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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12 Fresh Cup Magazine | freshcup.com ver y month, I'm astounded by the rapidity of change in the coffee industry. Those of you running cafés, roasteries, import businesses, and the like know better than anyone how fast this industry moves, and in conversation after conversation with you that theme pervades the discussion. And it's not just about chasing down a hot new brewing method. That's fashion. Change in this industry runs to its bones, and its speed is systemic. Two stories this month show that. In our lovely cover story, "Experiments with Tradition," Jimmy Sherfey visits a Salvadoran farm near the Honduran border. The owner of the farm, Sergio Ticas, gave his mother-in-law a small lot to run a project. The lot was designated as women-only because the mother- in-law wanted it to be a high-quality, boutique garden, which she believed required the women's delicate touch (a bit sexist, especially consider- ing Sherfey's descriptions of the women's boulder-moving work, but there it is). She also, more equita- bly, wanted the female laborers at the farm to have greater access to the income of the plantation. Sergio and his wife, who pay their workers double the regional average, also want to bring their workers into cupping sessions with importers. "In the same way a culture of preci- sion materialized among baristas on the consumer end," Sherfey writes, "bringing in the harvesters may be the next logical progression towards a well-educated supply chain." Well- paid, invested workers might also be the farm's best defense against the coffee leaf rust epidemic. One farm represents several huge shifts on the origin side of coffee. In "Going Pro," Emily McIntyre examines the expanding opportuni- ties for workers on the other side of the supply chain. Not long ago, baris- ta work represented either a dead end job or something temporary while you worked toward a career unrelated to coffee. Coffee simply had few other places to go. With the proliferation of every kind of coffee business, and even the creation of new ones, like schools and advisory firms, there are not just more jobs in coffee, there are more kinds of them. A barista can move on to roast, wholesale, manage, import, advise, plan events, and, of course, start her own business. Or, if she loves bar work, she can move up the telescop- ing ladder of barista jobs. Barista work, or at least the perception of it, has changed from low-skill machine operator to technically advanced and artisanal-minded professional skilled in multiple preparations. With all this change, sometimes it's easy to think something is new when really it's making a comeback. Our special section on cold-brewed tea and coffee fits this perfectly. Cold-brew coffee has been around since at least Toddy's debut in the sixties, but it fell aside to the ease of iced coffee. Across the country, cafés have rediscovered the unique qualities of the drink and realized it requires as careful a preparation as a meticulous pour-over. Cold-brew tea, meanwhile, could be the indus- try's best way to introduce iced tea- guzzling Americans to loose leaf. The preparation is stupidly easy, but as I found out, the science of its unique taste is gloriously complex. We also look at kombucha cock- tails, a woman bringing tea to Brits (yes, Brits), and community-build- ing in San Diego. You should really get reading. Best, Change in this industry runs to its bones, and its speed is systemic. 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. An Industry Built on Change C Y N T H I A M E A D O R S E FROM THE EDITOR May14_magazine.indd 12 4/18/14 10:41 AM