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Stepping into Monarch Coffee in Kansas City feels like you’ve suddenly been transported eight hours forward in time and roughly 4,500 miles east. The Parisian aesthetics (reinforced through Instagram imagery) and detailed botanical wallpaper beckon even the shyest of selfiers to snap away in a fit of self-documentation. The space is simultaneously clean, intelligent, calming, and indisputably cute. But beyond the beautiful design, there is a holistic intentionality at work here, built around bringing people of all walks of life together in a comfortable, forward-thinking space.

The brainchild of Tyler and Jaime Rovenstine, Monarch Coffee’s mission becomes clearer when given some context. Tyler, a long and pedigreed member of the Kansas City coffee community as well as regional Barista Champion (South Central, 2014), sought to instill the space with some of the practices he picked up along the competition circuit. “We wanted to give the level of attention that’s given to judges [in competition] to the customer,” he tells Sprudge. Water service extends to guests in every corner of the cafe, for example, and seasonal signature beverages are given a prominent menu presence.

When initially stepping into the bare architectural space he saw the perfect layout for his ideal in-the-round coffee bar. “We knew we wanted an island in the middle to allow for drink delivery,” Rovenstine tells us. Service here happens on a custom seafoam green La Marzocco Linea PB espresso machine, paired with multiple Mahlkönig grinders in matte white and a Curtis G4 batch brewer. Monarch roasts their own coffee offsite using a Diedrich IR12.

Noticeably missing at Monarch are the regular shouts of, “<insert name>, your latte is ready!” Instead, the Rovenstines’ service style allows the customer to place their order at the bar and then immediately make themselves comfortable rather than waiting for their name to be called in the classic cafe stereotype. That’s more comfortable for the guests, but it also requires the baristas to address every drink customer in an inviting manner, building one-on-one relationships that feel personal and authentic. Actually knowing the customers becomes part of their daily equation. They cannot simply rinse and repeat.

The staff itself is small and tight-knit, composed of a diverse group of baristas rooted in gender-balanced, inclusive hiring practices. Tyler and Jaime Rovenstine hoped this would encourage both customers and staff from a wide swath of backgrounds and identities to find common ground at the cafe. Goals like this are always a work in progress, but a quick glance around the space reveals one of the most diverse coffee settings in the city, and this weekend Monarch’s lead barista, Gisel Alvarez, will represent the shop and the Kansas City coffee community at the 2019 US Barista Championship, hosted a few miles away at the KC Expo Center.

“This is the cafe I didn’t know I needed,” said Jaime, who headed the overall design approach to the space and vibe at Monarch. That work has led her to spend time training with The Open Table, a local organization dedicated to building a “…community where everyone belongs, a city where all have the power to pursue their dreams and ambitions, and a people who are committed to each other’s liberation…” This training has helped Jaime to co-lead anti-racism workshops on the local level; she’ll be hosting a special workshop on the weekend of the US Coffee Champs event in Kansas City (limited space available, sign-up here).

As a further extension to facilitate their outreach opportunities, Monarch Coffee’s nearly 1,500 square-foot private Drawing Room space has played host to several cultural and female-focused events and workshops such as the recent “Galentine’s Day” Pop-up party organized alongside The Homeless Period Project and American Daughters. The event showcased local female artists’ goods and snacks with the goal of raising awareness and donations of feminine hygiene products for women in need. Other public events have included holiday markets and yoga classes.

Kansas City’s coffee scene has come so far in the last decade, and it took that building and growth to lead us today to a shop like Monarch. The coffee tastes good. The room feels great. This place represents not just what’s possible here in Kansas City, but for the coffee culture at large headed into the next decade. I’m proud to call this my hometown shop, and if you’re reading with upcoming time in our city on the horizon, please consider this the strongest possible Sprudge recommendation for the coffee and culture work they’re doing at Monarch.

Charlie Burt is the lead photographer for SprudgeLive and contributor based in Kansas City. Read more Charlie Burt on Sprudge.

The post In Kansas City, Pushing The Coffee Culture Forward At Monarch appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

It can be hard out there for wholesale coffee roasters. As we gleaned from this year’s Build-Outs of Summer, it seems just about everyone roasts or wants to roast. And those adhering to the no-longer-en-vogue multi-roaster model are more inclined to stick with a few permanent options instead of rotating regularly. And even when they do find a home in a cafe, wholesale-only roasters’ entire consumer interaction is left outside their own hands.

