Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/131835
FROM THE EDITOR 11111111111111111111 TAKING A YEARLY SNAPSHOT LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Fresh Cup welcomes letters to the editor at comments@freshcup.com. Letters must be 250 words or less. Authors must provide verifiable phone number and city and state of residence. 12 COFFEE ALMANAC • June 2013 In addition, the format of the Almanacs allows us to run longer-form articles that we often devote to portraits of coffee-producing countries. This month we profile Vietnam, and it's another article that feels like it's capturing an exciting moment in time. The Southeast Asian country is a powerhouse when it comes to volume—second in the world only to Brazil—but only a tiny fraction of that is the quality Arabica we identify as specialty coffee. However, efforts are under way to produce a quality shift there; Will Frith lives in Vietnam and is helping to lead that charge, and in his article "When Yield Is No Longer Enough" (p. 42), he offers the kind of in-depth account for which these Almanacs are known. And Frith's efforts represent another idea you'll encounter throughout this issue and the Almanacs before it—instances of seemingly small players making significant impact. You can see it in a global sense in "Trends" (p. 18), which covers some of the organizations taking action to fight coffee rust. The power of the little guy also comes across in profiles of Prague and two middle-U.S. cities, where small companies are laying the groundwork to change how their communities think of coffee. Most everyone in our industry is part of an undersized operation (some of your companies may have no more than a single employee), but as an industry we've made great strides shaping the culinary, agricultural and even artistic landscapes around us. I invite you to sit back, flip through these pages and better understand the way your own work helps weave a global qualitycoffee tapestry that is well worth reviewing year after year. STEPHANIE KREUTTER W elcome to our annual Coffee Almanac, the special issue we produce each June. Here we take a short break from our tea coverage to plunge headlong into the universe of specialty coffee. (In December we pay the leaf the same respect with our Tea Almanac.) In putting together this coffee-focused issue, I began pondering a question I'm regularly asked, whether at trade shows or via email: How are the Almanacs different from the regular issues of Fresh Cup? First and foremost, there is a moment-in-time element to any almanac that I've always enjoyed. By definition, almanacs are annual publications, and as such there is a concrete, yearin-review feel that is an efficient—maybe even reassuring— way to mark the passage of days, weeks and months. As a child I went through a phase of almanac collection, and even now I have weathered early-'90s copies of the "World Almanac and Book of Facts" and "Information Please Sports Almanac" on my bookshelf to remind me of the details of those years. In the Fresh Cup world, the Tea Almanac launched first, in December 1998, and the inaugural Coffee Almanac published in June 2001. Since those initial unveilings, each December and June has seen a new addition to the Almanac stable. And looking at them now, the Almanacs are indeed reliable relics— or, as founder Ward Barbee called them, "timeless resources." A powerful example: The first Coffee Almanac included a profile of Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which had recently opened its second location. Now Stumptown is a thriving, investmentfirm-backed cultural touchstone with roasting operations and coffeehouses throughout the country. Reading that 2001 profile—with vivid descriptions of owner Duane Sorenson in the early years of a coffee obsession that would help change the industry—is like taking a step back in time.