There’s a very romantic notion to reading the morning paper while drinking coffee: sitting in a brightly lit breakfast nook, the early morning sun warming your skin; feeling the texture of the paper between your fingers, unfurling its pages wide past the breadth of your shoulders to immerse yourself in print; gripping a mug of coffee with two hands and holding it close to your chest as you check in on all the day’s news (don’t worry about the math on the number of hands. Romanticizing doesn’t require accuracy). There’s probably a sweater involved somewhere, maybe a cat.
Truly, reading the morning paper while enjoying a cup of coffee is one of the great simple joys of life. Or at least that’s what the Toronto Star is betting on. As reported by AdWeek, Canada’s largest newspaper is launching a new coffee subscription service called Headline Coffee.
Rolling out in October, the monthly subscription service will feature a different coffee growing region with each shipment, with the inaugural coffee coming from the Ketiara Cooperative in Northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Each coffee has a corresponding article, and as AdWeek notes, “in terms of both length and tone, [it] certainly reflects the purveyor’s newspaper background, as it reads more like a feature article than sales pitch.”
Subscriptions for Headline cost $20 a month and include 340g (12oz) of coffee, which is either priced about right or kind of expensive depending upon whether or not shipping is including in the price (we were unable to find it on the site anywhere). But you can get 50% off your first order if you use the promo code HEADLINE50.
The coffees will be roasted by Mountain View Coffee, a Toronto-based wholesale food distributor and coffee roaster not to be confused with North Carolina’s Mountain Air Roasting. Generally, wholesale food distributor-slash-coffee roasters don’t produce the best product, but I’ve never had anything by Mountain View so I can’t really say. Maybe it’s good?
Good or bad, the creation of a subscription service by a newspaper itself seems to show that in some ways, coffee in starting to be held in similar regard as wine. AdWeek notes that both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have wine clubs, and coffee is following in those footsteps, though a coffee subscription does seem qualitatively different; curating a list of wines produced by someone is not equivalent to hawking your own line of coffee toll roasted by someone else. TomAyto, tomAhto.
In the end, I’m just happy to read a coffee description penned by a professional journalist instead of a dude who’s pretty sure he’s God’s gift to both coffee roasting and the written word.
Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.