The most obvious solution (if not also the most expensive) is to open a coffee shop of their own. And that’s exactly what Richmond, Virginia’s Blanchard’s Coffee Roasting Co is doing. After 14 years in existence, Blanchard’s is opening not one but two shops in as many years.

The expansion into the cafe space will be gradual for the company; the first location—in a “historic building in the 3100 block of West Broad Street, Richmond,” per a press release—is scheduled to be open some time in the summer of 2019. The second location, “part of a new mixed use development on Richmond’s Forest Hill Avenue,” is expected to fruition in spring of the following year. Blanchard’s will work with architectural design firm Fultz & Singh Architects on both locations.

For founder David Blanchard, these cafes are a long time coming. “We have thought about opening a cafe every year for the last 10 years. However, the momentum of our business has always pushed us to further our investment in roasting infrastructure,” Blanchard tells Sprudge. But it wasn’t until a family vacation at the end of 2018 that finally convinced him to put the wheels in motion.

“My wife, Kelly, two daughters, Molly and Ann-Cason, and I spent a week in San Francisco. One of our vacation traditions is to visit local cafes, and I witnessed a light click on in my children’s minds as we visited cafes in San Francisco and Santa Cruz. They have been around coffee their entire lives, but they saw coffee from a different point of view in on that trip,” Blanchard states. “As we were flying home, I thought about Molly and Ann-Cason’s coffee ‘enlightenment’ and thought about our farmer relationships. Blanchard’s brick and mortar cafes would give us a larger stage to tell coffee’s story from our perspective as roasters. Cafes would force us to double down on education, incorporating educational opportunities for both our wholesale partners and retail clients alike, creating a robust platform from which we can push sustainable coffee culture further in our community and beyond.”

These cafes are just the start for Blanchard’s expansion plans. There are murmurs of other projects in the works beyond Richmond that have yet to be finalized. For now, they are doing the extremely difficult task of building two coffee shops at the same time. They are taking control of their narrative and expanding the platform upon which they can tell their stories and of those they work with. For more information, visit Blanchard’s Coffee Roasting Co’s official website.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Top image via Blanchard’s

The post Blanchard’s Coffee Branches Into The Cafe Space With Two Richmond Shops appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Montreal’s micro-roaster scene has exploded in recent years. Along with well-established brands, the city has witnessed the launches of many promising startups, with few projects more hotly anticipated than Jérôme Greniers–Desbiens and Mathieu Carrier’s Structure Coffee.

For years now, the longtime friends—and two of the most respected professionals in the local industry—were thinking of launching a coffee business. They had worked in Montreal and elsewhere, their professional paths never really crossing until Carrier’s return from the West Coast in 2017.

Greniers–Desbiens, a coffee “geek” with a background in chemistry, had been involved in numerous projects and was a co-founder of the East Coast Coffee Madness, an annual gathering of the city’s coffee community with renowned guest speakers from all over the world. Carrier worked as the general manager for 49th Parallel Kitsilano cafe in Vancouver and he has visited many coffee farms working with the Socodevi, a local nonprofit network of cooperatives.

Partners Carrier, Greniers–Desbiens, and Marco Dieckmann. Photo by Hélène Bouffard.

This time the two were ready to launch their own brand, Structure Coffee, planning an ambitious cafe-roastery in downtown Montreal. Permits and other assorted problems stalled the cafe project, but the young company had already bought green coffee during a trip in Colombia and decided to go ahead with the roasting.

“We started by renting the roaster at Kaito Coffee, nearly a year ago,” explains Greniers–Desbiens, who is the green buyer and head roaster. “We have two basic espresso blends, Fondation and 1852 (both made with a mix of coffees from Brazil and Colombia), along with single origin micro-lot coffees. We travel to meet producers and try to trade with them directly, as we work for the long-term profitability and sustainability of all parties.”

Due to the high expectations, Structure’s team knew they had to hit their stride quickly, and the response from the local community has shown that this goal has been reached. In a few months, the coffees were available in many well-known cafes in town like Cafe Myriade and Caffè In Gamba.

