Coffee Guide

Many people have turned to organic fruits and vegetables (and even meats) in recent years, striving to live healthier, longer lives. You may be one of these people. But did you know that organic coffee is now available, too? If you can’t find it at your local health food store, then you can definitely find it online.

How Organic Coffee Differs From Traditional Coffee

The coffee plant has traditionally been grown in the company of shade trees and other food and cash crops. This approach made for healthier soil and prevented water contamination. Unfortunately, many coffee growers have abandoned this approach in favor of larger crops and hence larger profits. However, synthetic pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers have become necessary to maintain these crops, and along with them the taste of the coffee has suffered, the soil has suffered, and no one knows the potential impact they may have on the future health of the coffee consumer.

In addition, the loss of the shade trees has had a direct impact on migratory song birds. While an obvious connection may not immediately come to mind, the relationship has actually been symbiotic. These birds used the shade trees as their habitat as they migrated, and as a result they provided a natural defense against many of the bugs and pests that can ruin a coffee crop. Without them, pesticides must be used to do the job.

Unlike the large, commercial coffee plantations, organic coffees are generally grown on small farms with plenty of shade cover. There are plenty of migratory birds to control insects, and pesticides are unnecessary. In fact, the United States requires that organic coffees be grown on shaded land and be completely chemical free for three consecutive years.

Tips For A Great Cup of Organic Coffee

Whole beans should be used within a week of purchase in order to enjoy the full flavor of the coffee.

Avoid vacuum-packed coffee, even organic vaccum-packed coffee. The process of vacuum packing cannot be done immediately after roasting. The coffee must sit for nearly a week before it can be vacuum-packed. This degrades much of the flavor.

Coffee beans should be stored in an airtight container, not on the shelf in the paper bag you brought them home with from the store. And in order to enjoy the full flavor of the coffee, you should grind only the amount you intend to use just before brewing.

Whole coffee beans that will be stored longer than a week should be placed in an airtight glass container that’s kept in the freezer.

As with any coffee blend, organic or not, grind the beans according to the brewing method you intend to use. Keep in mind that if you grind your beans too fine your coffee may end up bitter and muddy; if you don’t grind them enough, your coffee may end up flavorless.

Often overlooked, many people consider the most important step toward a good cup of coffee to be the proportion of water to coffee. Experts recommend 2 tablespoons for every 6 ounces of water.

In Conclusion

While you will pay more for organic coffee, just as you’ll generally pay more for organic fruits and vegetables, choosing organic coffee promotes the environment, the health of the coffee grower, and your health, too. Just as important for coffee drinkers everywhere: organic coffee tastes as good if not better than non-organic coffee.

D. Silva is the webmaster for Coffee Pleasures, a website about coffee, coffee flavors, coffee makers, and more.

Coffee is the second most-highly traded commodity in the world next to oil. It?s an enormous industry involving many players in the supply chain?the growers and farm workers, the processing mills, exporters and importers, small-batch roasters and huge commercial roasters, coffeehouses and cafes?all of who do their part to bring coffee to you, the final consumer.

Take a walk down the coffee aisle of a grocery store and read the labels. You?ll find one word dominates the label rhetoric: ?Gourmet.? Gourmet, it?s such a over-used term. By definition, it implies rare, expensive, high-quality, or at least sophisticated in some form of its preparation and service. Which, unfortunately, doesn?t seem to apply to the coffee most Americans drink on a daily basis. Considering how large the coffee industry is, how much of what?s marketed as gourmet could actually be considered truly gourmet coffee?

Sad to say, it?s estimated only 10 percent of coffee sold on the global market is of excellent quality. Meaning, 90 percent of coffee sold is considered poor to satisfactory in quality. That being the case, it becomes hard to believe the ads and labels on store shelves claiming rich, delicious, gourmet coffee. In fact, the reality is they?re much likelier selling the exact opposite of high quality coffee beans.

For instance, consider the ever applauded Dark Roast. Somehow the influential marketing gurus at roasting companies have managed to convince the masses that dark roasted coffee equals gourmet coffee. Not necessarily true. While there are some specific coffees that taste wonderful as a dark roast, there?s a reason most coffee today is roasted so dark. It?s precisely because of their low quality. Dark roasting covers a multitude of sins, including any flavor flaws.

And then there?s flavored coffee?a low-quality bean masquerading as gourmet coffee. Why use expensive, high-grade beans for flavored coffee, since the natural flavors themselves will never be detected over the added flavorings of Irish cream, French Vanilla, or Hazelnut.

Though the marketing says otherwise, coffee that is indeed gourmet should never require extensive roasting. Similar to grilling a steak, a great coffee will often taste great as rare to medium, or, in coffee terms, light to medium. Of course the actual lightness of the roast will depend on your personal taste. A lighter roast shows that the roaster has confidence in the quality of the beans. And for a true connoisseur of coffee, that?s what you should be looking for.

