Monday, July 6, 2009

Indonesia moves to raise coffee output

Indonesia has the second largest area of coffee plantations in the world but due to low yields it only ends up as the fifth largest producer after Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, and India, a researcher said.

Surip Mawardi, a researcher from the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI), said last week that Indonesia’s coffee plantation area totaled 1.3 million hectares but its production was still less than 700 kilograms per hectare per year.

“It’s very low compared to Vietnam’s annual production of 1,540 kilograms per hectare, Colombia’s 1,220 kilograms, and Brazil’s 1,000 kilograms.

“That’s why Vietnam is up from fifth largest producer to second largest, while Indonesia is down to fifth from third largest producer in the world,” he said.

Surip was speaking to the press after addressing a seminar on Indonesian coffee development, which was organized by PT. Nestle Indonesia, the subsidiary of Nestle S.A. the world’s leading producer of food and beverages.

Latest Agriculture Ministry data shows that Brazil, with a total area under coffee plantations of 2.37 million hectares has a total production of 2.02 million tons per year, Colombia with 560,000 hectares produces 744,000 tons per year, Vietnam with 491,800 hectares produces 1.05 million tons per year, while India with 328,000 hectares has an annual production of 507,000 tons.

“It’s because these countries adopted best farming practices with advanced agricultural technology. But we in Indonesia are yet to apply such technology to all of our coffee farmers.

“Most of our farmers are not yet aware of the importance of having good seedlings for their plantations,” he noted.

To address the problem, Achmad Manggabarani, the ministry’s director general of plantations, said in the same seminar that the government was pursuing efforts to promote the use of so-called Somatic Embryogenesis (SE) techniques among Indonesian coffee farmers and urged them to use plantlets and seedlings developed this way.

He said that the application of the SE technique had been pursued in cooperation with ICCRI, a state-owned agricultural research institute under the ministry of agriculture, and Nestle Indonesia — the largest buyers of coffee beans in Indonesia, with total annual purchases of about 70,000 tons of coffee per year, mostly from plantations in Sumatra.

Nestle claims to be the first corporation in the world using SE techniques in coffee plantations.
The Nestle research and development center in Tours in France, has conducted a mapping of Indonesia’s coffee trees and had identified 33 elite types, of which six of the best are being evaluated.

The chosen elite plantlets, which will be used to produce coffee seedlings, will be multiplied using SE technique that can produce up to 22 million plantlets per year.

The SE project is expected improve the coffee farmers’ competitive advantage in the international market by helping them to grow the best strains of coffee plantlets.

“This year we’ve targeted that our farmers in Sumatra and Java will grow about one million of such seedlings.

“Until now we’ve managed to secure the planting of 500,000 seedlings. Next year we target the planting of four million seedlings, and then in 2011 six million seedlings,” Achmad said.

With every hectare being able to accommodate 1,300 seedlings, the area that had been planted with the new seedlings has now reached about 385 hectares.

He said that the government was serious in developing coffee plantations as coffee was one of the top commodities in the country.

Employing 2.3 million people across the archipelago, the coffee plantation sector contribution to foreign exchange has been increasing during the last four years from US$504.4 million in 2005, to $588.50 million in 2006, to $636.42 millions or 11.66 percent of total agricultural exports in 2007, to $991.46 million or 24 percent of total agricultural exports in 2008.

“The SE technique has been also successfully applied to our cocoa plantations. Such techniques can increase the coffee yield by more than 100 percent from the current yield of less than 700 kilograms per hectare per year.

“By applying this, we hope we can double our coffee production and income in the next five years,” he said.

This year we’ve targeted that our farmers in Sumatra and Java will grow about one million of such seedlings.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/07/06/ri-moves-raise-coffee-output.html

Posted by Fresh Roaster at 17:47:24 | Permalink | No Comments »

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Mobile coffee, the wave of the future?

