Welcome To SUNDAY Coffee+: Coffee News That Made The Headlines
Each week, Craft Beverage Jobs compiles the top headlines for Craft Coffee News & Information. On Sunday morning we post those headlines in SUNDAY Coffee+ for your reading pleasure. Whether its industry growth, new business, job openings, profiles or human interest, you just never know what will tickle our fancy from week to week. We want to make SUNDAY Coffee+ a part of your Sunday morning coffee experience. Want Sunday Coffee+ delivered via email each weekend? Sign Up Here.
The Renaissance Of Coffee
The New Coffee Roasting Arms Race, by Shane Barnes – The Men’s Journal
The coffee industry is in the midst of yet another renaissance. While we first saw a Starbucks-led explosion of customize-able coffee (“medium roast,” “a two-hundred skinny mocha with no whip and an extra shot” in the ‘90s, the small, third wave coffee industry is booming. Last year, there were more than 1800 coffee shops in New York City and, according to what scant research there is, anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 shops in the United States. The other new factor defining the new age of coffee is an attention to detail that takes coffee to a level of fussiness previously only seen in wine circles, which isn’t surprising, given that coffee contains two-to-three times as many flavor compounds as wine. Indeed, every shop and every roaster has business practices and farmer relations unique to them.
To understand what’s happening in coffee, you’ve got to know a few basic things: a single origin implies that coffee is all from the same farm (or collection of farms); coffees grown at a higher elevation, and thus cooler climates, take longer to mature, allowing for more complex sugars, and so taste better; Arabica beans have more complex flavors than Robusto beans, but contain less caffeine; basically every coffee company, including the ones discussed here, taste beans through a cupping and scoring process as outlined by the Specialty Coffee Association of America and every little thing (rainfall, sunlight, frost, roast time, roast temperature, brew time, brew temperature, humidity, roast date, age of coffee when it was roasted, etc.) can and does affect the taste of coffee. “That’s the amazing thing about coffee,” says Amanda Byron, Director of Coffee for Joe Coffee in NYC. “All of those variables, as frustrating as they can be, make for so many amazing possibilities.”
Coffee & Collaboration
Tech discussion to build in Coffee Klatches, by Yvette C. Hammett – The Tampa Tribune
TAMPA — Coffee and collaboration — fuel for the county’s economic engine. That’s the theory, at least, behind a new monthly gathering for the area’s tech entrepreneurs.
Homebrew Hillsborough — Local Area Networking (LAN), kicks off at Buddy Brew on Friday, Jan. 30 at 
8:30 a.m. After that, the event will move from one coffee house to another throughout the county in an effort to draw in newcomers.
Former County Commissioner Mark Sharpe initiated Friday coffee with the local tech community after helping the county launch its Economic Development Innovation Initiative, or EDI2, a program that funds events supporting tech entrepreneurs.
Just in its first year, which ended in August 2014, EDI2, provided nearly $600,000 to fund events held by various groups throughout the community. Those same individuals and companies that come to EDI2 for support are the ones that showed up week after week for Sharpe’s coffee klatches at Buddy Brew on East Kennedy Boulevard.
“They grew to be huge, sometimes 40 people or more,” said Jennifer Whelihan, economic development manager for Hillsborough County.
“It’s a fantastic place and the energy at those sessions was great, so we wanted to continue what Commissioner Sharpe started and host these events monthly throughout the county,” Whelihan said. “We wanted to be able to reach out to others.”]
My Personal History With Coffee
Coffee, the constant in my life, by Marilyn Gleason – Post Independent/Citizen Telegram
Marilyn Gleason
Hello, my name is Marilyn, and I am a coffee addict.
I could chart a personal history using my preferred roasts and brewing devices. Vintage percolator, Melitta filter, aluminum screw-together stovetop espresso pot, French press. Naming them dredges up memories of living quarters, lovers and friends, jobs.
Coffee kept me perky through college finals and morning news gigs. It’s been a constant through poverty and plenty, the bad boyfriend and good dogs.
Certain vices I have given up for my health and the safety of those around me. Coffee is not one of them.
In pursuing a more local diet, I’ve changed routines and foregone pleasures. Seafood has no business in land-locked Colorado. I adore mangoes, but not their food miles. How all those bananas get here mystifies me. But give up coffee? Never.
Coffee is my guilty pleasure, the character defect I cling to.
Spending A Day With Valentine Roasters
Switch Shift: Coffee Roaster At Valentine, by Bobby Tanzilo – OnMilwaukee.com
Like baking or winemaking, roasting coffee is both science and art. At its heart, roasting the pits of coffee plant cherries is a buffet of chemical reactions – molecules transformed by heat, Maillard reactions, sugars undergoing changes. A ham-fisted roaster can easily mess up the science and destroy the coffee.
But learning how to not ruin good beans is not enough to create amazing coffee. The art dances around the edges; that is where a real artist – using time and heat and other factors – can create sublime roasts that result in a stellar cup of java.
This I learned when I recently spent a day with the good folks at Valentine Coffee Roasters, 5918 W. Vliet St. I also understood there’s very little skill to be learned about roasting coffee in a day. It takes time, it takes tinkering the variables, it takes practice and it takes a bit of coffee wasted in the process. Much like learning to pull a perfect shot.
I also learned that there might be no better place to learn the art and science than at this small company of about a dozen folks who love coffee and are passionate about what they do. That they eat lunch together around a table, as a family, says a lot about Valentine.
The company began about five years ago when gourmand and oenophile Robb Kashevarof – who also briefly kicked around a career in professional soccer in Poland – bought a roaster and tried to work out the ins and outs of roasting coffee.
Vietnam Specialty Coffee Movement
Vietnam’s small (but growing) specialty coffee movement, by Calvin Godfrey – Thanh Nien News
Will Frith (L) runs an impromptu barista training at Workshop, the newest and most prominent coffee-bar in Ho Chi Minh City