“As our needs were growing, we recently moved to the Montreal Roasting Society, a co-roasting facility created by Scott Rao and Andy Kyres,” explains Grenier-Desbiens. The space boasts two Probat Roasters, a 25kg and a 50kg, and many of the city’s newest micro-roasters use them.

With their roasting operations off and running, Carrier and Greniers–Desbiens returned to their cafe project. Getting the other side of the business on track proved a bit more complicated. In the process, a third member joined the team: Marco Dieckmann, a Berlin-born self-proclaimed “coffee aficionado” with a background in marketing and finance, who followed his circus passion all the way to Montreal’s Cirque du Soleil.

In spite of his creative background, the other two like to see him as the reasoned voice in the trio. Dieckmann agrees that he had to remind them that they really had to stay focused on their goals in order to get through all the obstacles. Finally, three locations and many long negotiations later, Structure opened its cafe on February 1st on busy McGill Street in Old Montreal.

Carrier manages the operations and aims to create a space where coffee lovers will be able to taste and appreciate their products. “This is something we’ve been waiting a long time for. I’ve learned from my time at 49th Parallel that it’s important to show respect to your customers, to acknowledge their needs, and to help them get the best of what they like.”

The vast space is bright with white furniture and there’s a central island which eases the flow of customers. The espresso machine is a three-group Sanremo Opera Revolution, and the staff has everything to meet the request of any coffee lover. There is a large selection of pastries and light bites baked by Automne Boulangerie and Dave Plant.

“Even with the large front bay windows, this is a semi-basement locale and we wanted to make it as ‘open’ as possible,” explains Grenier-Desbiens. “There are shelves on all the walls where we can highlight our products and those of our partners.”

Among those, a rich coffee caramel, the result of a collaboration with local confectioners La Lichée. And there’s also a beer, Tejo, prepared by Dunham Brewery with Structure’s Jaime Gonzalez Colombian coffee. Carrier hopes that the new cafe will open even more opportunities for Structure. “There are so many things we can do in a space like this. Once we are settled, and I’m confident it will come rapidly, I’m sure we will move forward.”

Michel Marois (@MMcafeLP) is a sportswriter for La Presse, and a Sprudge.com contributor based in Montreal. Read more Michel Marois on Sprudge. 

All photos by the author unless otherwise noted.

An earlier version of this story mistakenly described Greniers–Desbiens as the creator of the ECCM. There are five creators of ECCM, and you can read more about them all here. We regret the error.

The post In Montreal, Structure Coffee Finds A Home And Builds A Following appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

News broke last week (since confirmed by World Coffee Events) that 2018 Mexican Brewers Cup champion Carlos Maqueda had been denied a visa by the United States government, and will not be allowed entry into the country to compete at the World Barista Championship in Boston next month. As of the time of reporting, Sprudge can update that a total of four coffee competitors have been denied visas to attend the Boston event: both Maqueda and Emilio Arturo of Mexico, as well as the Brewers Cup and Barista champions from the United Arab Emirates Michaela Ruazol and Lablibell Bajarias, respectively.

As the adverse effects of international tensions trickle outside the bureaucratic world and into the lives of real, actual people, many in the coffee community are left with more questions than answers. Visa denials are constantly looming at World events; indeed, those international tensions can play out directly when it comes to accessing coffee’s grandest stage.

World Coffee Events brand manager (and former Sprudge editor) Alex Bernson told us that the exact number of visa denials over the near two decades of World Barista Championship events is difficult to know. While there are high profile cases of competitors having visa issues that play out publicly—perhaps none more famous that Iran’s first barista champion Mehran Mohammadnezhad Mirjani being denied and then finally approved for his visa at the 11^th hour to compete in Seattle in 2015—many can go unnoticed. “We don’t always receive full or even any reports from competitors and national bodies as to why they aren’t attending or sending a second place competitor instead of a first,” Bernson tells Sprudge, “nor do we necessarily expect everyone to let us know when they’re having visa specific troubles, because there are many reasons both political and personal that may be the case.”

According to Bernson, issues related to past visa denials are long ranging, and oftentimes unexpectedly personal. “[It could be] everything from not filling out forms exactly correctly to an embassy’s satisfaction on a first or second try, to having a citizenship from a country in Central Asia but working in and representing a European national body,” Bernsons tells Sprudge. “Sometimes the process takes too long and they don’t get their visas in time, especially with later championships. Sometimes competitors get a visa but their coaches and support people do not. Sometimes a person’s individual history in their own country or a host country may come into play with a government’s decision. Sometimes items are held in customs or huge costs and extremely intricate processes for visas are imposed on certain countries by other countries’ governments.”

