I love Portland, Oregon and I wish I spent more time here.  Any major city can host a festival dedicated solely to craft chocolate, and chocolate education.  But in Oregon, there are so many craft chocolatiers and cacao roasters operating locally, they can fill a convention center.  Dave Cook, owner of the Fire Roasted Coffee Company, and my original coffee roaster of choice when I lived in Canada, was the first to bring to my attention the many similarities between coffee and chocolate.

ChocolateFest is an annual event hosted by the World Forestry Center, and this is its seventh year.  The mission of the WFC is simple: educate and inform people about the world’s forests and trees, and environmental sustainability.  On their campus in Portland’s Washington Park for the first ChocolateFest, they attracted over 1,000 people.  Last year, over 8,000 people.

Even before entering ChocolateFest, guests are provided with education on the cacao tree, fruit, and seed, and its transformation into the chocolate we know and love.Recognized at the Food Network Awards, Portland loves cuisine of any kind, and appreciation of chocolate is no exception. The people came out to sample from local chocolatiers, learn more about chocolate, and buy pounds of it.

Exhibitors used many ways to stand out in the crowd. An exhibitor wouldn’t get by selling chocolate bars alone. It takes a different angle, either a variety of origins, unique packaging, or in this case, something visual. One exhibitor was not providing samples, a huge mistake at this show!
 

A Lesson in Chocolate…

• Types of Beans: Where the beans are grown, as well as how they are formented and roasted, directly affect their quality. Each high-quality variety of cacao beans has its own individual aroma, personality, complexity, subtlety, and character.
• Blending: Some chocolatiers use beans from only one region creating a desirable, distinctive flavor. Others, however, skillfully blend beans which can result in a unique product for their company and an extraordinary taste. Most chocolate today is made from blended cacao beans.
• Cocoa Content: The amount of cocoa in a piece of chocolate candy is one determination of its “quality”. The range is 10-75% with gourmet chocolate hovering around 60% and higher. Dark chocolate has a higher cocoa content and generally tastes more bitter. The remaining percent is sugar. The higher the cocoa rate, the less sweet it is. A typical American milk chocolate candy bar is about 11% cocoa.

The unsung heroes of ChocolateFest. Always smiling...it might be something in the chocolate!

The first person to help me see chocolate in a new light was Dave Cook, owner of the Fire Roasted Coffee Company, and my original coffee roaster of choice when I lived in Canada.

Read Profile: Fire Roasted Coffee Company

Dave had expanded from roasting coffee into also roasting cocoa into chocolate through a new venture, Habitual Chocolate Roasters.  It was a very cool experience for me to learn more about the similarities between coffee and chocolate, the same ideal climate and conditions for growing the coffee cherry as the cocoa bean, and so naturally, the same people bringing this to the world.  With those similarities, also the opportunity for a roaster to differentiate between the commodity chocolate product that we all know and take for granted, and something more akin to gourmet chocolate.

It was Dave who brought to my attention that the Pacific Northwest’s largest chocolate show was in my city of Portland, OR this weekend: ChocolateFest.

The event is hosted by the World Forestry Center, and this will be its seventh year.  The mission of the WFC is simple: educate and inform people about the world’s forests and trees, and environmental sustainability.  On their campus in Portland’s Washington Park for the first ChocolateFest, they attracted over 1,000 people.  Last year, over 8,000 people.  This year, they bring it to their largest venue yet, the Oregon Convention Center.

I’m happy to be there and continue my education in the world of chocolate.  I’ll be looking for similarities with coffee to help me understand the chocolate process better.  And I’ll also eat a stupid amount of chocolate.  If I see the woman from the above picture walking around with that bar, I will probably take it from her.

Read: Cafe Mocha Recipes

Stay tuned!  If you live in the area, check out the show.  Here is some further information:

ChocolateFest 2012
Location: Oregon Convention Center, Exhibit Hall A
777 NE MLK, Jr. Blvd., Portland, OR 97232

Dates: January 20 – 22, 2012

This evening, a good friend sent me a link to Yahoo! Games’ Coffee Rush 2, suggesting I might enjoy it. It’s offered with a 60-minute free demo, just enough time to beat the easy early levels, and start to become really good at it before the trial expires. As a side note, it’s ironic that people accuse casinos of the unlikely act of “letting” you win when you first sit down at a slot machine, so you put in more money and lose it. This seems similar to me for the $7 that Yahoo! charges for software that’s already designed and installed on my computer.

