BusinessWeek says:

Yemen has some serious troubles, including hunger, water shortages, and running battles with Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia are propping up the Yemeni government so its territory doesn’t become a launching pad for Al Qaeda terrorism. On Oct. 18, the State Department brought a delegation of Yemeni businesspeople to Bloomberg’s New York headquarters to discuss their desire to attract U.S. investment. What’s one thing that they said could help lift Yemen’s fortunes?

Coffee. The Yemeni city of Mocha is one of the world’s oldest sources of coffee beans. The website Specialty Coffee Advisor has this to say: “Yemen coffees are the epitome of a ‘wild cup’ and can border on scary at times because of their deep, earthy, complex pungency with overlays of dry fruit (think raisin), cardamom, dry cinnamon, and tobacco notes.”

The Yemeni government is encouraging farmers to plant coffee instead of qat, which is the unofficial national drug of Yemen. The leaves of the evergreen qat bush are chewed as a stimulant. Qat is legal and not strongly addictive, but chewing it is a huge time-waster, and its cultivation contributes to Yemen’s severe water shortage.

There aren’t any Yemen coffees available from any roaster we’re familiar with (at least according to http://newcoffeeupdates.com), but the folks at Red Tree Trading Company in Houston specialize in Yemeni coffees, and Sweet Maria’s offers up some fine green Yemeni coffee as well. Here’s what Tom Owens from Sweet Maria’s has to say:

Given the political instability in the region, we were amazed by the quality of coffee we were able to get from our supplier in 2011. The same has been true in 2012. This first lot of new crop coffee is from Ismali, and is all but gone. We’re gearing up to list the second – a nice lot from Harasi – which should be up on our site in a couple of days. Expect even more before the end of summer. We’re steadily working through our current lots of Yemeni coffee. Harasi and Matari are both great examples of how good Yemen coffee can be with optimal harvesting and sorting. These are the last of this year’s crop, so get them while you still can!

Do you have the inside scoop on where to find Yemeni coffee? Have you tried any Yemeni coffees recently that really knocked your socks off? Sound off in the comments below!

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On Thursday, August 9th, a crowd of no fewer than 175 people gathered together at the Blue Bottle Coffee Roasters cafe space on the top floor of SFMoMA for our fourth in an ongoing series of public cupping events. We reached out to dozens of roasters from across the state of California, and the results were simply stunning. With stunning cup wares by notNeutral and essential cupping supplies from Sweet Maria’s, we were able to table 42 individual coffees from 17 different roasters.

California’s own Wilbur Curtis Co. were on hand with their Gold Cup brewer, as were the folks at HG-One Hand Grinders and Fair Trade USA, who provided a select tasting of FT certified liquors. A sincere thank you to all of the participating roasters, to our gracious hosts at Blue Bottle and SFMoMA, and especially to our on-site support staff (Bennett, Sara, Benjamin, Selina, Lauren, Alex, Leah, of course Jenny and Stephen, plus anyone else we’re leaving out). This was by far our biggest event yet – it may very well have been the largest public cupping in human history.

The following is a full list of what was served on our table for Cupping California. Feel free to click on the quick-buying links to learn more and bring these remarkable coffees to your home. Viva California!

NorCal:

Ritual Roasters, San Francisco – Costa Rica Los Crestones: El Alto, Colombia El Guamo

De La Paz Coffee Roasters, San Francisco – Colombia San Sebastian, Costa Rica Salaca Dos Pinos ML, Ethiopia Kochere

Sightglass Coffee Roasters, San Francisco – Ethiopia Teklu Dembel Ch’elelek’tu, Guatemala Hunapu Antigua, Costa Rica Finca Genesis

Flying Goat Coffee, Healdsburg – Costa Rica Santa Lucia, Colombia La Esmeralda, Guatemala Hacienda Carmona Pulcal

Sweet Maria’s, Oakland – Ethiopia Guji Shakiso, Ethiopia Camp, Guatemala Rosma,

Equator Coffees, San Rafael – Panama Los Cantares, Ethiopia Sidama Watadera [Fair Trade, Organic]

Taylor Maid Farms, Sonoma County – Ethiopia Amaro Gayo, Mexico Pluma Real, Nicaragua Paraiso

