Keep It Kaimuki Archives - Page 22 of 23 - The Curb Kaimuki

It’s a quiet Saturday morning in Portland, Oregon, and coffee professionals Lucy Alvarez and Angel Medina are settling in for the day at their 14”x 14” coffee bar. The duo are glad to be home—they just arrived back in the city from a trip to Mexico, visiting coffee farmers in the Colima region, in the villages of Arrayanal, Yerba Buena, Cofradia, and Suchitlan. Alvarez and Medina pride themselves on their personal connection between the origin of the roast, their coffee shop, and their families. You can taste it in every cup of coffee served at Kiosko, their small coffee shop nestled on the SW bank of the Willamette River.

Alvarez and Medina opened back on July 1, 2017 with intentions to infuse the Mexican-American experience into Portland’s coffee scene. Starting out as a fundraiser for a national pro-DACA initiative, Alvarez and Medina went from small-scale roasting to shop owners overnight. Throughout the process, they’ve stayed true to their roots as small business owners with a deeply felt Mexican heritage.

Back in 2016, Alvarez was in school for pre-med, while Medina worked at the Portland headquarters for Airbnb. His role there was as a tech-y sounding “Launch Experience Agent,” focused on advancing the customer experience in Latin American countries. But then coffee started creeping into their lives in a big way. At home, Medina fell in love with roasting coffee on his Behmor roaster. At first he primarily roasted for personal use, but eventually started sharing with friends, and that soon led to other opportunities.

Angel Medina unveiled his roast to the public for the very first time in support of United We Dream, an immigrant youth-led foundation built to recognize and support DACA recipients. When customers donated $10 to United We Dream, they received a half-pound bag of Medina’s “Kickstarter Blend.” The couple received 48 orders during the initial roll-out, with Medina and Alvarez hand roasting and bagging their coffees in half-pound batches on the Behmor, 15 minutes at a time.

“When I grew up, my family had this saying ‘do what you can with what you have,’” Medina states.

This would be the beginning of their aptly-named roasting company, Smalltime Roasters. The couple went on to open Kiosko a few months after that to have more space to function and to establish their identity within the community. Slowly but surely they were falling into coffee as a life pursuit. 

“We didn’t have as much experience with espresso machines because we’re pour-over people,” Medina tells me. “So we got a machine a week before we opened hoping people wouldn’t be turned off by our latte art,” he laughs. Once a loose end in their launch plan, espresso drinks are now a favorite at Kiosko. Here in Portland, the shop has built a glowing local reputation for their innovative and boundary-pushing latte creations, including fan favorites like the mango sticky rice latte, maple bacon latte, and candied yam latte.

The most popular drink here is the “True Mexican Mocha,” made with espresso, textured milk, house-made Mexican hot chocolate powder, cocoa nibs, freeze-dried raspberry dust, and dark chocolate shavings. Kiosko’s creative approach also extends to their pour-over methods. Medina constructed a new contraption called the “Copper Flower” (pictured below), which he’s convinced is the optimal way for expressing his coffees as pour-over. “The science behind it is to extend the extraction process without compromising the taste,” Medina says. A washed process Mexico Colima is the most common brewed cup served in this method.

Since Kiosko has found their rhythm, they’ve had the ability to shift their daily focus to providing a unique experience. “We wanted to create the warmth and passion for coffee. It’s an extension of our home,” Alvarez says. The reciprocity can be seen in Kiosko daily; as Alvarez and Medina learn more about the community they serve, the city of Portland is exposed to the couple’s unique take and hospitality and heritage. “We feel love from the community,” Medina tells me. “When people walk by, we want it to feel like they are in a different country.”

Not only is Kiosko enticing new customers, they also attracted a staff of like-minded coffee professionals from similar backgrounds. Alvarez and Medina are both descendants of Mexican immigrants from the Jalisco area—a three-hour bus ride from their last round of farm visits—and the baristas on staff at Kiosko are of Puerto Rican, Peruvian, and Guatemalan lineages. Amid their shop growing in popularity, Alvarez and Medina still support groups that align with their personal upbringing. Last winter, they raised money for We The Dreamers, an undocumented-led group focused on their narrative through art. Kiosko bagged and sold single-origin Mexican coffee and donated the sales to the group.

