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 Brazilian Coffee Bag. Photo by P-A-S, Creative Commons Forbes has posted a blog that helps further explain the new prices you might see for your coffee (Not Bongo’s/BVRoastery coffee though). It reminds me of the land reforms of Russia during the early 20th Century and more recently Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe. Brazilian land for Brazilians. Foreign land ownership is changing by mandate in Brazil. The result? a lot of unknown about who owns the land, and there’s a lot of coffee plantations owned by foreigners. Add to this Colombia’s poor harvest and Brazil’s dry season and we’re walloped with high prices on the commodity market. It is starting to feel like $4.00 gasoline, with shortages and much more shopping around. The commodity market turns first to Brazil and Colombia to see what their harvests are like and what the political situation is like. Then the speculators play the market and we see 13 year highs.
Read more about this in the Forbes post, Coffee Caught Up In Perfect Political Storm, Shoots To 13-Year High
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We at the Buena Vista Roastery and Bongo Billy’s Coffees are noting the high commodity prices for coffee, the market having recently reached a 13-year high on Friday. Every time we order some new green beans, the prices are higher. We’re okay with that and we understand that the market fluctuates. The Commodity Market on Friday was at $1.85. That is the base price for the first transaction of coffee, before you add the various takes that others involved with export, import and distribution. You the consumer may not feel the change in your own pocket books, unless the roasters and retailers start to adjust prices accordingly. Apparently Folgers (owned by Smuckers) will raise their prices 9% in response. Others may follow suit. Brazil and Colombia, the top two producers of Arabica beans, play heavily in the C-Market and dictate the swing of the market, according to production. When the prediction is low, the market goes up on speculation. When it is high production, the market will swing the other way. That’s the concept anyway. Read this Market Watch for some more detail.
Fortunately, the market went down to $1.83 on Monday. Not that two cents is a big deal, but maybe there is relief. And for us at the Roastery, we’ll just keep making great coffee and think about the market after a good mountain bike ride on the Midland Trail in Buena Vista.
 Photo by: jakeliefer, Creative Commons A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor highlights the difficulty that organic farmers are having in sustaining a market, and therefore are looking to go back to conventional coffee production.
A lot of the transition comes down to a supply and demand. Roasters, like ourselves at the Buena Vista Roastery, have been increasing their organic offering over the years. We have increased through the years as best we can, with the understanding that some coffee varieties are not available as a certified Organic. Yet the cost of coffees continues to increase, with our own average price per pound for green increasing this year by 30%. The commodity price of coffee continues to rise, so roasters seek to reduce costs. One primary way of doing so is to offer conventionals. The demand wanes, and therefore the supply of coffee in situ means that farmers must offload their product by devaluing it via the conventional market. The more the consumer (roaster and imbiber) are unwilling to pay a premium, the greater likelihood that the farmers will go back to conventional agricultural practices. Seems pretty straightforward.Rest assured, we continue to seek high quality specialty coffees, certified Organic.
From the article, here is an interesting statistic and quote from a Guatemalan farmer:
The expense of organic certifications, composts, and the losses incurred by pests and other factors mean growing organic costs about 15 percent more than growing conventional crops, Mr. Haggar says. More notably, by using chemical fertilizers a farmer can coax about 485 pounds of coffee out of one acre, versus 285 pounds per acre on an organic farm, according to CATIE…
…“I can sell [nonorganic coffee] to a coyote [middle man] for around the same price [as organic], a little less, and I can use whatever I want on the coffee plants – fertilizers I can buy, pesticides,” says Jose Perez, who stopped growing organic coffee on his three-acre farm in Guatemala last year. “I can grow a lot more this way.”
 Coffee Anyone? Courtesy of Creative Commons There’s a lot of recent news about food fraud (and another article here). There is often this sort of thing in the paper, about one thing or another. For a long time it was about Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee – people advertising this coffee, when the coffee turned out to be a blend with only 10% or so Jamaican Blue Mountain.
We at the Buena Vista Roastery have recently entered a contract to sell Cafe Feminino coffee (our new Fair Trade Organic Peru) and we have certain demands for integrity along with it. Namely, that we will not blend the Cafe Femenino coffee with another and call it ‘Cafe Femenino’. This makes a lot of sense and unfortunately, a lot of roasters and coffee retailers may not use such integrity. Which brings me to the point of this blogpost: Food Fraud, namely organic integrity.
