Buena Vista Roastery
Coffee and the MountainsArchive for August, 2008
Fair Trade and a Hill of Beans
The Christian Science Monitor recently published a portion of an essay on Fair Trade entitled, “Fair-trade coffee: not worth a hill of beans.” Granted, this reads like an opinion paper without numbers and statistics to buttress the arguments, but the arguments seem worthy of further investigation. It’s more perspective to balance in the popular struggle to be certified or not to be certified, both supplying goods or demanding goods. I for one appreciate having people question what we have accepted as matter of fact.
SCAA Sustainability Committee
I am happy to say that I have been selected to serve on the SCAA Sustainability Committee for the next couple of years. A group of us from the coffee industry will work to progress efforts of sustainability – working with producers, suppliers, certifiers, roasters, retailers, etc. I am unsure who else is recently appointed to the committee, but know the previous and current members were a respected and thoughtful group. It will be an interesting experience and a great opportunity to help fashion or influence policy for the industry.
Rain
Buena Vista has been seeing some much welcome rain. The rain is increasing our humidity to 40% or so in the mornings, which then drops again to 24% by noon. Much different than the Midwest. The first cutting of alfalfa has happened, the river rose again last night via runoff, the blue gramma grass is putting up seed heads, and fire danger, while high, is tempered.
An article on the Bloomberg report talks about the recent rain in India and the effect on coffee yield. Our current Indian coffee is the Indian Monsooned Malabar. The Indian Monsooned Malabar, named for the process it undergoes that simulates its historic journey around Cape Hope and on to England, is a dark, buttery and earthy coffee that is very underappreciated. We expect samples for some new crop next week, which, once we select the best, we will optimize flavor and richness and soon feature.
Greening
We at the Roastery think of ourselves as fairly ‘green’ when it comes to our practices and philosophies. Green will mean different things to different people. On someone’s scale we will be neon, on someone else’s, a dull sage. In any case, there is always room for improvement in my eyes, and through the balancing juggernaut of day-to-day business, we can tackle evermore environmentally, socially and economically sound initiatives. We have declared some carbon reduction initiatives for the present year and are monitoring to check how well we are achieving these. One thing we are in the midst of is working with BBI International and their Green Business certification. An energy audit will commence sometime soon, we hope, and we will have a starting basis from which to work. We will post progress with our initiatives as it happens overtime.