These days, Kiosko is trading in what they deemed “starter” equipment for better options to support their workflow. They recently added the La Marzocco Linea Classic espresso machine, installed by Black Rabbit Service Co. They have the Zenith Eureka high-speed grinder and the G4 ThermoPro brewer from Wilber Curtis Company to round out the gear in their shop.

This story would be enough—a tiny cafe with deep roots and a huge heart, putting out some of the most innovative coffee drinks in the competitive Portland market. But there are no signs of slowing down for Kiosko. Alvarez and Medina are working on plans for their second and third locations, focused on a bigger footprint, improved efficiency, and a focus on highlighting the coffees of Mexico. Kiosko is creating a buzz in the community around their experience, and Portland is a better place for it. 

Giovanni Fillari is a social media manager at Nike and the publisher of @coffeefeedpdx. Read more Giovanni Fillari for Sprudge.

The post Kiosko: The Portland Cafe That Keeps Its Heart In Mexico appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

There is a lot of waste associated with coffee shops. It is a sad fact that many in the industry are painfully aware of and actively trying to curb. But sometimes, even with the best of intentions, the results are… confusing. Take for example, the Stircle, the new in-counter electric coffee stirrer. It feels like its heart is in the right place, so why can’t I not hate it?

Brought to our attention by Mashable, the Stircle is designed to combat the very real problem of waste in coffee shops, particularly the 400 million—by Amron Experimental’s count, the company behind the Stircle—stir sticks thrown away every day. But the solution feels a bit overdesigned, no? It’s like if you got a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros in a room and said, “We need you to design a new stir stick, not recreate the wheel,” and all they heard was, “create a new stir stick that is a wheel.”

According to Stircle’s website, the device “costs 99% less to run than stir sticks and it stirs better.” Dubious claims about “stirring better” aside (because what does that even mean? Surely this can’t be a real, verifiable claim), the Stircle ranges in cost from $345 to $490, depending upon whether you get the basic or advanced model. A cursory search yielded a box of 1,000 coffee stirrers for $3.40. For the same cost as a basic Stircle, you can get 101,470 stir sticks (144,000 for the advanced model). I don’t know how many stir sticks your cafe goes through a day, so you’re going to have to do that math yourself to figure out how long the Stircle will have to be operational for you to break even—not accounting for energy costs or maintenance—never mind costing 99% less.

But it’s not about savings, it’s about keeping plastic out of landfills and saving trees. Call me old fashioned, but what ever happened to spoons? Reusable spoons. Yes, they require water to wash, but surely the water lost in spoon washing (which PS: cafes are already washing anyway. Surely there is room for a few more) is paltry in comparison to what it takes to design and produce an electronic stirring device. And you don’t have to go on that $350 ride.

Maybe I’m on the wrong side of history here. In 20 years when there’s a Stircle in every coffee shop and all the empty landfills have been turned into parks and community gardens, I’m going to look like a real dum-dum. I’ll wear my well-earned shame on that day. But until then, give me a spoon.

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

*all media via Amron Experimental

The post This Coffee Stirrer Is Eco-Friendly, So Why Do I Hate It? appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Anthracite is hard coal—the mineral’s purest form, containing little filler, it burns as clean as coal burns, and built the world in the wake of civilization’s transition from primarily using wood for fuel at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It makes sense, then, that the Seoul-based Anthracite Coffee was founded in a factory, in the city’s Hapjeong neighborhood.

In total, Anthracite has three locations within metropolitan Seoul, as well as a fourth on Jeju Island, all catering to a mix of tourists and locals.

Formerly a shoe factory, the original Hapjeong space is marked by concrete walls, stone floors, and exposed beams. Its ample seating allows for patrons to soak in a kind of moody, industrialness that stands in stark contrast to the newer cafe and roasting space in the Hannam neighborhood, for instance.

There, each floor is replete with massive windows that lend themselves to the light outside, and you can clearly see the roasting process on display in the back, as well as enjoy an indoor pseudo-green space.

