Coffee Belwethers

When my university invited applications for the first TED Talks to be held on our campus, I jumped at the chance to spend 12 minutes with an audience that was deeply interested in thinking deeply about the future of our university. We were asked to talk about the university in 2040, and my first thought, of course, was to talk about our coffee situation at that time. In Coffee Bellwethers, I describe how the future of coffee relates to our campus as a community committed to sustainability and justice, and how it relates to the future of the planet as a whole.



More details of this vision are included in a Coffee Proposal that I developed with students and coffee experts over the years, but which so far has not been implemented. The proposal's Facebook page is a place to follow -- and lead -- ongoing efforts to move our campus toward a brighter coffee future.

Image: Roast Magazine
Pop-up shops of this kind could be integral to a campus committed to justice.

Lagniappe
A few weeks after giving my TEDx Talk, I heard a very interesting story on the TED Radio Hour that underlines the importance of cafes in universities. In Where Do Good Ideas Come From?, Guy Raz shares Steven Johnson's insights about the importance of collaboration in the gradual accumulation of ideas, in contrast to the "Eureka" moments that are not so often important. In his TED talk, Johnson extolls the coffee house as an ideal place to foster such collaboration.

Coffee Belwethers -- the TEDx Talk as Written

Two years ago, I was dining with colleagues in a restaurant just a few blocks from this hall. As the server brought water to our table, she hesitated as if she might know me. When she returned a minute later, she had figured out the connection, and she knew that the connection was about coffee. We had met only once before, at Logan Airport, but my face was familiar from family photographs.

This was because her daughter is a Bridgewater State College graduate who had participated in our first travel course in Nicaragua. She had learned about the geography of coffee first-hand, and had brought the lessons home. This was, in fact, not the first time that a relative of that student had brought the coffee connection to my attention. A two-week encounter with coffee and the people who grow it had changed this student’s view of the world and she had shared that with everyone she knew.
Bridgewater State University has a reputation for caring about coffee. More than a hundred of our students and alumni have made that journey to the coffeelands of Nicaragua to learn from farmers first-hand. Hundreds more have studied coffee in semester-long courses, and have shared their knowledge in community-wide coffee fairs. Many have done both.

I am here this evening because I want to make sure that in 2040 we are a campus that still has a reputation for its focus on coffee. And more importantly, that we deserve it.
But this is not JUST about coffee. For the next few minutes I want to borrow this coffee cup from the BSU of 2040. What is in that cup will tell us a lot – not just about our coffee reputation – but about our campus and the world it is part of.

Coffee will be, in fact, our bellwether. When it occurred to me to use that term in the title of this talk, it also occurred to me to make sure I knew what it meant, and I am glad I did, because I had been mistaken about its meaning. I had thought it was a nautical term, and always pictured a bell for ships, having something to do with weather.

But just as there is no X in cat, there is no A in bellwether, and it has nothing to do with rain, sleet, or even snow. A wether, it turns out, is a sheep – not the lead sheep and not the following sheep, but a member of the flock to which a bell is attached. The shepherd knows that wherever the bell can be heard, the flock can be found.

Where our coffee is, so too is our campus.
How can a cup of coffee be so important? There are three basic reasons. First, it employs a lot of people; second, it uses a lot of land; third, we consume it locally.

Today, up to ten million people make their living putting coffee in that cup. The only thing we trade more than coffee – in this whole world – is petroleum. By 2040, we had better not be trading so much oil, so coffee could and should be the most traded commodity on the planet in 2040.
Most of the ten million people who depend on coffee today are small farmers in the tropics and their families. I do not mean that the farmers are small, of course, but that they grow their coffee on farms averaging only a few acres and producing a few hundred or maybe a few thousand pounds of coffee each year.

At ten dollars a pound, a few thousand pounds sounds like it would provide a very nice living in most places in the coffee belt. But although ten dollars might be what we pay, it is not close to what most farmers earn. The costs of shipping, packaging, processing and marketing take most of the money that we pay for coffee.

Unfair trading practices take most of the rest. This is why the way we buy coffee matters so much. For millions of small farmers and their families, those trading practices can be the difference between poverty and dignity. For some, it can be the difference between life and death.

Even the most free of free markets operate within a set of rules, and in coffee, those rules put most of the risk on the backs of the small producers. As with all commodities, the prices fluctuate, but coffee buyers are able to protect themselves against fluctuations by purchasing financial instruments known as futures.

In coffee, we have the opportunity to protect the small producers from some of that fluctuation, and to help them build a future. Not a paper future, but a real future.

To understand how this can be, let’s turn from the cup to the fruit. Yes, coffee is a fruit, and this is what it looks like on the tree. And yes, coffee is also a tree. Everyone who drinks from a 2040 BSU coffee cup will have some understanding of this, and will know the major steps between the field and the cup. Because of the way we will serve coffee in 2040 at BSU, they will know the geography of coffee.

In 2015, the major way to protect a farmer from price fluctuations is a system called fair trade. Small farmers organize into cooperatives, and make arrangements with coffee importers to guarantee them a minimum price to cover the cost of production and a fair income. The farmers learn a lot about the market they serve. They also cooperate in the early steps of shipping and processing, so that they can earn a little more of that ten dollars.

As a university, we have committed to the fair trade model, but we are not actively following it. Over the next 25 years we can catch up on our commitments and make sure that every farmer who sends us coffee is earning a fair living in return.

We need to challenge even that goal, though. In 2040, we should be doing much better than fair trade.
Between now and 2040 we have a chance to change the coffee market itself, and to make fair trade unnecessary. Between now and 2040, if we apply what we learn about coffee off campus to our coffee on campus, we can be a model for other North American universities and the millions of cups of coffee they serve each day.

Model cafés on our campus can connect students to the farmers more directly. And the more students know about farmers, the less they will tolerate “free” trade as it currently operates. This will make “fair” trade unnecessary as more campuses follow our lead.

The second reason that cup of coffee matters is the land. This tree is on land in the community of La Corona, in Matagalpa Nicaragua. My friend Alfredo planted it there, and his family is able to make a good living from it because of fair trade.

In caring for that tree – and growing it organically – Alfredo and his family are protecting that piece of land. They are protecting the water of their own community, and of the city below. They are also providing habitat for birds that might even migrate to Bridgewater in the spring.

At least some of that coffee in 2040 should come from this farm. But there is no guarantee that it will, because of climate change. We are talking about the future this evening, but climate change is not a future event. I am pretty certain, in fact, that the tree in this photograph does not exist. We are looking at a victim of climate change already.

