The Guardian now has another update for us: The temperatures are warming enough that they are inviting a lovely little pest, the coffee berry borer, to live in higher and higher altitudes. This little beetle wants the same thing we do — coffee, delicious coffee! — but couldn’t hang with the coffee crops all that often because they preferred a cooler clime than the beetle’s 68F degrees. Warming kicked up temps in parts of Ethiopia’s mountainous growing region to this level in around 1984 and scientists have been tracking the borer’s population expansion ever since — it’s now present in every coffee growing region except Hawaii, Nepal and Papua New Guinea.

Coffee’s commodity price has been slowly increasing as a result of environmental and economic pressures and is at its highest this year. With an estimated $500m damage sourced to the coffee berry borer crew, it will only serve to increase the cost even more.

At the end of April, Bloomberg reported (from Euromonitor) the most avid coffee drinking countries in the world, measured by the quantity consumed in liters per capita. We took that, put it in a table and assigned each country a general region, as well, so you can sort it and see which parts of the world are the biggest coffee connoisseurs.

Since spending a nice chunk of time in its rolling hills in our youth (St. Mullins reprazent), we have always had a soft little spot for Ireland. While the coffee scene in the rural areas was non existent, we didn’t really see much of anything going on in the major cities we visited, either, but that was 15 years ago and a lot has changed since then.

There are a few people holding it down for the bean in Ireland, making great strides to bring quality, experimentation and true gastronomic appreciation for coffee to their communities. We love reading the work folks like Colin Harmon (2009 Irish Barista champ) are doing and we stumbled upon the musings of David Walsh via Twitter. His blog, The Other Black Stuff, provides excellent tips, opinion, perspective and experience on a variety of coffee and equipment related subjects — a great read for anyone interested in how coffee is changing in Ireland, but also interesting from a general coffee perspective as well.

But back to the show. We attended a few different lectures, talked with many of our vendors on the trade show floor, watched Midwest Barista Champ Mike Marquard compete in the USBC semi-finals and even headed to a little partay that Intelligentsia, La Marzocco and Espressi (makers of the MyPressi TWIST) were throwing at Intelligentsia’s roastery in L.A. Yes, Grammy got her groove on.

In this video, Gail talks to us about what she learned from the lectures we attended, discusses some new products we saw  and even shares with us her new love for TWIST-inspired cocktails.

While we absolutely cherish and extol the virtues of fun, when we thought about boiling down what we do at Seattle Coffee Gear to one simple, essential idea, we settled on another word: Knowledge. It’s in this blog we write, in the videos we produce, in our product descriptions, in the customer service we give on the phone and in the store — we have even dedicated a whole website to providing resources and knowledge to folks as they navigate the sometimes far-too-complex world of choosing their coffee related gear. While we have fun with this and it’s important to us to communicate the elemental joy to be found in the experimentation with, creation and drinking of coffee, teaching people, being honest and giving them the information they need to make the right choice for them is our ultimate ideal.

From a pure data perspective, this industry is really young in the United States: In Europe, the average household spends around $800 on their home coffee machine, while we spend an average of $80 in the US — obviously, there is significant room for growth and a big part of that growth is education. One of the most common refrains we hear from customers is that they want simple and concrete information, they’re confused by all the options, which is the best choice, etc. What these people are looking for is honesty, facts, advice and candid experience.

And that’s what we give them. But that’s not always perceived as a positive move in our industry.

For a long time, there has been a culture of limited information, building sales at the expense of support and of attempting to stranglehold supply in order to control the availability of specific machines in the marketplace. What this means for customers, at the end of the day, is that instead of being able to select the best machine for them and be relatively assured that said machine has longevity, reliable build quality and a service and support story that means they can keep this arguably high priced appliance around for awhile, they’re offered limited options from the beginning, and once they’ve purchased they have to contend with the business practices of the only company who supplies it because they’re the only game in town. This style of business supports mediocrity, allows it to flourish and, in the end, is not sustainable. It says that, rather than improve the business to compete on a variety of fronts, the only way it can compete is to be the exclusive supplier of something. So if your item is what someone wants, specifically, they have no choice but to deal with you. Sure, there are a lot of different business models out there, but this style is ignorantly disrespectful to the customer’s needs at best and downright anti-competitive at worst.

But it’s not just the home espresso industry that this applies to; this type of behavior goes on all over the business world and it has contributed to a growing clamor of distrust between buyer and seller. Things are made cheaply to maximize margins, organizations manage around customer dissatisfaction instead of working to eliminate it where possible and they focus on bringing in new customers more than keeping their current customers satisfied. What this breeds is a lack of accountability on both sides of the situation — and that results in a lot of frustration for everyone involved.

