Senses key to coffee roaster’s success

Written by: Adam Schrager, 9NEWS Legislative Reporter

BOULDER - Despite a slumping worldwide economy, sales of specialty coffee have continued to grow. The success of the $8.5 billion industry is leading at least one local entrepreneur into what he hopes will be a successful business.

Gerry Leary is a roaster who runs the Unseen Bean out of Boulder that caters to the personalized order. Inside his Tuff shed, Leary senses he's on to something.

“People enjoy coffee and they like getting a good cup of coffee,” Leary said.

And senses are maybe most important when describing his company.

“I tend to pay more attention to what I hear and what I smell,” he said.

That's because Leary can't see.

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The Buzz on Caffeine

Is there a down side to our favorite upper?

When a young German physician named Friedlieb Runge first extracted caffeine from a fistful of coffee beans in the early 1800s, Europeans were already high on the Old World’s newest drug.

A caffeinated hot chocolate was all the rage of Spanish aristocracy, and Londoners idled away so many hours downing full-caf java in the city’s 2,000-plus coffeehouses that King Charles II moved to shut them down—without success. Tea-sipping Asians had been buzzing centuries earlier, of course—and perhaps cola nut-chewing cavemen well before that.

Whole ages have passed since then, and still we’re hooked on caffeine. “Some 85 percent of the world’s population today uses substantial amounts of caffeine on a regular basis,” says Bennett Weinberg, co-author with Bonnie Bealer of The World of Caffeine and The Caffeine Advantage. “That’s far more than those who use alcohol, nicotine and any and all other drugs put together.”

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Coffee free market brews trouble

Mexican growers bank on quality for survival

By SUSAN FERRISS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

PANTELHO, Mexico -- In the verdant hollows of Mexico's Chiapas state, one thing unites Indians and non-Indians, Zapatista rebels and their foes.

They are all at the bottom of a production chain of one of the world's most traded commodities -- coffee.

And all have suffered the consequences of free market whims and manipulation.

Coffee growing has proved to many in Chiapas that the free market cannot be trusted to deliver stability and that international cooperation is sometimes necessary.

"We are fighting now to sell our organic coffee on the 'fair market' in Europe, which offers us better prices. If we cannot change our product and do this, we will die," said Juan Vasquez, a Maya Indian who leads Sociedad Tzotzil-Tzeltal, a coffee farmers' cooperative in Pantelho, Chiapas.

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Art of the Barista from Coffee Beans to Cappuccino

By Begoña Quesada

LONDON (Reuters) - Tovah Reed-Jenkins puts milk in the pitcher and steams it with precision up to a certain temperature as soon as she sees clients walking through the door, even if she doesn't know if they are ordering any coffee.

She is a barista, the equivalent of a barman in a coffee bar, and her goal is to combine the individual preferences of each customer with strict rules that cut through every single shot of coffee.

"There is nothing worse than a 35 seconds shot," said Reed-Jenkins, who has been a barista for Starbucks in the northern British city of Leeds for more than a year. She was referring to the time water takes to go through the coffee screw-in filter of the espresso machine.

An ideal shot should take between 18 and 23 seconds in a manual espresso machine and between 15 and 19 seconds in an automatic one. Longer times might mean the beans were ground too finely for an espresso and the coffee will taste bitter.

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Blenz Coffee's tall order: Taking on Starbucks in China

By GEOFFREY YORK

BEIJING -- With a whiff of tobacco smoke and a sly hint of anti-Americanism, the upstart Blenz Coffee chain from Vancouver is mounting a brazen challenge to the mighty Starbucks empire in China.

Seattle-based Starbucks Corp. has dominated the Chinese market for five years, establishing more than 80 outlets in mainland China after becoming the first Western-brand coffee chain to establish a strong presence here in early 1999.

But in a bold coup this past spring, Blenz Coffee managed to beat Starbucks into the important southern metropolis of Guangzhou, becoming the first Western chain to open an outlet in the capital of China's wealthiest province -- three months ahead of the first Starbucks store. Seven months later, Blenz is due to open its sixth coffee shop in China today.

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Happy New Year

We wish for the new year to bring you health, happiness, and good coffee.

Robert & Scott

Quote

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-wing bird
That cannot fly.

--Langston Hughes

Hawaii seeks coffee variety to rival renowned Kona

Jan Tenbruggencate
The Honolulu Advertiser

ELE'ELE, Hawaii - Ross Fowler and Joe Lopez visit the Kauai Coffee shop at Port Allen on the island of Kauai for the ice cream, but they don't drink the locally grown coffee.

Lopez concedes he has never even tried the coffee, which grows in deep-green fields that are visible from Port Allen. "What I heard, it was real bitter," he said. Overcoming that reputation for poor quality, established when the plantations were young and the staff inexperienced, is a challenge for the Hawaii coffees grown outside of Kona. Today, those coffees are generally much better, but the growers admit they need an edge.

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