In Search Of A Perfect Cup Of Coffee

Good coffee can re-enchant everyday life
SIMRAN BHARGAVA
Financial Express-India

The morning alarm rings. It’s so cold, you want to shoot the clock and snuggle back under the quilt. Unless. Unless you have something really special to get out of bed for. Coffee.

Shivering my way to the kitchen, I freshly grind some coffee beans that a friend has brought me from Mysore. A rich aroma fills the air. I inhale it by the lungful. Then I put the ground coffee in a plunger, pour hot water (never boiling) on top and wait exactly four minutes for it to brew. In that time, I choose some music to listen to: maybe Bach on the violin.

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Happy Thanksgiving

From our family to all of you, we wish a wonderful Thanksgiving Day. We hope you are able to surround yourself with loving family and friends. Be thankful for all the blessings you have been given.

"We bless You, HASHEM our God. King of the whole world, Who feeds the entire world in His goodness - with love, kindness, and mercy. He gives food to all people, because His kindness lasts forever. Because of His great goodness, we have never lacked food; may He never let us lack food. Why do we ask for this? - so that we can praise His Great Name, because He is the merciful God, Who feeds and supports everyone, and does good to everyone, and Who prepares food for all His creatures that He has created. We bless You, HASHEM, Who feeds everyone."

RABBI PLISKIN'S DAILY LIFT

Daily Lift #401 Do that Good Deed Today

The wise person will perform good deeds as soon as he gets the opportunity to do so. A fool, however, will push off doing good deeds, rationalizing that he will do them later. And even if he really intends to do them later, the delay will often lead to his not doing the good deeds at all.

Think of a good deed you have been pushing off. Do it today.
(see Vilna Gaon - Proverbs 10:8; Rabbi Pliskin - "Consulting the
Wise")

Aish.com

Coffee yield down in Kona harvest

By Associated Press

(Kailua-Kona-AP) -- State agriculture officials say this year's Kona coffee harvest is significantly down from the near-record four-point-one (m) million pounds produced last year.

The drop-off is mostly due to dry weather conditions.

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Audubon Coffee causes a stir

National Audubon Society (BirdLife in the USA) have launched a new line of habitat-friendly and socially-responsible coffees.

The new range of shade-grown, organic coffees is certified by the Rainforest Alliance and will help to protect many rainforest bird species and their habitat, as well as raising the quality of life for people in the world's coffee growing regions.

"Audubon Premium Shade Grown Coffee proves you can provide consumers with excellent coffee and do so in a progressive way that takes into consideration environmental and social concerns." —Patrick Milliman, Chief Communications Officer, National Audubon

The coffee is made exclusively from carefully selected Arabica beans cultivated by farmers in the world's premier coffee regions. The farmers use traditional techniques to grow beans as nature intended - under a lush canopy of tropical trees, which are home to hundreds of bird species and other wildlife.

This is in stark contrast to the way that much of the world's coffee is now grown. To boost production, many coffee farmers have switched to full sun farming - destroying native shade trees and leaving less wildlife-friendly habitat. The introduction of Audubon Coffee will hopefully start to reverse this destructive trend.

Picking Coffee in Brazil

After passing by so many women searching for the bad beans,
it is very likely that what finally fell into the containers was pretty
clean. At the end of the time, a company employee came and
examined each woman's little bag, and gave her a paper with
a number indicating how much money she had made.
Eva P. Bueno


What year was that? I don't recall precisely the date, but it may have been 1962, when I was about to start the third grade of the elementary school. What I do recall precisely, however, is that my family was going through a rough spot. Christmas had come and gone without one single toy for any of us. My mother had managed to make me a simple new dress for church, and a new shirt and shorts for my brother Zico, who is two years older than me.

The older people in the family had to make do with their same old Sunday clothes to go to church both for the Missa do Galo and for the Missa of December 31. Now that both my oldest sisters were married, one of the big brothers was in the Suez Canal working with the United Nations, and the oldest one had left to look for a job somewhere else, the only two people working and making money in the house were my father and my 16-year-old brother Elton. The money they both got was barely enough to pay the rent and buy food.


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Does shade coffee help or hinder conservation?

