The 2011 United States Barista Championship Competition Season
By Marcus Boni Sometimes I wonder how many times I’ve had to describe exactly what a barista competition is to someone who isn’t closely familiar with the Specialty Coffee Industry. My canned response usually starts with “Are you familiar with a bartenders competition?” and then I go on to talk about the basic service and …
Dollars and Sense: The Business Rationale for Training
By Shanna Germain If you’re in the specialty coffee business, you probably know a great deal about employee training. You’ve read articles, you understand the reasoning, and you likely have a system set up to train new and continuing employees. Chances are good that you also agree with the philosophy that says that having well-trained …
Creating a Common Language for Quality
By Craig Holt No system for evaluating coffee quality is perfect. The Q Coffee System, however, has been a great help to me as a specialty coffee importer and, I would guess, to many others in the specialty industry. While the vast majority of our clients today are skilled and thoughtful cuppers, we used to …
Dare to Differentiate: SCAA Certification Programs
By Ellie Hudson Matuszak Differentiation. It is a word that many of us, as specialty coffee professionals, use and occasionally even overuse. It is a word and a concept that some love and others loathe. It is highly specific in meaning but can also be used as a catch-all to describe the ultimate goals and …
Educating the Industry
By Peter Giuliano One thing that makes coffee special is that it takes so many skilled professionals to reveal its natural beauty. The skills of the farmer, miller, cupper, roaster, and barista are essential to specialty coffee, and SCAA has, since its inception, taken responsibility for cultivating, teaching, and setting the standard for coffee education …
Getting to Know Tim O’Connor
Q: Who are you and what do you do in coffee? A: Let’s reverse the order of that question–what I do in coffee is hard enough to answer! I’m actively involved in a number of businesses as well as serving as president of the SCAA. I’m based in Santa Cruz, California and most of my …
The FNC´s National Coffee Research Center (Cenicafé) was awarded with the Blue Planet Prize 2010-2011
For more than 70 years Cenicafé has researched on themes that include coffee production, harvesting methods, wet mill processest, quality, by-products management, and natural resource conservation. The protection, recovery, and appropriate management of soils and water sources have always been a priority to Cenicafé. The reduced use of harmful substances to the environment is possible …
High Prices Jolt Coffee Market
By Marvin G. Perez Rising food prices are eating into corporate earnings, and the coffee industry is no exception. For seasoned traders paying the current price above $2.30 for a pound of Arabica beans this may not be so shocking, especially if they lived through the price spike to $3.18 a pound seen in 1997. …
Our Top Four: The 2011 SCAA Sustainability Award Finalists
By SCAA’s Sustainability Council The Sustainability Council created the Sustainability Award in 2003 to promote, encourage and honor the efforts of those serving as role models in fields of sustainability. Each year, the council read about the depth and breadth of the sustainable work being done in all areas across the industry and chooses a …
Coffee and Sustainability: Are we Having the Impact we Intend?
By Tracy Ging Sustainability has been part of the discourse in the specialty coffee industry almost from the beginning and certainly for a better part of the past two decades. Early on, with vision and leadership bordering on radical, the industry made sustainability part of its mission. The SCAA also encouraged total quality, inclusive of …
The Specialty Coffee Industry Shows Initiative Worldwide
By Bruce Mullins The specialty coffee industry’s Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI) has officially been launched, and has begun its historic multi-year journey towards a more complete understanding of the science behind coffee quality and coffee quantity. The Initiative—developed over the past 18 months by a consortium of leading specialty coffee roasters, thought-leaders and …
Important or Self-Important: The Role and Influence of a Barista
By Tracy Ging with significant contribution by James Hoffmann After the World Barista Championship (WBC) this year in London, I got to be a fly on the wall and listen in on a conversation between Oliver Strand, a columnist for The New York Times, and the six WBC finalists. It was a casual yet deeply …