– Denver Wilkinson is founder, and currently head roaster of Cafe Avion, a roasting company based in Coeur d?Alene, Idaho, that specializes in small-batch roasting of exclusively organic and fair trade coffees. ?There?s a whole world of coffee out there (quite literally) and so many natural flavors to experience, don?t settle for the mediocre stuff. The darker the roast, the less likely you?ll experience the subtle apricot flavors in a great Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, or the blueberry notes in a wonderful Harrar, or the earthy, ripened notes of a great Sumatran Mandheling.? Adds Wilkinson: ?I?m on a personal mission to undo the myth of the dark roast.?

Consider the last time you bought a bag of coffee. Perhaps it?s wrong of me to assume, but would I be correct in guessing the coffee you purchased was a dark roast?

Most of the coffee available to the home consumer today is a dark roast. And by watching coffee commercials and reading the ads, without hesitation, one would easily believe the dark roast is, by far, a superior coffee. But when it comes to the roast of your coffee, while a great deal of it simply has to do with personal taste, don?t believe mass marketing that says the dark roast is the ultimate expression of quality coffee. It?s not. In fact, it?s often quite the opposite.

There are reasons the dark roast has become so popular. For one thing, the coffee industry is extremely large. It?s the second most-highly traded commodity next to oil. Just think of the massive volume of coffee that hits the consuming market each year. Then consider this: only 10 percent of that coffee qualifies as excellent in quality. The remaining 90 percent is considered somewhere between average to poor. Meaning there?s nothing very special about it, no inherent flavors that set it apart from any other coffee. And if there are intriguing flavors, most likely they aren?t desirable. For instance, a typical low-grown Robusta coffee can taste medicinal, even rubbery.

So, if so much of the coffee grown is of mediocre quality, why is it that people so happily consume so much each and every day? The answer: The Ubiquitous Dark Roast. (Well, and a lot of cream and sugar too. I?ll cover that some other time.)

Dark roast simply means that the coffee bean has been roasted to a higher temperature and typically for a longer period of time. This process causes all of the flavor molecules stored within the coffee beans?both the good and bad flavors?to be burnt away. By roasting so dark, the end consumer (you) can?t tell whether it?s a good bean or a bad bean because all the natural flavors have been turned to charcoal.

Think of it this way: a fine filet mignon and a strip of utility beef; if they?ve both been very overcooked, even a culinary expert would never be able to tell the difference between the two. Same with coffee.

So if you?re a large coffee company, what do you do? You roast dark, then, market the heck out of it and try to convince the mass market that it?s a wonderfully rich and complex coffee. Now you can?t really blame them can you? What else are they supposed to do, admit why they?re roasting your coffee so dark?

Not to be misunderstood, I?m not saying a dark-roasted coffee is always poor quality. There are some wonderful dark roast single-origin coffees and blends out there. Just don?t assume the dark roast is as ?rich and flavorful? as many roasters say it is. Most of the time there is a reason it?s roasted so dark.

Instead of going with a dark roast next time you?re picking up your bag of coffee, consider trying a freshly-roasted bag of something slightly lighter, perhaps a ?city? roast or even a ?full city? roast (almost a dark roast) if you?re not wanting to leap into lightness with reckless abandon. When shopping, keep in mind that the lighter the roast, the more confidence the roaster is showing in the quality of the raw bean.

– Denver Wilkinson is founder, and currently head roaster of Cafe Avion, a roasting company based in Coeur d?Alene, Idaho, that specializes in small-batch roasting of exclusively organic and fair trade coffees. ?There?s a whole world of coffee out there (quite literally) and so many natural flavors to experience, don?t settle for the mediocre stuff. The darker the roast, the less likely you?ll experience the subtle apricot flavors in a great Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, or the blueberry notes in a wonderful Harrar, or the earthy, ripened notes of a great Sumatran Mandheling.? Adds Wilkinson: ?I?m on a personal mission to undo the myth of the dark roast.?

If you are at all aware of health and environmental issues, organic coffee is a product that should be interesting to you.

Do you like to wake up in the morning, feel the sun’s rays on your face and savor the rich aroma of your favorite drink brewing? Do you like to spend rainy afternoons at the window, a cup smoking in your hand? Or to sit up late at night, watching a classic movie, the cheery pot resting at your elbow within easy reach? Then you will also want to ensure that you do not consume lots of harmful chemicals with the drink that you love so much. Then organic coffee beans are just what you need for your daily cup of coffee.

It’s a sad truth that modern agricultural practice greatly depends on the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. In order to supply the growing worldwide demand for popular crops, farmers don’t have a choice but to use harmful substances that boost production and minimize loss. Unfortunately, these substances persist in the finished product, though in residual quantities. Coffee is not an exception to this.

As a partial solution to this problem of slow poisoning through toxic residue, many people all over the world have chosen only to consume produce that has been grown using traditional methods and without the use of chemicals. Many organic farms have sprung up to supply their needs. Organic coffee is grown on all continents, but predominantly in South America, where the traditional low-tech methods are perhaps least different from modern techniques.

