Coffee and the environment / Coffee awards and competitions / Coffee news and miscellany

Recent sustainability awards

Rainforest Alliance Cupping for Quality. This event was started in 2004 as a competition for Rainforest Alliance certified coffees. The most recent cuppings took place last December and in April, with over 100 samples submitted. There are many top-flight sustainable coffees available; I was disappointed to see that most of these coffees scored under 90 points (specialty coffee = 80 or greater).

Here are the top farms:

  1. La Esmeralda, Panama, 90.04. Arguably, the most famous and pricey specialty coffee in the world.  We offered background here and a review here. It also won first place in the SCAA 2007 Roasters Guild Cupping Pavilion Competition earlier this month (for the third year in a row), and the Best of Panama, once again, last month. We have a jar on my desk to save up to try this one again. It just sold at auction for $130/pound, $80 more per pound than last year, it is just not worth it.  It was very distinctive and interesting, but this pricing reflects novelty/celebrity status.
  2. Carmen Estate Coffee S.A., Panama, 88.96.
  3. Santa Teresa, El Salvador, 88.25. (All bourbon coffee from four farms, from western El Salvador in Ahuachapan, is milled at the Santa Teresa Estate.)
  4. Finca Medina, S.A., Guatemala, 87.46 (Antigua;10% of the farm is regenerated native forest.)
  5. Grupo Aguadas de Caldas, Colombia, 87.04.

SCAA Sustainability Awards.  Established in 2004, this award recognizes specialty coffee companies that have created innovative projects to expand sustainability within the coffee world while inspiring others to initiate similar endeavors. These are the winners for 2007 announced earlier this month.

  • Poabs Organic/Biodynamic Estates, India. In the Nelliyampathy hills in the Western Ghats (Palakkad district, Kerala), pioneers of organic farming not only of coffee, but also tea and other crops.
  • Selva Negra Coffee Estate, Nicaragua. Sustainable coffee producer — read about their shade production, which incorporates Smithsonian Bird-Friendly criteria.
  • International Paper Company and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. For producing the first hot beverage cup made from fully renewable resources (ecotainer), a compostable corn-based material produced in a greenhouse-gas neutral manufacturing process.
  • SOPPEXCCA, Jinotega, Nicaragua. Cooperative alliance of coffee producers with many community initiatives, as well as a move from conventional to organic production.

Rainforest Alliance Green Globe Awards. RA honored companies which significantly advanced the goals set forth by the Rainforest Alliance and have integrated environmental and social sustainability into their work at their 20th anniversary gala last month. Honored were:

    • Caribou Coffee. Caribou has made a larger commitment than any other big coffee house to buying RA-certified beans, and they are up-front about exactly how much they use. By 2008, Caribou Coffee has pledged that 50 percent of its coffees will come from Rainforest Alliance-certified farms. Caribou Coffee’s lines that currently bear the seal, and the percentage certified in each blend include:    — Daybreak – 50 percent
      — Colombia – 100 percent
      — Guatemala El Socorro – 100 percent
      — Caribou Blend – 75 percent
      — Fireside Blend – 30 percent
      — Espresso Blend – 75 percent
      — French Roast Blend – 75 percent
      — Reindeer Blend – 30 percent
      — Perennial Blend – 30 percent
      — Amy’s Blend – 50 percent
  • Nestlé Nespresso SA. Okay, this is why I take a somewhat dim view of some of RA’s work. This recognition is for their AAA Sustainability Program. I’ve read through their whole web site, and the emphasis here is more on quality than environmental practices, and seems to lack stringent environmental criteria. Although this is a partnership with RA, it is not indicated that RA certification criteria are even required.  Some of the individual projects seem quite worthwhile. But even if we could agree that this particular program is completely righteous, it supplies 30% of Nespresso’s beans (50% by 2010).  Nespresso is a subsidiary of Nestlé and represents only a small amount of the total  beans purchased by this huge company which has a poor track record on many environmental issues, including pollution, water rights, and recycling (read more at Responsible Shopper).  I just can’t get behind rewarding a company like this unless they make an across-the-board effort to clean up their act.
  • Another award went to “innocent”, a UK smoothie brand.

Africa / Coffee reviews

Coffee Review: Green Mountain Gombe Reserve

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #24.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Gombe Reserve.