Lacking sufficient data to know for certain, Bernson speculates (based on the past few years) that there are, on average, between one and three deferrals each seasons for the annual event roster. That includes events in the United States and elsewhere around the world. “For example, in 2017 we know of at least one visa issue occurring in each of the three host countries that year, including one competitor being denied, one set of coaches being denied, and a difficult to acquire competitor one taking multiple tries coming down to the last hour.” In 2017 the WCE’s portfolio of events were hosted in Seoul (South Korea), Budapest (Hungary), and Guangzhou (China).

After winning the Mexican Brewers Cup in September, Carlos Maqueda began working on getting his visa paperwork in order with Carlos de la Torre, the 2018 Mexican Barista Champion and Maqueda’s employer at Café con Jiribilla. De la Torre is no stranger to applying for visas, having won multiple national coffee championships over the past decade, and had already secured approval for his trip to Boston. Included in the paperwork for Maqueda was an invitation letter from the WCE “highlighting their achievements and the great importance of bringing together all national body representatives on the global stage,” per a statement from the WCE. A letter in this style is standard issue for all national champions seeking visas for international travel related to official SCA coffee tournaments. Also included was “a letter indicating that all his expenses for travel were covered… his status as national champion, [and] the coffee bar where he works also extended all the documentation to support his history as worker and the economic proof of payments,” per an email from Arturo Hernández Fujigaki, a Mexican Coffee Association member familiar with the situation.

Even with all this substantiating documentation, Maqueda’s visa request was denied. The government is required to give a reason for any denial, but Maqueda tells Sprudge he received no such information. “They never gave me a clear answer. I always got a, ‘You do not meet the requirements,’ but they never specified which requirements.” As of press time, no clear indication as to why these visas were denied has been made available—Sprudge has asked every entity involved with this saga, up to and including the US State Department (no reply as of press time).

With a potential five-year visa application ban looming if further appeals are made, Maqueda has now opted to apply for Deferred Candidacy, allowing him to compete in Melbourne in 2020. 2018 Mexican Brewers Cup runner-up Emilio Arturo was offered the spot in Maqueda’s place, but Fujigaki tells Sprudge that Arturo’s visa application was also denied. Arturo will appeal the decision, but if he is unsuccessful, Fujigaki states an invitation will be extended to the third place competitor, Miriam Aldana, who already successfully obtained a visa.

It’s worth noting this is not the first time a competitor from Mexico has had difficulty obtaining a visa to compete in the United States; indeed, the issues pre-date the Trump Era (shudder), and have become sadly commonplace. “In 2009 for the WCE in Atlanta we faced the same situation with Aleli Moreno, our first woman champion, who was not able to get the visa,” Fujigaki tells Sprudge. Aleli ultimately received the aforementioned and deeply onerous five-year ban after exhausting her number of appeals. “We are very upset by the decisions taken in the visa process for Carlos, but that is out of our hands,” says Fujigaki. “The deferral process is not the best solution for him but at least Carlos will not face the same situation as Aleli lived years ago.”

Sprudge was a vocal critic of the SCA’s Deferred Candidate Policy as originally announced. But that policy underwent substantive review before being put into motion, thanks to the hard work of the SCA’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Task Force. Today the policy (read it in full here) is non-discriminatory, and centers the dignity and humanity of any competitor faced with a difficult situation. It is beyond shitty that governments around the world—including our own historically shitty regime here in America—have made a habit of not issuing visas to competitors seeking to travel and represent their nation on coffee’s biggest stage. But used in this context, it’s clear to see why a Deferred Candidacy Policy is so very necessary. This way, competitors like Carlos Maqueda get a second chance to represent their country on the international stage. It’s a right they’ve earned.

This story is developing. Do you know of other competitors having issues acquiring their visa? Contact us here.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman contributed to this reporting. 

The post Are Visa Denials The New Normal At World Coffee Competitions? appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

The commingling of coffee and cycling has been documented assiduously here, there, and everywhere. For the pros, caffeine is a legal, globally accessible performance booster. For those of a more athleisurist bent, cafes and bicycles offer a gentle, seated opportunity to take in the world while still getting a dose of vim and vigor.

