My favorite coffees of 2011, and what the list tells me.
Coffee news and miscellany
Sips: Single-serve, Slippery figures, Sbux
Single-serve steals market share, corporate coffee greenwashing, and Starbucks news.
Sips
Sara Lee gets out, Rogers gets into Keurig, mammals on Costa Rican coffee farms.
Update on Finca Dos Gatos
An update on coffee growing at home: fruit development, transplanting, new seedlings, indoor lighting set-up.
New Kenyan coffee varietal
Kenya has introduced a new high-yield, disease-resistant coffee varietal. Is it environmentally sustainable?
Sips: Latest corporate coffee news
Some tidbits from the big four: J.M. Smucker Completes Acquisition of Rowland Coffee. Smucker will now own Cafè Bustelo and Cafè Pilon as well as Folgers. Yippee. Sara Lee in talks for Brazil coffee brand. Sara Lee aiming to acquire or merge with Marata. Sara Lee already controls 22% of Brazil’s retail coffee market, and…
After the Harvest
When discussing the problems associated with commodity coffee, and why you need to pay a little more to make sure people and the environment are protected, I’ve actually had people tell me they have a “right” to cheap coffee. I often hear that certified coffees are too hard to find, and people tell me they’d…
A “new” species of coffee from Australia
Media outlets have picked up on a story about a new species of coffee, Coffea brassii, from Australia. In fact, this isn’t a new species, but a plant that has recently been reclassified by taxonomists from the genus Psilanthus. A number of species in that genus have moved around the genera Coffea, Paracoffea, and Psilanthus…
Growing coffee at home
How to grow coffee indoors, at 189 meters.
Sips: Speculation, shares, sharp words
Recent noteworthy news pertaining to sustainable coffee: Someone worked out how a coffee CSA can work: pick some farmers, buy some shares, enjoy coffee you invested in. The last word on Keurig single-cup brewers and why they and their ilk pose a real danger to specialty (and sustainable) coffee, from Jim Pellegrini of Muddy Dog…
Coffee berry borer: feature, lecture
The featured insect of the week at the North Carolina State University Insect Museum blog is the coffee berry borer.
Sips
We have just returned from a 10-day trip to Nicaragua, where we did insect and bird surveys, and bird banding, at two great coffee farms, Finca El Jaguar in Jinotega, and Finca Esperanza Verde in San Ramon. I’ll be posting about that soon. Meanwhile, some coffee news from when I was away. FLO (Fairtrade International,…
Sips: Corporate coffee news
News items from Kraft and Smuckers.
My year in beans: 2010
I buy over 60 pounds of high-quality, sustainable coffee a year for under $0.90 a cup. Here are my stats, and a calculator for you to use to determine how much your cup of coffee costs.
Sips: Season of giving
In the past, I have provided some suggestions for holiday gifts — great coffee- or bird-related charities as well as more conventional gifts for sustainable-coffee lovers. Here are my 2010 suggestions, which focus on helping people in coffee-growing communities. Sustainable Harvest International works in Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. Through projects with organic vegetable gardens,…