Recently I posted an overview of coffee from Tanzania, an east African country best known for their marketing of peaberry coffees. In the western part of the country, near the shores of Lake Tanganyika and the town of Kigoma, lies Gombe Stream National Park where researcher Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in 1960. This area is also the source of Green Mountain’s new Gombe Reserve coffee, via the 2,700-member Kalinzi Cooperative.

Deforestation has isolated Gombe’s chimpanzees, whose population has declined to fewer than 100 individuals, within the small national park. This severely limits their range and ability to enlarge their communities. This coffee will makes a significant contribution to the preservation of the Gombe chimps.  I can’t do any better than to quote from the Jane Goodall Institute web site:

Those who purchase this high-quality coffee are supporting cultivation of a sustainable, chimpanzee-friendly crop grown by farmers in the impoverished Kigoma region of western Tanzania. The coffee is shade-grown (meaning trees aren’t cut down). What’s more, because chimpanzees don’t like coffee beans, they don’t raid the fields, thus avoiding human-wildlife conflict — an increasing, life-threatening problem in areas where human and wildlife live in proximity.

JGI hopes the partnership with Kigoma coffee growers will result in a new leafy corridor connecting vital rangelands from which the Gombe chimpanzees have been cut off due to deforestation. The corridor will allow the chimpanzees to expand their feeding range and mingle with other chimpanzee groups, which is vital for genetic diversity and disease resistance.

By connecting the 2,700 small-scale farmers in Kigoma’s Kalinzi Cooperative with new markets and introducing new quality-control and production methods, JGI and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is helping the farmers significantly boost their income and coffee production. This gives farmers an incentive to work with JGI in the future to set aside land for the chimpanzees.

If key villages reserve 10 to 20 percent of their land, there will be an interlinked, multi-village forest reserve, providing additional habitat to chimpanzees and connecting Gombe National Park to forest reserves in Burundi.

The only thing that could make you feel better about this coffee than all that is if it were also incredibly delicious.  Folks, this coffee is!

This is a medium roast, and the beans had a sweet smell, with hints of honey, flowers, and even a little tobacco. It was a distinctively African smell, but seemed unique somehow.

With its proximity to Kenya, I think we all expected this Tanzanian coffee to have the wine-like tones so characteristic of Kenyans.  Instead, we were surprised by the little citrus kick when piping hot and the undertone of fruit that followed that was so reminiscent of an Ethiopian coffee. Finally, when cooler, came the tart wine finish.

This coffee was marvelously complex, but not jarringly so, as some Africans can be.  It harmoniously went from one flavor to the next, each nicely balanced. The bird song it evoked for us was that of the Yellow-breasted Chat: full of interesting and sometimes unusual notes, all coming from an enigmatic source. There was only one shortcoming in the Gombe Reserve — we felt it failed brewed in drip coffee maker, even using a gold filter. The loss of character was nearly complete. Please prepare this special coffee in a French press, Chemex , Eva Cafe Solo, or  vacuum pot. This is seriously good coffee — 4 motmots.

Retail and specialty roasters / Starbucks

A note from Terranova Estate (Starbucks Black Apron)

Last month, I posted about the latest Starbucks Black Apron selection, from Zambia’s Terranova Estate, owned by the Street family. Warren Street was kind enough to leave a long comment on the post, giving more detail on things I found difficult to research, such as the water management at the farm, the fact they have a 400-acre natural reserve, an update on the school, and that the $15,000 from Starbucks Black Apron program will go to fund a clinic.  Please give the comment a read — it’s a worthwhile addition to the post!

Corporate coffee

Wendy’s and Folgers

Greg at The Shot more than adequately sums up the puzzling move by Wendy’s burger chain to begin serving Folger’s coffee (owned by Procter & Gamble, the company which states in its sustainability report that “P&G does not track biodiversity land use as in
general we do not operate in these areas.”). The coffees will be from the Gourmet Selections line. Here’s what Kenneth Davids had to say about one of those varieties:

Pungently sweet, cedary, faintly sewerish-fermented aroma. In the cup neutral, sweet, very simple, with hints of walnut and continued composty ferment. Cleans up a bit in the finish. Considerable difference from cup to cup, with some cups more fermented than others.

Certainly a reason to rush to Wendy’s for coffee.  Not.