Coffee-related products

Coffee-related products

Review: Reusable hemp coffee filter

Mr. Natural’s reusable hemp coffee filter [discontinued here is an organic alternative]

I admit that I prefer the taste of drip coffee brewed through a paper filter, but hate the waste. Although I compost both the grounds and the filter, trees still fell to produce the filter in the first place.  Every brewing method brings to the cup a slightly (sometimes greatly) different flavor profile. I’m not always enthusiastic about the results a gold filter produces with some coffees.

I decided to try a reusable cloth coffee filter, and I’ve been extremely pleased with the results.

I have read that cloth filters allow some of the coffee oils through; not as much as gold filters (or from coffee made in a French press) and not as little as some paper filters. As with paper, there is little or no sediment with a cloth filter, depending on the fineness of the weave of the cloth. In general, cloth filters are said to result in a cup that is less astringent and with better mouthfeel.

As far as types of cloth, the choice is most often cotton versus hemp. Frankly, the tightness of the weave would probably be the factor most related to the final coffee outcome, although I’m sure some people will advocate for one or the other based on some other intrinsic quality of the fiber. In my opinion, if you’re going to go green by purchasing a cloth filter , you may as go all way and get hemp. Cotton, if not grown organically, is grown with a ton of environmentally-harmful chemicals. While I have seen unbleached organic cotton coffee filters, they are not as common as hemp filters. Hemp for fiber is typically grown organically or with a minimum of chemicals, so is probably the “greener” choice.

Therefore, I went with a hemp filter by Mr. Naturals. Compared to locally available cloth filters, I found this filter to be very thick and sturdy — it doesn’t sag in the filter basket. The weave is fine enough that brew time is not accelerated. Although it’s a #4 cone for my drip machine, I’ve used it in my #2 size pour-over cone and it brews at the same pace as a paper filter, and the fit is actually perfectly adequate. I agree with others on the end product: a slightly lusher mouthfeel than paper and only a little bit of very fine sediment. At least with this filter and the coffees I have been recently drinking, I couldn’t detect a significant flavor difference due to the presence of more oils. Your mileage may vary.

In addition to being far less wasteful, the other big advantage of cloth filters is that you don’t get the “paper” taste that some people get with paper filters. I will admit that I tend not to taste paper, so this isn’t an issue for me, but I know it is for many coffee aficionados. I certainly did not taste “cloth” with the hemp filter. But one of my biggest reservations in trying a cloth filter to begin with is that it seemed to me that it would be hard to clean, and eventually you’d taste old coffee oils or just general funk.

Here’s how to clean a cloth filter:

After each use, rinse thoroughly in very hot water, give it a rub or light brushing with a toothbrush, and store in container of water in the refrigerator to prevent mold or bacterial growth between uses. If it’s used daily or more often, you can just wring it out, pop it in a Ziploc bag, and toss it in the fridge. I’m pretty lazy, so that’s what I do. I confess that I have also just wrung it out and let it dry and so far I’ve had no issues. Once a week, soak the filter in Oxyclean Free (no perfumes) and boiling water, rinse it, and store it in the fridge again. Some users boil it again in clean water after the Oxyclean treatment. Frankly, it seems easiest to have at least two filters so you aren’t left in a lurch if one is getting an Oxyclean bath.

Coffee-related products / K-Cups/Keurig brewers: alternatives

K-Cup and other single-use pods: the waste issue, again

I’ve written several posts on the Keurig single-cup coffee brewers, or more specifically, about the K-Cup single use coffee “pods” and the waste they generate. I have explored, in detail, three ways to cope with this waste:

In each post I’ve also discussed the progress (or lack thereof) that Keurig owner Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) has had on finding sustainable or recyclable materials for use in the K-Cups.

This week the New York Times had a worthwhile article on the continuing dilemma of the convenience of single-cup coffee versus the waste it generates. The article notes that it is expected that nearly 3 billion K-Cups will be sold this year. (We’ll get to the other brands of single-use coffee pods in a minute.)

The article mentions that GMCR are experimenting with a paper K-Cup (no foil or plastic) for use with tea this year; the issues surrounding brew temperature and freshness of coffee apparently still have them stymied. GMCR goes on to say that they have done a life-cycle analysis of the environmental impact of the K-Cup and determined that most of the impacts occur where the packaging is produced, not where the waste is disposed. But this doesn’t mean the waste stream doesn’t have a big impact, and this leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of some consumers.

