choose to buy affects other peoples’ lives, and these purchase decisions have economic, social and environmental consequences.

The coffee we buy, for example, is at the end of a long and complicated supply chain that begins in some very remote places. There are over 25 million coffee growers in the world, many of whom have very small plots of coffee trees. Trying to make a living off a small coffee farm is very difficult, especially if the companies purchasing the coffee are solely motivated by profits.

To learn more about how the system works, I visited Sustainable Harvest, a green coffee importer based in Portland. Dane Loraas, a Quality Control Manager for the company and Katie Gilmer, a Relationship Coffee Manager, were my hosts when I visited the company at its Pearl District headquarters. They spent an hour with me explaining the company’s business model and answering my questions.

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Links for March 11

It’s that time of the week again. . .

Changes in weather patterns are creating problems for Colombian coffee growers in both output and quality, according to the New York Times. link

The Seattle Times investigates how climate change is affecting Costa Rican coffee producers. link

On a related note, coffee prices touched a 34-year high this week-FT. link

The rise in coffee prices is making coffee a more attractive crop to grow for Mexico’s opium poppy farmers, as reported in this article from the WSJ. link

Democrats in the House, led by Oregon’s Earl Blumenauer, wrote a letter to the Republican leadership asking them to reconsider their decision to reintroduce Styrofoam cups to the House cafeteria. link

After much speculation over the last few months, it appears that Starbucks is going to work with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to put Starbucks coffee in the K-cups after all. link

US News has some good news about the health effects of drinking coffee, and some concerns about caffeine-drinking kids. link

MSNBC has an article about cafés that cater to bikers. The author mentions Portland as a bike-friendly city with bike cafés, but does not bother to interview anyone here. Too bad. link

This headline from Australia has a logical flaw in it. Can you figure out what it is?

Corby Kummer of The Atlantic has a great assignment—searching Rome for pizza, coffee, and gelato.  How does one get paid to do that? That is the question. . . link

For my Korean friends, an article about coffee in Korea. link

Enjoy your weekend. Hopefully it is sunny where you are. Spring is almost here!

Case Study Coffee - Coffee on the Rocks

It had been a while since I had been to a new café, and I was feeling particularly motivated to try something new, so I headed to Northeast Sandy Boulevard to check out Case Study Coffee. Case Study is one of the newer cafés in Portland, having opened only eight months ago. The café sent two baristas to the 2011 Northwest Regional Barista Championship. Neither of the baristas made the finals, but the fact that such a new café would send two competitors to the competition shows that Case Study is serious about coffee.

Case Study Coffee

While it may be fairly new, Case Study appears to not be a secret. During my time in the café, a steady stream of customers came through the door. The café was fairly loud—not with music, but with people talking. I overheard people brainstorming about their next big creative venture [on a side note, have you seen Portlandia’s sketch about creative ventures? It takes place in one of the cafés we have already reviewed here]. Several Laptopistanis were glued to their screens and some of them also had their smartphones glued to one ear. I watched a writer distractedly go between staring at her notebook and checking her email on her iPhone. It looked like she either had writer’s block or she was hoping that the phone would give her a legitimate reason to not be productive.

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Robots and pour-overs

In the coffee shops of Portland, one of the trendiest things you can get is a coffee brewed using the pour-over brewing method (this is not exclusive to Portland, as you can see by reading this CoffeeGeek.com discussion). Most, if not all, of the specialty cafés around town offer customers the pour-over option. The baristas at these shops may soon have some new competition—from a robot.

The pour-over is a very old brewing method, but it is being revived for several reasons, not least of which because it makes great coffee theater. Baristas delicately pour thin, even streams of water over freshly-ground coffee, concentrating hard to evenly wet the grounds. Some have a special pouring pattern that they believe improves the results. The single serving pour-over method guarantees that you get the freshest coffee possible. When coffee is made this way, much of the brightness and fruity notes really stand out. If the barista uses a Melitta or Chemex filter, as most do, the coffee is also very clean.

The double pour-over. You can see how it might be difficult to pull this off effectively.

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