Bloggle

It’s enough to make even Motley Fool cheerleader Alyce Lomax choke on her coffee.

Consider –

• 600 store closings (or 12,000 job cuts)
• 1000 additional job cuts at the home office
• a first ever quarterly corporate loss, and
• diminished expectations for the rest of the fiscal year.

But wait, there’s more! Remember Starbucks’ purchase of the Clover brewing system? How they’ve made this innovative brewing system unavailable to every other coffee shop on the planet so they can have it all to themselves? Yeah… well, there’s a little problem:

“…I’m standing in line at a hilltop Starbucks in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood — one of Clover’s beta sites. I do a taste test: a cup of Clover coffee versus brewed coffee. A young barista tells me they’re out of the first two specialty coffees I request and suggests instead Starbucks’ everyday blend, called Pike Place. During brewing, the barista stirs the grounds into the Clover with a clunky rubber spatula — not a metal whisk — and pours the concoction into a crummy paper cup. I smell, I sip, I inhale. I can’t tell which cup of coffee is which — and neither is anything special. Is it the beans? My palate? After a few minutes, I finally pick it out: This coffee tastes a little bit like hype.”

Thus, even while we empathize with folks who’ve been cast loose from their paychecks (sorry, really… and best of luck) witness our collective grim delight in watching the coffee giant get its comeuppance.

Let me offer two cautionary notes…

Firstly, Starbucks’ rising tide lifted with it the status and visibility of a thousand mom n’ pop coffee shop and indie coffee bars. That tide may now be rushing out to the deep blue sea. Consider this a small craft advisory: those same economic factors that gouged a hole in the good ship Starbucks may prove rocky shoals for the indie retailer, too.

Secondly, some perspective is in order. About the same time that Starbucks was reporting its first ever quarterly loss, Exxon reported quarterly profits in excess of Starbucks’ entire market capitalization. Woof.

So, enjoy your slice of Schadenfreude Pie. It’s tasty… but have too big a helping and you’ll be sorry.

No Comments »

You should know something about coffee people… we’re *constantly* tasting coffee: our own, the stuff from the guy across the street, and across the country. Oh sure, part of it’s about keeping tabs on what other folks are doing — but that’s a small part, really. The larger share is just ’cause we like coffee, and love the origins and flavors of coffee the world over, even if it’s not us that’s selling it.

Consequently, things like family vacations are sometimes interrupted with a brief dash into an unfamiliar coffee shop to sample the brew of the day, or — in the case of a recent trip Don Holly made to Portland — a quick jog in to Stumpies to grab a bunch of beans for the gang back home ’cause you just *know* they’re gonna be good.

“The thing about El Injerto,” says Holly, “is they have the most amazing worm farm.”

I ponder this for a moment.

“So…” I ask, “how do you judge a worm farm, anyway?”

Don shrugs.

“It’s like art. I know it when I see it.”

There *is* something artful about this cup — Guatemala Finca El Injerto Reserva, by Stumptown Coffee — that’s just about as challenging to pin down. It’s something experiential: the rich, spiced cocoa and savory herbal note as it brews, the tremendous expression of jasmine and coffee flower aromas in the cup; the lush, saturated flavors of dark fruit — raisin and plum and ripe mango — matched with ample body and just enough of a bright, crisp, acid snap to counterbalance the richness of it all.

The way I see it, this is one great cup. It’s also, I believe, a limited offering, being a Cup of Excellence bean and all. So get it while you can.

Rating:

Available from Stumptown Coffee Roasters.

2 Comments »

First a disclaimer: I’m not of the “I drink coffee for a caffeine high” camp.

There’s two reasons for that. The first being that, as I have a long history of drinking cup after cup (after cup) all day long, I guess I have something in the way of caffeine tolerance. And the second, I don’t care how much caffeine a given cup has, if its flavor and aroma don’t move me, I’m just not interested.