Ultimately, it’s about being more responsible and balanced in all that we do — and none of the players in the equation are exempt. Business patterns, supply chain models and how individuals approach buying things are slowly evolving to reflect the requirements of a changing world, and what we’re experiencing right now is the flux that future generations will look back on as the bad old days.

Seattle Coffee Gear is responsible for providing good information to potential customers, communicating recommendations and suggestions as heard from customers or based on our own experiences back to the manufacturers so that the build quality and component longevity (ideally) improves, supporting customers after they’ve purchased by helping them get the most out of their machine through education and repair and to make sure that, whenever we sell a machine, it’s in good faith that we were able to match a customer’s needs with the best available machine for them. Sure, there’s always room for improvement and we make mistakes — after all, we are a composite of several humans that are far from perfect — but this is our ideal, what we strive for and why our company exists.

We are lucky enough to work with other suppliers and retailers in this business that also ascribe to this perspective, and the industry, as a whole, is evolving to one based on respect for the customer and not just their pocketbook. Thankfully, there is a swelling movement toward customer education, accountable support, improving build quality and offering customers the choice and unbiased advice in order for them to engage in the purchase contract wholeheartedly.

Yeah, there are holdouts — there always are — and they’ll either change with the times or disappear in them.

It can certainly be a really convenient option for those that are great with planning ahead, especially because you can setup a regular delivery of your favorite types of capsules so, theoretically, you’d never be out. And the way that Nespresso has structured their product and pricing reflects the fact that, when you buy a machine from them, you are starting a long term relationship, not just engaging in a quick n’ dirty one night stand.

So it’s no surprise that Nespresso is reacting with a little bit of attitude to the recent news of a second large company (this time, it’s Sara Lee) in the process of producing capsules that will be compatible with the Nespresso machines to directly compete with them. Last year, another company (Casino Guichard-Perrachon) announced it would introduce capsules made with coffee from the Ethical Coffee Company. Nespresso says it has over 1,700 patents covering the capsules and the way in which they interact with their machines, stating that they will “defend our intellectual property vigorously”.

We think competition does benefit the customer at the end of the day, so maybe two companies coming after their business will result in Nespresso changing up their game a bit. In our opinion, if they widened their capsule distribution to include their authorized retailers, that would be an excellent benefit for everyone involved.

Over a year later, the BBC1 show Bang Goes the Theory took the idea of turning coffee into a more explicit form of fuel by converting a 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco to use coffee as it test drives 210 miles from Manchester to London. Dubbed the ‘carpuccino,’ the project was taken on to accentuate the importance of experimenting with alternative energy. The catch, however, is the fact that the cost of the trip is between 25 – 50 times that what it would cost if petrol was used instead of coffee. Depending on coffee quality, the cost of the trip could be anywhere between about $1400 and $2800, compared to about $55 for a journey fueled by gas.

So, obviously, this may be a fun idea, but really not a great solution. Add to that the recent assessment by the International Coffee Organization that climate change has begun to severely impact the coffee growing regions around the world — which is contributing to the noticeable increase in the cost of coffee — and the idea of using java to power our favorite transport, digs and gadgets is even more ludicrous. But, we won’t slight them for trying — even if it was ultimately just a publicity stunt.

In this video, he talked with us about roast trends in the US by region, how farmers react to different industry factors and gave us some insight into how coffee grown at different elevations have different flavors and acidity.

Sal Bednarz, owner of the Actual Cafe near Golden Gate Park has decided to try this social experiment in an effort to spur his neighborhood customers to get to know each other a little bit better. He founded the cafe to create more of a meeting/social space for his community and wants to try this out to see how folks respond. Since it’s not inspired by trying to move customers through and keeping seats free (like what caused a number of NYC-area cafes to outlaw laptops during certain hours last year), it will be interesting to see if this does influence folks into talking to each other more, engaging and taking back the space from those using the cafe as an office outside of the office.

If you’re in the area and have a chance to check it out or participate in Bednarz ‘experiment,’ please comment and let us know your thoughts!

We may try to buy coffee that we know has a socially conscious providence or we may elect to do business with companies that are trying to create more equality throughout the entire coffee production cycle, from tree to cup. Another way we can contribute is to engage in microloans — giving money to an international entrepreneur through an organization such as Kiva, because $25 really can go a lot further in some parts of the world. These loans are mostly paid back to the lending organization and then you can choose to take your money back or to roll it into another microloan to help someone else.

For an example of how such a program can positively affect the coffee agriculture business, check out this great blog article on Kiva that shares the impact of its program on coffee farmers in Costa Rica.