Tomorrow, a new Earth Day post: Green Up Your Coffee House.

In the face of the now very real threat of global climate change, this year’s recognition of Earth Day carries with it a certain sense of urgency. It’s time to change some habits. Permanently. The good news? Greening up your coffee cup doesn’t mean sacrificing the quality of your coffee! Here’s some tips to get you started…

• Enough of the paper filters, already. If you enjoy your coffee in a press pot, good on you, you’re already there. But if you’re making a drip cup, consider some alternatives to your paper coffee filters. The gold standard of reusable drip filters are made by SwissGold, and they have a product line that covers most every filter basket style — from Mr. Coffee to Bunn to Melitta-styled cone filters — used in auto-drip machines today.
• Enough of the bottled water, too. I’ve written quite a lot about the importance of good water for good coffee. So by all means, use great water, but make it great yourself. Start with water from your own tap and filter it with any number of great filtration products (I like Brita, and PUR.) You’ll save oodles of money, and save oodles of carbon emissions from all the shipping that bottled water requires.
• Heat your water on-demand. Long-time readers will know that I’ve proclaimed my love for Bunn coffee makers in the past… but I have to tell you, that relationship is over. Home coffee makers that keep water hot 24 hours are energy hogs, pure and simple. Instead, use a water kettle to boil up only exactly as much water as you need. Chances are it’ll take no more time than your Bunn ever did.
• Take your mug on the road. If you’re heading to your local coffee house, take your mug with you! There’s thermal travel mugs and tumblers of every sort to make sure you don’t spill a drop on your commute, and chances are your coffee shop will thank you! (One of a coffee shop’s biggest costs is paper, and the lion’s share of that is paper cups.)
• Choose Fair Trade Certified™ and Organic coffee. Yes, you really can make a difference by choosing coffee with eco-friendly bona fides. And you have been! Sales of Fair Trade and Organic coffee continue to see accelerating double-digit growth. Keep it up! These coffees are ecologically sound, sustainable, and make for safer, healthier coffee-growing communities.

My regular coffee order at Starbucks sounds ridiculous. “I’ll have a grande, no-fat, sugar-free Cinnamon Dolce Latte, no whip. Please.’’ Once, a customer behind me chirped, “Would you like coffee with that?”

Heh.

Now Starbucks is making it easier on patrons like myself who like to order a little coffee with their adjectives. Coffee drinks made with nonfat milk and sugar-free syrups are now called “skinny.’’ So I can order a “skinny” Cinnamon Dolce and get the same no-fat, sugar-free, no-whip drink without so much effort. There are also “skinny” mochas, “skinny” caramel lattes and “skinny” hazelnut lattes.

This is new? This is news? I’ve heard “skinny” used in coffee shops from Portland, Oregon to Portsmouth, New Hampshire and all points between. And certainly not only at Starbucks. But it would appear that “skinny” has now officially hit the Starbucks lexicon. And some folks aren’t happy about it.

At The Gothamist:

The non-official Starbucks Gossip Blog posted a letter Wednesday that one disgruntled New York employee fired off to the company’s top brass. The barista wrote not to protest Starbucks’s aggressive ubiquity, their resistance to fair trade coffee, or their union busting tactics. No sir, she’s up in arms about the new company policy instructing employees to refer to drinks made with sugar-free syrup, non-fat milk, and no whipped cream as “Skinny.”

Um… yeah. That’s pickin’ your battles.

As a person of estimable size (i.e. a really big guy) let me offer a brief note to reluctant baristas, everywhere: if you think what you call your drink is going to have an impact my self-image — any impact at all — you greatly overestimate your power. If you think that “skinny” is politically incorrect and you’re personally offended by the term, you really need to get a grip. And if this is where you intend to make your stand, well… you might shuffle the deck of cards that comprises your priorities.

And that’s the real skinny.

Who is Matt, you say, that he should know from Fair Trade? (Apparently today you are a mensch… I don’t know why.) Matt and his crew at Just Coffee make up one of those small, really admirable coffee roasters that’s trying to raise the bar in terms of of transparency. For them, Fair Trade is a movement, not just a market. (Says so, right in their logo.)

I like the work that Matt’s doing, despite his tendency to talk crap about roasters — like Green Mountain — who offer a number of Fair Trade coffees (currently about 30% of coffee sales) but don’t offer Fair Trade coffees exclusively. This isn’t uncommon. In fact, it’s becoming something of a tradition among “self-certified” Fair Trade roasters… those who’ve who’ve cast aside third-party certification for their own flavor of a Fair Trade label. What tends to get lost in kerfuffles like this is that — despite the noise — the essential principles of companies like Just Coffee and Green Mountain are the same: a fair price for farmers, long-term relationships with growers, and support for sustainable and ecologically sound practices all around.