Coffee farmers wanting to earn a fair living must produce high-quality coffee. And as with high-quality wine, the coffee is very sensitive to differences in soil and climate. Organic farmers care for the soil, but we have to take care of the climate, or it will not matter.

The best coffee grows at high elevation. As the temperature increases, farmers have to go higher. Even if that is possible – and it usually is not – the soil will not be the same. And even while the AVERAGE temperature and rainfall is allowing Alfredo and his neighbors to produce good coffee, the timing of temperature and rainfall is already changing dramatically. This affects yields and quality, and it also makes way for diseases. Many trees in Central America – probably including this one – have been lost to roya, a blight that has been made very common by shifting weather patterns.

Coffee lovers are fortunate that Alfredo and his neighbors have replanted them. We need to get serious about climate change now, so that coffee continues to be possible in 2040.

The third reason to care about coffee is much more local. If we still have coffee in 2040, the coffee in our 2040 BSU cup will come from farmers who have been treated fairly on land that they have cared for well. It will also come IN a cup, not FROM a cup. By that I mean that the single-serve machines that are currently filling landfills will not be present on our campus, nor will they be needed. Instead, we will have actual people preparing and serving the coffee.

A student-led café will be at the heart of each of our major buildings, fomenting conversation, teaching about coffee, and providing meaningful employment. We will be roasting our own coffee so that it is fresh, and doing so in solar roasters on some of our sunny rooftops. That technology already exists, and we have plenty of time to adopt it by 2040. 

Rather than relying on vending machines, each café will provide real coffee – or tea or cocoa or juice – and real food that is as local as possible. Each café will be a place where we practice what we teach about social justice, sustainability, connections to our region, and critical thinking. The coffee cup of BSU 2040 can truly be a model for thousands of other campuses.

The last thing I will say about the coffee of BSU 2040 is that it will be delicious. When people ask me – and they often do – if fair-trade, organic coffee is as good as regular coffee, I say of course not. It is better, because if we take care of the land and the farmers and the roasters and the brewers, our reward will be in the cup.

California Coffee

Update 2/18/18

Geographers often study agriculture, and for several good reasons. As a discipline concerned with earth systems, we can help to ascertain how a given crop fits into -- or does not fit into -- the ecology of the places where it is grown. Because agricultural systems move food grown in some places to people living in other places, it is rich with questions of movement, networks, and connections. Agriculture operates at the interface between people and the land, and so does geography.

Jay Ruskey on his coffee farm in Goleta, California.

This comes to mind as I read a story that a friend in the coffee industry recently shared about California coffee. Many people already associate coffee with the Golden State, because significant players in the specialty coffee movement have come from there, especially from the San Francisco area. One of these is Paul Katzeff, founder of Thanksgiving Coffee and a key importer for my friend Byron. The definitive coffee history book Uncommon Grounds includes subchapter entitled "God's Gift to Coffee." I met him briefly in Matagalpa during my very first trip to Nicaragua in 2006, and among many important things I learned in that quick conversation was that it is possible to grow coffee in California, as he was doing near his home.

This was not a complete shock -- geographers understand that a given crop can be grown just about anywhere if cost is not a factor. A classic example is that greenhouses can provide tomatoes for miners in Siberia. A lot of the work geographers have done on agriculture concerns identifying factors that influence crop choice, which include both climate and soil as one would expect, and the costs of labor, machinery and transportation.

Katzeff's coffee is akin to the Siberian tomatoes -- something he is willing to do at a high cost because of his passion for the crop, but not something that would be considered commercially viable.

CCC? Commercial California Coffee?

Until now, possibly. The photograph above was taken at an elevation of just 650 feet in Goleta, just west of Santa Barbara. That is a fraction of the elevation of most world-class coffee farms, and more than 10 degrees of latitude outside the traditional Coffee Belt.

It accompanies Stephanie Strom's recent New York Times article Your Coffee Is From Where? California? A widely-accomplished journalist who has recently focused on food, Strom's reporting on the emerging coffee-growing scene in California touches on several interesting aspects of the geography of coffee.

The first thing I noticed is that the coffee is associated with avocados. It was from coffee farmers we met during a 2008 visit to the Atitlan area of Guatemala that I learned that the two tree crops could thrive in the same environment. As coffee farmers throughout the world seek to diversify their crops as a protection against climate change, related pests, and market volatility, avocados are therefore one possibility.

Avocados do not, however, provide the shade needed for genuine shade-grown coffee, of which there are several kinds. Real shade-grown coffee conserves water, provides an ideal habitat for coffee as well as birds, other wildlife, and perhaps epiphytes. It provides appropriate conditions for organic and biodynamic coffee. Simply planting coffee next to trees of a similar size provides minimal shade benefits, and only the slight ecological benefits of duoculture over monoculture. (I made that word up, but I think I am correct on this critique.)

Second -- and even more important -- is the insights the article provides into the costs of growing coffee. As I write this, coffee futures are trading for $1.26 per pound of green, ready-to-export coffee; see the widget at the top-left of this screen for up-to-the-minute prices (shown per 100-pound bag). Customers tend to pay several times more than this, of course, to cover packaging, shipping, transportation, processing, brewing, and profits amounting to many hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

Fair-trade prices are based on the minimum cost to produce coffee, and although this varies geographically, certification currently requires a payment of $1.40 or more. A story far more important than California coffee, therefore, is the story of how farmers get locked into agreements in which they do not even meet costs most years.

As the article points out, production costs in California are much higher, mainly because of prevailing labor and land costs. As with Hawaiian coffee, the higher costs will only be justified if truly remarkable flavors can be developed.  This presents California growers with an interesting challenge: mechanization is the only real way to keep costs under some kind of control, but mechanization -- particularly in the harvest -- is likely to reduce quality.

Brazil and Nicaragua Comparisons

Mechanization in coffee usually involves harvesting methods that simply shake each tree over a large pan that catches the fruit. Because Arabica coffee does not ripen at the same time, high-quality coffee is harvested by hand four or five times during the season. All of my friends in Nicaragua do this; my friends in Brazil do not, because the low elevation of their farm means that they cannot command a premium for quality, and therefore cannot afford to pay for handpicking at Brazil's higher labor costs. Hand-picking would improve the quality of their coffee, but not enough to justify the cost.

It remains to be seen whether California can square the circle of commanding a higher price without paying for human harvesters. As the article mentions, California growers are placing a great deal of their faith in selecting the best varietals. These are cultivated sub-species of Arabica, analogous to grape varietals. The Caturra mentioned in the article, for example, is commonly grown in Nicaragua as well as Colombia, and is known as Coffea arabica var. caturra. Each is best suited to particular conditions of soil and microclimate.

