Buy Great Coffee (And Feel Good About It)
Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 05:04AM 
UPDATED May 4: Yesterday, I received my first shipment of coffee beans and immediately brewed up a pot. It is definitely not Four Barrel awesome, but it’s quite good, with a rich taste. I have had sweeter Guatemalan coffee, but these are good fresh beans. I’m not a coffee expert or anything, but I drink enough coffee to know what tastes good and what tastes like Starbucks. If you’re replacing your Starbucks fix with CoffeeCSA, you won’t be disappointed.
This blog can’t be all photography, all the time. It takes a lot of energy to keep a blog fresh. And where does that energy come from? The Beans of Life themselves, coffee, of course.
Today I discovered my first coffee CSA, Consumer Supported Agriculture. CSAs are not new; if you join a CSA, you can get all kinds of fresh produce delivered to you straight from the farmers who grow them. The benefits of this setup are pretty obvious: lower costs by removing the middleman (grocer), fresher produce and less environmental impact by shortening the delivery chain, and a more predictable, higher income to the farmer who can then reinvest in making his harvest better every year.
Coffee CSAs have been done on small scales for a while, but CoffeeCSA.org is a new CSA with a much bigger vision and membership, with 140,000 small scale farmers from Ethiopia, Guatamala, Nicaragua, Peru, and Mexico. If you are a coffee lover like me, you recognize the names of these countries as the origins of some of the best gourmet coffees around. I particularly love the nutty sweetness of a good Guatemalan coffee.
CoffeeCSA allows you to “invest” in a single farmer, which basically means you are committing to purchase beans from a farmer each month. Every month, you will receive 2, 5 or 10 pounds of coffee beans (at approximately $10 per pound) from your farmer. For those who prefer variety in their daily brew, CoffeeCSA also offers “Farmer of the Month” plans which send you coffee from a different farm each month. All farmers grow organic, shade grown beans, so you get the very best.
I see this program as a mashup of a coffee club, micro-loan, and third world sponsorship program. When you hear stories about how Starbucks, despite their squeaky clean appearance has misled their customers into believing they support small coffee farmers when they really support the practices that are putting small farmers out of business, this is a real win for the little guy.
Speaking of Char, er Starbucks, if you’re a regular there and you buy an average drink say 5 times a week, you are probably spending $80/ month on inferior coffee that has been sitting in a Starbucks warehouse for months. For the same $80, you could be helping a small farmer in Ethiopia (some are even women, who have a very difficult time running their own businesses in third world countries) by purchasing 8 pounds of their coffee each month, enough for you and 3 of your friends to have a cup or two every day! And I guarantee you’ll never want Starbucks again after tasting a fresh, well roasted CSA coffee. One of my favorite local roasters, Four Barrel Coffee, sources their beans direct from small farmers.
My understanding is that CoffeeCSA.org is only about a month old, so here’s your chance to lead the revolution in helping small coffee farmers. Invest in a farmer today and get your friends to do the same.
co-op, coffee, coffeecsa, csa, delicious, farmer, organic, sustainable in Food For Thought
Reader Comments (2)
People are just way too fast and loose with the terms "best" and "perfect" these days.
Slightly off topic, but since you seem to be in the know, what makes Blue Bottle such a great coffee? I've had it a few times and even bought some beans to brew for myself, and I found nothing remarkable about it. Four Barrel is amazing and I also enjoyed Trouble Coffee, but I could never figure out the deal with Blue Bottle.