Trading poppy for coffee

THE MAINICHI NEWSPAPERS (Japan)

Villagers in northern Thailand are savoring a rich brew of success after trading opium crops for coffee in a bid to improve their lives and halt environment destruction in the "Golden Triangle" region.

The Doi Tung Development Project, supported by the Thai Royal Family through the Mae Fah Luang Foundation, has provided a livelihood for more than 4,500 local people and is integral to the sustainable development of the area.

The villagers' annual incomes have risen by eight times what they were in their poppy-growing days.

Launched in 1989, the project covers 60 square miles, 85 percent of which has been reforested. The rest is in sustainable agriculture for the 27 villages of hill-tribe people who live in the area. Four hundred and fifty families now grow coffee.

Doi Tung coffee is 100 percent arabica. It is shade-grown for the slow ripening and handpicked so only red-ripe coffee beans will get in the mix. The harvested coffee beans are processed, sun-dried, graded, roasted, packaged and sent to markets worldwide.

The coffee has been well received in Japan and its high quality has been recognized at various tasting demonstrations.

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Review of Capresso Infinity Conical Burr Grinder

No matter how you brew your coffee; drip, espresso, press pot, or perc, your grinder has to do its job correctly or your cup will be doomed from the start. If you are still using one of the blade grinders you will probably not believe how important the grinder is until you start using a good grinder. Maybe "doomed" is an overstatement, but you just cannot make a great cup with a grind from the whirlybird. The problem is consistency. Look at the grind carefully, with strong light and under magnification. You will see a wide variance in the particle size, from tiny pieces to dust. The difference in particle size causes a difference in the extraction process, and results in over extraction of some of the coffee and under extraction of other. Also, you can't control the fineness of the grind with the blade. If you want a fine grind, you have to let it grind longer, which makes more coffee dust and, because of the speed of the blade, the coffee is overheated during the grind. Overheating changes the taste of the cup. Inconsistent particle size changes the taste. Precision and consistency are the keys to good coffee.

This Capresso Infinity grinder is a good grinder. It does its job so you can concentrate on the other aspects of brewing a great cup of coffee. It is easy to use, easy to clean, produces a consistent grind, and is priced right.

The model I tested is the 560. It has a black plastic body and retails for $89.95. It takes a 5"x7.5" footprint and stands 10.5" tall. There are 16 fineness settings, from very coarse for French press to very fine for espresso or Turkish. The commercial heavy steel burrs grind slowly and with precision to reduce heat build-up and static electricity. I examined several grind settings under magnification and saw almost perfect consistency in particle size. It's very easy to clean, just by taking off the clear plastic hopper and lifting out the moveable burrs. It comes with a scoop and a cleaning brush. I recommend cleaning after each grind, because there is a residue of about a teaspoon of coffee that should be removed. The shelf life of ground coffee is measured in minutes, so you don't want that residue in tomorrow's coffee.

The operation of this grinder is simple. Turn the top housing to line up a black dot with the desired fineness setting. Fill the hopper with a measured amount of roasted beans, turn the timer clockwise to start, and when the grinder stops, slide out the collection tray for the ground coffee. The timer's max is 10, which is about 60 seconds. The hopper holds about one cup, much more than I need for my 12 cup press pot. Warning, the top hopper is so clear I forgot to take off the lid and spilled beans all over the counter and floor. It's good that no one was watching this klutz in action.

The grinder is quieter than most, which is important for those who get up first in the morning and don't want to wake the house with grinder noises from the kitchen. (Do you wake up grouchy in the morning? No, I let my wife sleep late.)

Negatives:

A design on the top lid to make it visible for klutzes. (I've added one to mine.)
Make the base more ergonomic to make it easier to hold when cleaning out the residue.
Make the dot on the upper housing larger.

Positives:

Consistent particle size produces consistent extraction.
Easy to control fineness settings.
Easy to clean.
Good price at $89.95. There is a chrome (brushed or bright) version for $139.95.
Quiet operation.

I like this grinder and recommend it.

Robert

Starbucks Nation

Dan Neil
Los Angeles Times
April 1, 2007

I am writing this on my laptop from a wobbly wrought-iron café table sitting by a battered wood banquette in the back of the hippest, coolest, most damnably noncorporate coffeehouse that I know of in Los Angeles. Casbah, on Sunset Boulevard in the Silver Lake area—out-of-towners, just follow the smell of disdain—looks like it's been moved brick by brick from the souk in Marrakech, notwithstanding the anorexic teenagers in eyeliner. The place is chandeliered with hand-hammered Moroccan tin lamps. The menu is hand-painted on an antique mirror hanging behind the counter. There's a little boutique in back selling muslin blouses and hand-painted ceramic tagines. Don't know what a tagine is? Get out, OUT!—before we call the multicultural police.

Is this the Starbucks of the future?

The gist of Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz's memo to his fellow executives, leaked in February to the consternation of stockholders, was that Starbucks—the coffee goliath with more than 13,000 outlets in 39 countries —had sacrificed the "romance and theater" of the coffee-shop experience for efficiency and profit.

Confronted with lines going out the doors, the chain had introduced automatic espresso machines to replace the La Marzocco machines (Schultz misspelled it "La Marzocca," which only seemed to underscore his point). Instead of open bins full of fragrant coffee beans, the chain sells its coffee in vacuum-sealed bags like in a grocery store. Likewise, in the name of "efficiencies of scale," the store design had been regularized so that one Starbucks looks more or less like every other. The sites, Schultz lamented, "no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store."

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Vietnam coffee short of world standards, admits industry

Though Vietnam is the second largest coffee exporter globally, the quality of its produce is still low since it has yet to adopt global quality criteria, the industry association has admitted.

Doan Trieu Nhan, deputy head of the Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association, told the Coffee Quality and Market Outlook in 2007 conference in Hanoi Thursday that the country was using old criteria and there were no quality tests at ports before customs clearance.

Vietnam had not adopted the quality regulations set by the International Coffee Organization (ICO) that 25 other exporters had.

ICO officials said last year European ports had detained 1.5 million coffee bags from 17 nations and territories of which over 70% had been from Vietnam.

In 2005-2006 about 73 percent of the world coffee had met ICO standards but Vietnamese coffee had belonged in the remaining 27 percent.

Vietnam’s robusta coffee is recognized around the world for its quality. But by the time shipments arrive in an import country, their quality deteriorates because of poor processing and preservation technologies.

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SWING TRADING: The Coffee Is Hot!

By Noel Campbell, Optionetics.com
Published: March 30, 2007 2:45 PM EST

I have a very exciting and highly potential profitable set-up to share with you on Coffee futures (KC-SpotV) traded out of New York.

Mario La Marra and I have been writing about the potential for massive upside on Coffee now for a while. The market has not yet experienced the boom we are anticipating, but I say now is the time and it’s ready to go on the boil.

The reason we are expecting a boom in the price of Coffee is based on 30-year and 10-year cycles culminating in 2007. Chart 1 shows you Coffee prices in 1977 and 1997, when the price of coffee exceeded 300 cents per pound. Coffee moves in increments (ticks) of 0.05 cents per pound, which are worth US$18.75 per contract. With coffee at around 117 cents per pound right now, a rise of 183 cents would bring us to a rally of 300 cents per pound.183 cents is 3660 ticks or US$68,625 per contract! Of course this is working on maximum optimism, but have I got your attention now?

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