Roasters of the world – are you single and looking? What if we told your dream account was just one click away? This your chance to rep your coffee company in a one-of-a-kind setting: the upcoming Coffee Common service at TED 2012. Your coffee will be served by some of the best baristas on earth. Violinists, political prisoners, brain scientists, novelists, academics, business leaders, and Bill Clinton will be your new regulars. Sounds too good to be true? It’s not; roasters are now eligible to apply for inclusion at the next Coffee Common event:

If selected, roasters will be asked to provide the following: 200 lbs of a single roast of a single coffee, which will be prepared in brew methods like handcrafted drip, espresso, siphon pot and aeropress. $1000 financial support which will be used to cover a dinner for baristas To apply, please complete the following form and mail a 12 ounce sample of the coffee…

Full listing available here. All submissions are due by February 8th.

Via HuffPo:

Kona coffee growers want Hawaii’s labeling law modified to provide more details on packages of coffee blends that contain Hawaii-grown beans.

Currently, coffee blends sold in the state that contain Hawaii-grown coffee must disclose what percentage is grown in the islands, and it must be at least 10 percent. The Kona Coffee Farmers Association said Thursday that it wants the state Legislature to consider a bill it has drafted that would also identify where the remainder of the blend is grown.

If the association is successful an example of a package label would read, “90 percent Panamanian coffee, 10 percent Kona coffee.”

The state senator from Kona said Thursday he plans to introduce the bill at the end of the month. “I respect the local community and Kona coffee is a big issue for us,” state Sen. Josh Green, D-Milolii-Waimea, said.

Next year buy Grandma Tu-Tu something from that big haole Pete Licata.

This feature comes from our “Not New News, But Still Interesting” desk – California coffee is no passing fad, confined merely to the kitchens of Finca La West Oakland. A farm near Santa Barbara, featured by the LA Times and elsewhere, is producing coffee with some interesting attachments and mysterious endorsements.

Jay Ruskey (of Good Land Organics) has been growing and cultivating coffee  in the Goleta area of SoCal for the last several years. According to this interview with Food GPS, Ruskey’s partner Mark Gaskell first sourced the coffee trees from El Salvador, taking with him back to California shrubs of the Catturra, Typica and Amarillo varietals. Ruskey is harvesting, processing and self-roasting his coffees at Good Land Organics – a process that hints at wider ambitions:

We feel that it’s important to vertically integrate. One of the models we’ve looked at is the Kona coffee model. They’ve been successful growing in an area that has high labor costs by producing their own coffee on the farm, not only growing it, but also processing it and post-havesting and roasting it, including doing farm tours and selling their coffee from the farm. That’s been a very successful model. So we think with the Kona model and the interest in farm tours – like some of the wineries have in Santa Barbara – that type of hybrid approach is going to be a successful model for coffee in the Santa Barbara region.

Buried elsewhere within that Food GPS interview, Ruskey mentions that he’s received advice and a farm visit from Price Peterson, he of Hacienda La Esmeralda fame. More interesting still, Mr. Ruskey seeks to form a Santa Barbera Coffee Cooperative, and has been distributing coffee seeds to nearby farms.

Good Lands Coffee is grown at an elevation of about 600 feet, which is not much of an elevation at all, especially in terms of specialty coffee (as a quick reference, the aforementioned Hacienda La Esmeralda coffee is grown at more than 1500 meters, more than 5000 feet above sea level). But it’s still pretty exciting stuff – and according to this second interview with the website “Eat Drink Explore” (unpunctuated), Ruskey’s Santa Barbara coffee has been vetted by coffee types in the know:

According to Ruskey, coffee experts were then invited to taste test the new product and subsequently gave encouraging reviews.

“They said that we have some promising coffee,” Ruskey told us.  So, the growing operation continued with about a dozen varieties of beans and more than 1,500 plants now being grown in the Santa Barbara area.

Our question for you is this – have you tasted Jay Ruskey’s California-grown coffee? Were you one of the “coffee experts” invited to cup recent or past crops? Let’s get our sticky hands on some more information about these coffees – any SoCal area Sprudge readers feel like tracking down this stuff at the Santa Barbara Farmer’s Market? If you go, take pictures, and please send them along to us at californiacoffee@sprudge.com – we’ll post shots and notes on the site.

Controversial on the message boards but always prepared with comment, our favorite Ethiopian blogger out of Seattle – Wondwossen Mezlekia – has penned another glorious piece about the the Bladdergate fiasco of 2011. Here’s his eloquent take on how it all went down:

Last month, coffee buyers across the globe had a rare glimpse into Ethiopians’ day to day experience, where haphazard policymaking is used by the government to interfere in and control people’s business whenever it feels like it. A new directive requiring the shipment of coffee in bulk container (a process of filling coffee in ‘dry containers’ fitted with a liner, as opposed to loading coffee packed in 60-kilogram jute-bags) suddenly surfaced in mid November and shocked the market.[1] It was revoked thirty days later because of pressures from foreign diplomats, plummeting sales, and a cloud of fear of losing coffee buyers for good.