The article goes on to describe the fact that some of the competitors of K-Cups can be recycled. This is a bit misleading, as these options are very limited. TerraCycle will reuse the plastic from Kraft’s Tassimo pods in Britain (and Mars’ Flavia packages). These recycling options are not available to consumers in the U.S., but offices and food services providers. Nestlé’s aluminum Nespresso pods can be recycled at some propietary boutiques in a few European countries. Sara Lee’s Senseo pods are made of paper and therefore compostable (how many consumers just throw them away, though?).

Even supposing these options were widely and easily available to consumers worldwide, I still believe that K-Cups are the most environmentally-friendly product in the single-use arena.

Why? GMCR sources coffee responsibly and has a strong corporate responsibility and environmental record.* You simply cannot say the same thing about Nestlé, Kraft, and Sara Lee. For just a few examples, you can read my posts deconstructing the sustainability claims of Nestlé, Kraft, and Sara Lee; read how Kraft and Nestlé got caught purchasing illegally grown coffee because they don’t even know where much of their coffee comes from; and take a look at the how a major organization ranked these big coffee companies in areas like the environment, human rights, health and safety, etc. Finally, you can see how these big corporate coffee roasters exploit farmers and the environment, to the detriment of us all.

The most sustainable choice is to not use single-cup brewing systems in the first place. If they are going to be used, then consumers have to look at the big picture. With the Keurig system, there are alternatives to throwing away K-Cups, as outlined in my other posts. If disposable K-Cups are going to be used, consumers are easily able to find sustainably-sourced coffee, including Rainforest Alliance certified Caribou Coffee K-Cups. And at least using K-Cups will be better than supporting the dismal environmental  and ethical records of the big corporate coffee roasters that manufacture other brands.

*UPDATE: Now that Folgers and Dunkin Donuts coffees are available in K-Cups and GMCR seems willing to license to anybody, no matter how bad the sourcing, I am modifying this statement. Let’s just say that more responsibly-sourced coffees (including Caribou and GMCRs own coffees) are available for the Keurig brewer, and there are a lot of options for avoiding the use of wasteful K-Cups altogether by using your own coffee. Do that.

Coffee news and miscellany / Coffee-related products / Corporate coffee

Sustainable instant coffee

I’ve been asked more than once about a source of sustainably-grown instant coffee. My usual reply is that there isn’t one. Understanding how instant coffee is manufactured will illustrate why the majority of the coffee beans that are used to make it are low-quality commodity coffee, and thus not a good option for consumers looking for coffee grown in an environmentally-friendly manner.

How instant coffee is made
Green coffee is brought to large manufacturing plants, often in the country of origin. Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico are the largest producers of instant coffee. At the factory, the coffee is roasted in large batches and ground. It then goes through multiple extractions using hot water under pressure. The resulting liquid is filtered and concentrated. Finally, the concentrated extract is dehydrated by either spray drying or freeze drying. Spray drying, in which the extract is spewed into an enormous tower and blasted by hot air, produces a fine powder. This powder must be “agglomerated” (other materials added to create familiar-looking granules that flow and dissolve more freely). Freeze drying creates clumps that resemble ground coffee, but the process is more expensive.

These production processes rob the coffee of most of the aroma. This is reintroduced by various combinations of natural or synthetic compounds, typically mixed with some type of oil, which are put back on the coffee particles prior to packaging in a process known as “replating.”

Why low-quality beans are used
The final goal of a specialty coffee roaster is great taste in the cup. To that end, they want carefully grown beans, processed properly at the mill, expertly roasted to bring out the best nuances of that particular bean.

The final goal of instant coffee is convenience. All the technology is aimed at leaching out all the water-soluble compounds to produce a product that looks and feels like coffee, but is quick and convenient to prepare.

This is the primary reason that low-quality beans are used for instant coffee: higher-quality beans with good flavor profiles would be used for the roast-and-ground market. Another way low-quality beans end up in instant coffee is because most countries don’t allow their lowest quality beans to be exported. Since instant coffee is often produced in the country of origin, it can be the final resting place of non-exportable beans.

