Insomniac With Coffee Addiction

Wow! Here's quite a piece written by an insomniac with an addiction to coffee. Is it the caffeine that makes him such a good writer! He speaks of giving up coffee to see if that was the cause of his insomnia, but he doesn't actually say if he made a link to it or not. All we do know is that without coffee, he suffers heart palpitations. But nonetheless, it's sort of horrifyiing to hear he describe his insomnia. Knock on wood, but I have trouble staying awake. My problem is not insomnia, but sleep deprivation from working a regular job, coming home and reading, reading, reading before dinner, then a quick dinner before I hit the computer. Tonight's a perfect example: at 9pm I was falling asleep at my computer and thinking I would go to bed, but the compulsion to do some stuff on my online art gallery website has me still slugging it out at 11:05pm. I'll be up as usual at 5:45am with not nearly enough sleep. So far, so good for me: an espresso right before going to bed acts as a good nightcap. But tonight, I dare not tempt fate having said that. I'm tired and need some sleep!

Does coffee keep you awake? Add a post and let us know.

Where is my coffee?!! Has she gone to Rwanda to buy the beans?!
(Miranda Priestly played by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada)

Rwanda seems to be in the news today! First of all, a piece from Sala Kannan writing for "The Sleuth", one of Agora Financials stable of investment newsletters, showed up in my inbox. The article used the growing of premium coffee beans as an example of how economies can surge in the aftermath of war.

Then later in the evening came a "Wide Angle" piece on PBS featuring the role of women in the recovery of post-civil war Rwanda. And what should be covered in one of the segments but the story of widow Epiphanie Mukashyaka who started her own coffee growing business. (You can watch the Wide Angel piece of the Rwandan woman who established a coffee growing business in the aftermath of the Rwandan massacre online).

Going back to Sala Kannan, she writes:

Chances are, your gourmet coffee comes from Rwanda...Rwanda, a small East African nation...has emerged from a treacherous internal ethnic conflict that left nearly a million people dead. After a terrible genocide ended in 1994, Rwanda established a constitution and an elected government. We can safely say that a political institution is in place. Does Rwanda have an established corporate institution? As far as coffee production goes, it does. Not only has the U.S Agency for International Development pumped $10 million into Rwanda’s coffee market to improve quality of production, it has also set up farming cooperatives.

The cooperatives provide the link between the coffee farmers and gourmet roasters all over the world. And Rwandan farmers get a fair price for their coffee. The cooperatives have done wonders for the nation’s coffee quality and its exports.
According to a New York Times article: "Maraba [was established in] 2001...[was] Rwanda’s first coffee cooperative and the initial experiment of A.I.D.’s Partnership to Enhance Agriculture in Rwanda Through Linkages.

"The partnership, which is known by its acronym as the Pearl project and is directed by Timothy T. Schilling of Texas A&M University, has since made a 300 percent return on its investment, with 90 percent of its revenue being paid to farmers. Pearl has promoted the production of higher-grade coffee by organizing farmer co-ops and training their members in farming techniques, coffee processing, quality control, marketing and by building relationships directly with the roasters who buy coffee...

"Five years ago, all Rwandan coffee sold at the C-grade, or lowest-quality, price. Now, demand for fully washed Rwandan coffee (about 7 percent of the crop) far exceeds supply. ‘The emergence of Rwandan specialty coffee on the global market is stunning,’ said Michael D. Ferguson, a spokesman for the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a trade group in Long Beach, Calif. ‘Everyone inside the specialty coffee industry is excited about it.’"

USAID now has a special agreement with coffee giant Starbucks, whereby it sells premium coffee from Rwanda. The roast is appropriately called "Rwandan Blue Bourbon." Costco (COST: NASDAQ) will also start selling coffee from Rwanda later this year.

Before coffee cooperatives were established in Rwanda, farmers had little reason to cultivate coffee. In the mid/late 1990s, farmers returned their war-ravaged farms, but cultivated other crops that were cheaper and took less time to harvest. And whatever coffee was grown was of poor quality. Before the savage genocide, 60% of Rwanda’s total exports were coffee. This is a fertile land and is called the "land of a thousand hills" for a reason -- the hills, soil and climate are perfect for coffee growing. But after the genocide, Rwandan coffee exports declined to 30% of the national total. Today, coffee accounts for 30% Rwanda’s total exports and is a $35
million industry. Besides, Rwanda’s coffee is now marketed as premium quality.

So as far as coffee production goes, both political and corporate institutions in Rwanda are conducive. But is there a free market? President Paul Kagame recently liberalized his nation’s coffee trade and has made coffee exports one of his top priorities. Not only is there a free market for coffee trade in Rwanda, the global coffee market is also helping things. After years of depressed prices, coffee has now joined the global commodities boom. According to the International Coffee Organization, mild Arabica coffee sold for 80 cents a pound in 2004. Today it sells for $1.05 and coffee prices recently hit six-year highs.