In this game, the villain to the left with a striking resemblance to the Devil has come to your city and crushed all of the small coffee entrepreneurs, replacing them with his chain. What a great concept! First, that the designers would come up with, and second, that we all quietly get the joke. They did everything but name the Devil’s coffee company, Barstucks!

The goal of the game is for you as a quality-oriented small coffee entrepreneur to provide better and more personalized customer service so that you can replace the Devil’s chain locations in the city one by one. As a customer of local coffee roasters, the game resonates with me – no, I didn’t spend $7 on the full version, but I did go to the kitchen and make a cup of Portland Coffee Roasters coffee.

It did make me realize one important thing that the world of local roasters are missing because of their less-prominent locations and budgets: drive-throughs. The coffee market is still heavy on people that want to be served at the wheel, and those people will continue buying mediocre coffee than to find a parking spot and walk inside.

I recently moved to Portland, Oregon.  Before choosing this city as my new home, I visited here on a weekend to make sure I liked it.  I already knew the city loved coffee, and while that certainly turned out to be true, it was beyond my wildest expectations.  If you follow me on Twitter (please follow me on Twitter), you may have noticed that my “coffee walkabout” the day after I arrived was my busiest day of tweeting since I opened my account.  Yes, the caffeine had something to do with it.

Here is just a flavor of what I ran into that day…

Embarrassingly enough, my coffee adventure started in the hotel room.  Hey, it’s not always easy to get this body moving.

From my hotel room, I made the shortest walk to a cafe across the street called Kobos Coffee, a Portland-bred roaster with a few locations and roastery in the city.  I had the Black and White Blend at their SW Market location, and sat down outside their store to enjoy it and consider how the rest of the day would go.  I decided to cross the downtown core of Portland to make my way to one of Stumptown‘s locations – by the end of that walk, I figured I would need another.

For some, Stumptown Coffee Roasters is THE name of coffee in Portland, due to their signature ambiance, appeal with local residents, but also consistency in their product and service for the numerous locations that they’ve opened.  I was also intrigued by their Direct Trade program, where the company’s purchasers meet directly with the coffee farmers to ensure quality and consistent growing practices.  This seems the natural evolution of Fair Trade, as long as you’re big enough to afford the direct sourcing.  Stumptown is one of a handful of roasters in the country that can afford it.

I would hit a second Stumptown location in downtown Portland before the end of the day.

My next stop was to hit a Portland staple, an actual attraction, Powell’s Used Book Store, the largest used book store in the country.  Don’t laugh, for a city that loves reading (hey, it’s one way to pass the time with all the rain), it’s a natural attraction.  And for another, it is truly a giant book store.  I suggest checking it out when you’re in Portland, but have a genre of book in mind, it’s way too big for browsing.  Located inside is World Cup Roasters, where I bought a 12oz cup of their Drip Coffee.

From there, I ventured back towards the downtown core.  By this point, I had sat down to enjoy two of my four coffees and walked with the other two.  One was served by pump container so hard to say how it was prepared.  Two were served by French Press, and the last was served by Drip Brew.  You know you’re in a city that loves coffee when they even tell you on their menu how it was brewed.

If you live on the west coast, you’d probably wonder why I would stop for a coffee at Peet’s.  After all, with as many homebred microroasters as Portland has to offer, why go for the chain?  That’s because I’m not from the west coast.  The Major Dickason blend from Peet’s was one of the first coffees that made me realize how good coffee is supposed to be.  I’ve gone on to different coffees from there, but never forgot how much that particular blend opened my eyes (and tastebuds).  Since I had never seen a Peet’s outlet for myself, I had to stop and get one.  This was my first coffee of the day that I confess I didn’t actually want.  I needed a break, but couldn’t turned down a fresh-brewed Major Dickason coffee.

I knew I was heading for a major caffeine crash at some dreaded later point in the day.  In the meantime though, I was full of energy.  Enough that I walked through downtown Portland to the Willamette River and crossed it to check out the south side of the city.  With all the energy I had, I would’ve swam across the river if it was warmer out.

