# Coffee



## dogcom (May 23, 2009)

I am in Kona Hawaii of course enjoying myself but I am taking the time to visit the coffee plantations on the island. Of the ones I visited Greenwell farms had the best coffee and tour. They also use the outside skin of the bean to make a great antioxidant drink. I also learned there was coffee I could drink without cream. The 100 percent Kona coffee is fantastic especially when you add macadamia nut to it. You also find out why real coffee is so expensive being hand picked and all.

You can get roundup fed coffee much cheaper but of course you will need your cream and sugar. Anyway talking to the local people and farmers is great and I hope to take my coffee tour to the other side of the island towards Hilo.


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## bayview (Nov 6, 2011)

Was there more than 20 years ago. Kona coffee already well known then. Cant remember much about it. Macadamia nuts -yes- Yummy!!!
Beautiful sunsets!!. Enjoy your stay!


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## Cal (Jun 17, 2009)

Sounds like a great trip, thanks for making us jealous!

Not a coffee drinker per se, love the aroma, love walking down the coffee aisle at the grocery store, but when I drink it, it seems too watery. I like iced caps, frappucinos, and those Bolthouse mocha cappuccino drinks in the veggie section of the grocery store as they are thicker...and am told that I should try European or Turkish coffee as it is thicker.

Enjoy. :encouragement:


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## MoneyGal (Apr 24, 2009)

I just started planning a Hawai'i trip with my mom - she's not really into coffee (giant Folger's tin in the freezer) but our coffee obsession is getting a bit ridic here...we buy green beans and hand-roast them etc. We have Hawaiian beans on the go right now, I just drank some.


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

We have a friend who owns a gourmet coffee shop, and as a gift one year she gave us bags of her most expensive coffees, including Kona and Jamaica Blue Mountain. Strangely enough we didn't like either of them; we prefer strong-flavoured coffee with some bite to it and these were both so smooth and mild that we ended up mixing them with Kenya AA dark roast.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

it doesn't seem strange, there are surely millions upon millions of coffee drinkers who prefer strong & black, including espresso drinkers.

it surprises me here in north america that dark roast beans are so expensive. In france these were cheaper as the beans themselves were nearly always an inferior grade. The maisons de torréfication could get away with this because the extra roasting, almost to the point of burning, masks all flavours anyhow.

i've never tasted roast chicory root, which is sold as a caffeine-less coffee substitute.

as a matter of fact i tend to believe roast dandelion root & roast burdock root would work just as well as chicory, if one could chop them up fresh, dry the pieces & get everything to a maison de torréfication for a slow dark roast. Botanically, chicory & dandelion are first cousins; burdock might belong to the same family, i'd have to look that up.

a possible nano-business enterprise: grow organic burdock in raised boxes for local coffee roaster. Burdock roots are powerfully medicinal, boost the liver, sometimes given to cancer patients before they undergo chemotherapy, to help them endure the devastating treatment. A mixture of 50% roast burdock root/50% dark french roast coffee would actually be pretty healthy imho!


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## MoneyGal (Apr 24, 2009)

(FWIW when you buy green beans, they are all pretty much the same price - and you can control the degree of roasting yourself)

(Also BTW re: chicory if you are shopping with your mom at Calgary Co-op, the one where she's been shopping for 40+ years, you can buy this: http://www.sybertooth.com/camp/)

(BTW2 when I say "me" I mean "you")

Ready Aye Ready!


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## fraser (May 15, 2010)

I have not seen the Camp coffee label in years. I grew up with this in our house, and in my grandparents home. That, along with HP and Tate & Lyles Golden Syrup in the green and gold cans.

We buy Costco Kirkland brand (Starbucks) Expresso blend beans. We grind the beans prior to brewing the coffee. We use our old, plastic Melita filter and run the water through. We have been doing this for years. We have never felt the need for anything else though we have considered a French press. We dislike very much the Keurigs, etc. Very expensive coffee, poor selection of coffees, non recycle packages, and more trouble than they are worth.

So, besides Safeway and London Drugs, we can only seem to find Melita brand Number 6 coffee filters and only in a small box. Does anyone know where we can get generic Number 6 filters in bulk, say 200-500 at a time for a lower per filter cost? We also use Number 4 filters but we have no issue in finding generic packages of these.