Finally, instant coffees from the big corporate roasters such Nescafè’s Taster’s Choice (Nestlè), Maxwell House (Kraft), and Folgers (Smuckers) all contain robusta beans. Robusta is the lower-growing species of coffee (Coffea canephora) that is grown in large full-sun plantations. In some markets, some of these brands are 100% robusta (spray-dried instants are more likely to be all-robusta). In addition to the negative environmental impact of robusta plantations, these beans are considered inferior quality. To make robusta palatable, it generally must be steamed or treated in some way.

The big roasters not only use robusta, they will use very low-quality robusta. This article from Nestlè (a downloaded copy, since removed from their site)– incredibly boasting about quality — notes that they buy “coffee beans having eight percent to 16 percent triage.” Triage coffee, for the unsuspecting, is all the moldy beans, broken beans, sticks, stones, insect-damaged or rotten beans…all the stuff that is rejected or sorted out at the mill! [1].

The world’s largest producer of robusta is Vietnam, where it has been noted, “Wherever coffee was grown, forests have disappeared.” Brazil also grows a lot of robusta, but the variety grown there, called Conillon, is higher-priced than African- or Asian-sourced robusta. Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) is another major exporter. Côte d’Ivoire is the most biodiverse nation in west Africa, but has suffered severe deforestation and fragmentation, in part due to mass plantings of coffee and cacao in the late 1980s. Because of the time lag between environmental destruction and biodiversity loss (known as “extinction debt”), it has been projected that Côte d’Ivoire may still lose a third of its primate species.

In addition to being cheap, an additional motivation for manufacturers to use robusta is that it has a higher extraction rate than arabica. The rule of thumb is that it takes 2.6 kg of green beans to produce 1 kg of instant coffee. Manufacturers get a higher proportion of soluble materials out of robusta.

The authors of The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop put instant coffee in historical context:

“If in retrospect the coffee industry appeared to be out of its collective mind in pursuing the race for low quality, it is worth remembering that this blind love affair with consistency and technology was part of a larger cultural embrace of a mass-market modernism … Instant coffee was created by the same technophila that later produced technified cultivation systems.”

My mantra is generally that when it comes to the environment or farmers’ livelihoods, there is no such thing as “cheap” coffee. In the case of instant coffee, the cost of convenience and low consumer prices nearly always includes habitat loss and crappy proceeds to farmers.

One exception may be the new Starbucks VIA Ready Brew.  The majority of Starbucks beans are sourced under their C.A.F.E. Practices supplier guidelines (with a 100% goal by 2015), which use 24 criteria based on over 200 social and environmental indicators. I’ve received no confirmation so far that the beans used in VIA are part of this program.

[1] For a couple of discussions on how the use of this extremely poor quality coffee drags down the entire coffee industry, see this statement to Congress by the former SCAA director (scroll down halfway) and the post and comments on this blog post by Sweet Maria’s Tom Owen.

Photo from iStockphoto.

Coffee-related products

Holiday gift guide for sustainable coffee lovers

In case you don’t come across enough holiday gift guides this season, I’m highlighting some of my favorite items, many of which you can find year-round in the Coffee & Conservation store.

The two best coffee books are Uncommon Grounds The History Of Coffee And How It Transformed Our World and God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee. Here is my review of God in a Cup.

Another book I have not yet read is Ivette’s Natures Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty, which includes a chapter discussing coffee. Authors Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer are University of Michigan professors who have done so much of the pioneering work on biodiversity and shade coffee. More on this book here.

Three excellent low-tech coffee brewing devices are the Chemex Classic Glass Coffee Maker; the AeroPress Coffee and Espresso Maker, which is excellent for travel; and my favorite press pot, the Planetary Design Table Top Stainless Steel French Press. I reviewed its smaller cousin the travel French Press mug, and the same praise applies to the larger models.

I also like to recommend gold coffee filters to reduce the use of paper filters.

I’m pretty blown away by the remarkable art of Andrew Saur and Angel Sarkela-Saur, who use coffee to produce stunning watercolors. Take a look at their gallery at Coffee Art; prints start at only $10.

Earlier this year I screened the three-part documentary Black Coffee. It was extremely well done and traces the impact of coffee through history. Readers may also be interested in the story of Ethiopian coffee in the well-known powerful film Black Gold.

Finally, if you’d like to spread cheer directly to coffee-growing communities, please consider a donation to the Cafe Femenino Foundation, Grounds for Health, or Kiva micro-loans to coffee farmers. This is really what holiday giving is all about.