Regardless of which location a person visits, however, every Anthrocite features the same selection of coffees, all roasted by Anthrocite, whose bags bear the images of stark, angular pieces of coal and names like William Blake and Pablo Neruda. Anthrocite’s lattes are at once smooth and assertive, with a nutty, spicy, almost chocolatey flavor that goes well with one of the many primarily French-inspired baked goods on offer.

Anthracite is serious not only about providing excellent coffee drinking experiences, but also about educating folks on what they are imbibing. To this end, public cuppings are offered weekly on Tuesday evenings. Additionally, for patrons who are interested in diving deeper into the art of coffee brewing, Anthracite offers home barista courses throughout the year. From the information available on the webpage, the course provides instruction on a variety of coffee related subjects, from coffee history and varieties, sensory evaluations of coffee, and an array of extraction and brewing methods. At Anthracite, not only can you have your cup of coffee, but you can learn more about it, too.

Michelle Hwang is a writer who splits her time between California, Paris, and Seoul. Read more Michelle Hwang for Sprudge.

The post In Seoul, Anthracite Coffee Fuels The Hapjeong Neighborhood appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

That blockchain is so hot right now. Blockchain. It is, without question, the word I’ve heard the most recently without having any idea what it means. It generally goes along the lines of, “something something Bitcoin something something blockchain something something.” It’s very technical. But now, a coffee company is using blockchain technology to bring more transparency to each cup of coffee. Put another way, “something something coffee something something blockchain.”

In its most uncomplicated form, blockchain is just a cloud-based ledger that records transactions. According to the Wall Street Journal, Denver’s Coda Coffee is applying this new fangled record-keeping to tracking coffee from the farm to the coffee shop. Each coffee they sell is given a QR code that customers can scan to “see the date and location of every transaction—from collection at the farm to washing and drying, milling, export, roasting and retail.”

For this traceability to work, new processes have to be put in place at origin. To catalog new coffees, farmers in Eastern Uganda put their crop through a machine that “analyzes the beans and assigns them a lot number that customers can trace.” Called the “bextmachine,” that analyzer was created by Denver startup Bext360 and is intended to be a useful tool for more than just the end user.

Listen, I’m not sure if this whole Bitcoin blockchain thing will be around in 10 years or if it will go the way of the pet rock, but like, a pet rock that you can use as currency on the dark web. But nonetheless, transparency in coffee is a good thing and trying to use new technologies—whether ultimately successful or not—to increase traceability is worth attempting. So yeah, I’m willing to take my coffee with a side of blockchain. I’m still not sure if I’m using that right.

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

The post Trace Your Coffee Using Blockchain appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

The tastiest tipple we tasted at the London Coffee Festival? A coffee beer that doesn’t taste like a coffee beer.

Brew By Numbers, celebrating its fifth year in 2018, was founded by Dave Seymour and Tom Hutchings. From humble beginnings home-brewing in a basement on London’s Southwark Bridge Road, the two have built a strong brewing company with a loyal beer geek following. Brew By Numbers worked with Round Hill Roastery, located near Bath, to develop a coffee pale for the London Coffee Festival.

Sprudge spoke with Dale Seymour at the festival to learn more.

Brew By Numbers beers are all numbered. What number is this one?

The name of the coffee beer is 21:16. Just pale ale with coffee. So the first two numbers we have in all of our beers is the style, so in this case, 21 represents pale ale. And then the second two represent the recipe within that style. So this is the 16th unique pale ale that we’ve brewed.

How did you approach this coffee beer?

Well we’ve brewed quite a few coffee porters, and dark beers in the past, but we’re checking with Oli [Bradshaw] from Round Hill about doing something a little different, so we wanted to bring something lighter, the pale ale made a lot of sense because you can find balances between hops and the coffee in terms of the flavors. We decided with Oli we were going to use the Kochere filter, so I went through the tasting notes on that, picked out the different flavors and aromas that the coffee displays, and then found hops that would match those flavors. And then we brewed the pale ale pretty much as normal, and then add the whole bean coffee to the finished beer. Leave it to steep for about 12 hours.

You have a coffee background, yeah?