These circumstances were surely relevant to the founding of La Fábrica Girona. It helped, too, that the business filled a major market gap in Girona, a city in Catalonia, some 60 miles north of Barcelona. Having little to no specialty coffee or breakfast and brunch culture is not unusual for smaller-town Spain, but it must have disappointed Girona’s growing international crowd. That includes professional cyclists—many of whom have, like Lance Armstrong, been sojourners, taking advantage of the dry weather, tranquil roads, and varied terrain—along with culinary travelers building trips around a precious reservation at the tri-Michelin-starred El Celler De Can Roca, and more recently, fans of Game (and Gay) of Thrones, the sixth season of which was filmed at spots across Girona.

And yet, a more personal matter urged the March 2015 opening of the pioneering specialty coffee enterprise. It was the commingling of its owners. When Christian and Amber Meier arrived in 2008 from their native Canada, he was on a professional cycling contract. After the couple married in 2010, they decided to settle in Girona permanently. The years went by, Christian Meier did a Tour de France in 2014, among other races with impressive results, and Amber grew tired of playing expat housewife.

She recalls her frustration, saying to him: “I don’t want to have to resent you for living your passion, so I’ll go back to Canada and we’ll do long-distance.”

Christian demurred and proposed the idea of establishing their very own watering hole. After all, they met at a cafe in Metro Vancouver, where she worked and he was a customer, and they had been pining for comfort foods and drinks.

“There was nothing,” Amber remembers of Girona back then. “We lived here for so long, and maybe two or three times a week, [we’d realize]: ‘Oh, I wish we could go for a coffee. I wish we could go for brunch.’”

But, she stresses: “The reason we opened La Fábrica is because I needed something to do. It was never about the money. It was never about success. It was just: I want something to do a few hours a day while my husband is out cycling.”

Christian and Amber Meier

Intended or not, their success is surging. Christian, once on the road 170 days a year, has since retired, nowadays channeling the focus of a competitive athlete into roasting for their own label, called Approachable Coffee. Amber, who is approachableness personified, manages much of the daily operations with equal parts meticulousness and merriness.

Open daytime hours from 9am to 3pm, La Fábrica offers dining options in sol y sombra: outside at tables arranged on a landing between steps, visitors can take in sun; inside, the converted carpenter’s workshop provides a cool, stone-walled sanctuary. With a tire pump at the door and a basket of borrowable cable locks, the peloton is welcome, though, the Meiers emphasize, non-cyclists are, too.

Toasties and artisanal pastries are par for the course, but so are bagels and breakfast bowls. The kaleidoscopic spread of tropical fruits surrounding violet sugar-topped yoghurt must be the most edigrammable breakfast on the Iberian Peninsula.

The espresso machine is a two-group Rocket R8. While the brand is less common in commercial settings, it is no coincidence that the company’s founder, Andrew Meo, is a former pro cyclist and someone the Meiers call a friend. The Compak grinder holds one Approachable Coffee roast at a time—a “people-pleaser,” according to Amber, that works well alone or with dairy. Ask for a café con leche, a cappuccino, or a flat white, and you get the same double-shot of espresso with foamed fresh milk. Order a café amb gel—espresso poured over ice as Catalonians traditionally do it—and you get instead a cold brew because Christian hates the thought of his flavor profiles being shocked on the rocks.

Remarks Amber: “In the nicest way possible, we’ve wrecked coffee for a lot of people because now they can’t drink it anywhere other than here or Espresso Mafia.”

Her reference is to the Meiers’ second cafe, which opened in March 2017. For all of La Fábrica’s Middle-earth coziness, Espresso Mafia, which is a two-minute walk away, sparkles in a Pearly Gates palette. Its whiteness with metallic accents simultaneously index the place’s designation as, in Amber’s words, “the experimental laboratory.” Of its branding, “we could’ve done a little bit more research into the sensitivity of the word ‘mafia,’” she admits. “A couple people don’t like the name, but you learn and you move forward.”

Here a custom two-group Sanremo Cafe Racer and two Victoria Arduino Mythos One grinders facilitate the serving of up to five different coffees. Menu highlights are a tasting flight, cascara, and summertime nitro. Open til 7 PM most weeknights and an hour later Fridays and Saturdays, it attracts aficionados as well as the spandex set.

