Welcome To SUNDAY Coffee+: Coffee News That Made The Headlines
Each week, Craft Beverage Jobs compiles the top headlines for Craft Coffee News & Information. On Sunday morning we post those headlines in SUNDAY Coffee+ for your reading pleasure. Whether its industry growth, new business, job openings, profiles or human interest, you just never know what will tickle our fancy from week to week. We want to make SUNDAY Coffee+ a part of your Sunday morning coffee experience. Want Sunday Coffee+ delivered via email each weekend? Sign Up Here.
Coffee DNA Project: Using Algorithms To Determine Your Customers “Taste” In Coffee
Caffeinating with Craft Coffee, The Internet Coffee Company, by Erin Griffith – FORTUNE
What Craft Coffee is doing is, in fact, selling coffee on the Internet. That’s what it has done since 2010, when Horn started the site out of the General Assembly co-working space in New York. But over the summer, Craft Coffee participated in Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator. While living and working alongside tech startups in fields such as nuclear fusion and data science, Horn adopted a more tech-focused strategy.
At Y Combinator’s demo day in August, Horn unveiled The Coffee DNA Project. No longer a mere purveyor of coffee, Craft Coffee is now “Pandora for Coffee.” Like the Internet radio company, Craft Coffee now uses an algorithm to determine which kinds of artisan coffee its customers might like. Unlike Pandora P 0.90% , it will then sell customers that artisan coffee.
To create its coffee recommendations, Craft Coffee has acquired a $10,000 industrial machine called an Agtron Coffee Roasting Analyzer. It was invented by “a literal mad scientist who knows everything about coffee,” Horn says. Mass coffee producers use Agtron machines for quality control, since it can analyze the organic chemistry of ground coffee and assign it an integer. But Craft Coffee uses the Agtron to compare different coffees. “We can put Folgers in there and we know it’s a ‘52’ or whatever,” Horn says. “That gives us the key number to be able to be a data science company.”
Meet Hawaii’s Coffee Geeks
Hawai’i Coffee Geeks Are Jolting The World’s Coffee Scenes, by Martha Cheng – HONOLULU
Miguel Meza & Lorie Obra of Rusty’s Hawaiian Cupping Coffee (How Experts Taste Coffee). Photo, Joshua Fletcher
We came down the mountain from Cloud Rest, a region of Ka‘u where the clouds hang low and a soft rain falls every afternoon. Miguel Meza of Rusty’s Hawaiian Coffee had invited me over for a cup of coffee on the lānai. The first thing I noticed was the scale—a tool of the trade for any serious barista, but Meza’s was snow-white and a dead ringer for an Apple TV. It connected wirelessly to his iPhone, and, as he poured water through the coffee grinds, it displayed and measured—in real time—the volume and rate of water poured. With the app, he could also track the coffee grind size, the water temperature and the brew time, and share it with the online community of coffee aficionados.
I had entered the full-coffee-geek zone. I’d been falling down the rabbit hole for a week so far: “Drink me,” beckoned endless cups of espressos and pour-over coffee. When I first started this research, I was like the average coffee drinker: I knew pretty much nothing about how the bean became my beverage. Now, when I go to a serious local coffee shop and ask what’s in the espresso blend, and the barista answers: a washed Maragogype from Kona and a natural red Caturra plus washed Typica from Rusty’s, I know what all those words mean. And it’s a little bit exhilarating (or maybe that’s the caffeine rush) and a little bit isolating, because there are very few people I can communicate with in my newfound language.
Coffee Review’s Top 30 For 2014
Top 30 Coffees of 2014, by Ron Walters – Coffee Review
We are pleased to present our Top 30 Coffees of 2014, Coffee Review’s second annual ranking of the most noteworthy coffees we reviewed over the past year.
We selected and ranked these exceptional coffees and espressos based on quality (represented by overall rating), value (reflected by most affordable price per pound), and consideration of other factors that include distinctiveness of style, uniqueness of origin or tree variety, certifications such as fair trade and organic, and general rarity.
This year’s list actually includes 31 coffees. Two coffees share spot No. 29 because their roasters, without intending to, sourced the same exceptional green coffee, brought it to an identical roast color based on Agtron readings, and even charged the same price. Reassuringly, perhaps, these two versions of the same coffee also earned the same score in separate blind cuppings a month apart.
In 2014, we cupped thousands of samples and published roughly 350 coffee reviews. Approximately eighty of the reviewed coffees scored 94 points or higher. Obviously all of the 94+ point coffees were exceptional. But we couldn’t include them all, and some were more unusual or noteworthy or better values than others. Obviously some outstanding coffees were left off the list; on the other hand, every coffee on the list is remarkable or exciting in some way.
Coffee Goes Tech With Coffee App
New Smart Coffee app helps customers find perfect blend, by Matthew Reed – Daily Journal News
Coffee. What would the world be like without it? For many consumers, it is the nectar
of the gods when done correctly.
But what happens when a coffee drinker wants to find a particular flavor that is not available in stores? They can go to Thanksgiving Coffee’s custom blend application.
Paul Katzeff, founder and CEO of Thanksgiving Coffee, has been working on a Smart Coffee application for five years, which was recently released to the public, said Marchelo Bresciani, marketing coordinator at Thanksgiving Coffee. Katzeff wanted to help coffee drinkers choose the right blend and educate them on what goes into the flavor profiles. The app was built as a tool for coffee drinkers to find the perfect blend.
Fair Trade USA Makes $25 Million Investment In Future Of Coffee
Fair Trade USA Campaigns To Make A $25 Million Investment For A $1 Billion Impact, by Julie Fahnestock – Justmeans
As you reflect on the year 2014 and begin thinking about 2015, don’t forget that your new, five-year goals are inclusive of the year 2020. What kind of impact do you hope to make by then? How about giving $1 billion to farmers, farm workers, factory workers, and fishermen in over 70 countries around the world? That’s the 2020 goal of Fair Trade USA. Since 1998 and the history of the Fair Trade USA label, Fair Trade USA claims to have helped farmers earn an additional $350,000,000, a combination of premiums and price above the market rates. Today, they are campaigning to raise $25 million, the investment they believe it will take in order to reach their $1 billion goal. And it’s a good possibility it might not take them five years. Bob Stiller, longtime Fair Trade USA supporter and Founder of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, recently gave them a personal, $10 million matching grant. Other big foundation names like Skoll, Rockefeller, Kellogg and Packard are considering investment, as well.
But where and how exactly will the $25 million be invested? How will Fair Trade USA measure the impact of the grants? More importantly, how will the producers benefit? In a conversation with Fair Trade USA’s CEO, Paul Rice, I learned more about where the funds will be allocated, and how the hardworking people fair trade seeks to benefit will see their livelihoods and communities changed.
When we looked at the opportunities around fair trade, expanding into more countries and impacting more workers, we knew we needed a number of key investments in order to unlock that growth Our primary indicator of impact is dollars we generate above market price which flows back to workers. – Paul Rice, CEO Fair Trade USA