Our annual inspection comes up in a week or two. The diligent inspector will come and put us through the proverbial ringer to test to see that we, in fact, know and adhere to the standards set to ensure that there is no cross contamination in the processing of our coffee beans. Organic means Organic. Anyone who comes into the roastery can be sure that the organic beans we grind to brew as an organic brew were not ground in the same machine as a conventional. It’s truly organic. Furthermore, when it says it’s ‘organic’, it is. There is no out-of-date label on a bin. The bins have been washed with approved cleaning materials, the beans haven’t been blended with others and are true to what we say it is.
There are other places I have visited that sell “Fair Trade Organic” espresso that I know for a fact is not (because we sell them the beans and they don’t buy FTO beans). We can tell them, but there is no regulatory mechanism in place to maintain integrity on the retail side. I have asked about this, and there is nothing the industry can do.
I also have seen beans sold by another non-certified roaster as “organic”. We pay thousands of dollars to be certified and we are inspected as a service to the consumer so that they know their beans are organic. A processor who is not certified, can be selling any beans, cross contaminating, and is creating a horribly unfair competitive advantage for themselves, even not acting out of integrity.
So, please ask your roaster about their inspection, about their certification, about integrity. Be sure that the coffee you buy is in fact what it says it is. Let’s be rid of Food Fraud and express integrity.
Last Friday, we held our first ever latte competition here at the Buena Vista Roastery, and what a fun night it was! 3 judges, 5 competitors (our entire team at the Roastery), 20 lattes.. 1 winner. There were 4 categories – temperature, taste, latte art, and time – and each competitor had 10 minutes to make 4 lattes, presenting their best 3 to the judges. The competition was stiff, but Chris won by just 2 points, with Joel and Brad right behind her, and Amy and Shawnelle right behind them.
There is more buzz (no pun intended) than ever around coffee in the U.S. right now, and we at the Roastery are trying to bring some of that excitement to our little valley in the Rocky Mountains. These barista competitions are the perfect way to both educate our customers (this is what a good latte should look/taste like  , and motivate our baristas to step up their game. The competitors last Friday were all from the Roastery, but we’ve decided that the next comp should be opened up to all the baristas in the valley. That way, everyone has a chance to strut their stuff, and maybe we’ll all become better baristas in the process!
Anyway… here’s a little video that Glenn Walton made of the night… enjoy!
Buena Vista Roastery latte competition!
 Downtown Buena Vista We’ve done it. Our little town has become a Fair Trade Town, the first in Colorado and the 14th in the nation, much to the contribution of the Buena Vista Roastery. Here is the post from TransFair USA.
By Guest Blogger Joel Benson
Our small community in central Colorado has been working rather hard to put its best foot forward, sustainably. In 2005 a group of forward thinking individuals started our region’s first and only New Urbanist subdivision. We have the longest whitewater park in Colorado, more fourteen thousand foot peaks than anywhere in the country, and Galdling has recently listed Buena Vista as the number one “Best Outdoor Destination with Everything”, alongside such places as Auckland New Zealand, Quito Ecuador, Vancouver BC and others.
Well, it only seems fit that our group of concerned and active citizens has worked with Fair Trade Towns USA to make Buena Vista the First Fair Trade Town in Colorado. What pride we have for our community of 2200 people!
In early 2010, a group of 10 or so citizens, including Town Trustees, the Chairwoman of Planning and Zoning, business owners and managers, realtors, Chamber of Commerce representatives, and community event planners started the campaign. Within a month, the Town Trustees passed a resolution supporting Fair Trade and a few weeks later, the Chaffee County Times picked up our first press release. We were official.
Finish reading on their site….
On Valentines Day weekend, a few members of our Buena Vista Roastery team attended this years Mountain Regional Barista Competition in Loveland, Colorado. None of us competed (next year, baby!), but we had a really great time, and were totally blown away by the quality of baristas that we saw there.
