Heirloom Coffee

For many of us, especially since the latest spike in oil prices, the priority is to eat local foods and buy local products.  Many of us too make an effort to buy as directly from farmers or other producers as possible.  Of course there are many important reasons for this, but what about those products that can’t be obtained locally?

For those of us that don’t live in the tropics, coffee is one of these products.  Many of the same reasons we look for local products are relevant to coffee.

We all know there’s a load of certification programs for different kinds of coffee.  Organic, Fair Trade, Birdsong, you name it.  Many of us also realize that most of these labels are just marketing, and there’s not always a lot of added value that goes along with them.

It turns out there are really a lot of important differences in coffee that concern things we care about.  Most coffees are grown on large faceless plantations, often producing a very low quality product.  Farmers can receive very different levels of compensation, mostly far below what most of us would consider a living wage.  There are heirloom and F1 hybrid varieties of coffee.  Coffee can be grown in environmentally friendly and sustainable ways or can be destructive to the environment.

You can make a really huge difference in many ways according to the kind of coffee you buy, both for social reasons as well as quality.  What’s the secret?  The secret first of all is to roast your own coffee, because the market for pre-roasted coffee is tightly controlled and you have access to many more different kinds of beans if you buy them green.

Once roasted, coffee goes stale in about 2 weeks even when vacuum packed.  This means if you roast and grind your own coffee, you get a freshness you may not experience any other way.  I did a post about this a while ago.

Here in the Netherlands, I purchase green coffee beans from ongebrand.nl.

Until now, I haven’t been able to find a good source for socially responsible green coffee beans elsewhere to recommend to anyone else, but recently I came across a blog dedicated to exactly this topic!  This blog does a much better job explaining all the politics and history of coffee production in the world, and is really worth having a look at, especially if you drink coffee.  This blog is mostly focused on the US, so if anyone else knows of other good sources of green coffee beans elsewhere, I hope you will let us know.