Labeled 'bird-friendly' but may accelerate tropical forest clearing

While shade coffee is promoted as protecting tropical forests and birds, conservationists are split on whether it actually works. The December issue of Conservation Biology has the latest on the debate: one side says shade coffee can give farmers a reason to preserve tropical biodiversity while the other side fears it can actually encourage farmers to clear more forest.
Shade coffee is a traditional farming method of growing coffee bushes under a canopy of diverse trees, which helps protect the many bird species that depend on them.

The case for shade coffee is argued by Stacy Philpott of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Thomas Dietsch of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington DC, who say the keys to making it work are requiring rigorous certification and offering financial incentives. "Without incentives, and faced with economic hardship, farmers may convert their lands to sun coffee, pasture or swidden agriculture, requiring that they cut more forest," they say.

Philpott and Dietsch say that there are currently two rigorous shade certification programs (Bird-friendly Coffee from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and Eco-OK from the Rainforest Alliance) that require a diverse canopy over coffee farms. However, these programs are not widely used by small coffee farmers in part because they can be expensive.

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COLOMBIA - A Jolt of Coffee Culture in the Jungle

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

The valley narrows as we move east toward the Andes on horseback, rolling pasture rising into virgin jungle. Along the ridgelines high above us march lines of swaying wax palms. Their towering trunks, topped by small tufts of fronds, appear like visions from a Dr. Seuss tale.

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Colombia's Coffee Region

washingtonpost.com

The best way to arrange a trip to Colombia's coffee country is through a Bogota travel agency, which can book rooms, arrange transportation to and from the airport and to theme parks, and recommend places to eat. The packages are usually less expensive than purchasing the components separately, although nothing in Colombia costs much. A recommended travel agency in Bogota with experience booking coffee country trips is IdealTour, telephone 011-571-619-3462.

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Coffee, tea and cocoa - Direct-order marketing program

Direct-order marketing program to aid farmers launched by Catholic Relief Services; Baltimore County chamber hosts networking event

By Frank McCoy
Special to SunSpot

It is possible to do good and do well, and some people can start the process with their morning coffee.

On Tuesday, Catholic Relief Services Inc., will begin its CRS Coffee Project. The goal is to market coffee grown by small farmers around the world directly to the nation's 65 million Catholics.

"We think that this project is important because it has the potential to positively affect the lives of small-scale farmers around the world," said Joan Neal, the Baltimore-based agency's deputy executive director for U.S. operations. "It ensures that their families have enough food to eat, and the basics to live are available to them.

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Coffee Heaven--Greenwich Blue

BY SOPHIA FINDLAY LAIDLEY Observer staff reporter

Around the globe the Blue Mountain brand of coffee has brought pride to Jamaica. Now, added to the geographical region's list of beans, is the newly introduced Greenwich Blue.

According to the Grahams of Palace amusement fame, the hand-picked beans, grown and packaged exclusively by Greenwich Mountain Estate Limited, are unlike any other Blue Mountain crop of coffee as its size, # 19 on the classifier (used to sort the beans' size) is unique.

Steven Cooke, one of three directors, which includes mother, Melanie Graham and father, Douglas Graham, who operate the family-owned company said the beans come from seedlings grown from carefully chosen parent trees.

"Greenwich Blue is a bean size that is very rare and it has all the characteristics of the exportable grade but bigger. It's attractive, sexy and not a giant. Number 19 is the best of the best," said Cooke at their South Camp Road factory.

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Brazil Seeks to Show Coffee's Health Benefits

By Peter Blackburn

COSTA DO SAUIPE, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil, the world's No. 1 coffee producer, hopes to convince people to drink up -- and ease a global crisis caused by oversupply -- by proving that coffee is good for you.

The country that offers school children "coffee breaks," plans to try to show that coffee can help reduce heart disease, countering the conventional wisdom that coffee causes health problems including anxiety and hypertension.

The Brazilian (news - web sites) government is funding a study of 200,000 doctors to see if there is a link between heart disease and coffee consumption.

Professor Darcy Lima, who is leading the study, said it would make doctors' aware of the benefits of coffee.

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Quote

"If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed." Mark Twain