I do yeah, I’ve worked previously at the Department of Coffee and Social Affairs for a few months, and a few other places as well, including Fernandez and Wells. At the same time I was working in coffee I was also starting the brewery with my friend Tom, and the brewery won in a sense in terms of the actual career. But I still love coffee. I love making coffee, I love drinking coffee, and finding the way to bring those two things together was something I really wanted to maintain.

Brew By Numbers has been known to split batches at different stages to create variations of each brew—did this happen in the making of this beer?

Not this one. Something we’ve done before, but we do less these days, is to run some [of the beer] off into like a pilot fermenter, but a lot of the time we design a beer and we brew that one beer as an entire batch, on the clean side at least. For the sort of sour and funky beers, it’s a whole different story. There’s a lot of blending and splitting there. But for this one, basically I was taking small samples—like a little bit, roundabout a liter—and adding some coffee to it, and doing some different temperature trials, and dosage trials, and some steep time trials.

How has the response been here at the Festival?

It’s been amazing. It’s been really good. Lots of people are relieved that it doesn’t just taste like coffee. I think that seems to be the way coffee beers are approached. The dosage rates are often crazy high. We’ve always tried to maintain the fact that it’s a beer first, and it’s showing coffee. And for this one especially. You know, our coffee porters are usually a bit more coffee forward, but for this one I was really trying to find that balance where it’s a pale ale and you can taste coffee in there.

Is it available outside of the London Coffee Festival?

Yes. I think it’s on sale now, I think we might’ve launched it this weekend at the tap room, so it will be on general sale from this week I believe.

Will it be available in stores?

Yes! We’ll be sending out directly to customers and also to our distributors. So it should be available in the coming days, and on our online shop as well.

Do you ship internationally?

We do, yeah. I think about 20 or 30 percent of our beer is sent abroad.

How has the London beer scene changed in the last five years?

It’s changed a lot. In the early, early days there was quite a tight-knit group of people who were at all the beer events, and they were the conversation for beer. But it has certainly broadened a lot these days and you know, Instagram has been a big factor. As you know very much, you know marketing on Instagram and on social media is building hype and then there’s lots of conversations going around about certain beers, and people getting excited about the release of particular beers. Whereas before it felt very much like we could brew whatever we wanted to brew and people were excited to be introduced to new beers, or to be given the chance to try beers they might not otherwise.

But the market’s very much going towards like hazy, hoppy beers at the moment. That’s a huge thing. But you know, it will be interesting to see how it develops in the next few years and if it carries on this way or in this course, or if people move towards other styles or not. It’s going to be interesting to see.

Thanks for your time!

Visit Brew By Numbers in London at their Taproom on 75 Enid St and online.

Zachary Carlsen is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Zachary Carlsen on Sprudge. 

Chug-a-lug! There’s heaps more coffee beer coverage in our archives.

The post Coffee Beer: Brew By Numbers x Roundhill Roastery’s Coffee Pale Ale appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Today is 420, so we ask for but a small portion of your time spent dabbin’ your doobies to bring you some coffee news. But SURPRISE! It’s really cannabis and coffee news. A coffee company that is using cannabis tech to grow coffee plants in Southern California.

According to Wired, Boulder, Colorado’s Front Range Biosciences—a producer of “marijuana plants free of viruses and bacteria”—is expanding their crop diversity to include coffee plants and have agreed to give 3 million plants over the next four years to Frinj Coffee. Much like coffee trees, cannabis plants are susceptible to bacteria and diseases that drastically affect their output. To combat this, Front Range Biosciences has created a “clean stock” system of cloning plants that uses tissue grafts to ensure that just the plants themselves get duplicated, not any of the nasty diseases they may carry.

And Front Range is now using the same process for cloning coffee plants. These lab-cloned plants provide a secondary benefit of allowing Frinj to know exactly what coffee variety they are growing. According to the article wind-pollinated coffee trees often lead to wild hybridization, making it difficult to know the exact genetic makeup of each new plant. But because everything is controlled in the lab, spontaneous hybrids aren’t an issue.