With summer in full swing, now is the perfect time to go camping. When I was younger, it was a tradition in my family to go find a spot in the middle of nowhere, try desperately to set up a tent before it rains, and eat charred food that even squirrels wouldn’t touch. Then in the morning we would rise from our piles of nylon and sit around the campfire sipping coffee that had the consistency of tar. Now that I’ve reached the age where I’m ready to take my family into the woods against their wishes, I feel a duty to give our camping trips a bit more class. Imagine waking up to the delicious taste of a cappuccino instead of drinking a substance you could use to patch tires. My friends, I introduce the Handpresso.

Espresso in an instant

(Credit: Handpresso SARL)

While it may seem like another needless gadget to a coffee lover, the Handpresso is an answered prayer. With its size, portability, and ease of use, you can literally get your caffeine fix anywhere you go. Going on a picnic? Have a mocha! Sitting in your cubicle? How about an americano? Car broken down on the side of the road? Why not sip on a latte? All you need is hot water and one of the E.S.E pods, or Easy Serving Espresso, which are relatively easy to find in your local grocery store. Use the pump and build up pressure, pour in hot water into the 50 milliliter reservoir, and with the push of a button you’re ready to partake in some delicious java.

The only downside to the Handpresso is the price. While the company is selling convenience and the ability to take your coffee literally anywhere, the fairly steep price of $150 may convince a few people to keep going to Starbucks. However, if you’re desperate to sit at the Grand Canyon sipping on espresso and nibbling on biscotti, this might be the ideal Christmas gift.

Source:
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13553_1-9955598-32.html

Posted by Fresh Roaster at 22:27:49 | Permalink | No Comments »

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Gas pumps that smell like coffee

It’s not enough to have your customers’ eyes and ears–now you need to attract their noses too. This month, 100 gas stations in California will be trying technology that wafts coffee aroma at the pump in a bid to tempt its pay-and-go customers into the store for java.

Clear Channel (Charts), meanwhile, is experimenting with scented billboards. USA Today and the Wall Street Journal are set to offer “rub and sniff” newspaper ads. And some retailers are also preparing products with added smell.

Wal-Mart (Charts) is rolling out experimental DVDs with “smell-o-vision,” electronic scent wafers that release the odor of a burning building, say, or a freshly fired gun, at precisely timed moments during the movie.

World’s 11 coolest products

Until recently, scent-based ads were rarely used outside the fragrance and cosmetics industry. But now Madison Avenue has figured out that it can use smell to distract consumers from other media.

Scent marketing gives companies “a competitive advantage over ads on the Internet,” says Arthur Sherwood, managing partner at sensory marketing consultancy Scent ID. “It’s something the Internet can’t do.”

Ad companies plan to spend as much as $80 million this year on scent marketing; the three-year-old Scent Marketing Institute estimates that number will reach more than $500 million by 2016.

Depending on consumer reaction, of course, this could turn out to be a short-lived–and expensive–fad. In December, San Francisco bus shelters were equipped with chocolate chip cookie-fragranced strips for a “Got Milk?” campaign. Days later, transit authorities tore down the strips after commuters complained that they were triggering allergic reactions.

Lesson learned, says the industry: Enclosed areas should be avoided.

Ed. I know this article doesn’t mention coffee in detail but I posted it anyhow because coffee scented gas pumps are a very interesting concept.

Source:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/04/01/8403354/index.htm?section=money_latest

Posted by Fresh Roaster at 18:52:17 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Friday, November 2, 2007

Coffee condoms!?!

A U.S.-based charity is hoping to fight the spread of AIDS with a unique product that appeals to coffee mania in the country that claims to have invented the drink: java-scented condoms for Ethiopia.

art.ethiopia.ap.jpg

An Ethiopian displays a coffee-scented condom Wednesday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Washington D.C.-based charity DKT International says the novelty product addresses a serious issue.

Ethiopia has an AIDS rate of 2.1 percent, and in the capital Addis Ababa it is more than 7 percent, according to government estimates.

Andrew Piller, director of DKT’s local chapter, said the aim of the coffee condoms was not to make money, but to make condom-users more comfortable.

