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 …
In Search of the Holy Grail: Mapping the Espresso Landscape
By Shanna Germain Espresso. It’s a drink, a lifestyle, a ritual, an addiction. It’s an end-goal and a dream concoction. It’s an art and a science, a measurable entity and a mystical experience. It’s also full of controversy, misunderstandings, missteps and flawed logic. To uncover some of what makes espresso such a complicated creation, we …
Why Standards Matter: The GFA Example
By Mark Inman In the fall of 2010, a San Francisco-based group called The Seedling Projects organized a group of known food producers, writers, grocers, farmers and chefs to create “The Good Food Awards” (GFA), recognizing producers and food communities around the U.S. that create excellent beer, charcuterie, cheese, chocolate, pickles, preserves and coffee. The …
Welcome to the Issues Issue
By Peter Giuliano The coffee plant is barely domesticated. Its cultivated form is almost identical to the wild coffee plants that still grow in the forests of Western Ethiopia. As such, it thrives in environments that mimic the primeval forest; and these forest-like farms—we call them shade-grown coffee plantations—are among the most environmentally positive forms …
I Want Coffee, Not Coffee
Or: How I learned to appreciate cream and sugar again By Nicholas Cho Recently, I had the privilege of producing a “person on the street” video segment that was shown during the 2011 SCAA Symposium. Titled simply, “SCAA Symposium Street Interviews,” the video showed me asking nine random people outside of the Ferry Building in San Francisco a …
Does Quality Ensure Sustainability?
By Lily Kubota As with all industries, specialty coffee has a number of long-standing premises that, founded or not, are often taken as something akin to gospel. One of these premises is that better coffee equals higher prices (and therefore, economic sustainability for producers), and that economic sustainability can drive other facets of sustainability. At …
The Case for Active Goodness
By Ric Rhinehart It was in 2000 that Google employees Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel first wrote a phrase on a conference room whiteboard, three little words that would become the unofficial statement of corporate values for the company: “Don’t Be Evil.” The phrase, akin to the medical version of “First, do no harm,” was …
What Can Specialty Coffee Accomplish?
By Peter Giuliano As we all know, coffee is a uniquely global product. Grown only within the tropics and typically consumed outside of them, coffee is one of the rare luxuries that transcends boundaries and cultures. This unique element creates a deeply, completely global industry where we regularly use names and words from a number of different …
Connecting to the Cause
How to Find Charity (Even) When Deciding Not to By Tim Castle No matter who they are or what they do, people look for connections and community. After all, it’s not for nothing that we call ourselves “social animals.” right now, it’s “social media” and a digital “social network,” but 10,000 years ago it was …
Reassessing the Role of Certifications
By Tracy Ging About a year ago at the annual roasters Guild retreat, we posed the question in the roundtable discussions, “is fair Trade dead?” We selected the subject because it was a trending topic. in side conversations, blog comments and on the roasters Guild forum, people were discussing the purpose of an additional premium …
Friendly Competition: There is No “I” in Coffee
By Lily Kubota Mac vs. PC. Facebook vs. Twitter. NBC vs. ABC vs. Fox. We live in a world of competition, one in which companies knock their opponents in ads, product devotees push their favorites and make fun of the others in YouTube videos, and customers are expected, always, to choose a side. It is, …
Competitions and Competitiveness
What it Means when Baristas Compete By Tracy Ging “What’s the deal with barista competitions?” That, it seems, is a common question from some members of the coffee industry. Many people know what the competitions are, they understand how they work, but all-in-all, they find that the whole production resembles a Christopher Guest movie—while they …