Coffee Choice

The following would hardly make it through an academic review process, but here are some observations based on our 2008 sampling of reader nominated coffees (this speculation has a margin of error of somewhere around 100%).

1. Current specialty coffee drinkers may be losing interest in extreme dark roasts, and fewer small regional roasting companies are roasting all of their coffees dark regardless of origin.
2. On the other hand, few of the smaller roasters we sampled have migrated to the newly trendy medium-to-light roasts. Most are situating themselves right in the middle of the roast spectrum — in artisan-roasting terms, just into the second crack.
3. Small roasting companies and their customers continue to interest themselves in coffees certified Fair Trade and organic.
4. It appears that few of the nominated roasting companies have jumped onto the micro-lot bandwagon. (Micro-lots are very tiny lots of extremely refined coffees, usually sourced directly from small growers.) Most nominated coffees appear to be from old-fashioned macro-lots sourced through the regular specialty supply chain, identified rather broadly by origin, coffee type, certification or occasionally farm. Names were familiar, ranging from Tanzanian Peaberry (a favorite, with several nominations) through well-established Central American estate names to plain old Colombia.
5. Small roasting companies continue to sport names that lean toward the rustic and irreverent: Rusty Car Roasters, Muddy Dog Roasters, Wildfire Roasters, and not reviewed here, Black Bear Microroastery (with its Hibernation Blend) and Pike's Perk (in Colorado of course).
6. The great majority of nominations came from the middle part of the country, between the coasts. It may be that readers and roasters in those parts of the country feel left out, though I hope not. The reader who nominated the excellent Yirgacheffe from San Antonio-based Wildfire Coffee Roasters (90) wrote that he "would like to see a roaster from a non-traditional (for most roasters) part of the U.S. get a mention."
7. The quality of this sampling overall was arguably better than past Readers' Choice samplings. There seemed to be fewer outright defective green coffees and more tactful, origin-sensitive roasting.
8. On the other hand, a surprising number of mildly musty coffees turned up, though most were the kind displaying the pleasant, roundly rich kind of mustiness that can be safely glamorized as earthy. 

What is your choice of coffee product?

Coffee Bean

This blog will contains of about coffee and many other story who related with coffee like this one.

The United States consumes one-fifth of all the world's coffee, making it the largest consumer in the world. But few Americans realize that agriculture workers in the coffee industry often toil in what can be described as "sweatshops in the fields." Many small coffee farmers receive prices for their coffee that are less than the costs of production, forcing them into a cycle of poverty and debt.

Fair Trade is a viable solution to this crisis, assuring consumers that the coffee we drink was purchased under fair conditions. To become Fair Trade certified, an importer must meet stringent international criteria; paying a minimum price per pound of $1.26, providing much needed credit to farmers, and providing technical assistance such as help transitioning to organic farming. Fair Trade for coffee farmers means community development, health, education, and environmental.

Coffee prices have plummeted and are currently around $.60-$.70 per pound. "With world market prices as low as they are right now, we see that a lot of farmers cannot maintain their families and their land anymore. We need Fair Trade now more than ever," says Jerónimo Bollen, Director of Manos Campesinas, a Fair Trade coffee cooperative in Guatemala. Meanwhile coffee companies have not lowered consumer prices but are pocketing the difference. "The drastic fall in coffee prices means, in two words, poverty and hunger for thousands of small producers in Latin America," says Merling Preza Ramos, Director of PRODECOOP Fair Trade cooperative in Nicaragua