Coffee, SEO, Rice-washing, U.S. Supreme Court being weird Pt. 2
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And now…
Coffee news!
The International Coffee Organization (ICO) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) came out with the ‘Sustainability & resilience of the coffee global value chain: towards a coffee investment vehicle’ report aimed at supporting millions of coffee farmers, attempting to remedy the issue that even good coffee certifications aren’t always getting that money back to the farmers. It proposes a fund to be created ranging from $256.2M to $1.04B annually.
On Monday, June 17th, the US Supreme Court backed Starbucks with their anti-union firing in Memphis.
The high court also overturned the Chevron doctrine, dealing a major blow to federal regulators and giving a win to conservatives and business interests; rejected a Purdue Pharma settlement that would have provided billions to address the nation’s opioid crisis; allowed cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors; narrowed a federal obstruction charge that hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants, as well as former President Donald Trump, were charged with; and blocked the Environmental Protection Agency’s "good neighbor" rule aimed at curtailing air pollution.1
Strongly consider allowing homeless people to stay in your coffee shop in the daytime, get free water/drip coffee/etc., if you have the space and coffee to do so. Coffee shops are one of the few refuges around the country during the daytime, as even in NYC Library funding isn’t guaranteed, and shelters often only open after 7pm or so. If you get some free books they’ll have something to do while they hang out.
Yemeni coffee is having some help from the International Labour Organization (ILO) via a new program aimed at revitalizing coffee cultivation and production. The article mentions qat as a competitor; qat [or kaat] is a leaf that is chewed similarly to tobacco or the coca leaf [cocaine] and sold primarily in Yemen. Coffee allows export power and foreign value to help income in Yemen. This helps add stability.
Atomo, the beanless coffee company, has made “Remix”, a 50% beanless coffee and 50% arabica coffee blend. Their beanless coffee is a mix of “upcycled” ingredients [a word I wouldn’t necessarily prefer in food] like seeds, pea protein, guava, etc., and isn’t that bad, despite tasting almost identically to sawdust. So this is probably pretty good.
Sproud, a pea milk company, signed a deal with Joe & The Juice’s 250 European stores last year and is seeking investment. Might be time to get pea milk in your coffee shop before it’s cool.
I think I talked about this before, but a report from Germany has the amount of money going to each part of the coffee farm-to-cup pipeline and it shows that farmers are getting less than their fair share.
And then, the amount of net profit [money after all your costs are paid] for each part of the process:
Notice the disparity between the farmers’ step [red] and the retail amounts [blue].
The World of Coffee Copenhagen put on the Copenhagen World Coffee Championships this week, including the World Latte Art Championship, the World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship, the World Coffee Roasting Championship, and the Cezve/Ibrik Championship.
PacSun created a t-shirt with Caffe de Matini’s sidewalk storefront picture on it without permission.
Rice washing in a rice-eating world
Rice washing is a thing people(?) are doing with cocktails to absorb some of the volatile compounds and make your drink smoother. It also adds a nice starchy flavor, yum!
I tried it with coffee.
In this experiment, I made a cup of coffee via the Peet’s Chemex method, ~27g ground coffee and ~400g total weight of coffee-in-cup, and then split the coffee into two mugs.
Rice washing enters—I took a coffee scoop-ful of unwashed rice and stirred it into the experimental mug for about 1 minute. I also stirred the control mug with an identical utensil to control for temperature and aeration changes impacting the flavor.
I then filtered out the rice.2
Tasting them side by side, I tasted the control first to get an idea of how it changes with the addition of rice.
It was everything except nutty and chocolately. Fruity, good-bitter, a little tannins, a nice finish. A basic specialty-ish coffee, I’d say. I got the coffee from Qahwah House, as well as the mug in the above picture. It came included!
COMPARISON TIME (of the Barista’s Rice Washing technique that is used for cocktails and is now for coffee Rice Washing SEO rice washing)
The coffees that I try I generally like to categorize thusly: I use 6 or so descriptors, and for most coffees it’s enough to get a good idea of what the coffee is like. I could say “eating a Starbucks coffee bean” and you’d know it was “Bitter, burnt flavors” and nothing else. Whereas an Ethiopian would generally be very fruity/acidic and maybe have tannins and finish. You could separate fruity and acidic into two categories, but for my purposes I didn’t want to bog you down with a lengthy explanation about how I see the differences.
There’s also “paper-y” in between “Bitter, burnt flavors” and “Tannin-y”, but the program wouldn’t let me export more than once without paying. Ew.
Importantly, I consider “bitter, burnt” flavors here as a positive thing, whereas with a not-so-good coffee this would be a negative attribute. This categorization is for mid-level coffees, especially.
The control coffee is the first row, the rice-washed the second.
I found that when I rice washed the coffee, the tannins went a little down, and the fruit and acidic flavors went aside to let the bitter, burnt flavors shine. I liked it more as I have a preference away from punchy, straightforward acidity.
However, I didn’t stop there!
I mixed the two together after I got tired of sipping plain coffee, and voila! A breakthrough! There is a starchy taste that shines through when mixing them together. So, this means that I should do a half coffee-scoop of rice for 30 seconds [wait, isn’t that halfing it twice?]. Okay, a half coffee-scoop for 60 seconds.
I liked the starchy flavor as it increased the paper-y flavors coming through from the coffee, and maintained the bittery, paper-y-ness of the coffee. I thought I enjoyed the mixture better than either the control or the experimental cups.
Don’t waste the rice
You can still use the coffee stained rice! If you make it with a normal pot of rice, you probably won’t taste the coffee much.
Why not have it as a rice side to a chopped coffee and brown sugar ham?
Why not make a coffee horchata?
Why not a coffee rice face mask or scrub?
This is not a no-waste newsletter, but certainly at scale you shouldn’t be throwing away huge quantities of anything.
For bartenders, check out this write-up on rice washing for negronis.
Thanks for tuning in!
Enjoy your coffee!
Did you think I was going to take a picture of the coffee? It looks like coffee! It’s a little more cloudy with the rice, but my mugs are not see-through as the budget for this newsletter ran out before I could request a set of hand-blown glass. Ah well.