Latte ART

By JONEL ALECCIA
Mail Tribune

In a world where coffee consumption has become an art, Maia Potter is an artist.

No longer is she limited to get-and-go lattes with their cardboard cups and plastic lids.

Certainly not.

Instead, the 26-year-old roastmaster for Melello Coffee Roasters of Medford crowns each steaming cup with a creamy flourish: a heart, a leaf, a chocolate-and-cinnamon rendition of the Taj Mahal.

"I really inherently believe there is art in every cup of coffee," says Potter, who put her vision to the test last weekend in the Millrock Latte Art Competition in Las Vegas, Nev.

More...

Infusion Tea and Coffee Brewer dispenses 3 perfect beverages

The new BUNN Infusion Series™ of iced tea brewers launches with an innovative model that brews perfect iced or hot tea and hot or iced coffee in one footprint less than 12” wide, incorporating BrewWISE® precision and simplicity for the first time into an iced tea brewer. BrewWISE intelligence with pre-infusion and Pulse-Brew™ allows maximum flavor extraction. More control is also available with digital temperature control and cold brew lockout, other BrewWISE features.

With an updated design and computerized technology, the Infusion Tea and Coffee Brewer (ITCB) combines beauty and brains for front-of-the-house looks and brewing intelligence. A large tank provides back-to-back brewing capacity and allows 3 or 5 gallon tea batches. Two programmable batch switches allow full and half batch brewing of iced tea.

The brewer is shipped with iced tea, hot tea, and hot coffee recipes installed. An iced coffee recipe is included in the brew memory.

The brewer has these additional features:

§ Dual voltage adaptable. Can operate at 120V/15 amp or 208-240V/20 amp. U.S. models will ship set to 120v/15a with a NEMA 5-15P cord set.

§ Brews into all BUNN iced tea dispensers (except TDS-5) and 1.9 to 3 liter airpots.

§ English and Spanish alphanumeric display.

§ Display shows if the machine is ready to brew and other status items.

§ Brew counter keeps track of how many batches are brewed.

For more information, visit BUNN at www.bunn.com or call 1-800-637-8606.

Uncovering Coffee Beans' Genes

By Marcia Wood

New, gourmet coffees might result from investigations by researchers in Hawaii. Agricultural Research Service scientists at the U.S. Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center and their Hawaii Agriculture Research Center colleagues are discovering more about the genetic makeup of this popular tropical crop. Their studies should benefit coffee lovers as well as coffee growers. Both research centers are located in Aiea, just outside of Honolulu.

One of the scientists' goals is to ensure that coffee's genetic diversity, or gene pool, is preserved for the future. That's because as-yet-unknown genes in today's popular commercial coffee varieties or in their wild, uncultivated relatives might hold the key to delicious new coffees for tomorrow.

The researchers examined coffee's genetic material, or DNA, to look for similarities and differences. Any dissimilarities among the species could be important. They could reveal interesting genes, such as ones that make some plants hardier or more disease resistant, or make their beans more flavorful.

The researchers analyzed Coffea arabica and C. canephora, the two most widely grown coffees in the world, and C. liberica, grown commercially in the Philippines as well as in parts of Africa. C. arabica was about 50 percent different from C. canephora and C. liberica. These differences may explain why these species vary in their resistance to pests, for example, or thrive at disparate elevations. Of the five C. arabica varieties studied, Catimor and Mokka Hybrid differed the most from each other--information that could eventually result in a better cup of coffee.

These studies are the most comprehensive genetic analyses to date of cultivated C. arabica coffees and the first to use a sophisticated laboratory technique called AFLP (amplified fragment length polymorphism). The scientists' findings were reported earlier in the journal Theoretical and Applied Genetics.

Read more about the research in the June issue of Agricultural Research magazine.

Good Coffee, Surfing and Your Bottom Line

I'm sure you agree that it's hard to judge the quality of some services until we experience them. Quite often the only basis for our choice is the conversation with the service provider, Sometimes the look and feel of the business place and quality of their printed materials. If we're are lucky we can review testimonials and if we are very lucky someone we know and trust refers us to that business.

But most of the time we still experience anxiety when making a decision to buy from someone for the first time. We wish we could have more reasons to be confident, don't you agree?

It is oh-so-important to remember all of this when we sell our own services. Because no matter how great our expertise and no matter how wonderful our marketing materials are, the prospects don't *KNOW* how good we are until they *experience* what we really do for them. So, they are *entitled* to be skeptical, distrustful, reserved and thinking about hiring someone else instead us. It is natural.

More...

The Israeli woman who took on Starbucks - and won

By ISRAEL21c staff June 13, 2004

Every business has a moment where it faces a major existential challenge: for Sara Shemer, owner of the upscale Arcaffe chain of Israeli espresso bars, that moment came in late 2001, when the international coffee giant Starbucks began opening its first outlets in Israel.

The competition to Shemer's business couldn't have been more direct - a global, world-famous chain opening its flagship branches precisely on the same blocks in central Israel as her carefully-chosen outlets of Arcaffe espresso bars.

Fast forward a couple years, and the winner in the caffeine battle: Arcaffe - in a knockout punch. Starbucks opened their first Israeli coffee shop, together with local corporate partners with plans to reach 20 outlets nationwide by the end of 2002. In the end, they wound up opening only six outlets. By April 2003, Starbucks had admitted defeat and closed up shop.

More...

Coffee giant's ruse denies aid to farmers

Antony Barnett, public affairs editor
Sunday June 13, 2004
The Observer

One of the world's largest coffee traders, which supplies beans to Nescafé and Maxwell House, is accused of using a British tax haven to avoid paying millions of pounds to the developing countries from which it buys.
Campaign groups and charities have accused Volcafe - which provides the beans for one in every seven cups of coffee drunk - of employing financial tricks to deprive some of the poorest parts of the world of much-needed revenue. The company denies any wrongdoing, but British MPs are calling for an investigation.

More...

Rebel barista with a cause challenges employee policies at Starbucks

Taipei Times

Daniel Gross and a band of disgruntled New York Starbucks java-servers who feel that the company should be held to the standards it preaches have, to the company's dismay, formed a single-shop union

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , New York
Sunday, Jun 13, 2004, Page 12

In the cozy corporate lingo of Starbucks, the java-servers in company baseball caps and green aprons are so far evolved from folks who, in quainter, less caffeinated and less linguistically sensitive times, were dubbed soda jerks, that the coffee chain graces them with a special name: baristas. The moniker conveys a Euro-cachet, implies a certain skill set and is the entry-level niche at a US$15 billion behemoth with a hot -- in more ways than one -- product and a rung on the Fortune 100 best-places-to-work list.

More...

Save your money and go to 7-11

When a coffee shop calls itself a gourmet coffee shop and charges $2.39 (USD) for a cup of coffee it has a responsibility to both consumers and providers to deliver a good cup of coffee. I mean each cup and every cup.

I recently visited the Cocoa Beanery at the Hershey Lodge in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Regretfully the coffee was not better and maybe even worse than the coffee I could have purchased at the convenience store down the street. It reminded me of what Abe Lincoln said, "If this is coffee, bring me tea. If this is tea, bring me coffee."

It amazes me that coffee shops invest thousands of dollars on equipment and fixtures and then serve poor quality coffee. When a person spends $2.39 for a cup of coffee and gets swill it's reasonable to assume that another negative opinion has been created about gourmet coffee.