, San Francisco – Ethiopia Debello

Chocolate Fish Coffee Roasters, Sacramento – Costa Rica El Cipres Helsar De Zarcer0, Panama Lerida Estate, Honduras Las Capucas

Blue Bottle Coffee Co., Oakland -  Aida Battle Selection Finca La Florida Los Tanques [Kenya Style], ABS Finca La Florida Orange Bourbon, ABS Finca La Florida Los Tanques [Ethiopia Style], ABS Finca La Florida Los Tanques [Natural]

Barefoot Coffee, Santa Clara – Tanzania Songea Kusini Peaberry

Four Barrel Coffee Roasters, San Francisco – Honduras La Espana, Ethiopia Gera Yukro

Verve Coffee Roasters, Santa Cruz – Guatemala Pulcal, Panama Elida Estate [Green-tip Geisha special edition!]

SoCal:

Klatch Coffee Inc., Upland - El Salvador Orange Bourbon Varietal, El Salvador San Francisco Natural

Intelligentsia Coffee, Los Angeles – Ethiopia Doyo, Ethiopia Limu Union

Augie’s Coffee Roasters, Redlands – Ethiopia Idido Cooperative, El Salvador San Juan Bosco, Guatemala Finca La Soledad

Handsome Coffee Roasters, Los Angeles - El Salvador Finca Tanzania, Ethiopia Idido Cooperative, Ethiopia Konga Cooperative

Thank you again to everyone involved in making this wild night a huge success, all of our participating sponsors, and especially the Blue Bottle and SFMoMA staff who helped us realize the vision for this event (then stayed late to help clean up!)

And the city of San Francisco and state of California, your wonderful coffee community, your dedicated sourcing minds and immensely talented roasters, we sincerely thank you too.

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We’re thrilled to announce our next in an ongoing series of public cupping parties, happening in the city of San Francisco on Thursday, August 9th. It’s called “Cupping California“, a celebration of California specialty coffee roasters – a night of cupping coffees roasted within the wild confines of the Golden State.

The event takes place in the rooftop garden at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and is anchored by our gracious hosts at Blue Bottle Coffee Roasters. Hot water and batch brew specialists Wilbur Curtis Co. will be on hand to brew select coffees on their Gold Cup Brewer, the design experts at notNeutral will generously provide cups to suit the dramatic outdoor MoMA setting, and the fine folks at Sweet Maria’s / Coffee Shrub will be on hand to assist with cupping logistics and round out our cupping supply needs.

Attendance is free to the first 100 guests, and those attendees will receive free admission to all exhibits at MoMA as part the event. Click here for a full list of current exhibits, including a limited engagement of the lauded and influential photography of Cindy Sherman. A selection of local libations will be on hand for a post-cupping mixer, where guests are cordially invited to shake their tasteful butts at a live DJ set from your very own Sprudge.com Editors (the bold should clue you in that we’re really excited to DJ). Guests will also have a chance to demo and oogle the HG One hand grinder, made in San Francisco and very much a part of our California theme.

Join us, won’t you? Thursday, August 9th at SF MoMA (151 Third Street, in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood) – event begins at 6pm, museum closes at 9pm.

More details coming soon – follow along with the Twitter hashtag #AROMoMA for Cupping California updates.

A look back at our previous cupping parties:

[Portland] Rwandalust! Hosted by Stumptown Coffee Roasters
[Seattle] Colombiana! Hosted by Milstead & Co., sponsored by La Marzoco USA
[Los Angeles] International Delight! Hosted by Handsome Coffee Roasters, sponsored by Visions Espresso Supply

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Aleco and Dan talk about how we cup our coffees here at Sweet Maria’s. They go into detail about how we obtain consistency in the cupping room and techniques they use to taste coffee.

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Coffee Common NYC is underway in Chelsea. In a recent blog post, CC explains a section of its pop-up: “At the ingredients bar folks can taste exactly how cream and sugar make bad coffee taste better by masking it, and delicious coffee taste worse by diluting it.”

At its core, Coffee Common’s aim is to enhance the public image of coffee, and we feel that’s terrific. We imagine a lot of New York coffee drinkers never really gave their usual coffee modifications much thought. It’s appropriate for Coffee Common to showcase exquisite coffee at this limited engagement. However, we take issue with celebrating “delicious” coffee while categorically poo-pooing everything else. We’re reminded of the Sweet Maria’s/Coffee Shrub 2012 “Mondo Coffee” calendar and the month of April that asks some tough questions:

Is anyone thinking about the importance of volume anymore? And how can a roaster act like they just hit a home run for the farmer when they buy a 10 bag Micro Lot? How is that going to pay the bills?”