Having said all that, this is cute. ;)

[Hat tip: Hasbean]

No Comments »

Seven years ago today the fine folks at Blogger (You remember them? Swallowed by Google?) recognized Bloggle [the Coffee Odyssey] as a Blog of Note. Oh sure… you can smile your isn’t that nice smile now, but it was a Big Deal in 2001. It was like… you’d arrived.

‘Course it’s been all downhill, since. ;)

No Comments »

What’s the impact of global climate change on coffee?

I’ve had conversations with a number of coffee farmers — particularly folks in South and Central America — about what they’re experiencing on their farms. The stories they tell are of seasons off kilter: of too much rain at the wrong time of the year, not enough when they need it; of coffee trees flowering and coffee cherries ripening in increasingly staggered spans — especially among farms at varying altitudes –  making harvest more challenging. But still, they are simple anecdotes, these stories farmers tell… and every year has such stories. They are not, themselves, a body of evidence of climate change.

The report released by Oxfam this month — Turning up the heat, Climate Change and Poverty in Uganda — now that’s evidence of the impact of climate change on coffee production. And the evidence does not bode well:

“The outlook is bleak. If the average global temperatures rise by two degrees or more, then most of Uganda is likely to cease to be suitable for coffee..this may happen in 40 years or perhaps as little as 30.”

Keep in mind that the figures that Oxfam cites are for coffee production in all of Uganda. It’s more than possible — it’s likely — that coffees from premiere origins within Uganda could succumb to the devastating effects of a changing climate in only just a few years as they lose those unique microclimates that contributed to their coffee’s character. Coffees like Bugisu, the bluesy, saturated cup from Mbale that I profiled here a short seven years ago:

In the cup this is a deep, dark mysterious liquor. It’s muscular, musky and oozes languidly on the tongue. Its deeper tones are bitter chocolate, its high notes ripe fruit… very ripe. It’s slightly wild, rich, fat and funky. Not the fuzzy stuff of a monsooned Malabar–it’s far too smooth for that–but still it’s earthy and intense. The Bugisu has got the body of a Java, and while its finish is long and syrupy, it is decidedly not sweet.

From an utterly selfish point of view, I don’t want to lose this coffee. But you don’t have to be self-serving to worry about the devastating impact of climate change on coffee, because it’s the very same impact that will be affecting the wider food supply. All the world’s food supply. Crops like coffee that thrive only in superbly balanced ecosystems and rarefied microclimes are likely harbingers of the greater threat of climate change. Where coffee fails, tea may follow. Where tea fails, rice may follow. Where rice fails, well… two thirds of the world’s population may follow.

Like canaries in the coal mine, specialty coffee — and the farming families who produce it — may prove among the first to succumb to the hazards of a warming world. And if that doesn’t worry you just a little bit, it damn well should.

2 Comments »

• Nick Cho makes his debut this week as the Coffee Nazi — or something like that. From the glossy web pages of U.S. News’ Money & Business section, to the frenzied spaces of Boing Boing and MetaFilter, Cho’s Murky Coffee was grabbing headlines as the coffee shop that wouldn’t serve it the way the customer wanted it.
  

  “It sounds like a cheesy sitcom scene: Man goes into coffee shop. He orders his favorite drink, a triple shot of espresso over ice. Barista declines; he says the drink goes against company policy because pouring espresso over ice ruins the quality of the coffee. Man gets angry. He leaves a tip with an expletive scrawled across it.”

  It didn’t end there, of course, as the customer blogged about the experience — complete with a snapshot of the explative-laden dollar bill he left as a tip. (Yes, he hated the experience so much he left a tip. Go figure.) And that led to the colorful, open letter from Murky’s Cho.

  Oh, the calamity.

• Starbucks gets “back to basics” by… introducing smoothies?  How does this get back to the core that Howard was talking about not so long ago?
  

  “One of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past,” he wrote. “Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee.”

  No worries… the Jamba Juice gambit will surely make folks focus on the coffee. Meanwhile, in light of Starbucks’ malaise, how are independent shops faring? Just fine, thanks.

2 Comments »