Social, political, economic and global environments have all come together to lift Rwanda’s coffee industry. Its achievements are just another example of the robustness of a postwar economy. It is an example of the abundance of its land. And more importantly, it is an example of the promise of Africa...Sala
Kannan

Great to think that a country that was so ravaged by war is finding the growing of premium coffee beans as one of the ways to grow its post-war economy. I'll be looking out for the Rwandan coffee beans at Costco.

Read about the two varieties of coffee beans at EspressoCoffeeSnobs.com

How Much Caffeine in Chocolate Espresso Beans?

On average, it takes 2 tablespoons of coffee beans to make a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee, depending on the brewing method, contains 90-150 mg. of caffeine. Eating the coffee beans, as opposed to drinking the coffee, might give you a greater dose of caffeine, and the chocolate coating adds even a bit more caffeine to the mix. As for a chocolate-covered espresso bean, a Shock-a-lots candy and chocolate covered bean is reputed to have 20mg of caffeine per bean. So about 5 beans would give you about the same amount of caffeine as a cup of Joe.

Sounds like a good late night snack before heading off for a good night's sleep to me! Search for chocolate-covered espresso beans at our store.

Recommended reading: Espresso Beans

Coffee Lore for mountain Bikers

The latest edition of Dirt Rag {Print Rag} (an online mountain biking forum) contains homespun wisdom and down-to-earth tips for the mountain-biking caffeine addict! From making chocolate espresso beans to how to brew a gritty cup of coffee over the camp fire, this edition has all the dirt, including the following:

"The coffee is finished. The voices are distanced again. This time there is no innocent ecstasy, no blissful slumber. But the caffeine high serves as an effective substitute. Previous urges return. Ah yes, today's difference, today's special purpose. A brief conversation with the other voices would surely shed some light on this troublesome conundrum, but I suspect that it will not be required. There is an ancient legend that Mohammed was given coffee by the angel Gabriel. The coffee supposedly gave Mohammed the strength to unseat forty horsemen and make love to forty women".

The above quote reminds me of a segment I heard on NPR this morning about Iraqis being killed by "religious assassins" for things such as failing to diaper their goats so that their genitals are not visible, and for arranging fruit in a sexually suggestive fashion. While it has nothing to do with coffee, the quote above about Mohammed making love to 40 women makes me wonder how it got from celebrating the sexual prosess of Mohammed to religious police and Taliban imposing a version of Sharia law that kills goat farmers and vegetable sellers going about their ordinary business. Listen here to the NPR segment: Iraq Still Manages to Shock - Windows Media Player (Real Player link)

Starbucks = Quantity over Quality

Or so says Sarah Gilbert in this piece at bloggingstocks.com. Writing on Starbucks sales figures for June 2006, Gilbert writes: "It's a long-subscribed-to axiom that you can't have both quality and quantity. And in my opinion, Starbucks' quantity has finally increased to the point that its quality is problematic" and also tells of one Starbucks barista who quit to open their own store when Starbucks moved from mechanical espresso machines to fully-automatic machines. So I'm not the only one who thinks that Starbucks just ain't that great as I wrote in my post about the "Coffee Industrial Complex".

The Coffee Industrial Complex

Time for a rant. I was driving down 7th St. in Long Beach last night and noticed that two independent coffee shops are now Starbucks stores. The area is not my local neighborhood, so I don’t know when ownership changed. Congratulations to Starbucks on two more stores, and congratulations to the previous owners who I presumed got a good price to give up their leases. My sympathies to the locals because in my opinion Starbucks just ain’t that great! If you feel ready to rise up and defend Starbucks, I can understand it. My guess is that most Americans just don’t know any better coffee than Starbucks. Starbucks is the best in their experience simply because most Americans just haven’t had the experience of the superior espresso coffee that you can find in some other countries, or the excellent espresso made at a few independent coffee shops within the U.S.

Of my almost 50 years, I have lived the most-recent 10 of them in the United States, before that I had 4 years in Japan, and the rest in my country of birth, New Zealand. When I was growing up in New Zealand, there wasn’t the sophisticated “café” culture that exists there now. At home it was instant coffee; going out it was filtered coffee. The first coffee shops in New Zealand had been started by the many Dutch immigrants who moved to New Zealand after the Second World War. It was drip filter coffee; a long way to go yet. But the propensity of young New Zealanders to get off the rock and travel and work internationally, a phenomenon known affectionately as “OE” for “overseas experience”, introduced New Zealanders to European coffee standards which they brought back to New Zealand and so the café scene got going. Today thousands upon thousands of cafes in New Zealand serve superbly made espresso coffee drinks as a complement to food and wine not just in the urban centers, but right out to the cow towns as well, not least of them MacFarlane’s Caffe where I once worked. Many cafes have food menus offering light meals made on the premises, wine and beer lists, and waiters/waitresses to serve you.