Coffee Calendar Countdown

Strom points out that the quantity of coffee being grown in California is still very small? How small? Much smaller than the quantity grown on Hawaii's 800 farms (it grows on every major island in that state -- it is not all about Kona). But Hawaii is small, too, in comparison to the huge quantity of coffee grown in the world.

As I thought about how to represent these differences graphically, I struggled with how to make California's crop visible on the same image as the world's crop. As I was playing with the math, I realized that another analogy might be helpful. Consider the year's coffee production, which in 2016 totaled just over 20 billion pounds -- enough to make something like a TRILLION cups of coffee.

Imagine the crop being consumed in this order through the calendar year: biggest producer, next biggest, then all the rest, followed by Hawaii and California at the very end. This is not possible, for a whole host of reasons, but as a thought experiment it is telling.

On January 1, we could begin drinking coffee from Brazil. In 2016, Brazil's coffee could have supplied the world right up through my birthday in early May. The second-largest producer is Vietnam, whose coffee could supply the world from then through Independence Day on July 4. That is correct -- well-known Brazil and little-known (in coffee terms) Vietnam supplied over half the world's coffee in 2016, though almost none of its specialty coffee.

From the summer months until Christmas, we could drink coffee from about 50 other countries throughout the coffee belt -- Mexico, Peru, Indonesia (mainly Java & Sumatra), Kenya, Ethiopia, and many more.

On Christmas Eve -- as a special treat -- we could start drinking coffee from Nicaragua, where my friends grow some of the highest-quality coffees in the world. On the afternoon of New Year's Day, perhaps around 5 p.m., it would be time to drink some Hawaiian coffee, which would take us through our evening celebrations. And then ONE SECOND BEFORE MIDNIGHT, the world could slurp down all of the coffee produced in California!

Lagniappe

One of the advantages of my reputation as a Coffee Maven is that a wide network of friends who keep me updated on coffee developments. As mentioned above, an industry friend let me know about this story last year; more recently a local friend from my church let me know that journalist Jodi Helmer of NPR had covered it more recently. With another crop year having passed in such a young trend, it seems there is even more exuberance, though the use of the phrase The State's Next Gold Mine might be a bit overmuch. 

Coffee for Chemists

By a cosmic coffee coincidence, Javatrekker and aspiring comic Dean Cycon released this video just as I was preparing to address the annual meeting of the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers, which was hosted by our BSU chemists last week. I had not worked with this group before, but rightly surmised that this would be a good way to open my presentation. I post it here for the benefit of those NEACT participants who might wish to share it, along some of the other resources I presented that evening.

(Prior to the talk on coffee, I mentioned two other resources that might be of interest to anybody involved in education in New England, especially southern New England. These are the Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History, which can put together an educational program on any subject and our own EarthView outreach program.)

As Dean points out in the video itself, of course, the pesticides associated with "conventional coffee" are in reality no laughing matter. Many chemicals we have banned in the United States are routinely used on the coffee -- and other products we import from around the world. In real life, Dean sets an extraordinary example, and I was able to offer the teachers a choice of his No CO2 and Decaf Chiapas coffees. Each of these single-origin selections gave us a chance to discuss some environmental chemistry, related to carbon offsets and caffeine removal, respectively. The byproduct of decaf coffee, by the way, is now marketed as "green coffee extract" by Starbucks -- coffee without the coffee flavor. Gadzooks.

Never mind the debates about whether traces of these nasties make their way into our cups: there is no denying that the barrage of chemicals sprayed on the coffee, sugar, flowers, oranges, and countless other tropical crops have profound effects on the ecosystems and communities from which we extract these bounties. As much fun as I have with coffee as a beverage and teaching tool, I remember that life-and-death questions really do surround its production.

Because the theme of this year's NEACT meeting was green chemistry, I put together an eclectic talk entitled "Greening Coffee: From Red to Green to Brown." That is, I provided a sampling of environmental choices at various stages of coffee production, from the growth of the plant (red berries) through the in-country processing (green coffee) to its roasting and brewing (brown beans or beverage).

This required a very brief overview of the roughly 50 steps from field to cup, which I summarized with the names that are typically used to describe coffee in Nicaragua. On the tree, the fruit is a cherry. Once picked, it is a grape. When peeled, the slimy seed is honey. When dried, it is parchment. When green, it is gold (because it can earn money). When roasted, it is a bean. When brewed, it is coffee.

I also mentioned the parts of the cherry that are separated at various stages, and an online quiz that I created for those who wish to learn these parts. A more advanced quiz teaches the geography of processing -- the locations in which each part of the coffee is typically removed through processing.

I discussed the geographic parameters that determine where coffee can be effectively grown, and I mentioned Coffee & Conservation, a marvelous resource on the relationship between coffee ecology and the habitat of migratory birds. Then, as an antidote to Dean's Mad Scientist, I shared the best example I know of coffee being produced in harmony with its surrounding ecology -- the biodynamic production of my friend Byron, the Poet of Coffee.This video also provides a nice transition from the coffee grower to the importer and roaster, who also have the opportunity to make important decisions about the environmental impacts of the coffee.



An interesting development at the roasting stage is the growing interest in solar roasting, a growing field in which Solar Roast Coffee of Colorado seems to be a leader. As roasting coffee on our campus continues to be an elusive goal, we might actually have an opportunity to do some relevant roof-top research.

I talked about brewing not in terms of environmental impact so much as flavor impact. Flavor is important, however, as brewing coffee properly honors the work of those who have put tremendous care into producing it. Moreover, the more consumers learn to appreciate good coffee, the more likely are farmers to be fairly compensated for their work and talent. Rather than discuss my approach to brewing in detail, I mentioned one brewing method that is favored by industry experts and was invented by a chemist in Springfield, Massachuetts: the Chemex coffeemaker.

And even though most of the audience members were (I presume) going to be spending the night away from their romantic partners, I ended the presentation with Ella Fitzgerald's rendition of the sultry song Black Coffee and reference to the work of Lavazza and others on a different kind of coffee chemistry that is explored in some depth on my (PG-13) Coffee & Tea Romance page.

Mainstreaming Coffee Justice

I have the great privilege of counting some of the world's best coffee farmers among my friends. I also know of coffee retailers who do their best -- through certified fair trade or other models -- to connect customers to producers in ways that enhance the social and environmental sustainability of production.