When not kitted and cleated himself, Christian is regularly found next door, where he roasts green beans from Falcon Coffees and Mare Terra on a 15-kilo Joper. Approachable Coffee’s wholesale business is expanding, notably in Barcelona. The most like-spirited venue so far seems to be specialty coffee-serving bike rental shop On Y Va, whose French name means, most aptly, “Let’s go!”

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge.

The post In Cyclist Mecca Girona, La Fábrica Is A Bike Cafe For Everyone appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

As Tea Week comes to a close here on Sprudge, we’re going ease ourselves back into robust coffee coverage (don’t want to pull a hammy, y’know), and there is no greater middle ground than coffee tea.

Coffee tea is nothing new to the specialty coffee world. Normally, its comes in the form of cascara, made by steeping dried coffee cherries—a byproduct of coffee production—to create a sweet, pipe-tobacco-like flavored tisane. But there’s a new product entering the market offering a new take on coffee tea. Made from the leaves of the coffee tree, Wize Monkey is rethinking coffee tea and hoping to provide a windfall for producers and pickers during the non-harvesting season.

For their lightly caffeinated product, the Vancouver-based Wize Monkey is working with Finca La Aurora, a coffee farm in Matagalpa, Nicaragua run by the Ferrufino family—the son, Enrique Ferrufino, is one of the co-founders of Wize Monkey along with Arnaud Petitvallet and Max Rivest—who have been producing specialty-grade coffee for three generations. After the three-month coffee harvest ending in March, Finca La Aurora lets the trees rest through the remainder of spring in order to regenerate for the next season. Then starting in June and lasting through fall, leaves are harvested from tree trimmings already being done to maximize the coffee harvest, ensuring the new product doesn’t disrupt the health of the primary income.

The leaves are then processed on-site in a method Petitvallet describes as similar to that of oolong, containing “notes of honey, hazelnut, some earthy layers, and happens to blend very well with all sorts of flavors without overpowering them.” Having sampled a few of their offerings, Wize Monkey’s coffee leaf tea is indeed a very mild beverage with a light, honey-like sweetness. It lends itself especially well to their Earl Grey, where the tea has a chocolatiness that lets the bergamot take center stage.

More than just an added revenue stream for the farm owners—which coffee leaf tea most certainly is—Wize Monkey is wanting to create a positive effect for the coffee pickers as well. Many of the people doing the actual coffee picking are migrant workers, traveling from farm to farm during the different harvesting seasons in order to make enough money to survive. This nomadic lifestyle can be especially hard on the children, who travel with the parents, rendering them unable to stay in one place long enough to attend school. According to Wize Monkey, by extending the work season from three months to something closer to nine, families are more able to establish roots. Petitvallet tells Sprudge that Wize Monkey current employs 100 people to harvest coffee leaves.

Looking forward, Petitvallet, Rivest, and Ferrufino are eyeing different processing methods—currently a “green” and a “black” tea are in the works—to be used both in limited quantity micro-lots and in their blends.

Wize Monkey coffee leaf tea currently has eight flavor options—original, earl grey, mango party, sunset chai, ginger lemon, strawberry hibiscus, minty marvel, and jasmine—that are available both in bags and as loose leaf. Their products can be found in grocers like Gelson’s, Sprouts, Mother’s Market, and Whole Foods as well as online via Amazon and their webstore.

For more information on Wize Monkey coffee leaf tea, visit their official website.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Top image via Wize Monkey

Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post Wize Monkey Is Coffee Tea, But Not THAT Coffee Tea appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Coffee houses have a long and noted history for being hot beds for new and radical ideas. The home of the intellectual and the revolutionary alike, the coffee house was home to the free exchange of ideas amongst the people (much to the chagrin of those in power). But it’s Tea Week on Sprudge, and so we must ask: what of the tea room? According to an article in JStor Daily, the tea room was no less revolutionary and in many ways were hotbeds of late-19^th/early-20^th century radical feminism.

At the turn of the century, women in America and parts of Europe weren’t allowed to dine out unaccompanied by a man, if they were even allowed into the establishment at all. Without gathering places to go and socialize, women of the time often found themselves relegated to sit at home alone. But they came up with an ingenious solution: turn sections of their houses into tea rooms, creating places for women to dine out.