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## Sampson (Apr 3, 2009)

pie is bang on. How you treat or prepare the beans, i.e. roasting, blending etc is as if not more important than the beans themselves. Italian multinational master roasters Illy are a prime example. They source both robusta and arabica beans from all over the World but the magic happens when then roast and blend.

Kona coffee is unique due to the temperatures and humidity levels on the volcano. I personally like a cup of kona due to it's low acidity and clean smooth finish, but this is only good for a continental (sort of medium) roast as the beans quickly lose their oils when roasted darker. My preferred kona brew method would be a simple Melita style drip or French press, and typically, single sourced kona beans make terrible espresso.

Are they worth the premium, I don't know about that. You can get much more complex and tastier brews at much cheaper costs, but there isn't anything like it in the World, so the price premium is really for that 'uniqueness'. Nonetheless, I've long fantasized about leasing a plot of land on the Big Island and going into the coffee business. Darned fear of losing everything to an eruption, and all the other other fears of packing up and changing lifestyles are the only thing holding me back.


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## Sampson (Apr 3, 2009)

MoneyGal said:


> (FWIW when you buy green beans, they are all pretty much the same price - and you can control the degree of roasting yourself)


What are you using to roast? A small barrel home roaster?


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

MoneyGal said:


> (FWIW when you buy green beans, they are all pretty much the same price


Well, maybe, but the expensive ones are still pricey. I just checked greenbeanery.ca and you can get a pound of green Fair Trade Colombian coffee beans for $9.45, whereas 1 pound of Kona goes for $36.70. A half-pound of Jamaica Blue Mountain green coffee beans will set you back $20.41.


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## m3s (Apr 3, 2010)

It's interesting to work with different nations and see all the different coffee habits at work. The Americans often have a percolator within sight. It's quick, cheap and keeps a pot ready within reach to refill their giant mugs. The Germans share fancy expensive machines that you pour whole beans and water into and out comes coffee, to a selected ml quantity, strength and temperature (you won't fill an American size mug though). The Dutch have these Senseo machines that take a pad of coffee like a tea bag. It reminds me of a Keurig machine except a mere fraction of the price (if you select 2 cups you can use a huge American cup, if you tilt it to fit..) The Belgians bring out the French press from time to time. The Italians meet religiously in the lounge around the simple Bialetti pot. They grind their own beans and mix some kind of sugar, but they say the secret is in the temperature and pressure. For entertainment I like to ask them if they ever tried Starbucks. Regardless of beans the coffee tastes completely different depending how it was made. Sometimes I have to put milk in percolated coffee but never in espresso.


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## MoneyGal (Apr 24, 2009)

brad said:


> Well, maybe, but the expensive ones are still pricey. I just checked greenbeanery.ca and you can get a pound of green Fair Trade Colombian coffee beans for $9.45, whereas 1 pound of Kona goes for $36.70. A half-pound of Jamaica Blue Mountain green coffee beans will set you back $20.41.


Yabbut I just meant that "dark roast" and "light roast" does not explain the price differential. I get my beans from merchantsofgreencoffee.com, which is closer to me than greenbeanery.ca .

@Sampson - we are using the FreshRoastSR300 http://merchantsofgreencoffee.com/equipment/ which someone gave to us.


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## dogcom (May 23, 2009)

Money gal if you do go to Kona visit the Greenwell farm as the coffee is unbelievably good. Your mom can also learn about the 200 types of avocado that grow on the island when you are there. I never knew there were so many types of avocado around, I also tried the star fruit apple bananas and white pineapple which where all fantastic.

Coffee that is organic and certified 100 percent premium Kona coffee is very expensive for a reason. The beans go through screens to get the exact size and all split or damaged beans are removed. In the processing they lose 80 percent of the hand picked coffee bean before it can get to your cup. I learned this in the Mountain Thunder coffee tour 3500 feet above Kona. Their products of coffee,teas and lotions are very expensive but you do appreciate why that is so.


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## Spudd (Oct 11, 2011)

fraser said:


> So, besides Safeway and London Drugs, we can only seem to find Melita brand Number 6 coffee filters and only in a small box. Does anyone know where we can get generic Number 6 filters in bulk, say 200-500 at a time for a lower per filter cost? We also use Number 4 filters but we have no issue in finding generic packages of these.


