JulieCraves

Corporate coffee / Fair and Direct Trade

What’s wrong with cheap coffee, in a nutshell

The Fair Trade USA/FLO break-up and its ramifications is seeping into the mainstream media. Recently, for example, the New York Times published an article on the debate on the future of fair trade, and NPR carried a radio segment. A piece in Mother Jones magazine by Tom Philpott summed up the kerfluffle nicely, but what really resonated with me in that article was the paragraph on what sparked the genesis of the fair trade movement. It neatly summarizes (much of) exactly what is wrong with big, cheap, corporate coffee:

Huge, rich-world companies like Nestle and Folger’s (now owned by JM Smucker) dominate trade and drive prices down, reaping windfalls. Production consolidates onto huge plantations that employ workers (often, children) at poverty wages; small producers get squeezed out. And as these high-production plantations expand their monocrops to meet global demand, they gobble up high-quality farmlands that might otherwise be supporting smallholders who grow food staples for domestic consumption along with foreign-exchange-earning crops like coffee.

…and destroy biodiversity in the process, I might add.  Read more about the practices and impacts of corporate coffee here.

Coffee reviews / Latin America

Review: Bob-o-link Coffee

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #48.

The backstory

I first heard about Bob-o-link Coffee on a local birding listserv. My first thought was, “Why would anyone use a grassland bird species to represent coffee?”  The answer is sort of a practical one: the owners have an Illinois home on Bob-o-link Road. And the area where the producing farms are located, the Mogiana Region of SÁ£o Paulo and Minas Gerais, Brazil, is so far south that few North American migrant birds spend the winter there. Bobolinks (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) do travel there: these small songbirds have one of the longest journeys of any North American songbird — each year they make a 20,000 km round trip! They are strictly grassland and agricultural field birds, and never found in forests*. But given their very steep population declines (in part due to pesticide exposure on rice farms in winter), they do make good ambassadors for the problems facing Neotropical migratory birds.

Tenuous link aside, Bob-o-link Coffee comes from a group of small farmers practicing sustainable production techniques, including reforestation, organic methods, protection of water resources, and careful post-harvest quality control. The effort is spearheaded by Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza (FAF), an organic (though not USDA certified) coffee farm in the region just outside the town of IgaraÁ­. FAF also produces “natural” coffee. Not so much in the sense of a natural (dry) process coffee, but apparently coffee planted by merely scattering beans under a shade canopy and providing no further intervention: no chemicals, no fertilizer (not even organic compost), no pruning. Honey, vegetables, cheese and other products are also produced on the farm. FAF provides support and instruction on organic and sustainable agriculture to local farmers and volunteers from the organization World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.

The other farmers that produce Bob-o-link Coffee are located at 900 to 1300 meters, and grow a number of arabica varieties: yellow and red Bourbon, yellow and red catuai, and Mundo Novo, to name a few more common ones. What’s in a bag of Bob-o-link Coffee might vary by crop year, so check with your roaster. Like many Brazilian coffees, this is typically dry processed. Note that this coffee is sometimes labeled as “bird-friendly,” but it is not certified by Smithsonian Bird-Friendly at this time (and the term “Bird-Friendly” is trademarked by Smithsonian; you must see the Bird-Friendly seal on the coffee to assure that is is certified). Bird-Friendly certified coffees must also by certified organic. Not all of the supplying farms are, which is an impediment for BF-certification.

Review(s)

We have tried this coffee in two crop years from three different roasters. Last year, we purchased it from Klatch Roasting; the Bob-o-link Coffee was a regular offering. Recently, Klatch announced that it is discontinuing its relationship with FAF and will no longer carry Bob-o-link Coffee. We also bought it from Portola Handcrafted Coffee Roasters, which has since morphed into Portola Coffee Lab and no longer has online sales. This year, we were contacted by Peter Asher Coffee and Tea Company in Champaign, IL, who sent us a 12-oz bag to try. Peter Asher has been carrying this coffee for two years, the buyers have made trips to FAF. They are so impressed with the mission of FAF that they also support student visits there through the University of Illinois Office of International Programs.

Of course, as an agricultural product, coffee quality and taste can vary widely from year to year, even from the same farm(s).  Further, every roaster will treat beans differently. It’s hard to tell what contributed to the dramatic contrasts we experienced between crop years and roasters with the Bob-o-link Coffee, but here is what we found.

The Portola version was sold as organic, and we found it sweeter than expected, a little spicy, with a pleasant tobacco-essenced finish. However, it was always the first few sips that were most interesting, then the coffee faded a bit and veered into monochromatic territory. In general, folks were ambivalent about the coffee, so we sought it out again. We were even more disappointed in the Klatch batch. Whether prepared as a drip, Chemex, Aeropress, or French press, it had a persistently tinny taste. Personally, I often tend to find a metallic aspect in many Brazilian coffees, but I wasn’t alone in detecting it this time. Knowing this was a coffee with a strong backstory working toward a sustainable “brand,” we decided to wait another year before publishing a review. Indeed, the current crop year roasted by Peter Asher is barely recognizable as the same coffee.