It wasn’t just room in their homes, though. According to the article, women “rented or borrowed barns, old houses, and grist mills to serve as makeshift tea rooms.” In them, proprietors would serve tea (most of the time) and a variety of light fare, a contrast from the heavy, meat-and-potatoes dominated menus of the male-catering establishments. Things like fruit and vegetable salads, finger sandwiches, waffles, and toasts were common on the hand-written menus. (So basically a menu that would not be out of place in today’s Instagram cafes.)

Tea rooms were more than just places for socializing, though. They also served as a means for women to earn an income. Per the article, “unlike many occupations, feeding people and presiding as hostesses were accepted ways for women to enter the workforce, since these tasks felt a lot like what they’d been doing all along, without pay.”

Tea rooms soon became a symbol of independent women. From the article’s author Cara Strickland:

As a young girl, I read books like the Nancy Drew mysteries—the characters were always popping into tea rooms for lunch. To a modern reader, tea rooms conjured visions of crumpets and china, but when the books were published (the first in 1930), mentioning a tea room was meant to communicate to the reader that Nancy and her friends were independent women who could eat out without a man to escort them. While most women think nothing of dining out without a man now, tea rooms played a major role in bringing about this phenomenon.

The effects of the tea room are still felt in the modern dining scene, where common table items like flowers and candles all trace their roots back the “home idea” trend popular in tea rooms. While coffee houses may be better known as the birthplaces of radical ideas, tea houses were literal homes of revolution.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Top image via JStor Daily

Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post The Tea Room’s Important Role In Turn Of The Century Feminism appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Welcome to Sprudge Shop Spotlights, a new weekend series in which we highlight our very favorite items currently available in the ever-changing, fast-moving, utterly bespoke Sprudge Shop. Now shipping worldwide, featuring unique artist and brand collaborations from around the planet. Enjoy!

It’s Tea Week presented by Breville USA, huzzah! A whole week of content dedicated to the wide wonderful world of Camelia sinensis (and yes, also a few lovely tisanes). What good is a themed week of content without some fun merch to back it up? For a limited time we are carrying special Tea Week merch over at the Sprudge Shop! Get your hands on pin-packs and tees and save 15% off your whole order using promo code TEAWEEK.

Pin Packs

Just in time for spring, these delicious looking pastel pins tell the world how you really feel. “Actually, It’s A Tisane,” “Tea Drunk,” and “Tea Is Good” will tell the world hey, I like tea, alright?

T-Shirts

This charming “Tea Is Good” tee comes in sizes small, medium, large, and extra large in a fashionable vintage kelly green. Quantities are stupid limited, so don’t stall on ordering—this is a highly allocated limited edition Tea Week shirt drop the likes of which you’ve never seen.

Head over to the Sprudge Shop immediately! Enjoy $5 flat-rate shipping for US domestic orders so order a ton of stuff! It’s only five bucks! And remember to use promo code TEAWEEK to save 15% off your whole order.

Happy steeping friends!

Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post Limited Edition Sprudge Tea Week Merch appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

It’s Tea Week here on Sprudge, which means we’re turning our attention to the wide world of Camellia sinensis and beyond for a weeklong deep-steep of coffee’s leafy counterpart. This includes News Wire, Sprudge’s daily hard-hitting coverage of coffee news from around the world, which will spending the next five days scouring the internet for the best tea stories going.

But we’re going to ease into Tea Week here on Wire, with a story oh so familiar to coffee news readers, but with some of the names changed.

TEA! It’s the key to long life! Specifically green tea. In a recent article in the New York Post, red wine, salty snacks, and none other than green tea are espoused by The Longevity Solution authors Dr. Jason Fung and James DiNicolantonio as a recipe for living to an advanced age.

To reach these conclusions, Fung—a nephrologist—and DiNicolantonio—a doctor of pharmacology—look to blue zones, “areas of the world with the longest living populations,” for clues, one of them being Okinawa, Japan. Their research yielded some fairly standard “longevity cures:” don’t eat a lot of meat, animal products like eggs and cheese, or processed foods; eat vegetables and whole grains; and get your protein from plant-based options like nuts and legumes. But they also had a few suggestions that amount to more than simply, “eat right, dummy.”

