Buy Great Coffee (And Feel Good About It)

Java
Originally uploaded by DodogoeSLR

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.

"Rwandan Moment"

“It wasn’t that [Starbucks] was exceptionally nefarious or greedy; it was that the company just like any other company, was willing to do just about anything and say just about anything to move product.” - Bryant Simon

John Moore reports in his excellent blog, Brand Autopsy on a book by Bryant Simon, “EVERYTHING BUT THE COFFEE: Learning about America from Starbucks”. In it, Simon reveals his “Rwandan Moment” where the ugly truth about Starbucks was revealed to him. The sheen of Starbucks has worn thin over the years, but this type of behavior confirms that Starbucks was never a company to deserve such esteem in the first place.

BRYANT SIMON: Before I started my research, I found Starbucks to be an interesting place, most notably a potentially important public gathering spot in suburbanizing America. But the deeper I dug into the company’s history and charted its actions and located it within the context of the changes in American society, the more skeptical I became about the promises it made. My patience with the company snapped when I learned about its behavior (both the promises it made and its deeper indifference to what was actually going on) in Rwanda.

Rwanda, as most people know, has had a mean and bloody past. Ethnic violence in the mid-1990s cost the nation, a former colony with a woefully underdeveloped economy and infrastructure, hundreds of thousands of lives. By 2000, the country was trying to get back on its feet and the coffee industry had the potential to help it and some of its farmers recover. Starbucks, it turned out, played on this history and this guilt – a western guilt over doing nothing to stop the killing – to sell some pricey coffee and make itself look better.

In 2005, Starbucks introduced Rwanda Blue Bourbon with its “subtle acidity” and “herbal, spice, and cocoa notes” as one of its “Black Apron Exclusives” – the designation it uses for its highest-end, most expensive specialty coffees. “Taste a special coffee,” an in-store sign maintained, “that’s helping transform farmers lives.” “A Promising Future in Every Pound,” a company press release announced to mark the introduction of Rwanda Blue Bourbon. “Following the devastating events of 1994“ – a store sign proclaimed and this was all it said about the country’s troubling past – “this new cash crop (coffee) has given Rwandan farmers hope for a better future and helped them afford better education, medicine, and housing.”

These signs – again promises – got me interested in what Starbucks was actually doing in Rwanda. I asked around a bit and found out that while Starbucks charged $22/per pound for its coffee, it wasn’t paying any more at origin than other roasters buying Rwandan beans from small growers and charging consumers far less. Starbucks, moreover, wasn’t buying its bean from co-ops or small farmers, at least not directly. “These are plantation beans,” one source who knew something about the Rwandan coffee industry commented when I asked him about Starbucks purchases. When I asked him what he meant by this, he curtly answered, “I meant what I said.” Starbucks was buying beans from large shareholders, not small farmers, from powerful landowners with, in many cases, ties to old colonial authorities, not from the victims of the ethnic cleaning campaigns that ripped the country apart.

But the Starbucks’ promises, again, made it seem like it was helping the least fortunate (not lining the pockets of people who never stopped getting decent educations, adequate health care, and spacious accommodations.)

So this was my Rwandan moment. To me, this was just too much. Manipulating the Rwandan tragedy to make money seemed totally out of bounds and nearly unethical. But even more, it demonstrated to me the utter ordinariness of Starbucks. It wasn’t that the company was exceptionally nefarious or greedy; it was that the company just like any other company, was willing to do just about anything and say just about anything to move product.