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Victoria Brown is passionately pursuing a career in coffee, journalism, and history. Her work has appeared in History Magazine, two Johns Hopkins University blogs, Barista Magazine, Daily Coffee News and several industry websites.
Sometimes a little bit of competition can be a good thing. In Mexico, a strong internal market for specialty coffee is helping to stabilize coffee price volatility and provide better prices for farmers, says Jorge Cuevas, Chief Coffee Officer at Sustainable Harvest.
We've been supporting the work of Dr. Jeremy Haggar, Professor of Agroecology at the University of Greenwich, and Dr. Aaron Davis, Head of Coffee Research and Senior Research Leader of Crops and Global Change at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London, who, along with Daniel Sarmu, a development specialist from Sierra Leon, have identified several wild populations of stenophylla in Sierra Leone and are studying their potential.
In 2021, new regulations prevented washing stations from establishing collection sites where they receive cherry from farmers who are further away from their station. These collection sites were located about 3 to 10 kilometers away from the station. "They ensure that most farmers didn't have to travel more than 3 kilometers to deliver their cherry," Eddy says.
It's a scene with which many cafe-goers are too familiar: The coffee shop packed with glazed-over faces behind the bluish glow of laptop screens, with fingers clacking away at keyboards and brows f...
Victoria Brown Research Assistant Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future On every street corner, small cafes with standing-height countertops serve cappuccino, espresso, thick, pudding-like hot chocolate and more to hundreds of commuting Italians. Each morning, as I joined the crush of commuters on Turin's underground tube station, I looked forward to that first sip of frothy coffee-milk.
You may think you've got a handle on Robusta, but there's more to it than meets the eye. We spoke with Kristine Breminer Isgren, Q Grader Robusta & Arabica and QC at Complete Coffee Limited, and Walter Rossi, Quality Manager and Q Grader at Sucafina, to learn more about Robusta's hidden side.
As the mercury keeps rising, café customers are seeking reprieve from the heat in iced coffees. With the option of multiple brewing methods to highlight different flavors, finding just the right coffee for your preferred method can be a challenge. So, below are a few ideas for improving your cold brew and flash brewed/Japanese iced coffee methods.
A question we frequently hear is "why do my coffee prices change?"(and more recently, this has mostly been phrased as "Argh - Why do prices increase?!") There's no short answer, so we've marshalled our best minds to help us give you an overview of why coffee prices change over time and in these specific circumstances.
When bags of green coffee are shipped from the warehouse to the client, they're loaded onto pallets and wrapped in plastic wrap to hold the bags in place. We're diving into the practice of wrapping pallets, examining why it matters, how it impacts the supply chain and what we could do differently.
Fique. You may not have heard of it, but this miraculous fiber is sustainable, improves livelihoods and offers options for farmers in illicit crop-growing areas, and offers a neutral bag for packaging coffee. We spoke with experts at Excala Packaging (who produce bags for nearly half of all coffee produced in Colombia) about the history, benefits and future of fique.
Diet and Cancer: Yet Another Connection Incidence of obesity has reached an all-time high in the United States and continues to rise. In addition to the well known dangers of obesity-hypertension, heart disease, high cholesterol-obesity changes the body on the molecular level. These changes place overweight and obese people at an increased risk for a...
Victoria Brown Research Assistant Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future Today is World Food Day, a day of action dedicated to achieving Zero Hunger worldwide. So it seems especially appropriate today to consider the predictions concerning the rising population, which may reach 11.2 billion by 2100.
Curious about cascara? To better explore this exciting product, we spoke with Diego Guardia, Owner of Hacienda Sonora in Valle Central, Costa Rica, and Tim Heinze, Coffee Education Manager for The Center. With their help, we'll learn more about cascara, how it's made and its benefits.
Lab-grown coffees are relative newcomers to the coffee industry. At their most basic, lab-grown coffees are coffees that are produced in a lab environment, rather than on a tree in a field. They are not growing full coffee trees in a lab environment but are using different methods to isolate the flavors and characteristics of coffee in a way that bypasses the need for trees.