Front Range will also keep a tissue repository of the different coffee varieties—including Geisha, what Frinj is growing. Because a farm full of cloned single variety plant lack genetic diversity—an important factor in keeping entire crops from being wiped out by disease—having this stockpile they can easily replicate is crucial.

Front Range Biosciences has plans to do the same cloning for bananas, sugar, and hops some time in the future. But right now they’re bread and butter are coffee and cannabis. Which begs the question, can these cannabinerds hybridize coffee and cannabis to create a THC-rich coffee cherry? It would be really nice to stop having to put all that butter in my coffee.

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

*top image via Front Range Biosciences

The post Using Cannabis Technology To Grow Coffee Plants appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

When people think of spaces for queer communities to congregate, collaborate, and enjoy each other’s company, bars and clubs are usually the first thing that comes to mind. This assumption—that an openly  gay or queer space must inherently be a bar—is beholden to its own history and fraught with prejudice. It’s also only part of the story.

Queer coffeehouses have for centuries been vital to queer culture past and present, presenting valuable spaces for organizing, finding community, and freely inhabiting queer identity. While many tend to associate queer culture with nightlife—a direct result of the criminalization of queer identity over the course of history—queer coffeehouses occupy their own essential cultural space, sometimes operating as part of the nightlife scene, and sometimes acting as a valuable counterpoint.

As the legality of various queer identities and expressions has fluctuated over time, the culture around where and how queer people congregate has shifted alongside it; while the queer coffeehouses of the past were often spaces where expressing queer identity was an act of open (and sometimes illegal) rebellion, queer coffeehouses of the present are able to inhabit queer space in marvelously myriad ways. With a nod to the past, today’s queer coffee bars show us the stunning diversity of what it means to be queer in the 21st century, where the fight for respect and inclusivity continues.  

Photo by Leslie Foster.

Queer Coffeehouses Go Way Back

Today’s queer coffee bars are as modern as they come—more on that later—but the coffee house’s role as a popular space for queer folks to get together go way back: all the way back to the Ottoman Empire, in fact, when coffee made its way from Yemen to Turkey. As coffee became a popular beverage for royalty, the majority of the general public met coffee through the establishment of coffeehouses. Coffeehouses quickly became an integral part of Istanbul social culture, where people would congregate to discuss poetry and literature, play chess and backgammon, and read.

As coffeehouses were a center for intellectual and social progress, it’s only natural that they also became hubs for queer people, specifically queer men. At that time in Turkish culture, male beauty was lauded and homoerotic romance was not criminalized. Over time, the culture shifted, and the prevalence of queer activity in coffeehouses actually contributed to periodic attempts by the Turkish government to prohibit coffeehouses, the most drastic being Murad IV’s 1622 law mandating execution of coffee drinkers (and tobacco smokers); during that period in Istanbul, religious leaders preached on street corners that coffee would “inspire indecent behavior.”

Stewart Allen, author of The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, told the story of an Ottoman Grand Vizier secretly visited a coffeehouse in Istanbul. “He observed that the people drinking alcohol would just get drunk and sing and be jolly, whereas the people drinking coffee remained sober and plotted against the government,” said Allen. The link between coffeehouses as spaces for intellectual activity, queer activity, and revolutionary activity repeats throughout history, and the criminalization of coffeehouses and criminalization of queerness are similarly linked; once we acknowledge the role of coffee in revolution, it’s not surprising that the idea of queer people meeting in coffeehouses was at times even more threatening to governments than queer people meeting in taverns. Today nothing has really changed.

That’s not to say that queer coffeehouses didn’t partake in their fair share of revelry. In 18th century England, molly houses provided a popular venue for queer men to get together. While many molly houses were taverns, the famous Mother Clap’s was a coffeehouse that also served spirits; a center for dancing, cross-dressing, and sex, it was one of the most popular and successful molly houses of the time. Mother Clap’s was raided in 1726, leading to the arrest of 40 attendees, most of whom were released on “lack of evidence” (read: not being caught in the act of queer sex), but many were fined and three were hanged. Mother Clap herself, the proprietress, was fined, pilloried, and imprisoned for two years for “keeping a disorderly house.” Nevertheless, the queer subculture continued, and shutting down individual molly houses didn’t stop people from getting their queer culture elsewhere.