But after more than two decades of growing attention to specialty coffee, fair trade, and other forms of innovation for sustainability, all of these efforts continue to reside in niche markets -- even boutique markets. The vast majority of customers do not know anything about where their coffee comes from, and seem to prefer not knowing. "Cheaper than a cup of coffee" remains a byword in fundraising, to signify amounts of money too small to notice -- despite the tens of billions of dollars spent on coffee each year, and the millions of people who depend on their miniscule shares of those dollars.

As I have been thinking about my coffee seminars in the spring 2016 semester -- the tenth year of these seminars -- I have been considering an assignment that would directly address the question of mainstreaming coffee justice.

That is, I have been hoping that at least some of the student research in the course could be devoted to options for improving the lives of coffee farmers who will, realistically, never be part of the elite ranks of specialty producers. Coffee is an industry that provides only modest rewards to those at the very top of the quality scale, and essentially no rewards to everyone else. The latter part of this equation must change.

Here is where George Clooney enters the conversation. Yes, George Clooney, nephew of Rosemary. Two aspects of his off-screen work have been overlapping of late, with interesting results. He is a celebrity face for Nespresso, the coffee-pod branch of Nestle -- about as mainstream and far from quality as one can get in coffee. He has also been politically active in South Sudan. The result has been a nascent attempt to develop coffee production in the world's newest country, and to get Nescafe to think about the (obvious?) connection between sustaining coffee producers and sustaining coffee production.

So far, the corporations involved in Clooney's efforts seem to be discovering problems that those of us who study coffee communities have long known, and the remedies they are beginning are inadequate. But their recognition -- however belated -- of the crucial role of farmer viability in their businessses may provide a vital opening for bringing some modicum of justice to mainstream coffee.

Both the country of South Sudan and our department's beautiful wall map were new when South Sudan's ambassador to the United States, Dr. Akec Khoc, paid a visit. We were pleased that the new map shows not only his country, but some details that he mentioned in a talk that day. He is shown here with several BSU faculty members. L-R, Dr. Madhu Rao, Dr. Khoc, Dr. Vernon Domingo, Dr. James Hayes-Bohanan, and Dr. Jabbar Al-Obaidi.

... and Climate

Environmental concerns around coffee have centered on organic, shade-grown, and bird-friendly coffee. These practices tend to require a lot of additional work on the part of the farmers growing the coffee, and they command premiums from concerned buyers, myself included. Somehow the dollar-per-pound premium at retail translates to pennies or a dime at the farm gate, even in fair-trade models, but at least the farming communities get the benefit of cleaner air and water, and less exposure to chemicals in the field.

Just as important as the potential threats to the environment posed by conventional coffee-growing methods are the environmental threats to coffee production, particularly from climate change. The best coffee -- like the best wine -- depends on delicate and rare combinations of cloud-forest microclimate and volcanic soils. A skilled farmer can work with these to coax amazing flavors from a plant whose fruit would be unremarkable in a different location.

The farmers I know who work in such locations have been worrying almost constantly about climate disruptions for a decade or more, but most conventional farmers have until now been relatively unaffected. Mainstream coffee has not been as vulnerable to climate change as the rare specialty coffees are, but that is about to change, according to a new study by World Coffee Research.

Click image to enlarge. Both optimal (purple) and suitable (other colors) conditions for coffee are expected to become more scarce in East Africa.

The forecast decreases in suitable coffee lands pose an existential threat not just to the elite segments of coffee, but to coffee in general. Sadly, this may be what finally motivates some folks to get serious about climate change.

This is Coffee 1961

Among several video entries in the new MaxGuide to Coffee, the 1961 promotional piece "This is Coffee" from the Coffee Brewing Institute stands out in several ways. SPOILER ALERT: near the end, the grandiosity reaches full throttle as the narrator intones, "Perfect coffee: sending its glow into our lives around the clock."

In 12 minutes, this film covers the waterfront of thinking about coffee a half-century ago. (That is, right around the time I was born.) Most striking to me is the way that the film constantly refers to the importance of proper care of the coffee in order to ensure quality. I always associate these words with each other and with the philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which Robert Pirsig claims that caring is the inside of a structure whose outside is quality -- that is, they are deeply intertwined and both require focused attention and observation. Pirsig's work has had a profound influence on my thinking in general, and more recently I have explained how it relates to the preparation of coffee at a spiritual level.

Because of the deep meaning I associate with coffee care, it is especially jarring to see how the concept is used here. Rather than advocating that the consumer become deeply educated about the beverage, the 1961 Gestalt is one of reliance on experts, precision, and technology. Coming in the last year of innocence between Rachel Carson would pull the plug on blind faith in technology with Silent Spring, this video conveys what people had every reason to believe at the time. Precision in the measurement of water, coffee, and time are seen as the key to coffee perfection. The narrator alludes to the relevance of choosing an appropriate grind for the brewing method chosen, but goes on to suggest that careful measurement can somehow yield perfect coffee from a percolator, which is the electric chair for coffee -- where even the best coffee will go to die!

The film alludes several times to the rich story behind the cup, but glosses over most of the more interesting parts, characterizing the geographic variation with such sweeping, even offensive, broad brushes as the exotic Orientalism in the case of Turkish coffee and the zesty, dark vigor of Latin American coffee.It emphasizes good coffee while showing the harvest of mixed ripe and unripe, sun-grown coffee (as opposed to shade-grown coffee harvested at full ripeness, which really is good coffee). At 02:40, women are shown at a sorting table while the narrator extols the devotion of millions of men to the production of coffee.

A montage sequence near the end of the film is a transparent effort at up-selling, showing the virtues of coffee throughout the day, from the well-known morning wake-me-up to other uses throughout the day. At one point, the mood even turns to coffee romance!

Despite the many misgivings that come from a half-century of hindsight, I recommend this film for its broad coverage of coffee and for its glimpse into an earlier era. For further viewing, I recommend my coffee and tea film page, as well as the library guide from which I first learned of this CBI item.

Lagniappe

In 2026, I still enjoy sharing this film with students, and I return to this post to add a find from a recent puzzle in the daily Strands series from the New York Times. Spoiler alert: if you have not done the January 1, 2026 puzzle, look away!

The theme is "Not your average Joe," yet it took me a moment to catch on. Once I realized the univiying word (shown in yellow), I realized that all of the other words are commonly associated with coffee -- but not my me. I particularly resist the word "strong" because it is often used to describe coffee, but not with any specific meaning. On the first day of class, I will have something to say about each of the terms in blue -- and how most of them do not relate to "good" coffee.