The United States, meanwhile, has fallen victim to the industrialization and “corporatization” of food and beverage delivery. It was Dwight D. Eisenhower who coined the phrase “Military-Industrial Complex” in a 1961 speech. I don’t know if there’s been a similar phrase coined yet for what has been happening in the food and beverage industry for many years now, but if there hasn’t, I’m about to do it. Call it any of the following: “Food Industrial Complex”, “Beverage Industrial Complex”, or “Coffee Industrial Complex”, but it’s all one and the same thing: large corporations have decided they can make the most money by taking out local independent providers, offering us branded food that is generic from coast to coast. To achieve the greatest economies of scale they need repeatable menus, repeatable training guides, and repeatable floor plans and layouts captured under the umbrella of a brand. Sure Americans must love it because you can see the success of it reflected in the profits of the industrial giants such as Starbucks, but it’s a Faustian bargain; we trade away our feelings of insecurity and the risk of a bad experience by going to a coffee shop or restaurant that’s branded, but in return end up with generic mediocrity.

Footnote: Here are a couple of links on the coffee wars in Japan. As I mentioned, I lived there for 4 years in the early 1990s. At the time I would have given anything for a Starbucks. The best coffee on offer at the time was the “Doutor” chain, whose stores were few and far between. Here’s an article on how Starbucks is being beaten off by Doutor in Japan. And this is a link to a paper written by a student at the prestigious Japanese Sophia University that studies the Starbucks vs Doutor marketing strategies.

I can teach you the one simple step you can take to move your espresso coffee drinks up from mediocre to great!

Coffee Shops Bring Community

I saw this article about a coffee shop called The Jidder Bean in a place called Connell in an area described as Tri-Cities Mid-Columbia. Keeping up with espresso coffee news is turning into a geography lesson too! Anyhow, it's yet another story I'm seeing played out again and again across the United States and the world: people look to coffee shops to build community. I guess that's why I hear about churches having "coffee socials" after their services. An interesting pattern so far, though, is that the coffee shops that appear in these kinds of articles are owner-operated, and in this case built with a lot of community involvement. I don't see stories like this about the opening of another Starbucks, or is it that Starbucks just hasn't reached these smaller communites yet and the locals are still waiting to be rescued by the big green logo? I know that you can get the "personal" treatment from Starbucks if you frequent the same store daily. One of my workmates picks up her caramel latte every morning at her local Starbucks in Ladera Ranch, CA, and she doesn't have to tell them her order or her name: they see her, and up comes her drink. It's the kind of thing that makes you feel a sense of community and belonging. She even gets her morning fix free of charge from time to time. I'm not sure if that's Starbucks policy or just something unique to this store, but it's the kind of treatment that's bound to buy loyalty and a sense of belonging. Anyhow, I personally am not looking to Starbucks for anything, mostly because every time I drink Starbucks coffee I see the drink being made in a way that just breaks all my rules for making great espresso coffee drinks, and literally leaves a bad aftertaste in my mouth. Apart from breaking my golden rule for making great espresso drinks, I think it's the excess of scalded milk that does that in my opinion. I just hope that the local coffee shops mentioned in stories like this don't just try to become replicas of Starbucks, trying to beat them at their own game, which they won't. Rather, I hope they set out to change the way espresso coffee drinks are made in the United States. They could do no worse than to start with my golden rule to making perfect espresso.

Caffe d'Arte

I saw this press release today from a Florida coffee shop called "Cuppy’s Coffee & More" that mentioned that they get their beans from a place called Caffe d'Arte in Seattle. Reading the Caffe d'Arte website you can see that they are pretty sophisticated coffee roasters with a long history. Has anyone tried their coffee? Let us know with a comment to this post. Currently I'm getting my beans from another Seattle bean roaster called Espresso Vivace. They only have two espresso roasts, but they are both excellent. They also sell the Dolce roast as green beans. I'm about to try roasting some of them at home. You can join in on this adventure with me on my page devoted to roasting coffee beans at home.


Today's recommended reading at EspressoCoffeeSnobs: Learn about the two varieties of coffee bean.

Make Your Own Blended Iced Coffee

The heat wave stretches on throughout the U.S. Well, actually here in Southern California we're actualy experiencing a respite from July's heat wave. Starbucks announced their monthly sales figures today which weren't as good as expected. What got the blame by the company? The heat! Supposedly sales last month were off because of an unexpectedly high demand for frozen drinks such as the Starbucks Frappuccino in the morning instead of the hot espresso drinks they usually sell during their A.M. rush. The frozen drinks take longer to make, which affected how long people had to wait in line, which affected how many people were willing to wait in line. Perhaps so, or maybe it was that so many people learned how to make a frappucino at home courtesy of EspressoCoffeeSnobs.com!