It’s not clear how it all began, but it appears some genius one day figured out the quickest way to “modernize the country’s export packaging and shipment standards” and the government decided to begin shipping coffee in bulk containers within two years. And, sometime during the 2010/11 fiscal year, an anonymous “investor” was granted a permit to import coffee blowers (machines equipped with a fan to generate a controlled pressure air current that throws coffee into containers, and a suction system to remove the dust created by the process.) Then, the operation began rolling out.

Read the rest of Wondwossen’s details on the Ministry of Trade by surfing over to Mr. Mezlekia’s blog, Poor Farmer. (Ed note: if there is anyone out there looking to start a dedicated coffee-themed early 80s synth-pop band, Ministry of Trade would make for an excellent name.)

This just in from our friend Francisco Mena of Exclusive Coffee, based out of Costa Rica:

A tropical depression affecting Costa Rica’s first pickings. After beautiful 2-3 weeks of great dry and sunny weather in Costa Rica’s coffee regions, we’ve been poured by showers in the past 2 days. A tropical depression that is also affecting Panama, has stationed in Costa Rica as well. Forecast indicates that this depression might continue all week. “We are just starting to harvest in the highlands, and hope this ends soon, as it’s not good for the ripening stage”, mentions Wayner Jimenez, Q Grader at Exclusive.

We hope it ends soon too, as Latin America has really taken a beating this year from wild and inclement weather systems.

The coffee market in China, predicted by ICO, is about to burst as many Chinese students abroad are expected to return from western countries. To seize this opportunity Hogood has committed to the industrialization of coffee facilities, to build a domestic brand known for its quality. The Company’s strategic plan is highly adhere to local government policies, and the Company is firmly supported by the government.

Hogood’s coffee plantations have now expanded up to 6,667 hectares, almost one third of coffee planting area in China. Hogood produces 30,000 metric tons of coffee berries annually from over 30,000 acres coffee plants.

Hogood coffee products are characterized by its special flavor; gentle aromatic smell, strong but not bitter, along with its special fruit sour taste. According to ICO, Hogood coffee shares many similarities with Colombia coffee.

We haven’t had a chane to try it. Have you?

Spotted on the Stumptown Facebook feed, this beautiful photograph (large version here) of the drying beds at Suke Quto, taken from the fermentation tanks, looking out onto the Shakisso Valley. Harvest is just about to begin in Ethiopia, and this photo – its tranquility soon to be interrupted by a flood of tiny drying seeds – captures that “before” moment beautifully.

The following excerpt comes from a special report by independent analyst Maja Wallengren for CoffeeNetwork.com, a subscription only web source for the coffee industry:

El Salvador’s Ministry of Agriculture has now released its first official report on the damage from the rains and say that the losses will be between 100,000 and up to as much as 283,000 bags of coffee.

While the rains did start to cease in parts of El Salvador and Guatemala over the weekend, where sun was reported for the first time in 10 to 12 days, heavy rains have continued over most of Honduras and parts of Nicaragua all this time because of the formation of a new tropical storm which started forming on Thursday and which by Friday already had become a Tropical Storm Rina. As of a few hours ago Rina had already strengthened to become a powerful Category 2 Hurricane and is expected to become a “major hurricane” of maximum category 4 or 5 in the next few hours. Rina is swirling just off Honduras’ Atlantic coast and is forecast to move along the coast for the next four days before making landfall somewhere on the southern part of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsular. This will bring more and continuous intense rains over most of Honduras for the rest of the week.

The report goes on to say that as much as 20% of the overall coffee production in El Salvador has been lost, and similarly harrowing numbers can be expected from Honduras and Guatemala. 2 million people have been affected by the rains, which thus far have left more than 500,000 people homeless. More than 100 casualties have been reported.

The most recent storm formation, Hurricane Rina, ran up the length of the East coast of Honduras and now sits over the Yucatan Peninsula in southern Mexico. You can track the storm’s progress here. Expect the aftermath of this storm to seriously affect coffee prices, both in the affected regions and in the worldwide markets. Our thoughts and prayers go out to our friends Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico.

Félix Regalado, who cultivates coffee on a small farm in Honduras, the largest coffee producer in Central America, and thousands of other coffee farmers are about to start harvesting the bulk of Central America’s crop at a time when supplies are tight. Stockpiles of arabica coffee in exchange-certified warehouses have shrunk nearly 60% since September 2009.

Big coffee roasters were looking to this upcoming harvest in Central and South America for relief from three years of lackluster global production. However, the severe rains, which have already claimed scores of lives across the region, are dashing such hopes.

“The coffee is falling from the plants, both ripe and unripe berries,” said Mr. Regalado. The berries contain the beans that are cleaned and roasted to make coffee. Not only is the actual coffee damaged, but weather conditions make it difficult for farmers to harvest and get the beans to storage terminals or ports.

“When it rains like this, we can’t cut,” Mr. Regalado said. “And when it’s slippery, we have to transport on horseback.”

But amidst these troubled times, there’s a message of hope. This was uploaded to Facebook early this morning by our friend Antonio Meneses:

“For sure sun rises up today in Guatemala! Rain is over, now to concentrate on the damages and next crop coming up” – Antonio Meneses, International Sales Manager at Santa Felisa Coffee