One such suggestion was green tea, which Fung says “suppresses the appetite and boosts the metabolism a bit.” The article also notes that “some research suggests that the drink can help ward off cancer,” and the positive health benefits of caffeine have been widely reported here on Sprudge. Fung goes on to suggest drinking it without cream and sugar, because no duh. If your goal is to be healthy, adding milk fat and sweet, sweet empty calories ain’t it. Instead, opt for—and this is Sprudge speaking here, not Fung—any of these lovely green teas from Japan sourced by Kettl of Brooklyn (we especially like the Ogura Gyokuro) or this beautiful White Dragonwell from San Francisco’s Song Tea. Head on over to Sprudge’s tea buying guide for more tips and suggestions.

The doctors also suggest one to two glasses a wine a day (we have a website for that too!) as well as salty foods for added longevity, and a generally happy life anyway. Because what’s the point of living a long time if you’re eating flavorless food?

As you’ll probably see suggested across Sprudge this week, maybe consider adding a little tea to your daily drinking ritual. Not only is it a whole world of flavor worth exploring with the same passion and rigor as you would coffee, it may also help you live longer. And the longer you live, the more coffee you can drink. Think about it. It’s simple math.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post For A Long Heathy Life, Tea Is Key appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Hello and welcome! We are Sprudge, the world’s most popular coffee publication, and for the last decade, we have published stories all about the world of coffee every single week, sometimes two or three or more a day. But this week, if you will so kindly permit us, we’d like to try something a little different.

This week we’re going to run around a dozen or stories about tea. This is Tea Week on Sprudge presented by Breville USA.

Yes, tea! We really, really love the stuff. But moreover, tea is enjoying a particularly interesting cultural moment right now, as access to better and better quality small lots grows worldwide, and the ancient culture around tea enjoys new interpretations and points of influence. As a beverage and medicinal practice, it is thousands of years old, with roots in mainland China and a cultural footprint across nearly every nation in Asia; and at the same time, it is blowing up right now amongst young people in the all around the world, across social media and Instagram, and at high-end tea shops and coffee bars from Taipei to London to New York.

It has never been easier to have access to great tea, and yet this access is threatened by political forces. Mankind’s fundamental urge to trade openly with other peoples and cultures around the world is under attack by an ugly, virulent resurgence of isolationism and racism. Tea stands against all that—it is both old and new, local and global, a personal practice and yet inherently political—and that’s why we love it so much.

Across these pages, you’ll find stories about tea shops and tea influencers, traders and purveyors, ceramicists and design artists around the world. We’ll explore how tea interacts with graphic design (“Tea Cakes are the New Sneaker Drop“), and travel to Taiwan with one of America’s foremost young tea buyers (“For Song Tea, Sourcing Matters—But It Isn’t Everything“). We offer a series of guides on where to buy delicious tea and how to get started with the stuff you need to make it, from ceramics to home brewers like those offered by our sponsors at Breville USA. We talk to tea shop owners like Elena Liao of New York City’s Té Company and Lina Medvedeva of Floating Mountain, both of whom escaped the corporate world to follow their passions into tea entrepreneurship.

We’re also looking forward to serving you tea in person this week! On Thursday, March 7th and Friday, March 8th we’re throwing the doors open to our HQ in Portland for an open tea service, featuring complimentary teas from around the world (featured in our guides) served in artisan ceramics, along with a hands-on chance to explore Breville USA’s range of tea brewers, kettles and steepers featured in these articles, including the Tea Maker, Tea Maker Compact, Smart Tea Infuser, and IQ Kettle Pure. There will also be yummy tea snacks. Check our Instagram for full details! 

This is our first real crack at writing about tea on Sprudge, and we won’t nearly come close to telling every meaningful story from this deep and fascinating world. We hope to continue writing and reporting on tea in the months and years to come, bringing in more viewpoints and perspectives on the topic along the way. And don’t worry, we still love coffee! Coffee and the global industry around it will always be our main focus here at Sprudge, and we assure you, a great many gallons of coffee were brewed and consumed over the course of writing and researching these stories.

But for this week let’s cast our eyes together on the world of progressive tea in 2019. There’s fascinating stuff happening here, both from a culinary and cultural perspective. Today tea offers a fascinating global culture mash-up for modern drinkers, and there’s never been a better time to fall in love with it.

Happy steeping!

—The Sprudge Team

Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post Welcome To Tea Week—Presented By Breville USA appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News