Fred's kitchen notes

Coffee. What a great invention. The perfect drink for starting the day, for enjoying a break, to chat with your colleagues, to feel happy.

Unitl a few years ago, I was “picky” about coffee but only in respect of “italian vs non italian”. Then, a few years ago, we started to do our shopping at the “Living earth” store in Worcester, MA where I started trying some of the coffee beans that were sold there. First test purchase I made was a wee bag of organic espresso beans from the Equal Exchange company, which is based in mansfield, MA. It was love at first sight. Best coffee I had in ages. I would say that it does get close to an Illy quality. Not cheap (~ 11 bucks per pound), but worth every penny. Since then, I have stopped buying other coffees excepot for a brief period of a few months, when I started buying a coffee named “Cafe bustelo“. It’s way cheaper and still maintains a couple of properties that are very important to me, regarding the coffee I buy. But I’ll talk about those later. Right now I am enjoying the Organic Black Silk Espresso from Equal Exchange and I am very happy about it. Lovely. Dark. Bot too bitter. Not sweet. Mmmmmmhhhh.

Now, as I was quickly mentioning before, there are a few issues with coffee that make me very very very picky about what I buy:

First of all, quality. Naturally. I do not consider Starbucks or Dunking Donuts as being coffee. Thir coffee is either over-burnt, or too bitter or too acidic (DD especially). Badly roasted, badly ground and badly mixed. Bustelo is quite ok. There are some batches tat have that unpleasant metallic taste, but hey, once in a while can be tollerated.

Second, and the most important of them all, is that my coffee has to be guaranteed “fair trade“. Not the fake fair trade like Teavana, for example, where a small, tiny percentage of profits go to the farmers but where the farmers get paid a proper price for their beans. What’s the difference? very simple. With the “% of profits”, farmers do not have a constant, fixed and guaranteed income. They can not plan for the future and they still heavily depend on loans to start the season. With the “fixed price per kilo”, farmers have a good estimate of how much thwy will make, they are pushed to produce more and better and, most imortantly, can plan ahead and depend much less on loans for the next season. I know I am over-simplifying, but I am still reading and learning a lot about this issue myself.

Here’s something that will convince you even more, in case you still have doubts about it. I’ve seen this documentary on a VS flight and it really made me realize that the issue is serious and worth the “fight”. It’s called “Back Gold” and talks about a coop in Kenya. One single passage made understand how important this movement is: “we do not need your loans and goodwill. We need you to pay or products for their real price. 25 cents more per kilo allowed us to build a school. We can and we want to be self-sufficient”. They are right. Let them spread their wings. Or are we crushing them on purpose? Are we afraid?

I am doing my part. I only buy fair trade. Now you should do the same. Act now!

This is my first post about coffee. There will be more for sure.

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