Photo courtesy of Squirrel Chops, a women-owned cafe in Seattle.

The Modern Era: Compton’s Cafeteria and the Queer Civil Rights Movement

When the US established independence after the Revolution, crimes like “sodomy” and “buggery” were capital offenses in many states, and cross-dressing was a felony punishable by imprisonment or corporal punishment. For a long time, since no queer activity was legal in the US, all expression of queer identity was forced underground. By the 1960s, queer communities had had enough of police and state oppression of queer identities and fought back; unsurprisingly, there was coffee involved. While the 1969 Stonewall riots are commonly thought of as the beginning of the queer civil rights movement in the US, the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, which predated it by three years, started with a cup of coffee thrown in a police officer’s face in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.

Compton’s Cafeteria acted as a gathering place for trans women, drag queens, and crossdressers—who, as a result of transphobia in the gay community, were often not allowed in gay bars—to congregate. Because crossdressing was illegal at the time, police could use the presence of trans people as a pretext to raid the establishment and close it down. According to The Advocate, “The “screaming queens” erupted one night after one of their own was being hauled away from the cafeteria. After she emptied her steaming cup in the police officer’s face, all hell broke loose. Chairs, dishes, and sugar shakers went airborne and the restaurant’s dirty windows were smashed; outside, queers broke the windows of a squad car and lit a newsstand on fire. Immediately following the chaos, restaurant owners banned trans women and drag queens. The community picketed against the decision the following night.”

The riot, aided in part by coffee, marked a turning point for the local queer rights movement: after the riot and protests, a network of transgender social, psychological, and medical support services was established, which culminated in 1968 with the creation of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, the first peer-run support and advocacy organization in the world. By 1974, the anti-crossdressing law was repealed, and today San Francisco remains a hub for trans and gender-nonconforming individuals, who enjoy greater legal protection in SF than in most regions across the country.  

Photo by Johnny Gallagher.

Queer Cafes Today

Queer rights are nowhere near comprehensive in the US, and although the right to legal gay marriage was established at a federal level in the US in 2015, politicians and civilians on both the right and the left continue to rally around criminalizing or simply not legalizing specific elements of queer identity. In the US today, trans individuals are not legally protected against discrimination at a federal level, and nonbinary gender identities are only acknowledged in a few states. Nevertheless, we’ve come a long way from a full criminalization of all queerness, and it shows in the diversity of queer coffeehouses and companies today. I reached out to several queer coffee companies and found them each wholly unique expressions of queer culture in the US today. I couldn’t possibly fit all their stories into one article, but below are just a few.

Photo by Johnny Gallagher.

Founded in 2009 by Ryan Galiotto, San Francisco’s Wicked Grounds provides the community with a full-service cafe, kink boutique, and community hub for the LGBTQ, polyamorous, and kink communities. “Think about the community aspects of your local leather bar, then envision that happening in a full service and sober cafe,” said current owner Mir Bilodeau. “We host about 50 events each month, including Kink 101 classes, munches for specific kink subcultures, activism groups, polyamory socials, and more.” In addition to their own events, they sponsor a wide variety of local queer organizations and events, like SF and Oakland Pride, the Trans March, Folsom Street Fair, and International Ms. Leather. They also partner with other queer organizations to offer everything from STI testing to prisoner letter writing days to give back to their community. In a region with so many queer bars, providing a queer space for sober folks and families is crucial, and the mission of education and activism speaks to a long tradition of queer coffeehouses in the SF region.

Michelle Barber of Queer Coffee. Photo courtesy QC.

Michelle Barber’s online coffee retailer Queer Coffee represents a different facet of queer culture. Launched in May 2017, Queer Coffee sells whole bean, fair trade, organic coffee online and donates $2 from every bag sold to an LGBTQ+ nonprofit—currently, they’re supporting the Campaign for Southern Equality. “The idea is that this is a high-quality bag of beans you’d be proud to have in your cupboard or give to a friend, all while supporting our own community. I’m passionate about coffee and I wanted to find a bigger way to support LGBTQ+ nonprofits,” says Barber. “I hope we can grow that support over the years to have a bigger and bigger impact. I have big goals for Queer Coffee, like organizing meetups and sponsoring events, but we’re small and new right now.”