I often compare notes on this puzzle with my sister-in-law, the only other person I know to be a regular player/victim of it. She said her thought first went to her son, my wonderful nephew Joe. 

Coffee from the Maven to Mandelas

When I was asked to provide coffee for some of the morning class sessions of our university's visiting Mandela Fellows, I decided to provide a different coffee each day. Each coffee gives us a chance to explore something a bit different about the geography of coffee.

Coffee is produced to some extent in almost every home country of this year's
class of Mandela Fellows. Among these, the best known for coffee are Ethiopia
and Uganda. South Africa is a bit of a surprise -- it is outside the Coffee Belt but
produces a small amount of very good coffee.

All of the coffees I am providing are fair-trade, organic coffees from Deans Beans in the town of Orange, Massachusetts -- about 100 miles northwest of our campus. The proprietor is Dean Cycon, a leader in authentic fair trade, and the author of Javatrekker, a book I use in all of the courses I teach about coffee. Every coffee his company sells is grown by cooperatives he has visited personally; most of them are described in his book, and all are described on roastery's web site.

A feature of the web site that reflects the whimsy that Cycon brings to the very serious work of coffee is the ability of customers to create their own blends and packaging. Of the coffees I am preparing for the Mandela Fellows, two are custom labels for this event and the other two are standard offerings. The labels are shown here in the order I will be serving them.

BSU Mandela Fellows 2018

Almost all coffee is from one of types -- the Arabica species or the robusta variety of the canephora species. The majority -- about 70 percent -- is Arabica. It is the more difficult to grow and does not have as much caffeine, but its flavor is generally preferred and its price higher. All of the coffee we will share this week is Arabica, which in a way is misnamed! Coffea arabica should really be called Coffea ethiopica, because it originated in a place that is now part of Ethiopia. Yes: humans and coffee began in the same part of Africa!

It is for this reason that I chose coffee from the Sidamo region of Ethiopia for our welcome. The region is featured in the 2006 film Black Gold, which I show many of my students, and in Javatrekker. The film -- which can be borrowed or viewed online through the BSU Maxwell library -- features Tadesse Meskela,  from whose cooperative Deans Beans purchased this coffee.

Timor Atsabe

My selection of coffees for the week is guided by my desire to share coffees that are geographically diverse and that allow me to focus on different aspects of what makes coffee important. For Tuesday's coffee, I chose Timor Astabe, from one of the world's newest countries: East Timor. Growers in East Timor are the subject of the short coffee documentary One Cup (scratchy versions of which can be viewed at the Internet Archive).

NoCO2 Peru

For Thursday's coffee, I decided to emphasize the relationship between coffee and climate change. Because it is a crop with very specific requirements of rainfall, temperature, and especially the timing of rainfall, climate change is part of the discussion of any coffee. In Peru, coffee farmers have the added concern of dependency on glaciers high above the coffeelands for part of their water supply.

It is for that reason that Deans Beans chose a partner cooperative in Peru for its first carbon-offsee coffee, NoCO2 Peru. This inspired me and my colleague Dr. Rob Hellström to plan Coffee and Climate Change, a course that would involve other Peru cooperatives and periglacial research stations in the Andes. Unfortunately, we have not yet taught the course, but it could happen in our summer 2020 session.

Ben Linder Birthday 2018

Today would be the 59th attainment day of Ben Linder, a civil engineer from the United States who was assassinated during the Contra War in Nicaragua. His birthday would be tomorrow, July 7. Today's coffee is named in his honor, and was harvested in the communities of northern Nicaragua to which he was bringing renewable electric power at the time he was killed.

He has now been deceased for longer than he was physically alive, but his spirit lives on in the work that he did, the work he inspired, and in the gratitude of communities to which he provided light. His story is told in the book The Death of Ben Linder and in the half-hour documentary film American/Sandinista.

More than 100 BSU students have visited the grave where he is buried in honor, and several dozen have visited his hydroelectric projects or the cafés that were established in his name by victims of the war. Our students have been inspired to propose a Ben Linder Café on our campus, and we are still hopeful that it will one day be serving students, staff, and visitors in the atrium DMF Science and Mathematics Center.

What You Can Do

BLC on Facebook

To see more delicious, ethical coffee -- and education about coffee -- at BSU, please like the Ben Linder Café page on Facebook, follow posts there, and invite your friends to do the same. Contact me (jhayesboh@bridgew.edu)  if you would like a café education program for your club or other organization.

Cold Iced

At this time of year, attention turns to the question of how to prepare iced coffee. A friend recently shared a variation on cold brewing that was new to me, entitled Perfect Iced Coffee. Posted on the Pioneer Woman blog, this recipe emphasizes patience. Interestingly, I noticed this post just as I was enjoying and iced coffee after a bit of yard work. I describe how I prepared mine at the end of this post.

As Pioneer Woman points out, iced coffee is fraught with difficulty. Simply pouring coffee over ice essentially ruins it, and most ways of solving the problem involve time, complexity or both. The solution she does require both, but is redeemed by the avoidance of high temperature. It may be for this reason that the use of pre-ground, low-grade coffee does not impart excessive bitterness. The generous contribution of dairy products might also have something to do with her favorable results.

Iced coffee is generally more forgiving of flaws than hot coffee, but I believe that starting with terribly flawed coffee dooms the project to mediocrity at best. Pre-ground coffee is like pre-opened Champagne. Once coffee is ground, staling reactions begin that cannot be reversed, though they can be masked.

Some folks in the business recommend particular blends specifically for iced, but I've never found a worthwhile distinction. Rather, I find that a coffee I enjoy hot will be enjoyable for similar reasons iced -- whether smooth or bold, sweet or floral, that will be conveyed hot or cold, though I would welcome any demonstrable corrections on this.

The last time I served iced coffee to a group was for a presentation I gave on immigration at my church. Of course I brought Central American coffee, in this case a special coffee from Honduras. I had brewed it slightly strong the night before in a drip pot (a Black & Decker SmartBrew, whose main advantage is high temperature). I  let it cool to just above room temperature and then put it in the refrigerator overnight. It could then be served with ice and minimal dilution.

This is exactly the method that the blogger dismisses, but everyone who tried it loved it. I would like to try her method side-by-side with the coffee I used and the coffee she used. I would predict that her method with my coffee would be the best result.