Amazon.ca sells the 40-filter package for $3, not sure how that compares to your local prices. They also sell a re-usable version for $30, but that adds labour to the process so I don't know if it would interest you.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

Sampson said:


> I've long fantasized about leasing a plot of land on the Big Island and going into the coffee business. Darned fear of losing everything to an eruption, and all the other other fears of packing up and changing lifestyles are the only thing holding me back.




sampson perhaps a coffee plantation in a far less expensive country?

stephanie anderson samayoa runs her great-grandfather's Finca de los Angeles on the side of an extinct volcano in tecapan, el salvador.

her family had fled during the civil war. Less than 10 years ago, stephanie singlehandedly reclaimed the plantation from jungle, weeds & squatters. Gradually she's turned it into a shade-grown organic operation with a trademark part-bourbon coffee that she named Tecapan Blue. She's also established cacao trees & founded an en salvador association of organic cacao growers.

raised in california, stephanie's story reads like Out of Africa. It's not surprising that her father was danish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=nzFkWhi6l6E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Qcsf8mSMQ0I


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## fraser (May 15, 2010)

thanks spudd but we currently pay about 2.29 for 40 Melita Number 6 filters. We used to buy generics, 250 at a time, for about 30 percent of the Melita 40 pack.


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## Sampson (Apr 3, 2009)

humble_pie said:


> sampson perhaps a coffee plantation in a far less expensive country?


I have a friend from Costa Rica whom I always joke that we need to start a business together.

Surprisingly, the cost on the Big Island is actually quite cheap, I don't know the background of it, but I think there are only a few land owners therefore most people are on 99-year or at this point 40-50 year leases, plus compared to the other Islands the risk of active eruption is much higher.

Perhaps when I get to my freedom number it is something I could seriously consider. I've visited a few smaller farms near Kona and it was basically run by about 4-5 people. Gather some close family and friends with similar passions and all you would have to do is a bit more than breaking even.

Focus on raising the kids first...

Thanks for the links btw, very interesting story.


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## Sampson (Apr 3, 2009)

dogcom said:


> Coffee that is organic and certified 100 percent premium Kona coffee is very expensive for a reason. The beans go through screens to get the exact size and all split or damaged beans are removed. In the processing they lose 80 percent of the hand picked coffee bean before it can get to your cup.


This is true everywhere, except that in a giant factor, or when picked by amazonian natives in Brazil, the overall cost is much much lower. I quite liked the Mountain Thunder, and they are getting big time recognition since their farm has been featured on some national tv spots, and even Costco is starting to carry them both on islands and the mainland, West Coast anyway.


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## dogcom (May 23, 2009)

Sampson I probably won't be buying the real deal very often when I get home but I will definitely consider it now that I know what the family does to produce the coffee. The day I went to visit the mother who does the tour was a little late getting going because someone had stolen her sons motorcycle. Stuff happens even in the middle of nowhere. I also noticed her daughters pouring all the beans in the packages that we would buy when I was there.

Another fact she told us about was how they keep the weeds or vines that would grow and choke the coffee plants at bay. The geese keep the weeds away so they like to encourage them and keep them happy.


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## fatcat (Nov 11, 2009)

kona is pricey but very good coffee

i opened one of the first coffee shops in seattle back in the 70's and roasted for my shop and then commercially for coffee houses

today, like the gal, i roast at home with a fresh roast 8 and a fresh roast 500
with coffee, freshness is everything and can make even poor origin or poorly roasted beans taste respectable as long they are truly fresh
most commercial coffee, even the better brands, are already too stale by the time they reach the shelf

if you like coffee i highly recommend trying home roasting starting with something like this: http://www.greenbeanery.ca/bean/catalog/fresh-roast-p-12870.html

i am a devoted fanatic of bialetti moka pots since i drink milk with my coffee


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## dogcom (May 23, 2009)

Wow fat cat you must be an expert if you opened a coffee shop in Seattle which is one of the front running cities when it comes to playing with the new coffee trends.


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## Sampson (Apr 3, 2009)

dogcom said:


> Stuff happens even in the middle of nowhere. I also noticed her daughters pouring all the beans in the packages that we would buy when I was there.
> 
> Another fact she told us about was how they keep the weeds or vines that would grow and choke the coffee plants at bay. The geese keep the weeds away so they like to encourage them and keep them happy.