Caffeinated David Takes On Seattle's Goliath

Here's a story about an Israeli coffee company that is opening stores in the U.S. Can the fact that Starbucks pulled out of Israel in 2003 indicate anything about the chances of success for "Aroma" in the U.S.? I always used to think that Starbucks would not do well in New Zealand, the place of my birth, but each time I return there I seem to see more Starbucks stores that have sprung up, and which appear to be popular with teens. It's a fashion statement I guess, and of course Starbucks in New Zealand has "naturalized" to the extent that they offer the ubiquitous flat white in their New Zealand and Australian stores. But I have to take my hat off to the Israelis for defeating the goliath on their home turf.

Recommended reading: How to make good crema for your coffee drinks?

New business serves coffee in the hospital. How about that! Promise me if I ever end up in hospital that you'll put espresso in my IV drip, alright!

Recommended reading: How to make all sorts of espresso coffee based drinks for your IV drip.

Indian Coffee Chain Feels the Heat

I guess many of us traditionally associate tea with India, but working as I do in the IT industry with its current mania for "outsourcing" our jobs to cheaper Indian labor that we work side-by-side with at the office, I have learned that they appear to be even bigger drinkers of office coffee, as mediocre as it is, than my American co-workers. So here's some news on the coffee scene in India itself.

Popular coffee-brands and cafe chain "Barista" is looking for a buyer. Owned by Chennai based Sterling Infotech group, Barista's 130-odd espresso bars are up for sale and is also looking for new investors.

Barista had pioneered the branded coffee culture in India. However, it had lost over to arch rival Cafe Coffee Day owned by Bangalore based Amalgamated Coffee Bean Coffee
Trading with 300 and odd outlets to its credit...more

Here's the one simple step you can take to give your espresso coffee a flavor burst. I call it my golden rule of making espresso

Coffee: One of life’s simple pleasures

Here's a "sweet" story of one woman's passion for coffee and how it has not only lead her on a journey of discovery around the world, but has brought her many gifts which she has shared with her friends and colleagues. See how coffee makes the world a better place!


Recommended Reading: Get ready to work on your coffee passion and grow your circle of friends by getting an espresso machine for your home. Here's my recommendation for a great, resonably-priced espresso machine for your home.

Hi-Tech Coffee Machines Are Coming to Take us Over - BlueStreak processors used for coffee machines

The world of coffee makers just keeps on getting more and more hi-tech. What with "super-automatic" espresso machines, and the "plug and play" ESE pod machines, the art of making espresso coffee becomes more science as the days go by. Now the Italian coffee machine manufacturer, Saeco International Group and Sharp Microelectronics are cooperating in the development of new coffee brewing products. The centrepiece of the latest generation of Primea espresso machines is the BlueStreak System on Chip. Whatever happened to the espresso pot I used to put on the gas burner? Do you wonder if all the automation in espresso and coffee makers will lead to blandness or perfection? Read more about the BlueStreak System on Chip then have your say by posting your comments.

A cup half full of hope:

Here's a story telling how one woman's dream of opening a coffee shop brings hope to the entire community. Is there community without a coffee shop at the center of it all? A coffee shop should be the modern gathering place for the community. Next time you rush in and out of Starbucks with your take-out paper cup, consider stopping, asking for your drink to be made "for here" (which I'm told by a friend who works at Starbucks signals to the barista that you want it to be served in a real ceramic cup - fancy that!), and stay and enjoy a few moments of community. Perhaps at first you won't talk to anyone, but do it a few times, and start to notice the regulars. After a while you just can't help but acknowledge someone that you see day after day. Your sense of community can grow from there. Or learn how to make your coffee at home and invite your friends over. Build friendships and civility around your cup of coffee.

Mary Petrella-Williams cracks a cold bottle of water, sweating from hacking plaster off an old store's walls. For two years now, that's what she has been doing, scrubbing and cleaning, tearing down and painting up her Midland Avenue building, trying to turn it from a long-defunct butcher shop into a gourmet coffee shop named the Karma Kafe.

The coffee shop will be the first of its kind in Midland. And, while it's Petrella-Williams' dream, in some ways, it represents the whole borough's hopes as well.There's a sort of joke about knowing a town has "made it" when a fancy coffee shop sets up, as such cafes seem to exist for the prosperous yuppie set. So, for a place that's moved from rusting steel mills to shiny-new educational enterprise, could the promise of quality lattes also signal a good economy on the horizon.