Virginia Bauman (left) and Iris Bainum-Houle (right). Photo by Leslie Foster.

Cuties Coffee, launched through crowd-funding less than a year ago in East Hollywood, has already done so much to provide queer-centered community space for their local community. “We wanted a space that anchors the community, open during the daytime so that all ages could attend. We wanted a space for folx who don’t find a home in the queer nightlife scene. We wanted a space that was casual. There was a gap we saw that a coffee shop could fill,” said co-founder Virginia Bauman. Cuties hosts community events like the Friday Flirt!, craft nights, and queer movie nights, as well as casual coffee and donuts socials. They also put out a newsletter with events from other groups in the area, as well as media to enjoy from home for those who aren’t up for being out of the house for any number of reasons.

In addition to this valuable work, Cuties have recently launched a community tab program to ensure that no one who wants to enjoy the safe, affirming space they provide is turned away for lack of funds. Look for more on this community program in a coming feature here on Sprudge in early May.

It's always sunny at comic girl coffee. Come support our inclusive queer collective space.

A post shared by Comic Girl Coffee (@comicgirlcoffee) on Feb 21, 2018 at 2:54pm PST

In Charlotte, NC, Comic Girl Coffee is a queer-led co-op selling coffee with vegan milk options and queer/POC-centered books. They work to create a safe space for community-building and activism for Charlotte’s marginalized. One of their main goals is to make the space accessible to people of every income using a Pay it Forward board populated by magnets purchased by other customers and a section of donated books for which customers can pay what they want. They also donate 10% of profits to Trans.formation House, a healing space for homeless transgender people.

These are just a tiny handful of the beautifully diverse queer coffee companies carrying the tradition of coffeehouses as spaces for queerness, thought, and progressive society.

Photo by Leslie Foster.

Queer Coffeehouses, Past and Present

From the beginnings of coffee to the present day, coffeehouses have always been hubs for queer collaboration and activism. As coffee culture moved across the world, queerness moved from a non-criminalized subculture in Ottoman Turkey, to a heavily-criminalized underground scene in Europe and the US, to the open-yet-threatened status many queer people inhabit in the US today. Throughout that history, coffeehouses have always been exactly what the queer community needed them to be at any given time and place. So many different queer subcultures thrive across the US and alongside them, a rich spread of coffee shops prioritizes different groups, missions, and needs.

While the queer coffee scene in the US continues to thrive and diversify, queer civil rights in the US and across the world are still under attack. Many coffee companies and coffee professionals wish to remain apolitical in such a polarized climate, but coffee has always been political, a space to brew revolution. In honor of that history, coffee drinkers and coffee professionals alike should salute the companies who continue that legacy with the courage to boldly create and protect the space their community needs to survive and thrive. Visit and donate to these spaces, and respect those who risk so much to champion these causes. It’s easier to look away, but coffee’s history points us in a different direction. 

Photo by Leslie Foster.

RJ Joseph is a staff writer for Sprudge Media Network. Read more RJ Joseph on Sprudge.

Top photo by Sunnie Townsend. 

The post Coffee As A Queer Space, Past And Present appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

The London Coffee Festival 2018 has come and gone, but the memories remain—and so does all the hot new gear we tested at the show. One product we were excited to hear more about is Mazzer Robur S, a high performance coffee grinder that follows, yet completely re-invents, the current Robur model.

Mazzer are hardly newcomers to the coffee world.  Founded by Luigi Mazzer in 1948, the now 70-year-old historic Italian brand the brand exports more than 70% of its production nearly a hundred countries around the world. Mazzer grinders are used and loved by top baristas and roasters around the world, and often paired with espresso machines by La Marzocco through a longstanding partnership.

The new Robur S presented at LCF 2018 is an electronic grinder-doser (available in two versions, both automatic and electronic on demand) with conical grinding blades and slow speed rotation (420 RPM – 50 Hz). The ideal home for Robur S is a busy coffee shop with high consumption.

