Some lovely weekend reading for you and yours is now up live on Birds Of Unusual Vitality, specialty coffee’s premiere interview and photo hub, published by our Melbourne staff writer, Eileen P. Kenny. With photos shot on real film, and candid, free-wheeling interviews, it’s no wonder why we and many other certified coffee dorks consider Birds to be one of the very best websites covering specialty coffee. In this latest entry, Ms. Kenny interviews Ricardo Zelaya, a revered coffee producer with farms in Antigua, Guatemala.

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Here’s an excerpt from the feature:

Zelaya believes that a key concept to preserving a level of quality in specialty coffee is looking after your workers, โ€œItโ€™s a higher cost to produce high quality coffee, and I think that you need to make sure you maintain your workersโ€”because 80% of the cost of coffee is labourโ€”you need to depend on a lot of people. I think that if your people are earning a good salary, if they have good conditions and if theyโ€™re happy, then theyโ€™ll do a better job, and with more will.โ€

Enjoy this fascinating interview, and many more (like this one with coffee buyerย Jose Aguilar, or this one with *the* Tim Wendelboe, ooh, or this one with Mecca Espresso founder Paul Geshos) over at Birds Of Unusual Vitality.

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