Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Just when you think that Starbucks chairman, Howard Schultz, might be the last person left at the corporation who understands anything about good coffee, he makes boneheaded comments that dispel any chance of that happening again: Starbucks chairman sees gourmet coffee shortages | Reuters. Today in Mexico City, Mr. Schultz publicly predicted a global shortage [...]

As posted today by the Brazil-Arab News Agency, the Brazilian Coffee Industry Association (ABIC) forecasts that Brazil will unseat the USA as the coffee consumption capital of the world by the year 2010: Brazil to be world’s greatest coffee consumer market, association forecasts – ANBA. According to a report released yesterday, Brazilian coffee consumption is [...]

In a previous article, I made the curious observation that coffee has become a lightning rod for social and environmental angst in a way that is disproportionate with just about any other export. (As if nobody buys children’s toys or clothing from Wal-Mart.) As a point of comparison, I noted that while we obsess over [...]

Earlier this year, we wrote about the growing consumer appetite for coffee in China. Today’s The Vancouver Sun published an article on coffee grown in China for domestic use and international export: Coffee catches on in a nation of tea drinkers. In particular, there’s a growing interest in quality arabica beans from Yunnan province in [...]

BBC World Service radio recently aired a program (make that programme) that tracked a kilogram of coffee from its origins at an Ethiopian coffee farm to retail coffee houses in the Western world: BBC NEWS | Business | Tracking the true cost of coffee. The article mentions the gross imbalance in the distribution of profits [...]

The April 2007 issue of Coffee Talk primarily focused on the annual SCAA conference next month. The most interesting article comes from George Howell, president of Terroir Coffee Company, who wrote about the state of the world’s quality coffee supplies: Towards a segmented quality coffee market [PDF file, page 8]. With the growing public awareness [...]

Today’s Santa Barbara Independent published one of the more informed, and hence balanced, views of Fair Trade coffee I’ve seen in the past year: The Santa Barbara Independent :: cover story :: Bean Counting. By choosing Fair Trade coffee, you’re essentially outsourcing your ethical decisions to a third party proxy. All is well and good [...]

Last Thursday, the Chicago Tribune published an article on Ethiopia and its intimate relationship with coffee — both as a producing and a consuming nation: Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee | Chicago Tribune. The Tribune also published a related photo gallery and a brief history of the bean and beverage. However, that an article on [...]

In the news today from Bangalore, India has applied for a Geographic Indication (GI) for Monsooned Malabar coffee: Malabar coffee set to get GI brand : Malabar Coffee, Monsooned Malabars, Geographic Indication mark, GI : IBNLive.com : CNN-IBN. Some love the stuff, others can’t stand its “funkiness” at times. Whatever it is, it makes a [...]

Today the Chicago Maroon, an independent student newspaper of the University of Chicago, published a curious indictment of the Fair Trade movement: Chicago Maroon » Hurting the third world one latte at a time. Being the University of Chicago, the author takes a more world economic view of the issue. While I completely disagree with [...]