The Peter Asher Bob-o-link Coffee was a blend of dry and pulped natural processes. From the dry aroma to the last sip, this is a coffee loaded with cocoa and chocolate, not normally what I associate with Brazilian coffees. In addition to chocolate, tasters reported (each of the following qualities more than once) caramel, French vanilla, nuts, and butterscotch. I think you’re getting the idea: this coffee was like a candy bar. The only time we picked up the metallic taste was when it was prepared in a Chemex. Brewed, it was pleasantly sweet and smooth, balanced but subdued, and unremarkable. As a pourover, using a Clever Coffee Dripper with a longer-than-usual extraction time (5 minutes), it was fuller and more interesting. But preparation in a French press was when it had the richest chocolate tones along with a medium-bodied but creamy mouthfeel. Please start with one of these manual brewing methods to get the most out of this coffee.

Since the Peter Asher version is the current crop year and the only one of the three roasters which we tried which has the Bob-o-Link Coffee available, it is the one we rated here. At 3.75 motmots, it is one of the higher-rated coffees we have reviewed in some time. Bob-o-Link Coffee is gaining traction in the U.S. and not too hard to find online.  While it would be interesting to see how it fared from other roasters, we found a winner at Peter Asher, and thank them for reaching out to us so we could give it another try!

*The bird list from the supplying farms does not, in fact, include Bobolinks.

Male Bobolink photo by Janet and Phil under a Creative Commons License.

Birds and other biodiversity / Know Your Coffee Birds series

Know your coffee birds: Scarlet Tanager

Many birders have a “spark bird,” a species that captured their attention and inspired lifelong interest in birds. For me, it was the Scarlet Tanager (Piranga olivacea). As a young girl I was given a copy of The Bird Guide: Land Birds East of the Rockies by an elderly neighbor, a vintage book even back then. In studying the illustrations, I could not believe that a bird as bright and stunning as the Scarlet Tanager could be found in Michigan; if so, it surely could not be as brilliant as the book portrayed. It was some years before I finally saw a male Scarlet Tanager, as they tend to be canopy dwellers. I have handled and seen countless others since then. Each time, like the first, I still marvel at their brilliance.

I banded this male Scarlet Tanager at the Rouge River Bird Observatory in Dearborn, Michigan.

There are over 240 species of tanagers in the New World, and frankly they include some of the world’s most beautiful birds. They are really a tropical family, with only four species having evolved to migrate to North America to breed (a fifth is a rare breeder in the deep southwest). All of them retreat to the tropics to spend the winter.

The Scarlet Tanager breeds in large, mature, deciduous forest tracts over much of the eastern U.S. and southern Canada, save for the deep south, and spends the winter in northwestern South America, where they are most common in Ecuador, Bolivia, and the Peruvian Andes. During the nesting season, Scarlet Tanagers prefer to utilize the interior of large tracts of forest. Their sensitivity to fragmented habitats categorizes them as an “area sensitive” species. In small or fragmented woodlots, they suffer from predators and parasitism by cowbirds (which lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species, usually at the expense of their hosts). If a forest is too small (<10 ha), the tanagers will not attempt to nest at all.

Female and young Scarlet Tanagers are much more modestly colored than breeding males. In winter, males look similar to females, but with darker wings.

After their breeding season, the tanagers molt into their more somber winter plumage. The males go from scarlet to  bright olive with black wings. Females are a duller olive with dusky wings — the same color they are year round. This change from eye-catching to cryptic coloration is not unusual. Flashy colors are good ways to advertise for mates and let other birds know a territory is occupied, but are a little too conspicuous to predators the rest of the year. For North American migrant birds that share their wintering areas with many year-round resident birds in the tropics, it’s probably also a good strategy to be a little more modest.

Few species of North American migrant birds make it as far south in winter as the Scarlet Tanager. Their habits during winter are not well known, as they tend to be inconspicuous and spend most of their time in the canopy. While in the breeding season, Scarlet Tanagers eat insects almost exclusively, they also eat fruit in the winter.  They have been recorded on shade coffee farms in Central America (Panama and Nicaragua) during migration, as well as in winter. As canopy dwellers, they utilize the shade trees and do not find sun coffee appropriate habitat.

Two of the other North American breeding tanagers, Western Tanager (P. ludoviciana) and Summer Tanager (P. rubra) are also found on shade coffee farms.

Perhaps few North American breeding birds remind us so strongly that they are not really “our” birds, but tropical species on loan for a few short months in the summer. When we contemplate that fact, it reminds us that habitat on the wintering grounds — such as shade coffee farms — are truly critical for their survival. Support shade-grown coffee, so that future generations can open a field guide, become inspired by a vivid tanager, and discover that they really do exist.

Female-plumaged tanager photo by Jamie Chavez under a Creative Commons license.

 

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