We feel it’s important to celebrate all coffee, in all forms, from the most delicious 90+ coffee served in a champagne flute to the Cafe du Monde au lait, served with beignets and a heaping helping of powdered sugar. The segundos have their place in the coffee chain. Just because a coffee could benefit from the addition of cream and or sugar doesn’t necessarily make it a bad coffee. 

The post Common Knowledge: “Bad” Coffee? appeared first on Sprudge.com.

The fact that coffee buyers travel at all has recently been examined in posts by Kevin Knox and Ken Davids. Aleco Chigounis wrote a great little piece a while back on the same topic. Wish I could find the link to it. Kevin in particular has raised some points I feel are sentient, that traveling to origin and doing a direct trade deal is not any guarantee of getting the best coffee. It’s dead on true, but its also mildly annoying to me personally because here I am spending a wad of money, precious time (away from Maria and Ben and my important tasks in the cupping lab, not to mention missing possibly good surfing days at OB!) to make sure each trip is relevant, and absolutely does result in better coffee than I can get by trolling the brokers list. And the last thing I want is to ruin my good carbon-neutral standing.

The post Tom of Sweet Maria’s Responds To Video Comments appeared first on Sprudge.com.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

What it really takes to go to origin and tap the source. Amazing? Well, not really. This is an homage to another youtube coffee sourcing video. Quien es mas macho?

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We lost 98 bags of coffee (Pulcal – Hacienda Carmona) that was en route from Antigua to the port, just over an hour away. I don’t know the details yet, if the truck was stopped by thieves, or if anyone was hurt.

Tom of Sweet Maria’s tells the story of this most recent heist, and shares a harrowing account from Finca Siberia involving forced confinement, intimidation, and the senseless destruction of Pacamara coffee trees. Read all about it here.

The post Coffee Heists: A Grim Reality In Today’s Market appeared first on Sprudge.com.

Just about a year ago, in the heady early days of Sprudge.com, our very best puns and yuks were more often than not fueled by Aida Batlle’s delicious, refreshing, rocket-charged Cascara tea. We’ve missed it over the past few months, but are quite excited to announce new availability of Cascara via Sweet Maria’s online. With just the right amount of honey, over ice, in a hot cafe, there is honestly nothing else quite like it…

Cascara is the skin of the coffee cherry. When you wet-process coffee, the skin is difficult to save, and usually becomes part of the compost mix for the farm. But in Arabia and Africa, the skin of the cherry is used to make a very potent tea called Qishr (also spelled Kisher). In fact, making a tea from the dried coffee fruit pre-dates roasting the coffee seed to crush and steep in water, coffee as we know it.

If you like fruit-blend herbal teas, especially those with fruited flavors like hibiscus, rose-hips, tamarind, orange peel, mango, apple, you should like Cascara tea a lot. It makes amazing iced tea as well, and with a very moderate amount of honey can be very pleasant.

Possibilities for the use of Cascara tea seem endless; cooking, sauces, baking, beer brewing. It’s a tea. But it’s coffee. It’s unique.

Sweet Maria’s – El Salvador Cascara Coffee Tea $7.70

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This holiday season, Sweet Maria’s produced “The Unofficial 2010 Dogs of Coffee Calendar,” which was sold to benefit Coffee Kids and five other charities. The calendar has 15 full-color photographs of dogs from various coffee-producing regions. Co-owner Thompson Owen took the photographs during his travels around the world in search of coffee.

For over ten years, Sweet Maria’s has supported Coffee Kids through various fundraisers and they strive to educate their customers and online followers about our work. Their site is consistently one of the top referrer’s to the Coffee Kids Web site.
“Maybe he misses our dogs, West Oakland mutts of the first degree, or maybe dogs tend to be a friendly presence. Whatever the reason, over time, Tom has amassed quite a collection of photographs of dogs at coffee origins,” said Maria Troy, co-owner of Sweet Maria’s.

The unique calendar is available for purchase on Sweet Maria’s Web site.

Coffee Kids – Featured Donor: Sweet Maria’s

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