DKT has noted some users’ complaints about the latex scent of plain condoms, and has also tried to market condoms in other parts of the world tailored to local tastes, including those scented with the infamously stinky durian fruit in Indonesia and sweet-corn fragranced condoms in China.

In Ethiopia, consumers purchased some 300,000 coffee condoms during one week in September, the month the product was introduced here.

“Everybody likes the flavor of coffee,” says a DKT spokeswoman, Emebet Abu. The condoms sell in packs of three for 1 birr, or about 11 cents — about half the price of a cup of coffee in one of Addis Ababa’s many sidewalk cafes, and much cheaper than unsubsidized condoms.

Source:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/11/02/ethiopia.condoms.ap/index.html?section=cnn_latest

Posted by Fresh Roaster at 16:55:07 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Guess where this coffee comes from

How much would you pay for a cup of liquid cat dung?   Quite a lot, if some highly discerning coffee drinkers are anything to go by.
You won’t find kopi luwak at your local coffee shop

On the lush, volcanic slopes of the Indonesian archipelago, villagers “harvest” kopi luwak.

The beans used for the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee have already been munched by cat-like palm civets, and now they are plucked from the dung to be dried and roasted.

Retailing in North America and Europe for up to $600 a kg, kopi luwak, literally “civet coffee” in Indonesian, is not a brew for the faint hearted.

Less than 230kg of it is estimated to be produced a year on the islands of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, and war and disease are making it even harder to find.

 

   

“I first read about it in 1980 but didn’t manage to get my

 

hands on any until 1993,” says Michael Beech of Raven’s Brew

 

Coffee Inc.

Until last year, when supplies began to dry up, it

 

was the main supplier of kopi luwak in the United States.

 

   

The kopi luwak bean comes from
only three Indonesian islands

His clients have ranged from ordinary java junkies to comedy actor John Cleese of Monty Python fame, he says.

The firm has a backlog of 300 kopi luwak orders to fill at $75 for 114 grams. 

“To be honest, you can’t get $75 worth of quality in any coffee. You are really paying for the experience,” says Beech.

 

  

Fussy eater

The brew has become so rare that a newly published book on

 

coffee in Indonesia, “A cup of Java,” relegates it to legend.

 

“We have failed to find any coffee-seller who admits to

 

actually selling kopi luwak from the faeces of the civet cat,”

 

write authors Gabriella Teggia and Mark Hanusz.

 

To many Indonesians, the term kopi luwak has come to mean

 

simply the beans which the civet - a notoriously fussy eater

 

which selects only the ripest coffee cherries - would choose.

 

The war in Aceh province made
kopi luwak even more rare

“We just use the name for branding, but we don’t trade in it,” says Jeffrey Susanto, whose family runs the Kopi Luwak string of gourmet coffee shops in Jakarta.

 

The rarity of kopi luwak is confirmed by Nugroho Bintang Satrio, the Central Java chief of the Indonesian Coffee

 

Exporters Association.

 

  

“Only a tiny portion of small-holders are left who collect it,” he said, adding that traders buy it at about 11,000 rupiah ($1.30) a kilo, about twice the price of ordinary robusta.

 

   

Deadly harvest

In the last year, a government offensive against rebels in

 

rugged Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra has also

 

cut into supply. “Farmers get killed if they harvest the coffee

 

too far into the bush,” said one trader.

 

Then there is the bad press caused by the deadly flu-like

 

SARS virus.

Civets, which are not cats but are related to mongooses, have been slaughtered in their thousands in China and imports banned from many Western countries for fear they carry SARS.

 

“Even if SARS was associated with the coffee itself, by the

 

time it’s collected and washed there is a very long period that

 

has elapsed,” says Massimo Marcone, a food scientist at the

 

University of Guelph in Canada, who has carried out extensive

 

tests on kopi luwak and deemed it safe.

 

Producers are working on an
elephant poop variety

Yet, despite all that, some still harbour doubts.

 

   

“Sumatra, in the popular imagination anyway, is just too close to China and I’m just wary of the whole SARS thing,” says Beech, adding that Raven’s Brew may cease to offer kopi luwak.