My last stop of the day was at Coava Coffee Roasters, a roaster I would’ve never found had I not stumbled upon it, and one that you will hear much about in the blog posts to come.  It was the second time that a coffee was prepared for me by pourover (the first time being at Planet Bean in Guelph, Ontario, Canada), and the first time that day.  I sat down and enjoyed my coffee there until a wedding reception arrived to take over the floor space.  With all the coffee I’d drank, I couldn’t be sure if I was hallucinating the whole thing.

You’ll be reading alot about Portland, Oregon in the months to come, and the amazing and unique coffee it has to offer.  It is a great city that loves their coffee, and offers their coffee lovers many options and venues to choose from.  Forget Seattle, this is the capital of the coffee world!

JP brought to my attention on Twitter a new medical study out of the University of Guelph, looking at the effects of a combination of fast food and coffee on the human body.  The U of G is located in Ontario, Canada, and the news of their study has been making the international rounds this week.

• Follow Make Good Coffee on Twitter
• Read the University of Guelph study

Rest assured you’ll get a layman’s medical explanation of the study from me, so here goes…

There are two kinds of naturally occurring fats…saturated and non-saturated.  There are health benefits to including non-saturated fats in your diet, like those found in nuts.  But, saturated fats are nasty and harder for the body to process.  Saturated fat has been linked to heart disease, cholesterol levels, and everything else that makes good tasting food bad.  The only thing worse are trans-fats, which are man-made and very difficult for the body to process.

One of the known problems with saturated fats is that when you eat them, it makes it more difficult for the body to remove sugar content from your blood.  After a high-fat meal, a person’s blood-sugar level can potentially jump “to levels similar to those of people at risk for diabetes”.  Aside from the extra work that you need to do to burn the fat that your body stores, this increased blood-sugar level leads to even more problems.

The new study finds that for as difficult as it is for the body to reduce blood-sugar after we ingest a high-fat meal, that process is even more difficult when coffee is consumed.  This applies even hours after the meal.  My thoughts and questions…

- Another great argument not to drink fast-food coffee.  When you stop at the McDonald’s drive-thru, you’re probably getting more than just a cup of their coffee.  But surprisingly, the Egg McMuffin has only 5 grams of saturated fat compared to 13 grams of saturated fat in the Tim Horton’s Breakfast Sandwich.

- Stop eating fast-food.  I’m not happy to hear that there are detrimental effects to drinking coffee, but my first thought is that it makes something bad that much worse.  Cut out the saturated fat so you can properly enjoy a coffee.  We should be limiting our intake of saturated fat anyway.

- The study isn’t clear about whether it’s the caffeine or the coffee that’s the problem.  I’m asking myself this question because if an energy drink cocktail is just as bad, then I think the real lesson is don’t try to artificially alert yourself while you’re eating saturated fats.  The caffeine will offset the sluggishness of a big fatty meal, but with risk to your good health.

I used to follow medical studies related to coffee but I often found them inconclusive or even contradictory with each other.  The last I wrote on coffee and medicine was almost a year ago.

• Read: Coffee and Migraines

It’s not that I don’t take these studies seriously, it’s just hard to consider a single study credible.  I like to hear it from more than once source.  But having said that, the obesity epidemic is as widely reported as ever…maybe this latest study sheds some light, considering as a society how much coffee we drink and fast food we eat.

We might be in for longer waits at Starbucks in the months to come.  According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks management is advising baristas at all locations to slow down and not try servicing people so quickly.


The feedback from customers to the Seattle-based company was that they have reduced the fine art of being a barista to a mechanized process that might as well be coffee from a push-button machine.

In response, Starbucks tested changes at pilot locations and after positive feedback, have decided to make the new rules effective for all locations by the month of November.  What are the new rules?…

- Baristas cannot make more than two drinks at once, and can only start making a second drink as they are wrapping up making the first.
- A whole pot of milk cannot be steamed at once anymore to save time in making several froth coffees in a row.  Milk must be steamed individually for each drink.
- The espresso machine can only be used to make one drink at a time.

