Don’t Wave Your Stink Fist: Some Tips on Being a Coffee Traveler
By Craig Holt, Founder, Atlas Coffee Importers Coffee is such a great gig. It allows many of us the opportunity to visit a broad variety of cultures in some of the world’s most…
Guatemala Head Bleed: Some More Tips on Being a Coffee Traveler
By Craig Holt, Founder, Atlas Coffee Importers The first installment of this series about being a good coffee traveler touched on cultural issues. I explored the value of teaching yourself about more than…
The Gestalt of Gratuities… The Context of Tips… The Background on Bakshish…
By Tim Castle, Author & President of Castle & Co. Supposedly, the term “TIP” first came into use shortly after the founding of London’s Lloyd’s Coffeehouse in 1688. Perhaps apocryphally, the word is…
Hot Coffee: The Cult of Cool
By Julie Wolfson Discovering How Specialty Coffees Are Heating Up in the Foodie Frenzy How, I wondered, did I find myself standing with coffee growers from around the world watching Charles Babinski do…
Specialty Selling: How Focusing on Sales Furthers the Industry
By Devin Chapman, Barista, Coava Coffee Coffee is complex, incredible, and can provide sensory experiences unlike anything on the planet. The coffee industry is young and we have only scratched the surface of…
Improving the Quality of their Coffee Life
Thoughts on Connecting with the Consumer By Meister, Customer Support, Counter Culture Coffee If there’s one phrase that I balk at when chatting with colleagues and peers in specialty coffee it’s “educating the…
The Trouble with Cups
By Chad Trewick As a specialty coffee industry we have a hot cup problem, a great big cup problem. Many estimates cite as much as 90 percent of our customers leave our shops…
Between Courage & Carelessness
By Peter Giuliano Perhaps the best-known coffee town in Rwanda is Butare, located in Rwanda’s hilly southwest. Butare is a bustling central African town, with mostly unpaved roads and inconsistent electrical service coming…
Leaving a Bad Taste in Their Mouths?
By Christopher Schooley I always thought that one of the most important pieces of information that you could put on a bag of coffee was the roast date. It can identify the contents…
Home Coffee Roasting: A Bump on the Butt of Specialty Coffee
by Thompson Owen A guy goes into a coffee roasting shop and asks if he can buy some green coffee to roast at home. The owner says, “Sure, and I will give you a 10…
