Wonderful News!! Spent Coffee Grounds the NEW ‘Super Food’!

We all know used coffee grounds make great fertilizer and slug repellant and deodorizer – BUT! Now according to the ‘Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry’ coffee grounds are a very rich source of ‘ healthful antioxidant substances’, which could be utilized as a dietary supplement!

Apparently, some bureaucrat has done the maths and coffee drinkers globally generate 20 million tonnes of used grounds annually….

Most of course ends up in landfill…not now though… as the team suggests extraction from filter / plunger and espresso prepared coffees delivered excellent antioxidant material levels AND left the grounds for on going use as a fertilizer……Wunderbach news indeed for all you budding Alan Titchmarshes out there !

A sweet smelling success and hopefully another 20 years of youthful espresso swilling arrogance awaits us Monkey- Yippee!

Guru writes for Aromo Coffee – They are coffee experts focussed on providing convenient and tasty ways for the caffeine addict to take their medicine. Aromo supplies excellent ESE Coffee pods and superlative Senseo pods,  both of which offer the espresso and filter connoisseur  a no mess, no fuss,  super fresh and environmentally conscious method to make stunning coffee… the guys at Aromo also have a range of Dualit branded capsules which make a brilliant and economic alternative to nespresso capsules

Going Loco

A new report published by researchers from Africa’s International Institute of Tropical Agriculture suggests that Banana and coffee inter cropping could protect farmers from the effects of climate change in Uganda and other Eastern African coffee producing territories

Arabica is Uganda’s most important source of foreign exchange – but as we all know the prima donna Coffea Arabica is a sensitive flower and a mean temperature increase of just 1 degree Celsius results in an average loss of 98.4 kilo per hectare of raw green coffee and as well as minimizing the potential productive areas above the critical 1400m altitude

 So the banana tree can help reduce this loss by offering a shade protecting canopy to the vulnerable and venerable coffee tree…..

And- additionally, intercropping is beneficial for the farmer delivering and alternative source of income and  40% increased revenue per hectare- All good me thinks!

Willo the Wisp- The Freshness Debate

No! Not an advert for those ‘orrible Glade squirty plug in smelling nightmares….

But rather the ongoing debate about how fresh roasted coffee is….

Well, if you believe the hype – the 3^rd and 4^th wave purveyors of fine coffees and the High Street stalwart, Pret, after a week or two then any coffee is old, useless and past it – much like myself!

BUT! There is loads a research to suggests that this is not so and is in fact just good old-fashioned marketing mumbo and jumbo!

Clarke and Macrae advise that coffee packed into a bag with just good old fresh air shows little or no flavor difference for 10 – 12 days and is good for up to 40 days with a limit to ‘acceptability’ of 70 days!

Similarly, the European supermarket style of a solid brick  / vac pack style will remain ‘acceptable’ for 18 months!

And for those anoraks amongst you, another little nugget of fact is that when a whole bean coffee is finely ground, 45% of its latent CO2 is released within 5 minutes!

The result and benefit of all this research – well it beats me!

Slap a Boost pod in the machine Monkey – we need perfetto espresso inspiration me thinks!

Guru writes for Aromo Coffee – They are coffee experts focussed on providing convenient and tasty ways for the caffeine addict to take their medicine. Aromo supplies excellent ESE Coffee pods and superlative Senseo pods,  both of which offer the espresso and filter connoisseur  a no mess, no fuss,  super fresh and environmentally conscious method to make stunning coffee… the guys at Aromo also have a range of Dualit branded capsules which make a brilliant and economic alternative to nespresso capsules

Monkey’s News Round Digest

In this random update of recent trade news snippets we politely offer up the following note worthy gems of complete insignificance for your delight!

Cameroon has now joined the growing list of Arabica producing territories – taking the list of nations producing green coffee to near the 100 mark – can some smart alec confirm or otherwise the complete list – SAE postcards only please!

In 2012 7850 bags were exported – compared to nil the prior year! Robusta remains a mainstay at 491000 bags plus of course cocoa

Next up is a snippet concerning Nestle – they are playing the Chinese long game by launching a brand new coffee product in the emerging Chinese market called Pu’er

The raw material for the product is grown in the traditional tea producing regions in South West China… and the aim of the project is not to sell more product and make more margin…oh no! Only to ‘deepen co-operation ‘ between the billionaire brand expert and China’s largest coffee plantation base in Yunnan Province…..

