Jon tells us about fair-trade coffee.
"We have four or five different fair trade coffees. Fair trade coffee started in Europe, and branched out in America as Transfair in San Francisco, which is an organization that certifies with the fair trade label that the farmer was paid a fair trade price for the coffee. The coffee markets fluctuate daily, but the farmers get a high, set price for their crop. If the market goes below that, they still get paid the set fair trade price, and if it goes above that, they get a percentage higher.
"Coffee prices are really low right now, so the problerm with coffee quality is that when the prices do fall, farmers are trying to sell as much coffee as they possibly can to make a living. In countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatamala, the farmer is just trying to survive. They’re not as worried about quality when prices go down, just how much they can sell. So fair trade guarantees them a good price, and then they can worry about quality since they're paid a premium. So often fair trade coffee is certified organic. The farmers that get the fair trade certification take a lot of pride in it, so it's a good program. We’ve been involved for about a year and a half, and we were the first in the midwest to have fair trade coffee.
"Most coffees I buy are organic, because once a farmer has gone through the certification process to be an organic grower, they have an opening to the fair trade certification. A lot of the fair trade coffees are both organic and shade-grown. Shade-grown coffee became popular as more people became familiar with the Smithsonian migratory bird label that started being put on coffee five or six years ago. Shade-grown is good because lot of migratory birds from North America winter in Central and South America and find coffee farms a good place to go: it's kind of a deforestation issue.
"A lot of shade-grown coffee is naturally shade-grown and organic. Many farmers are really poor and on high-elevation farms, so they don't have the resources for a lot of fertilizers, so a lot of coffee that’s not officially certified organic is actually grown organically. The certified farmers go through a strict process: it takes three years to get organic coffee. They want to be sure the fertilizer is out of the soil, and it takes three years for a plant to mature to produce berries."
"Our decaffeinated coffee is decaffeinated through a chemical process that opens the cell walls in the bean to release the caffeine. It's a harsh agent, but the benefit is that the bean has to go through the process only once. There are two other processes that could be used. One, a carbon dioxide-water process takes six or eight steps, and you lose a lot of flavor . Then there's a Swiss water process that uses only water, but it takes 12-15 steps, and even more flavor is lost. If you are as worried about quality as we are, and about taste, then you have to have a decaf that tastes good. A lot of people think decaf has to taste bad, but it doesn't: if it's roasted well with a good quality bean, it tastes really good. Decaf drinkers don't want to forsake quality for taste."