Of course, neither of these methods is useful in a situation such as I faced this morning -- a bit of heavy yard work, too early in the day for a beer, and no iced coffee in the house. For such situations, I am always grateful to my brother and sister-in-law for the gift many years ago of a West Bend iced tea maker. Structured like a drip coffee maker, one puts bags or a filter with tea or coffee in the top and water in the machine. The difference is to nearly fill the serving vessel with ice. With a little experimentation, one can learn how much tea to put in in order to compensate for the melted ice. Once that dose is found, this becomes a very quick and reliable way to get iced coffee in about 10-12 minutes.

For more thoughts on the factors that affect coffee preparation, see the Caring for Coffee page on my web site.

Yemen: First Coffee

Coffee was discovered in Ethiopia, by a goatherd named Kaldi, according to legend. But it was first cultivated across the Red Sea in Yemen. Because this all happened some time ago, we should add "what is now" to the place names. We should also note that we call the main species of coffee (comprising 70 percent of world production) Arabica because Yemen is on the Arabian Peninsula. About 30 percent is known as robusta because it comes from a heartier, heat-resistant plant that originated somewhere in West Africa.

I was thinking of this recently because a new friend told me of a fort he had visited in Yemen -- constructed by the Portuguese to protect exports of coffee to Brazil. Of course, Brazil itself eventually became the leading producer of coffee, currently growing about 1/3 of the world total of both major types.

This led me to revisit some of my earlier posts about Yemen. In Missing Coffee (2013), I point readers to a whimsical but informative essay by a professor of food science, who explains the importance of Moka. In Arabica and Arabians (2010), I point to a few items related to Arabian iconography in the coffee business.

Coffee grows on terraces at unusually high elevation in Yemen, where it is too hot and
dry for coffee to be grown in more typical circumstances.
Image: Al Mokha

In my coffee seminars, students work in small groups to do research about the coffees of specific countries. They make posters and brew coffee from each country, which we present and serve at a large tasting event. Only one group has undertaken to research Yemen. They had difficulty finding much information about the current status of the coffee industry there. They learned that production is small -- something like 1/10 of one percent of the world total -- and the only vendors they could find were selling by the container (37,000 pound minimum). This suggested that most Yemen coffee production is for commodity markets, but I did find a single-origin source in the strangest place: Amazon.com, which does coffee from Yemen by way of several roasters.

One of those roasters is among those I found in today's research -- a company that is based in my home town and that is deeply committed to the coffee farmers of Yemen. Even though Yemen is not a major producer, its coffee industry is thought to employ one million people, or about 4 percent of the world's population. Washington-based Al Mokha (The World's First Coffee^TM) is connecting customers directly to those workers through direct trade, development programs, and consumer education. I hope to visit with Al Mokha staff during my next trip to D.C.

It is from Al Mokha's blog that I learned about a 2004 report on Yemen's coffee from the U.S. Agency for International Development. A dozen years is a long time -- especially in coffee -- but the great detail of the report suggests that it would be valuable for understanding at least the background of the current coffee scene in Yemen. Yemen's Coffee Revival is a briefer but more recent (2014) report from the regional news magazine Al-Monitor.

Coffee Readiness

We not only survived the 2012 Zombie Apocalypse in Livermore Falls; we got the zombies to wash our van. 

GQ is a font of wisdom on all kinds of subjects, so it should not be surprising that writer Cam Wolf has written about a serious matter of disaster preparedness: what about coffee?

He interviews a number of survivalists who make some interesting arguments about the value of coffee in an emergency, not only for its direct benefits in terms of energy and comfort, but also for its potential value as a tradable commodity. As cigarettes are to the prison yard, so coffee would be to extended off-grid survival.

Sudden Coffee cupping lab.
ostensibly.

As someone who was marketing combat and humanitarian rations in the period leading up to the Y2K scare, I know that long-term shelf stability is a key to such preparations. Otherwise, "preppers" (as Wolf calls them) would need to replenish their supply kits as often as they go to the grocery store. For this reason, they focus on freeze-dried coffee, though they claim to have found one that is substantially better than -- maybe even better than -- fresh-brewed coffee.

Sudden Coffee is "beloved among coffee snobs," according to Wolf, and employs an actual barista champion, according to the company web site. The involvement of Umeko Motoyoshi in "each step" of the process notwithstanding, I am very skeptical that any amount of care in the brewing process would allow the quality of coffee to remain intact through lyophilization and extended storage. I am also skeptical of coffee companies that claim to be trading directly but that provide no transparency about their sources.

The Sudden Coffee web site claims to offer "free" samples for the cost of shipping, but the online interface turns the sample order into a monthly subscription for that would provide instant coffee at a cost of $3 a cup! Thanks but no thanks. If I were a more cynical Coffee Maven, I might surmise that the entire GC article is simply part of a ruse to drive customers to this overpriced offer.

Wolf bolsters his claim by noting that humans and coffee originated in the same place, disregarding the millions of years it took for one to discover the other. Still, I certainly agree that coffee matters, and suggest a less costly approach for those who wish to hunker down in java readiness.

Once coffee is harvested, milled, and dried, it is generally considered shelf-stable for periods of two years or more.  Coffees with extremely refined flavor notes will lose some of those notes more quickly, but the vast majority of coffees are fine for several years once their internal moisture has gotten to the 11-13 percent range. I buy really good green coffee for the equivalent of 10 to 20 cents per cup, and roast it as I need it. My roasting is not expert, but it is so fresh that the result is still better than any coffee I can buy in my town.

Assuming there is a way to get fire and clean water in the apocalypse -- two rather bold assumptions -- a preparation kit that included a French press, a cast-iron skillet, and 10 to 20 pounds of green coffee could keep a survivor going for months. And for those interested in having something valuable to trade, a couple hundred bucks invested with Deans Beans could be worth thousands in a land overrun by zombies.

From Chains to Supply Chains

Thank the Farmers

I love coffee. Most people who know me know this about me.

I have a lot of fun with coffee and the many ways it intersects with geography and popular culture. I am, in fact, enjoying my umpteenth cup of fine coffee of the day, even as I write this.

But as most people who know me realize, my love of coffee is exceeded by my love of the people who produce it and the lands from which the best coffee is grown. I end almost every coffee story with the hashtag #thankthefarmers for that reason.

It is good to remember that however much fun we can have with coffee and however much we can appreciate the social and environmental benefits of coffee that is grown carefully and traded fairly, coffee can also be a very serious matter indeed.

A reminder come from a March 2016 Guardian article that has been sitting on my desktop since someone shared it with me a couple of months ago. For all this time, I have not know quite what to do with Nestlé admits slave labour risk on Brazil coffee plantations, but I knew I could not let it go until I found a way to share it and to connect it with my other work on coffee.