Don't get me wrong dogcom, I buy my fair share of coffee from Hawai'i and for all intents and purposes, the majority of farmers there are small business owners - I feel very happy to support a good product.

But the fact is, coffee is one of the most exploitative resources on Earth. 1/3 of all coffee is grown in Brazil. The workers that pick the fruit, process it, and do all the work are poor. Not only that, but they recognize that their vegetation (Amazon forests) are being exploited for the sake of our consumption, but what other choice do they have. I know many a Brazilian whom on one hand understand that it is not good for their country and the environmental sacrifices being made are bad for the future, but those people are so poor that you cannot blame them for changing the use of their land to grow coffee. 

Like all resources, the value chain is long and the front line people do not earn their fair share. This is one of the only reasons that Kona coffee is so expensive. Any single origin bean is going to produce better results than a Folger's or Nestle produced coffee. But coffee is a prime example of an exploitative industry. (sorry to steer the thread towards philosophical and moral issues)

So I just bought another Bialetti moka pot, this time a Brikka - not sure if anyone has tried it, I tiny bit of crema and a pretty sweet tasting cup.


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## dogcom (May 23, 2009)

I don't mind the extra content at all Sampson because it is good to know what is going on around the world.

I asked someone from work safe not to long ago about how they mine Uranium in the third world. He told me they use workers over 50 because they will probably die before the Uranium mining kills them. Of course they are happy to do it to feed their family.


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## m3s (Apr 3, 2010)

Sampson said:


> So I just bought another Bialetti moka pot, this time a Brikka - not sure if anyone has tried it, I tiny bit of crema and a pretty sweet tasting cup.


I just have a normal one, but it's ingeniously simple. I can use it at home or camping and I'm not sure they ever wear out. No more hassle than a percolator but it doesn't burn the coffee. Home roasted beans sound amazing but I probably don't go through enough coffee to make it worthwhile.


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

Sampson said:


> Like all resources, the value chain is long and the front line people do not earn their fair share.


The journalist Fred Pearce wrote an eye-opening book a few years back called "Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff," in which he traveled around the world to see where the things he owned or consumed (jeans, coffee, computer, cellphone, green beans, shrimp, beer cans, etc.) were made and how they were produced. He always drinks fair trade coffee, but when he went to Kenya to see where his "fair trade" coffee was made he quickly learned that the prices that coffee farmers get for their beans are still far from fair (and not enough to help them rise out of poverty), because there are so many steps in the distribution chain and each step requires profit. 

A Kenyan "fair trade" farmer who grows about 660 pounds of organic coffee beans in a year will have an annual income of about $1,000. That's $1.50/pound. When you figure that Starbucks can squeeze about 60 cups of espresso out of a pound of beans, thus transforming that pound of coffee into about $300 worth of lattes, the magnitude of the value chain starts becoming clear.

There used to be a small coffee roaster/distributor here in Montreal run by a Mexican family; the rest of the family was back in Mexico growing the beans so there weren't many middlemen in the process. But those kinds of setups are hard to find.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

brad said:


> A Kenyan "fair trade" farmer who grows about 660 pounds of organic coffee beans in a year will have an annual income of about $1,000. That's $1.50/pound


but 660 pounds of coffee would be only a hobby size operation? a few backyard trees, that's it? might there be a zero or 2 that's missing?

in el salvador, stephanie samayoa harvests coffee cherries in what look like 60-100 pound sacks. I don't know how many sacks, certainly hundreds, possibly thousands. At harvest time, she has 100 workers on the finca. Yet hers is still classed as a small family operation.

organic tecapan blue sells for about USD $12/lb. As best i can recall, stephanie has said the finca gets back about 50 cents on the dollar. But she's a brilliant manager with no middlemen.


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

humble_pie said:


> but 660 pounds of coffee would be only a hobby size operation? a few backyard trees, that's it? might there be a zero or 2 that's missing?


Nope, according to Pearce most of the smallholder farmers in Kenya who produce for the fair-trade cooperatives have small farms, typically around 5 acres, with about 1,400 coffee trees (that's what it takes to produce 660 pounds of beans per year).


