Coffee Talk: Gesha
By Danny Pinnell, SCAA Our coffee talk from this week’s staff meeting was a sort of team effort between Peter Giuliano and Ric Rhinehart. While working as a coffee buyer at Counter Culture coffee in 2004, Giuliano received a phone call from Rhinehart, co-owner of Groundwork Coffee in Los Angeles at the time. He called …
The End of an Era and the Future of Sustainability: The Coffee Kids Legacy
By Lily Kubota, SCAA On Tuesday morning, thousands of coffee professionals around the world woke up to the news that Coffee Kids, a non-profit NGO supporting a wide variety of projects in coffee farming communities would be suspending programming and seeking “an appropriate organization with which to merge.” This announcement spurred a lot of conversation about …
Coffee Talk: Naturals
By Danny Pinnell, SCAA Walking into the conference room for our weekly staff meeting, our fearless “coffee talk” leader Peter Giuliano asked us to smell three different coffees, which were presented in cupping glasses as dry grounds, and note their fragrance. One of these coffees was Huabal, a “washed” coffee from San Ignacio, Peru. The other …
Global Coffee Treasure Up for Auction
Ian Bersten spent 37 years traveling throughout the world to bring together a unique collection that is now The Bersten Antique Coffee & Tea Collection & Museum. Recognized within the industry as one of the largest and most significant collections of coffee and tea makers in the world, it reflects Bersten’s lifelong passion as a …
Coffee Talk: Rwanda
By Danny Pinnell, SCAA As we begin gearing up in preparation for The Event in April, planning meetings become more frequent to make sure we’re ready for you all to join us in Seattle. This week’s staff meeting was entirely devoted to the show, but it wouldn’t be complete without our weekly coffee talk. This coffee …
Giving the People What They Want
By Peter Giuliano, SCAA Baristas have the best job in coffee. They get to experience that magical and important moment in coffee’s lifecycle, that final moment of truth, when months and years of work by farmers, millers, exporters, importers, roasters, and the myriad other professions in coffee comes to fruition. That moment, when a harried …
Finding Connections, Creating Conversations: The Coffee Shop Regular
By Chérmelle D. Edwards, The Coffeetographer Imagine the young morning sun beginning to bloom on the sidewalk, a fall wind sweeping leaves into circles, the bustle of a city slowly rousing. As you awake, the choice to have coffee away from home is an easy decision, and it is because these natural elements somehow incite …
A Coffee Maker for Everyone: Accessibility in the Age of Specialty Coffee
By Emma Sage, SCAA Sometimes it feels like we need a cup of coffee in the morning before we can even manage to brew one. Brewing specialty coffee is not difficult, but can certainly take some effort and experimentation to discover the desired brew strength. For at-home specialty coffee customers, trying to replicate the cup …
When Coffee Drinkers Don’t Share our Tastes
By Tracy Ging, S&D Coffee and Tea, Inc. “It tastes like soap,” squealed one of the second graders treated to a seven-course, $220 tasting meal at Daniel. The comparison to soap wasn’t even the half of it—the kids thought some of the dishes were disgusting, the pasta course was “meh,” and they basically didn’t like most …
Perceiving is Believing: Getting to Know Your Coffee
By Tim Castle, Castle & Co. I’ve always thought of coffee as an information medium, much like a flash drive. It is a liquid and volatile (gaseous) collection of pixels, or data points: we smell it, inhale it, feel the temperature of it in our hands, the steam of it in our nostrils—in addition to …
Translating the Language of Sustainability
By Adam Kline, Atlantic Specialty Coffee Inc. As specialty coffee professionals, we know we are lucky. Lucky in many ways, but especially in that our industry has developed based on the distinction of quality over the equalizer of commercial price. We realize that our unique need to protect quality—of coffee and of life—allows us to conceptualize …
The Home Consumer: Are they Ready for the Pros?
By Anastasia Chovan, UNIC USA The fundamental question for specialty coffee is this: what does the future of the coffee consumer look like? In other words, how are consumers going to be making coffee at home in the coming years? Those companies who are able to anticipate this trajectory will be the winners. Where should you …