As I look at the title carefully, I notice two small things. Where The Guardian uses "slave labour risk" a U.S.-based paper would use "slave-labor risk." Spelling and punctuation aside, the use of the word "risk" is itself interesting. From the standpoint of a major corporation, the possibility that slavery was involved in its operations is a risk to be managed like any other, such as weather or the fluctuation of currency markets.

The article mentions two of the very biggest such corporations in the $77-billion coffee market, which were known at the time it was published as Nestlé and Jacobs Douwe Egberts. The latter is now known as JAB, which includes those companies as well as Keurig (a little Boston-based company whose convenient brewer was purchased by the erstwhile Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and eventually swallowed Green Mountain and much of the industry). Together they sell about 40 percent of all of the coffee that is sold on the planet. For food companies operating at this scale, the food and the lands and people from which the product comes are such abstractions that even fundamental questions such as slavery and freedom become mere columns in a spreadsheet.

If slavery -- or any other inconvenient truth -- turns out to be contributing to the bottom line, the equivalent of a politician's plausible deniability provides a convenient fig leaf to cover the original sin of greed. In coffee, that fig leaf is in the form of a supply chain that is deliberately blurry in appearance. Someone growing $5,000 worth of coffee in a year cannot bring it to the gates of Nestlé or JAB -- there are in fact no such gates. The small farmer sells to middlemen (always men, and known in Latin America as coyotes) who consolidate purchases for the convenience of large processors ; it turns out that even a large plantation can benefit from selling coffee through brokers who can hide their practices.

Federal auditor investigating claims of human-rights abuses on a coffee farm in Brazil.
Photo: Lilo Clareto/DanWatch via The Guardian

When price is the main competitive factor, the pressure to force prices down will stop at nothing, not even the use of bonded labor. When citizens -- sometimes thought of only as consumers -- push back, the race to the bottom involves deceit, even self-deceit. Kate Hodal's excellent reporting on this complicated matter could be read by some as Nestlé and JAB being victimized by bad actors in a complicated network of suppliers. Stories like this -- which have parallels in the U.S. chicken industry and throughout food systems globally -- can also be read as evidence that more vigilance and accountability is necessary.

Moreover, it is a reminder that education about coffee in particular and food in general should continue to begin and end with considerations of human rights.

Second Coffee Myth: Busted

The first myth of coffee is the myth of its origin about 1500 years ago in Abyssinia, in what is now Ethiopia. A goatherd named Kaldi is said to have noticed his goats dancing with extra energy. He also noticed that they were eating the fruit of some tall shrubs, so he chewed on them, got energized, and the rest is history.

Coffee: Fruit to grounds

The rest is also geography -- the Abyssinians only got as far as mashing the fruit into something like a power bar; it was across the Red Sea in Yemen that coffee as we know it began to emerge about a century later.

The second coffee myth comes much later, in the 1970s, and it actually includes the word "second." The myth goes like this:

Myth: Coffee is the second-most actively traded commodity, after oil.

This is a myth that I have repeated online, in classes, and in public lectures. I have read it on coffee web sites and many kinds of books about the beverage. And I have heard it in almost every documentary film about coffee that I have watched.

And, it appears, it is about as likely to be true as the legend of Kaldi. Perhaps less so.

Over the years, I have intended to look up the numbers behind the claim, to make sure that they were "still" true. The possibility that the claim was never true simply did not occur to me.

And then an alum shared Jon Greenberg's PolitiFact article No, Coffee Is Not the Second-Most Traded Commodity After Oil. The article is a bit blustery and inexplicably centers on Starbucks, but it usefully cites a couple of statistics and authorities that cast doubt on the second-most ranking. One of those incorrectly says that the claim was once true, which would give me comfort, but it turns out that even this is not the case.

Fortunately, Greenberg cites one authority I know personally -- Mark Pendergrast. When I first began preparing to teach coffee classes in 2005, I chose his book Uncommon Grounds as a text. Coincidentally, a teacher who was attending a geography workshop at which I was giving a short presentation on coffee said, "My uncle has written a book about coffee." It was the book I had already chosen, and I was able to arrange for him to speak on our campus as part of the send-off for my first coffee travel course. I later took a group of students who had read his book to meet him while we were touring a roastery near his home.

I mention those meetings because they took place after the book was published, but before Pendergrast had been made aware of the error shared by so many scholars of coffee. Scholar that he is, he doggedly researched the topic, going much deeper, of course, than the PolitiFact author could go. Details of his retraction were published in a 2009 issue of Coffee & Tea Trade Journal  with the cumbersome title Coffee second only to oil? Is coffee really the second largest commodity?, which is helpfully republished on The Free Library.

Pendergrast's best theory as to the origin of the myth is that it originally referred not to global trade, but to exports from developing countries. He explains this distinction clearly, and also explains why apples-to-apples comparisons (as it were) between the 1970s and today are no longer possible.

As careful as he is in the retraction, Pendergrast is also careful to emphasize that the ranking is not so important. However it is measured, the coffee business touches tens of millions of lives directly, along with wildlife habitat and water supplies throughout the tropics. Those of us who care deeply about those people and places should never have taken the "big is important" bait.

A second edition of Uncommon Grounds includes the correction, but as we all know -- retractions never travel as widely or quickly as errors. I am making it my duty as Coffee Maven -- beginning with this post -- to set the record straight.

Siegried in Vietnam

I endeavor to learn something new about coffee every day. *Today I got a very early start. I was grinding some excellent Honduran coffee during the opening seconds of BBC Witness History when I thought I heard coffee and Vietnam mentioned. 

East Germany's Coffee from Vietnam
9-minute radio interview

Đắk Lắk province

I do know a bit about the geography of coffee in Vietnam, but I had been missing a significant chapter of its history. BBC journalist Michael Rossi spoke with Siegfried Kaulfuß, an East German government official who had been instrumental in bringing 10,000 hectares (about 25,000 acres) of land in Dak Lak Province into production in the 1980s. 

I can be forgiven, perhaps, for not knowing about this important chapter in Vietnam's coffee history; even the Wikipedia article on the subject gives it only a brief mention and a link to a separate article. And although the project was huge, it accounts for less than two percent of the land now under coffee cultivation in Vietnam.

The story bears out a few things I knew about coffee in Vietnam -- it is indeed the second-largest producer of coffee, for example, but it was not a significant player in world markets prior to the 1980s. The interview emphasizes the role of a fellow centrally-planned (communist) state in its growth; my understanding is that significant investment from global capital was also involved.