 

   

“We are working on an elephant poop coffee,” he says with a chuckle, explaining a plan he vows is serious.

The idea is to feed coffee to tuskers at an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka and sell the product, farming the proceeds back into the orphanage.

 

   

“It will be a do-gooder coffee, pooped out by bonafide orphan elephants,” Beech explains.

 

According to some experts, a bean that has been partly digested tastes special.

 

   

“What I did find with kopi luwak was that the acids, the gastric juices and the enzymes were actually getting inside the bean and breaking down the proteins,” says Marcone.

 

   

“You start getting amino acids. When these things are heated during roasting, they react with other components and they create certain flavour compounds different from other beans.”

 

   

Exotic processing

So what does the world’s most pricey coffee taste like?

 

Pure unadulterated coffee beans,
undigested by any animal

Coffee buffs say it depends on whether the civet has been

 

eating arabica or robusta beans.

 

   

“Initially people thought it must be the best coffee in the world, but I have to be honest about it, it’s a crappy cup of

 

coffee,” says Beech of the robusta variety.

 

   

No matter how exotic the processing, it is mostly robusta cherries the luwak munches.

That fact is a legacy of the coffee blight which in 1878 destroyed every low-lying arabica plant from Ceylon to Timor, allowing Brazil and Colombia to take the lead as the world’s main suppliers of arabica.

 

   

Weeks of phone calls around Indonesia results in a fragrant mailbox containing a brown envelope from an East Java coffee

 

trader. Inside is 250 grams of brown gold - kopi luwak arabica.

 

   

The aroma is rich and strong and the beans oily. Ground and

 

steeped in boiling water the flavour is, well, much like any

 

other coffee.

But the experience lingers in the memory.

Source:

http://english.aljazeera.net/English/Archive/Archive?ArchiveID=2966

 

Posted by Fresh Roaster at 21:51:30 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Friday, September 14, 2007

Java joy in coffee study

When the Ink Spots sang “I love the java jive and it loves me” in 1940, they could not have known how right they were. Coffee not only helps clear the mind and perk up the energy, it also provides more healthful antioxidants than any other food or beverage in the American diet, according to a study released Sunday.

Of course, too much coffee can make people jittery and even raise cholesterol levels, so food experts stress moderation.

The findings by Joe A. Vinson, a chemistry professor at the University of Scranton, in Pennsylvania, give a healthy boost to the warming beverage.

“The point is, people are getting the most antioxidants from beverages, as opposed to what you might think,” Vinson said in a telephone interview.

Antioxidants, which are thought to help battle cancer and provide other health benefits, are abundant in grains, tomatoes and many other fruits and vegetables.

Vinson said he was researching tea and cocoa and other foods and decided to study coffee, too. His team analyzed the antioxidant content of more than 100 different food items, including vegetables, fruits, nuts, spices, oils and common beverages. They then used Agriculture Department data on typical food consumption patterns to calculate how much antioxidant each food contributes to a person’s diet.

They concluded that the average adult consumes 1,299 milligrams of antioxidants daily from coffee. The closest competitor was tea at 294 milligrams. Rounding out the top five sources were bananas, 76 milligrams; dry beans, 72 milligrams; and corn, 48 milligrams. According to the Agriculture Department, the typical adult American drinks 1.64 cups of coffee daily.

That does not mean coffee is a substitute for fruit and vegetables.

“Unfortunately, consumers are still not eating enough fruits and vegetables, which are better for you from an overall nutritional point of view due to their higher content of vitamins, minerals and fiber,” Vinson said.

Dates, cranberries and red grapes are among the leading fruit sources of antioxidants, he said.

The antioxidants in coffee are known as polyphenols. Sometimes they are bound to a sugar molecule, which covers up the antioxidant group, Vinson said. The first step in measuring them was to break that sugar link. He noted that chemicals in the stomach do the same thing, freeing the polyphenols.

“We think that antioxidants can be good for you in a number of ways,” including affecting enzymes and genes, though more research is needed, Vinson said. “If I say more coffee is better, then I would have to tell you to spread it out to keep the levels of antioxidants up,” Vinson said. “We always talk about moderation in anything.”