What’s new? The new grinder improves dose consistency and reduces coffee retention by 52% compared to the previous model. It is capable of operating at high speed, grinding five grams of coffee per second without over-heating. A special cooling system with double fan keeps the coffee safe from temperature exposure, preserving maximum aroma.

Robur S makes it easier to set the grinder to your preferred grinding size with stepless micrometrical grinding adjustment and a new system for the disk, called Memory Track. The system allows users to rotate the disk to the preferred number and lock it in place to index grind setting. Additionally, Robur S features an easy system for changing out the burrs, allowing for quick and easy cleaning of the grind chamber without losing your grind setting.

A new digital control panel allows users to set the grinder and access data stored in the software. Time settings include single, double, and triple doses; dose countdowns to monitor the stocks; a programmable pre-tap pause function to level down the coffee in the portafilter, stats on grinding output data; and maintenance alerts (for example, when the burrs are due to be changed). All this data can be easily viewed on the display or on the connected apps.

Indeed, one of the most interesting innovations of the Robur S is its inbuilt Wi-Fi connection, which allows baristas, roasters, and service teams to access grinder data remotely and store it in a cloud database. The Robur S app will be unveiled in the next few months.

Robur S is a major example of the ongoing renewal at Mazzer. In 2016 the company expanded its facilities, nearly doubling the production area to meet with market demand. They’ve also heavily invested in innovation and R&D, hiring young engineers, developers, and support staff in a bid to keep the brand at the forefront of the coffee industry.

High performance, attention to detail, and product reliability are at the core of Mazzer’s operations. “We are involved in the whole production process. Every single metal component we use goes through our quality control process,” says Cristina Scarpa, Marketing Manager at Mazzer Italy, who I spoke with at length during the London Coffee Festival.

Mazzer has also made a commitment to investing in green energy: about 40% of appliances are produced using renewable energy sources (saving 307 tons of CO2 yearly) thanks to a photovoltaic system installed at the Mazzer factory near Venice.

Do you want to know more about the new Mazzer Robur S grinder? You will find Mazzer at coffee trade shows worldwide in the coming months, ahead of the global release of Robur S at the end of October 2018.

Giulia Mule is a Sprudge.com contributor based in London. Read more Giulia Mule on Sprudge. 

Mazzer is an advertising partner on Sprudge Media Network. 

The post Meet The New Mazzer Robur S Grinder appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News

Waste from disposable coffee cups are an issue. We all know this; it isn’t news. But perhaps what is most perplexing about this problem is that many of these cups are actually recyclable. A new article from BBC News breaks down how the problem isn’t necessarily the cup itself, but how it is disposed of.

The article notes that a staggering 99.75% of the estimated 2.5 billion (in 2011. That number is believed to be higher now) disposable cups in the UK end up in a landfill. But many of the biggest producers of these cups—including Starbucks and Costa—have cups that actually are recyclable. So what’s the problem then? The snag comes in where these cups are thrown away.

Because disposable cups are a mix of paper and plastic, it takes a specialized facility to properly dispose of them. So if you throw away a cup in recycling at Starbucks or Costa (which doesn’t really make sense; take away cups are for taking your coffee away from the coffee shop), they will be taken to the appropriate recycling plant. But, if you throw your cup away in a bin at home or on the street or just about any place that isn’t where the coffee was purchased, it will most likely end up in a landfill.

To combat this, many companies are creating compostable cups, but this comes with its own set of challenges. If, for instance, a compostable cup ends up in the recycling, it could contaminate, rendering the entire batch of recycling useless and destining it to a landfill.

So what can we as consumers do? The easiest solution is to bring your own reusable cups, like this lovely Sprudge KeepCup. The article notes that many coffee shops even offer discounts for those bringing in their own cups, so not only are they better for the environment, they will eventually pay for themselves. Short of that, we can all be more mindful about making sure our waste is appropriately disposed of; put recyclables in the recycling bin and waste in the waste bin. Mixing the two can undo the work of other mindful disposers.

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

The post Many Take Away Cups Are Recyclable, So Why Do They End Up In Landfills? appeared first on Sprudge.

Source: Coffee News