“Fair traders have been way too reluctant to take a critical look at what we are trying to build and this book accomplishes that objective and does it well. Dan makes the point that FT needs to re-connect with other organizations and movements for social and economic justice instead of selling out to the corporations that they oppose. We could not agree more.”
– Matt Earley, Just Coffee

I’m looking forward to some interesting reading.

The Fair Trade system as we know it today does admirable things. It is not, however, a panacea. And it’s got some warts. And the only way to make it better is to keep the dialog going, otherwise folks who are serious-minded about coffee quality are simply going to route around it. Point of fact, they already are… witness the rejection of Fair Trade certification by some, and the various and sundry Direct Trade models that have begun to circulate.

I don’t think third-party certification is going to become irrelevant any time soon, but I worry that greater numbers of ever more prominent roasters may fold up their tents in favor of systems that offer equal transparency, more equity for farmers — no matter whether they’re a single-family farm or a coop or an estate — and increased respect for coffee quality as a part of the equation.

Most coffee growing countries you may visit you’ll have a hard time scaring up a good cup of coffee. Ask for a cup and often as not you’ll get instant – granules spooned from a tin or a jar kept above the stove. Only Ethiopia — the birthplace of coffee — has had a coffee-consuming tradition for as long as the bean has been cultivated. (Yemen, too, but somewhat less so.) This is changing, and one of the most profound changes may be in Kenya.

For most of Kenya’s 100 years or so of coffee production, it’s been illegal to roast beans for local consumption, all to better assure a steady supply of beans for foreign trade. Those rules have been relaxed… and many more of the traditionally rigid, compulsory practices of the Kenya Coffee Board are being reexamined as Fair Trade principles — and Fair Trade’s higher prices — find their way into the Kenyan economy.

Thus, the latest entry into the Kenyan coffee culture… the iconic coffee shop –

Plush coffee bars are springing up all over the capital, serving home-grown lattes and cappuccinos to young, status-driven Kenyans breaking from the country’s tea-drinking past. Where there were no proper coffee shops in 1999, there are now more than 20. In the gritty city centre alone, Java House, the best-known chain, serves 1,500 cups of premium coffee a day.

“People thought we were crazy to try to sell coffee to Kenyans,” said Jon Wagner, an American former relief worker who co-founded the company eight years ago, and has seen revenues grow every quarter since. “It was virgin territory but we believed a good cup of coffee would always find a market.”

“There are few products of capitalism more pertinent than coffee, the world’s most popular drink, with more than two billion cups drunk every day. And there are few products more economically complex. The final price of a cup of coffee in the West will have absorbed the costs of insurance, taxes, transport, processing, packaging, marketing, storage and much more. But of the £2 charged for a cappuccino in a British coffee shop, an average farmer gets less than 2p.

Coffee is one of the least transparent industries in the world,’ said Nick. ‘We’re supposed to be marking 200 years since the abolition of slavery. The coffee industry is not slavery, but when people are being paid half a dollar a day it is not far off. The companies argue that it’s better than nothing, and that’s a problem. By which standard is an equitable wage being judged? The companies who supply us with coffee wouldn’t treat their own employees the same way.”

Given a consumer’s fervent desire to do the right thing, is it possible — between million-dollar marketing campaigns, and confusing and ambiguous certification labels — to find an ethical cup of coffee? Filmmaker Nick Francis:

“The question for consumers is whether we can find a coffee that is less exploitative than the others. Maybe that is all we can say for now.”

I guess it’s understandable you’ve never heard of it. Heck, until just a week or three ago even TransFair USA was a little confused about just where to find it on the calendar. And even today TransFair sends visitors seeking resources about World Fair Trade Day to a third-party web site that offers little more than empty pages and empty promises of world-changing stuff to come.

Really, now… that’s just embarrassing.

Despite the apparent cone of silence surrounding the day, there are about 50 events in honor of World Fair Trade Day in the US and Canada… perhaps you can find one near you. (Yo, Vermonters, there’s an event at the Brattleboro Farmers’ Market if you’re so inclined.)

Oh! And while on the subject of upcoming events, don’t forget that Sunday is Mother’s Day. I bet *that* one’s on your calendar!