His findings were released in conjunction with the annual convention of the American Chemical Society in Washington.

In February, a team of Japanese researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that people who drank coffee daily, or nearly every day, had half the liver cancer risk of those who never drank it. The protective effect occurred in people who drank one to two cups a day and increased at three to four cups.

Last year, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found that drinking coffee cut the risk of developing the most common form of diabetes.

Men who drank more than six 8-ounce cups of caffeinated coffee per day lowered their risk of type 2 diabetes by about half, and women reduced their risk by nearly 30 percent, compared with people who did not drink coffee, according to the study in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Bonnie Liebman, nutrition director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said she was not surprised by Vinson’s finding, because tea has been known to contain antioxidants.

But Liebman, who was not part of Vinson’s research team, cautioned that while many people have faith that antioxidants will reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease and more, the evidence has not always panned out. Most experts are looking beyond antioxidants to the combination of vitamins, minerals other nutrition in specific foods, she said.

Source:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2005/08/68677

Posted by Fresh Roaster at 21:32:17 | Permalink | No Comments »

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Win a $200 Gift Card From Boca Java

 Boca Java isrunning a promotion where you can Win a $200 Giftcard with Boca Java.

Each order that you place for Boca Java coffee, gets you one more entry for the $200 prize. Here are the full details…

Kris, a friend from work, joined up with the Boca Java Coffee Club and shares the coffee with me. I’m a big fan. One of our favorites is Lee’s Caramel Kiss Island coffee blend. Its got a caramel and chocolate taste.

One of the cool things about Boca Java (and the Lee’s Carmel Kiss Island blend) is that it is dedicated to Lee Frcek, cherished wife, mother and grandmother, who battled leukemia for thirteen and a half years. A portion of the proceeds from this coffee will be donated to the leukemia and lymphoma society.

You get a great cup of coffee and also help others out in the process.

Source:

http://www.gourmetcoffeeblogger.com/2007/07/12/win-a-200-gift-card-from-boca-java/

Posted by Fresh Roaster at 21:50:26 | Permalink | No Comments »

Boca Java Operation 3 Million Cup- Now 5 Million Cup!

As I’ve shared before, Boca Java coffee is currently a favorite at-work-cup-of-coffee for me. I’ve been looking around the Boca Java Coffee website and it’s pretty interesting.

Since October 2003, Boca Java coffee has been donating coffee to our troops. Their way to provide a welcome taste of home for our men and women in the service.

In July 2005, they created ‘Operation Million Cup’ as a way for their customers to send coffee to the troops. Through this program, they discount the price of the coffee to $4 per 8-ounce bag and match each customers’ donation bag for bag.

They originally set a goal of one million cups and reached that goal in about a year. Since the troops were still not home, and the coffee donations were still needed, they continued this special program and renamed it Operation 2 Million Cup. And now with more than 2.5 million cups donated, it’s been renamed to Operation 3 Million Cup- now 5 million cup BTW.

Here’s one of the many letters from the troops to Boca Java coffee:

From: Hummel, Jennifer CPL
Sent: Friday, September 09, 2005 3:35 AM
Subject: Thank you so much

All, Thank you so much for the wonderful donations of coffee. The soldiers here are enjoying all the great tasting brews. I am elated to know that there are still so many people back home that are doing what they can to help support the soldiers that are away from their normal life styles as well as their friends and family. We pull some long hours at times and having the coffee that you donated to us helps keep the mission going! The job we have to do here could not be done without the support that everyone state side gives us everyday. Thank you for being so thoughtful and taking time from your busy schedules to send something our way.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FROM THE Headquarters & Headquarters Battery 2-44 ADA

V/R
SGT Hummel, Jennifer
2-44 ADA BN S-6

They have a page of frequently asked questions to learn more about the program.

Source:

http://www.gourmetcoffeeblogger.com/2007/07/12/boca-java-operation-3-million-cup/

Posted by Fresh Roaster at 18:59:19 | Permalink | No Comments »