 Brad, Chris, and Shawnelle at the barista comp! The competition was no joke; each barista had to show that, not only could they make a great drink, they could do it under immense pressure. In front of an eager crowd and 4 judges, they pulled their shots, made their drinks, and served them with style and flair. I got
 Barista serves the judges his signature drink sweaty palms just watching as each competitor tried not to sound nervous while explaining (via head-set mics) how, say, their espresso contains ethiopian and thus the hint of blueberry, or how they would now be cooking up a caramel sauce to use in their signature drink (yes, people brought hot-plates and prepared drink ingredients right there on stage! crazy!). Each barista even had to have their own specially chosen music to accompany them while they were on stage! And all this with a giant timer above their heads, counting down from 15 minutes…
 The set-up.. Needless to say, this competition was a great experience for our BV Roastery crew. We tasted some really incredible espressos, and were impressed by the creativity involved in each competitor’s ’signature drinks.’ We came away excited, a little intimidated, and totally challenged to become both better roasters and better baristas. Maybe next year, one of our own will get to compete in the Mountain Regional Barista Competition! Fingers crossed!
I am a part of a discussion forum on LinkedIn, for coffee professionals. I would like to present here the comments so far, to point out that if we continue along this line of communication, we will go around and around with little progress. I have been a part of similar conversations with any number of coffee industry professionals. The context for a conversation is not established, and therefore there is no end in sight. I suppose we all need to bandy about ideas in any case in order to come to some consensus at some point. One individual posed a question as a topic of discussion in preparation for the upcoming World Coffee Conference this week. Since the conference is nearly underway, I imagine the discussion will cease in this venue.
Hello friends! Chris here, attempting to write my second blog post ever! I agreed to help with the Roastery blog, thinking that it couldn’t be that hard to write about coffee, seeing as how it’s one of the few things that I know a lot about. As I enter the vast world of blogging baristas, however, I’ve begun to realize that I still have a LOT to learn. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still confident that I can make you one of the best latte’s you’ve ever had, latte art to boot (see our facebook page for proof). Still, as I peruse blogs written by some of the world’s most knowledgeable coffee guru’s, such as ‘Tamp This’, I am both overwhelmed and excited by everything going on in the coffee world, and all that is left for me to learn!
As I’ve surfed the coffee blogosphere, I’ve been noticing a running theme: pretty much everyone who considers themselves a dedicated barista is attending and/or competing in, barista competitions. I, on the other hand, haven’t yet had the chance to attend even one. Fortunately, that’s about to change… because we at the Buena Vista Roastery are attending our first Mountain Regional Barista Championship in Fort Collins, Colorado this weekend!
None of us are competing at the Fort Collins competition, but our excitement about attending is still so great that, not only have we been practicing our latte art with a fury, but we’ve been inspired to do a little research into the rules and and regulations enforced at such competitions, just in case we want to enter the next one. We weren’t surprised to read that each competitor must present the judges with both an espresso shot and a cappuccino… that’s pretty standard. What we weren’t expecting was the third drink that each competitor is required to present: the signature drink.
A signature drink is a drink invented by a barista that’s espresso based, alcohol- free, and if you want to win a competition, very creative in its construction. Here at the Roastery, we have several great coffee concoctions that are delicious, fairly simple, and honestly, the most experience I’ve ever had making anything more than straight cappuccinos and lattes (most of my years in the industry were spent in Australia, where even the addition of flavor to lattes is scoffed at as tainting the purity of one’s coffee).
 Barista pouring his signature drink at the Canadian National Barista Championship That in mind, you can imagine my dismay when I discovered that, to compete in a barista competition like the one we’re attending this weekend, not only do I need to invent a signature drink of my own, it must be able to challenge the likes the ‘Coffee and a Cigar’ (which, yes, actually uses tobacco-infused cream as an ingredient) and the ‘Crimson Sage,’ an espresso shot with sugar-cane juice, a pinch of white pepper, and topped with a dollop of sage-infused steamed milk. Winning signature drinks are always awesome… and incredibly intimidating. Continue reading Tobacco infused latte, anyone??
 Brad's Triple Short Latte We at Roastery in Buena Vista take our latte art seriously, perfecting our foam and playing with designs on our lattes and cappuccinos. A triple rosetta on a macchiato is next in line. All of our baristas shy away from playing with chocolate sauce to make teddy bears and other cute things. Still, no matter how well we like to think we are doing in our ‘art with coffee’, there is somewhere new, like Coffee on Paper. This caricaturist is taking art with coffee somewhere else, and filling a great niche for himself. Much like the teddy bear latte, it will appeal to a distinct group. One of these days when my to-do list in pared down to a couple dozen things, maybe I’ll play around with a sketch of Bongo Billy. Pretty unique niche to find and capitalize on. Check out the art of Dirceu Veiga.
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