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

brad said:


> Nope, according to Pearce most of the smallholder farmers in Kenya who produce for the fair-trade cooperatives have small farms, typically around 5 acres, with about 1,400 coffee trees (that's what it takes to produce 660 pounds of beans per year).


there must be something wrong with Pearce's information. That's less than half-a-pound per tree per annum.

not going there with him. After all, we're not talking about civet coffee droppings ...


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

True, but coffee trees in conventional production generally produce about 1-7 pounds of beans per year. These are organic (simply because the farmers can't afford pesticides), which means they probably lose a fair portion of their crop to pests and disease, so I think 0.5 pounds/year/tree is believable.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

brad said:


> True, but coffee trees in conventional production generally produce about 1-7 pounds of beans per year


???

if that's true coffee should sell well north of $100 per pound.

of course dried coffee beans might weigh one-tenth what fresh coffee cherries do. Still, suppose fresh weight is x 10. I can't imagine any fruiting tree in any kind of commercial ag production that produces as little as 10-70 pounds of fresh fruit per annum. 

even eve in the garden of eden did better than that.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

this gives me a good excuse to email stephanie & ask her what she harvests, on an average, per tree.

the danish baroness' plantation in Out of Africa was, i believe, in kenya? they are so much alike, those 2 pioneering women ...


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

humble_pie said:


> ???
> 
> if that's true coffee should sell well north of $100 per pound.
> 
> of course dried coffee beans might weigh one-tenth what fresh coffee cherries do. Still, suppose fresh weight is x 10. I can't imagine any fruiting tree in any kind of commercial ag production that produces as little as 10-70 pounds of fresh fruit per annum.


If you do some Google searching for coffee bean yield per tree you'll see that 1-2 pounds of beans per year is pretty common, at least for Arabica. It seems that 11 pounds per year would be an exceptional crop (grown in full sun with fertilizer and pesticides). See for example http://www.soulfullcup.com/Coffee Tree.htm but that's just one of many sources that all corroborate this range.


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

thankx brad. Flabbergasting information.


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## Sampson (Apr 3, 2009)

brad said:


> There used to be a small coffee roaster/distributor here in Montreal run by a Mexican family; the rest of the family was back in Mexico growing the beans so there weren't many middlemen in the process. But those kinds of setups are hard to find.


This is certainly the trend amongst fashionable local roasters around these parts and typically throughout the Pac NW. I think it really highlights the difference in pricing for Kona coffee vs. elsewhere. I don't believe an American operating a farm in Hawai'i would first be able to pay employees if beans were sold at typical prices.

At the same time, some of these people I know in Brazil almost 'must' exploit this little profit since they do not have much else going on, it is still on of the more profitable crops in their neck of the woods.

Back to brewing methods... I was close to getting a Handpresso unit for camping and to use at the office, but opted for the Moka pot instead, my second one in about 8 years - this time only 2 cup, Brikka version for camping. Very sweet, never understood why Italians would add sugar to it.


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## fatcat (Nov 11, 2009)

dogcom said:


> I don't mind the extra content at all Sampson because it is good to know what is going on around the world.
> 
> I asked someone from work safe not to long ago about how they mine Uranium in the third world. He told me they use workers over 50 because they will probably die before the Uranium mining kills them. Of course they are happy to do it to feed their family.


well, i closed my shop over 3 decades ago so my knowledge of the business is not exactly as fresh as my current beans 

sampson, i have 2 brikka's, great choice .. they produce a better extraction and are worth the extra cost over a traditional bialetti

m3s, actually usually people that drink a _lot_ of coffee have trouble with home roasting because entry level roasters don't produce a lot of coffee per batch ... if you drink a relatively small amount of coffee, home roasters are worth a try

i now have my one cup of cafe-au-lait in the morning and that's it so a pound will last me a long time, too long, which is why home roasting is a great idea, you can roast in say 200 gram batches

if you roast at home with a nice mix of good quality green beans and let it rest for 48 hours and then brew, you will taste something completely new ...

coffee is really only at it's peak for no more than a week after roasting

most commercial packaged beans are already a couple of weeks and often a lot more old when they hit the shelves and then after you open they often go a week or 2 more

illy coffee is notoriously among the stalest and oldest coffee on the planet as an example


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