When it comes to interesting fermentation methods, koji is the new kid on the block. Koji has been used for centuries in Asia to ferment rice, barley and other grains, but it's new to coffee. We have a lot of questions about koji and how it affects fermentation.
Why is Indonesian coffee so expensive this year? It's a question we've gotten frequently, so, we've spoken with Daniel Shewmaker, Managing Director Indonesia & Timor Leste to help us understand the complex supply issues that contribute to increased costs.
Producers in Indonesia are driving a local supply chain revolution that's changing the way they produce green coffee, which is in turn improving the quality of coffee in Indonesia overall. Producers are connecting directly with Indonesian roasters and custom-producing experimentally processed lots that roasters sell in-country to a growing population of interested Indonesia consumers.
Victoria Brown Research Assistant Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future It's almost impossible to imagine now-sheep grazing on the White House lawn, tending their lambs and grass with care. Perhaps just as unfathomable is that this scene was organized and made possible by the First Lady.
"Why study cacao and chocolate?" read the slide. Dr. Carla Martin of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute (FCCI), who is pioneering specialty guidelines for the chocolate industry, stood in front of the assembled crowd at InterAmerican's Providence office one September evening.
"Perception is dependent on sensation," began Amanda Armbrust-Asselin, InterAmerican Quality Control coordinator, standing beside her hand-draw poster depicting the brain's sensory responses to a person eating a strawberry. "But not all sensations are perceived." So began an evening of taste, trials and triangulations.
Victoria Brown Research Assistant Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future A puff of red dirt stained my foot as I jumped over the deep crevice gouged into the clay road, hurrying to keep up with the bustling form of Fatuma, my host mother.
Recently, Quality Control (QC) teams and traders from InterAmerican's three offices gathered around their respective cupping tables for a blind calibration exercise. On the tables were a variety of qualities and cup profiles from Guatemala, designed to stretch the comfort zones and palates of all involved.
Victoria Brown Research Assistant Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future My host mother Smita, whose name means "ever smiling lady," is handsome with an infectious smile, and she stands amidst the shining metal tins and fragrant spices of her Ahmedabad apartment kitchen rolling out thepla, a Gujarati flatbread.
Becky Ramsing Senior Program Officer, Food Communities & Public Health Program Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future This post was co-authored by Victoria Brown and Becky Ramsing. Meatless Monday as most people know it today began in 2003 with the work of former ad man turned health advocate Sid Lerner and the founder of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, Bob Lawrence.
Victoria Brown Research Assistant Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future "You can't assume that a high price means good working conditions, or that by paying a high price you're paying for environmental sustainability," advises Kim Elena Ionescu, Chief Sustainability Officer for the Specialty Coffee Association.
Victoria Brown Research Assistant Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future In a quiet corner store off a busy intersection in Arusha, Tanzania, I chose a vibrant cloth package of coffee. On a side street in Rome, I picked up a small, compressed foil packet labeled "Fantasia" off a candy shop shelf.
Editor's Note: This post also appears on the Center for a Livable Future's blog (CLF, based at Johns Hopkins University). Check there often for fresh ideas about a healthy food system...and good writing. The post is part of a series focused on the Meatless Monday initiative, a global effort encourag
Entering Counter Culture's Soho training center, for InterAmerican's Sept. 27 Future of Coffee event, was like being immersed in a warm golden hue. All polished wood and clean, comforting lines, the space, like so many New York City businesses, is long and slim.
Victoria Brown Research Assistant Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future On any given day, more than 500 customers walk bleary-eyed into an average Starbucks store. With more than 24,000 stores globally, that's 12 million people drinking Starbucks each day.
As I set off to write this post, I naively googled "umami." Three whirlwind umami-research days later, I headed to the grocery store to pick up ingredients for a sensory exercise that would revolve around tasting tomato products. You may ask: What is a sensory exercise?
Victoria Brown Research Assistant Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future The Photovoice medium, which some refer to as a form of "citizen science," is an emerging tool being put to good use by food policy councils, government agencies and, most importantly, citizens around the globe.