|
||||||
|
Story Archives of 'Coffee'
What Starbucks Says About Us
By Virginia Prescott on Wednesday, October 7, 2009.
Starbucks rose like a meteor after it went public in 1992. Nearly 44 million people go to a Starbucks somewhere in the world each week. Until recently, eight new stores were being built each day. Today there are more than 16,000 outlets in malls, airports, small town USA- there's even a Starbucks clone in Beijing’s Forbidden City.
Depending on who you ask, Starbucks has the best coffee, drives out mom and pop cafes, is expensive or ubiquitous. Bryant Simon is more interested in what the explosion, and now, deflation, of Starbucks says about identity, consumption and community at this moment in history. He spent five years visiting Starbucks around the globe, often spending 12-15 hours a week observing the stores. What he found was not the exchange of ideas and conversations of the traditional coffeehouse. Instead, he saw individuals holed up in comfy chair bunkers reinforced by wi-fi and headphones and a company trading on our broken civic life. Bryant Simon is professor of history and director of American Studies at Temple University. He’s author of Everything But the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks. And he joins us with more.
Associated Press: What's true cost of a Starbucks latte, author asks
Telegraph UK: Starbucks kills communities, academic claims
(Photo courtesy rudolf_schuba via Flickr/Creative Commons)
Coffee Chain Goes "Local"
By Deb Baker on Saturday, August 8, 2009.
Seattle Times writer Melissa Allison recently asked, "When is a Starbucks not a Starbucks?" When it's the chain's latest café, 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, located in their headquarters city, Seattle. This is the first of several "neighborhood" shops planned to make Starbucks seem more like a local coffee house than a corporate behemoth.
Bird-Friendly Coffee
By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, February 5, 2009.
Next time you fill up your coffee mug, think about how your caffeine habit might be affecting birds. Why? Because many of the migratory songbirds arriving in New Hampshire each spring spend their winters nestled in rainforest canopy above the coffee plantations of Central and South America. Migratory songbirds like bobolinks, barn swallows and eastern kingbirds are suffering from mysterious population declines.
It turns out that pesticides that are now illegal in the US are being sprayed on crops by farmers in the southern hemisphere, which is why many conservation biologists are pleased about a new certification for bird-friendly coffee.
Here to tell us more is Bridget Stutchbury, an ornithologist, professor of biology at York University in Toronto and author of Silence of the Songbirds.
Dr. Stutchbury will speak at the Audubon Center in Concord, NH, tomorrow evening (Friday) at 7 pm.
(Photo courtesy Seabamirum via Flickr/CC)
Coffee "Cupping"
By Virginia Prescott on Wednesday, January 21, 2009.We are living in a golden age for coffee snobs, with a Starbucks on every other corner in some cities and McDonald’s serving lattes. So why settle for a regular old cuppa joe when you can order Tres Rios Costa Rica Bella Vista?
Coffee geeks are now seeking a deeper connection to the origins of their daily fix, and coffee vendors are steering them to "cupping," a ritualistic smelling, brewing and tasting process with rhetoric usually reserved for wine. Cupping is a longtime rite for coffee traders trekking on donkeys to El Salvador or camels to Ethiopia to find the highest quality beans. Now cafés in the Northwest are adding cupping to their offerings.
For more on this, we talk with Seattle Weekly food editor Jonathan Kauffman, who recently wrote about cupping. We also check-in with Ian McCarthy, a New Hampshire native and a roaster at Cultiva Coffee in Lincoln, Nebraska.
And even if you're not a person who practices meditation, there are any number of everyday activities that can inspire an almost zen-like level of focus and awareness. Producer Dale Short brings us what he calls "a guide to contemplative coffee making."
(Photo of Ian McCarthy by Avishay Artsy)
Coffee Can Fuel The World
By Avishay Artsy on Thursday, December 11, 2008.
As part of our series “the next green thing,” we’re always looking for new and innovative sources of energy besides the traditional fossil fuels. Well, today we learned that you need to look no further than your local coffeeshop.
Sampling "The Clover" Buzz
By Virginia Prescott on Tuesday, July 29, 2008.The company that helped teach America a whole new coffee lexicon is in trouble. Starbucks recently announced that it will close 600 stores in the coming year, leaving some loyal customers without their six-dollar grande sugar free vanilla lattes with soy.
The reasons behind the giant coffee chain’s troubles are varied and debated. But in a leaked memo, Starbucks founder Howard Shultz stated his opinion clear and simple – the company had stopped focusing on the basics. While customers could buy breakfast sandwiches, fancy milkshakes and John Mellencamp records, the quality of Starbuck’s main beverage wasn’t standing up to competition.
That’s where "The Clover" comes in. The high-tech, highly-regarded $11,000 coffee machine has developed an international following, and will start making appearances in stores around the country. Some say it brews the best cup of joe in the world, and Starbucks is banking on it.
Writer and coffee connoisseur Mathew Honan wrote about "The Clover" for Wired Magazine, and is here to fill us in on the details.
We also look at a different kind of coffee maker. It’s not new, it’s not necessarily expensive, but some die-hard fans say there’s no better coffee machine out there. It’s the vacuum brewer, and writer Corby Kummer is a huge advocate. He recorded this piece for the "Design for the Real World" series on public radio’s Studio 360.
(Photo by Adam Kuban)
Songbirds and Shade Trees
By Scott Fitzpatrick on Friday, November 10, 2006.Many of us have a passion for good coffee and good chocolate. But most of us don't know how those two passions can affect our songbird populations.
The Lovely Vices: Coffee and Chocolate
By John Walters on Friday, February 21, 2003.PSC Psychology professor, Paul Fedorchak found that when given a choice of beverages, rats preferred those enhanced with caffeine. He joins John Walters to talk about his recently published article "Caffeine-Reinforced Conditioned Flavor Preferences in Rats." Find out more about his work at http://oz.plymouth.edu/~pfedorch/
Also, we'll hear about the 14th annual Chocolate Festival in Conway, in which participants snowshoe or cross country ski from site to site in order to earn gourmet chocolate treats.
www.crosscountryskinh.com
Coffee
By Laura Knoy on Thursday, November 23, 2000.We'll explore the robust and flavorful past of one of America's favorite beverages. We talk with Vermont author Mark Pendergrast. His new book is "Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World".
