More and more organically minded coffee businesses in the United States are trying to help desperately poor coffee farmers. For example, Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers of Portland, Oregon, works directly with family-owned coffee farms in Central America to insure they can uphold stringent standards to produce premium-quality coffees for which they are paid premium prices. Allegro Coffee Company of Thornton, Colorado, a subsidiary of Whole Foods Market, forges relationships with its growers, assuring them of a fair price, requiring that they use sustainable and traditional coffee growing techniques, and bringing members of coffee co-op farms and family farms to Denver from Guate-mala, El Salvador, Mexico, even India, so they can see how their coffees are roasted and marketed. The JBR Coffee Company of San Leandro, California, has developed a program called Source Aid to help organic coffee growers in Central America through the efforts of its green bean buyer, Pete Rogers. (To find out more, visit http://www.naturefriendly.org .) For more general information on about specialty coffee and some of the important issues today, visit the Specialty Coffee Association of America web site (http://www.scaa.org). I guarantee that a trip through these web sites will be an eye-opener regarding our daily cup of joe. 

What to Look for

The highest grade of coffee is Coffea arabica, usually called just arabica in stores. It’s a bean that thrives in shaded mountain regions. Today the market is being flooded with lower quality robusta (Coffea canephora), which comes mostly from Vietnam and Brazil. Don’t buy it; in addition to being of poorer quality, it’s causing immense social disruption in coffee-growing countries. 

Truly good coffee should meet certain requirements. It should be grown at high elevations (mountain grown) and be specialty grade arabica. However, as with wine, you can have an award winning coffee from a plantation one year, and the next year it will be unremarkable. The best bet is to find a company whose product you know, like, and trust as truly organic, shade-grown, and high-grade arabica, and stick with it until you find something even more to your taste. Look for coffees that are certified by all three organizations listed below. With triple-certified coffee, the consumer makes a direct connection with the people and places where the coffee is grown.

These certifications represent a landmark standard for the food industry (or any industry).

1.    Certified Organically Grown and Processed by QAI. Quality Assurance International is a worldwide organic certification agency.

2.    Certified Fair Trade by Transfair USA.  ....read more