I had a brief conversation a decade or so ago with a fellow who had been somewhat involved but was by then running an art gallery in Nantucket. He averred that the rapid expansion of coffee in Vietnam had been encouraged by the World Bank as part of an effort to reduce the country's political isolation by increasing its trade. 

This was despite the hypsometric and climatic challenges of growing coffee in this location. Although it is well within the global coffee belt, the temperatures are too high and the altitudes are too low for arabica coffee to be grown in most of the country, and even the lower-quality robusta requires an extraordinary amount of chemical inputs.

Back to the BBC. The interview mentions an aspect of Vietnam's coffee history that I did know, but a translation error puts its origins in the wrong century. The Wikipedia article above points to the correct timing. Rossi says that coffee cultivation dates to the French Revolution of 1789 but it really entered around the time of the French Invasion by Napoleon in 1857. This geographer notes that these are opposite kinds of events at opposite ends of the Eurasian continent in separate centuries. 

Another important part of the historic importance of Vietnam's rapid expansion into the global coffee market is that it now sits alongside Brazil as such a large producer that local conditions have global impact. A frost in Brazil has become a cliché as an example of a commodity price disruptor, since such an event can send prices of coffee up throughout the world. 

In 1999,  Vietnam had the opposite effect, with its rapid increase in production cratering prices worldwide and creating a coffee crisis that permanently altered the structure of the industry, especially in Central America. This April, a drought in Vietnam was having the effect as a Brazilian frost, contributing to a dramatic increase in the price of coffee futures. 

I should note that mainstream economists and the journalists who follow them tend to pay attention to the industry only when a rapid increase in price is occurring, even though the industry itself uses futures markets to shift most of the financial risks to farmers themselves. 

*A note about timing: I started this blog post with enthusiasm but it has lingered as a set of open tabs for many weeks. In this context "today" means "about two months ago."

Cafe Crawl for Credit

"For me, coffee is a way to connect our students to the wider world." -James Hayes-Bohanan, geography professor #HumansofBSU
Posted by Bridgewater State University on Friday, November 13, 2015

I am very pleased to have been included in my university's #HumansofBSU series of vignettes about members of the campus community. I am even more pleased that it was one of my students who suggested I be invited to participate. It was a great opportunity for me to talk about the relationship between two of my favorite subjects -- geography and coffee -- and how both relate to my work with students. More on those relationships can be found in Coffee Bellwethers -- a somewhat longer video recorded in April of this year as part of the first annual TEDxBSU event. My Geography of Coffee web site points to many more facets of the work, and I enjoy giving occasional public lectures on coffee to a wide variety of audiences in our region. (Note the lectures link seriously needs updating, but the frequency and types of such lectures continue in a similar vein.)

Coffeelands World Gifts Espresso Cafe connects customers to their local community and the world community of coffee growers like no other. It will be part of the Coffee Week (NOT Weak) course in July 2016.

Travel Courses
The real opportunities for learning, of course, come in my credit-bearing courses on the subject, in which I am able to serve as a sort of bridge between my students and the many extraordinary coffee experts I am privileged to know. The courses, mentioned in the video above, include a travel course (a.k.a. study tour) in Nicaragua each January. The course last two weeks and usually costs just under $3,000. Well over 100 people have participated since the first tour in 2006. Everyone who has gone agrees that it is money well spent, but of course not everybody has that kind of money to spend.

Because I also know that a number of area teachers are interested but cannot travel in January, I'm hoping to offer a Peru version of the trip some day. Meanwhile, because our travel course did not get enough students to run in January 2016, we are going to pilot a new kind of academic travel -- a non-credit tour of the coffeelands of Nicaragua in January 2016. The cost will be about $1600, and details will be posted here by November 20.

Classroom Courses
With over a dozen sections offered since 2007, the other coffee class mentioned in the video is a Second-Year Seminar entitled the Secret Life of Coffee. Well over 200 students have taken this course, including about a dozen who participated in the travel course as well. In addition to general discussions of the coffee industry and the book Javatrekker, students report on coffee shops as individuals and work in small groups to organize a major coffee tasting and fair for the campus community.

As popular as the seminar is, many interested students are not able to take it because only second-year students are eligible. For years, I have been looking for a third way, and just this week -- between the recording of the "Humans" video and its posting online, the university announced a new course format that is perfect for a new course.

The Third Way
In order to promote new approaches to summer teaching, the university is supporting one- and two-week programs that would meet every day for a full or half day, respectively. The idea is to allow longer time frames for different kinds of experiences, including regional travel and guest speakers, and an overall more intensive learning experience that might be easier for some students to schedule.

Given this format, it did not take long to develop a week-long program, and my brilliant wife Pamela (who named the Secret Life of Coffee course) suggested a play on the word "week." Hence:

GEOG 400: Coffee Week (NOT Weak)
That really is the proposed title, with tentative dates of Monday to Friday, July 18-22, 2016 (if not the week before). This will be a three-credit course, available to all. I will soon know details of the cost, if any, of proposed cafe visits. Below are the course description and a tentative schedule.

The purpose of this course is to learn about coffee as a global commodity, an agricultural product, and a cultural vehicle. Drawing on more than a decade of experience and contacts in all segments of the industry, this course is an intensive exploration of the physical, human, and environmental geography of coffee. Through readings, lectures, film, music, and site visits, students will emerge from the week with a much greater appreciation for coffee and the 10 million people who make a living from this globally popular beverage. The course culminates with a service project in which the students share their newfound coffee knowledge with the campus and surrounding community.

Meets Daily, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Order of activities subject to change

Monday	Café Jumpstart – local cafe Coffee Workshop – field to cup Roasting lecture by BSU alum / master roaster
Tuesday	Café Jumpstart – local cafe  Roasting field trip – 2 specialty roasters in our region
Wednesday	Café Jumpstart – local cafe Coffee on currency, stamps, and film Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History
Thursday	Café Crawl – visiting innovative cafés throughout the region, including Coffeelands World Gifts Espresso Cafe in Clinton (shown above)
Friday	Café Service – creating a temporary, teaching café for the campus community

HOW DO I SIGN UP FOR ALL THIS???

I'm glad you asked! Current BSU students can just look for GEOG 400 in the listings for summer classes. The course has no prerequisites -- the 400 is just a number applied to all of our special-topics classes. And what topic is more special than coffee? That's right: none.

For non-BSU students, we have a single office to help navigate the application, registration, payment, and transfer bureaucracies. Visit the BSU SUMMER page of our College of Continuing Studies for all the details, or call 508-531-2788.

Then choose your favorite travel mug and clear your calendar for a week of caffeinated learning!