Starbucks is going for a more “handcrafted” experience, as well as to allow baristas to connect with their customers.  It’s tough to comment on because while it’s a more romantic experience to know that a trained barista is focusing on my drink and my drink only, I don’t know that it will translate to a better drink in the cup.  And as far as attachment with customers, I’m only a sample of one but I don’t need a love connection with my barista.  Just take my $5 and give me my cup of coffee.  That might sound harsh but in a cafe that already has the longest wait time of them all, wait times are about to get longer with these changes.

Earlier in the year, a consumer study was released by Market Force Information, a “worldwide leader in customer intelligence solutions”.  2,000 people were surveyed.  One focus was the coffee (and tea) sector and here’s what it had to say:

- Of 2,000 respondents, 82% of them said they drink coffee.  Most cited the bigger “mass” brands like Folgers as their regular choice.

- But of those who regularly drink coffee from the bigger brands, specialty coffee enticed the majority (52%) to try a new brand that they hadn’t tried before.

- The #1 new brand tried by consumers was Starbucks.  They received approximately twice as many mentions as the #2 brand, Dunkin Donuts.


What’s it all mean?  For the record “specialty coffee” refers to any premium or gourmet coffee identified by and sourced from a specific source and climate.  For my own purposes, it’s any coffee of quality that isn’t one from one of the big grocery retail names.

I might drink my coffee black, but I drank it “double-double” for most of my life.  I switched to black so I could appreciate subtle differences in the specialty coffees of different regions, but even in the content you’ll find across this website, I won’t admonish the non-purists who add cream or sugar to their coffee.  In fact, I still encourage it if that’s how you best enjoy a coffee.

When it comes to specialty coffees, there’s an almost limitless number of varieties of how coffee can be enjoyed.  If it only came in black, there would probably be half as many people drinking it.  However, if coffee can become AN ingredient in a more complex or “specialty” drink, then I am happy for coffee to be able to play that part.  Coffee purists should relaaaax!  However people choose to enjoy their coffee is not only their business but a great opportunity to experiment.

And it’s these specialty coffees that have brought more coffee drinkers to the table.  I wouldn’t personally buy a specialty coffee from Dunkin Donuts because they can’t do it right.  They’re introducing them simply to compete, not because they have a trained barista that knows how to properly prepare one.  If coffee was only available in black, I might never have come to enjoy it so much…but I got there gradually.

Learn more about specialty coffees and what makes them great at Peet’s Coffee and Tea and Starbucks Store.  These two sites have a lot of information and coffee expertise.

Thanks to Jacques for sending this in.

I remember when Jolt Cola first came out.  The concern was that we were going to end up with younger and younger caffeine addicts.  Sure, coffee doesn’t have a minimum drinking age but it’s simply not as accessible to children as soda.  When caffeine equivalent to a cup of coffee was put into a soda on store shelves, the schools would be filled with tazmanian devils.


Then came Red Bull, just as accessible as Jolt but slightly more dangerous because the period of consumption is shorter.  Now you get all the same effect compressed into a smaller drink.  Heck, it’s not even carbonated so it doesn’t take as long as Jolt to drink.  To be sure these “energy drinks” are more about the affect than flavor, where is Jolt?  I know it’s still around (barely), but Red Bull and the knock-offs all but kicked it the back of the shelf.

And now, David Edwards, professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard University (yeah, I checked, he’s still there – I was expecting “former professor”) has designed a product called LeWhif.  Originally designed so people could inhale the flavor of chocolate without the calories, its second generation version promises the “kick of coffee without the cup”.

Now while you drink your coffee, your toddlers can enjoy the same high without the hot bitter beverage. Look at the guy in the grey jacket on the far left, even he knows there's something wrong with this.

How does it work?  Users place one end of the stick, which is about the size of a lipstick tube, to their lips then inhale gently.  “Whiffers” intake about 100 milligrams of caffeine which is equivalent to a small cup of espresso and less than a single calorie per Whif.

Remember where you were when I predicted this will be a huge problem in the public school system!

…22 gallons of coffee per year (US stats). This is according to a marketing company that paid to have the research done covering the year 2000 which I decided shouldn’t be markedly different in coffee consumption from today.

