Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
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BUILDING BREW-HEMIA Continued from page 53 MAMA COFFEE: The roaster was the first in Prague to offer fair-trade-certified coffee. coffee to Prague as well as a more civic-minded approach, working with NGOs and community organizations. Selling wholesale and also at the retail level, Mama Coffee now operates several branded cafés, differentiating each location based on the particular neighborhood it's located in. It recently launched a café featuring a brand dubbed Original Coffee, which focuses on small lots with unique flavor profiles. La Boheme also helped breed a number of individuals who would expand the scene, including Doubleshot's Tucek and Jarda Hrstka. The pair started Doubleshot in 2010 after acquiring separate coffee knowledge: Tucek, along with third partner and operations manager Kamila Sotonova, spent a year visiting farms and working with Graciano Cruz, owner of Panama's celebrated coffee farm Los Lajones Estate. Meanwhile, Hrstka spent a year working with Canada's 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters. CHANGED LANDSCAPE While small roasters have helped lead Prague's shift toward better coffee, they point out that their efforts alone aren't the whole story—some credit must go to consumers themselves, whose openness gave new coffee concepts a chance. "Czechs are pretty much interested in anything new," notes Kolsky of Mama Coffee. Roasters say that consumers have been remarkably receptive to educational efforts—the acidity issue is a good example. "To differentiate from the word kyselost, which is the same word for both sourness and acidity, we introduced the word acidita," says Fleer of La Boheme. "The definition is very similar to wine, so people can understand their coffee is not sour, it just has some acidity." La Boheme and the majority of other specialty roasters 54 COFFEE ALMANAC • June 2013