Organic coffee is produced under strict certification guidelines, and growers do their best to ensure that the methods are as environmental-friendly as possible. It is very often shade-grown, which means that large shade trees are used to shelter to coffee plants during critical periods of their growing season. In terms of environmental protection, this is superior to the high-tech method of clearing out wide regions around coffee plantations. It also means that the soil is protected from erosion, and the habitat and food-sources of birds and wildlife remain intact.

? Copyright Randy Wilson, All Rights Reserved.

Randy has more articles on coffee and coffee beans at Coffee such as Coffee Enemas.

Gourmet coffee lovers have been seeing a few new terms in the local premium coffee shop as they file past the seasonal retail displays of roasted whole bean bagged coffees. Phrases include eco-friendly, organic, shade grown, fair trade and certified sustainable. Most often those beans seem to the casual buyer to be simply more expensive than the corporate mega-brands.

But these few phrases represent far more than at first glance, including economic and social gains for the growing regions and farmers, harvesters and processors of green coffee beans at the local level. Sustainable coffee means premium prices and quality coffee due to organic farming practices, fair market payment for beans to local growers and quality controls being adopted by the certified coffee brands.

Those premium coffee prices reflect growing concerns worldwide of paying fair wages to growers, using more expensive ecologically friendly organic farming practices, better pay for traditionally underpaid harvesters and processing workers and strict quality controls being adopted for certified sustainable coffees.

Daniele Giovannucci consults with governments, international agencies, and businesses on coffee markets and production strategies to improve competitiveness and support innovative environmental and rural poverty reduction work. Giovannucci has authored exhaustive studies, including the 2003, The State of Sustainable Coffee Report – A Study of Twelve Major Markets.

http://www.cec.org/files/PDF/ECONOMY/CoffeeSurveyEN.pdf

This study discusses coffee market forces in Europe and Japan and the growth of sustainable coffee around the world, estimating that fair trade, organic, and eco-friendly coffees represent less than 2 percent of coffee consumption in developed markets.

Another Giovannucci authored study, Sustainable Coffee Survey of the North American Specialty Coffee Industry, he estimates the Global market for sustainable coffee to be approximately $565 million retail for over a million 60 kilo (about 132 pounds) bags of green coffee beans.

http://www.eftafairtrade.org/Document.asp?DocID=391&tod=21534

It is estimated that growers of certified sustainable coffees can nearly double their income from otherwise depressed coffee prices. So economically challenged third world countries see small farmers adopting organic growing techniques as a ticket out of poverty and subsistence. Corporate buyers are attracted to sustainable growers by consumer goodwill and health concerns related to those organically grown coffees. This leads to dubious claims by some of the corporate coffee representatives and has lead to the need for certification authorities.

One group, Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLO) has been active in monitoring and certifying, auditing and verifying standards for sustainable coffees. Another, named Transfair USA, carries on similar activities in the American coffee market. Consumers are justifiably confused when many terms are applied to sustainable coffees and fail to differentiate between organic, eco-friendly, fair trade and sustainable terms.

Premium prices are sometimes supported by certification, labeling and monitoring by third-party organizations and sometimes by local governments such as the Jamaica Coffee Industry Board. But some labeling is simply slick sales and PR by greedy corporations seeking premium prices for average coffee beans, so support for labeling initiatives and independent certification is growing.

Fair Trade and sustainable coffees are seeing increasing production in Central and South American growing regions, most notably in Mexico and Peru. Columbia has seen some pressure and attempts to divert production of cocaine with coffee crops for the fair trade market with little major success to report so far. Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia are big participants in sustainable coffees in Africa while East Timor, India and Indonesia are major supporters of sustainable coffee in Asia.

With the North American coffee market dominated by multinational giants Sara Lee, Kraft and Procter & Gamble, little interest has been shown in adopting sustainable coffee by major corporate coffee producers. Meanwhile, Brazil and Vietnam, the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 coffee producers, respectively are flooding the market with poor quality beans and driving down coffee prices.

But major grocery chains are seeing demand for sustainable coffee and may adopt fair trade and organic coffees to sell nationwide at Safeway, Kroger and Albertson’s stores. Increases in availability, demand and awareness of sustainable coffee are leading to more of the same in a spiraling increase for fair trade organic and shade coffees in premium markets. Some sustainable coffees are even finding their way into instant coffees, but the vast majority of the sustainable market is in premium and specialty markets.

? Copyright 2005 – http://www.TastesOfTheWorld.net

Tastes of The World coffee company http://www.tastesoftheworld.net focuses on specialty gourmet coffees which are not readily available in the United States. Rare Gourmet Coffee from Jamaica Blue Mountain to Kopi Luwak exotic and fine Italian Espressos from Illy and Marcafe as well as a selection of premium Puerto Rican coffees including Cafe Tres Picachos.

Come discuss your favorites in the coffee talk forums at http://www.tastesoftheworld.net/talk/