The first thing I asked myself was how I compared to the average person. Not the average coffee drinker, but the average person. I’m down to 4-5 cups of coffee per day (mugs of coffee, not metric cups). I make 8-9 metric cups per day and there are four of those in a liter.

So if I drink 2 liters of coffee per day, then I drink 730 liters of coffee in a year, or 193 gallons. This shouldn’t be too far from the truth. After all, I really drink 2.25 liters of coffee per day if I make 9 cups, but I rounded down. And that’s how much coffee I make just to take on the challenges of a regular day. On days where I didn’t get enough sleep the night before or just feel like having an extra coffee, it’s probably more.

So the average person drinks 22 gallons of coffee per year, and I drink 193 gallons. In fact, I’m probably pushing 200. That’s huge.  I suppose I should be very interested in the coffee-health studies I usually ignore.

Now, I’m interested in how much coffee is consumed by the average coffee drinker. That would probably be a more reasonable comparison for me. All I know by this is that I drink almost ten times as much coffee as the average person!

I learned today that Colombia’s environmental agency IDEAM is predicting unseasonably scorching hot weather to take Colombia through February and into March.  When temperatures lighten up in April, they’ll be followed by rain showers, but even those will be below the average for this time of year.  This announcement comes in the wake of ongoing forest fires at a high and major rivers at a low.

It got me thinking about an investment book I once read that said if there is unseasonably high rain in Brazil, buy shares of Starbucks.  See why?  If not, it’s good to learn about the coffee investment and I know I needed the refresher.

Coffee trades as a commodity on the New York Board of Trade.  It trades alongside other commodities like oil, sugar, cocoa, metals, etc.  When you invest in coffee as a commodity, you are buying what’s called a futures contract, a standard contract to buy or sell a certain amount of coffee at a specific future date for a specific price.  The coffee in question is green, unroasted coffee since the idea before a commodities market is that the commodities are unprocessed for the most part.  Once you roast coffee, you’re processing it on its way to the retail market and into the cupboards of coffee drinkers everywhere.

There are investors who see coffee investment plays and the price of a futures contract is generally used by coffee exporters to determine the price of coffee.  There are some generally accepted standards for what coffees can go for a premium over the commodity price and what coffees can go for a discount.  However, the one thing that generally doesn’t change is what we consumers pay for coffee.  It would be a crazy world if you didn’t know the price of your cup of brewed coffee or pound of whole bean coffee until you got to the cashier and he needed to check the commodities exchange for the latest price.  What that means is that the buck stops at the consumer.  Larger retailers can flex their muscle and insist on standard or fairly standard prices so that they don’t have to deal with the price fluctuations.

But at some point, somebody between the exporter in the coffee-producing country and the retailer that sells the coffee to consumers has to deal with these fluctuations.  It the commodity price jumps, you and I pay the same for our coffee but people in the chain make less money for themselves.  If the commodity price drops, you and I still pay the same but people in the chain make more money for themselves.

So if it’s raining unseasonably in Brazil, the world’s largest producer of coffee, then coffee farmers will have more coffee to harvest than what was estimated.  This will increase the supply of coffee to the world, so that if demand for coffee stays the same, the commodity price of coffee will drop.  Supply high, demand same, price drops – if supply drops then there is less of that thing and therefore it fetches a higher price.  So in our example, the world’s largest coffee retailer Starbucks will pay less for the coffee they buy but charge us the same for the coffee that we buy from them.  That means when it’s raining unseasonably in Brazil, Starbucks will make more money that year and you should invest in them before they do so you can share in the profits as a shareholder.

So all of this came to mind today when I learned about the heat wave about to continue in Colombia.  Colombia is now the world’s third largest producer of coffee after Vietnam, and a large supplier.  This weather news does not bode well for Colombia’s coffee crops and consequently, the supply of coffee to the world.  If Brazil can’t pick up the slack, there will be a lower supply of coffee in the world and provided demand stays the same, an increase in coffee prices.

I went to the Intercontinental Exchange, which lists commodity trade charts.  For news likely unrelated to what’s going on in Colombia, the price of coffee has been dropping all day…a good time to buy a contract in light of the news out of Colombia?  It will take a finer investment mind than me to answer that question, but I’m thinking of dabbling in the commodities market for the first time in my life.