Of course ! How silly of me……Ah life’s rich tapestry eh?

Guru writes for Aromo Coffee – They are coffee experts focussed on providing convenient and tasty ways for the caffeine addict to take their medicine. Aromo supplies excellent ESE Coffee pods and superlative Senseo pods,  both of which offer the espresso and filter connoisseur  a no mess, no fuss,  super fresh and environmentally conscious method to make stunning coffee… the guys at Aromo also have a range of Dualit branded capsules which make a brilliant and economic alternative to nespresso capsules

I drink coffee all day long

Now like most of you – we like to have a drink of tea or coffee, but I seem to drink about 5 or 6 cups of espresso based coffee everyday. Is this normal? Is this good for me? I don’t know if there has been any research into how much coffee is bad for you – what is the limit. I also have let my 12 year old son start drinking coffee -now in my head I always thought coffee was an adult drink – perhaps this is down to my own childhood? Anyway I thought well if he drinks all these fizzy drinks that I know contain caffeine and sugars then how bad can coffee be?

Caffeine for you kids

Caffeine has always been talked about like nicotine  - an unhealthy and potentially dangerous product – but is that really true? If you have the answers to this or any of my questions then please post a comment.

How about this for ingenuity. NWPipesmoker is a guy I follow on YouTube who lives in Washington State USA, home of Starbucks, and he had this idea that roasting his own coffee would be fun.

He shows you how to do it in this video and gets reasonable results from a hacked pop corn blower.

Luckily for us he concludes that roasting coffee is fun but the results are more reliable if you buy from a professional but hey I make my own beer but I still prefer the pub !

The video starts part way through, so you miss the pre-amble

Roasting your own

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UUx2TXcd5nGgrikCRMj-BuQQ&feature=player_detailpage&v=zKU4KjX6J_M#t=95s

The Band Wagon is full – Helpful advice from the big boys!

‘The coffee industry risks running short of beans….. if it does not promote more sustainable farming methods!!”

This helpful advice was recently given by the head of Kraft Foods, now renamed Mondelez, which purchases 6% of global coffee supply….

Ironic for a company, which no longer calls itself a coffee company, rather a confectionary player, after the recent acquisition of Cadbury!

And confusing advice, as most would agree that it is the behemoth that is itself making the very trouble it is warning us of…

Mondelez has pledged to source 65% of its European coffee from “sustainable” farms by 2013 and all of it by 2015, up from about 40 percent now

This promise was made because a few years back, when, Mondelez advises, there was a surplus of sustainable coffee and therefore the sustainability of sustainable coffee was therefore at risk!

I love the backwards logic here…!

In a market where 10 > 13 % of global supply is accredited, we have the unusual situation of a major player advising of a shortage which will be driven by their actions…

Coffee takes a minimum of 4 years to grow and to produce a harvest, accreditations can take some years to achieve  – Viz Organic – Whereas, changing a pack label and managing an advertising and PR plan will take even for the fattest of corporates perhaps 12 months to push and prod into place

Hence the irony of the biggest tanker of them all advising that they are on course to hoover up all sustainable beans by 2015

This means prices will go up and it also means that farmers will move to coffee production- good on the one hand as players like Neumann believe that by 20220 world supply will need to be c 170 m bags, but it also means that supplies of other grains, maize and oil will be hit again- therefore pushing prices up for retail confectionery and snacks ( the new focus for Mondelez!)

And at the centre of this web – the big corporates – shape shifting , changing names and tweaking strategies…In a Star-wars style epiphany we see the folly of letting the big boys get just that little bit too big…

Guru writes for Aromo Coffee – They are coffee experts focussed on providing convenient and tasty ways for the caffeine addict to take their medicine. Aromo supplies excellent ESE Coffee pods and superlative Senseo pods,  both of which offer the espresso and filter connoisseur  a no mess, no fuss,  super fresh and environmentally conscious method to make stunning coffee… the guys at Aromo also have a range of Dualit branded capsules which make a brilliant and economic alternative to nespresso capsules