Velasquez Family News
©2007 Velasquez Family Coffee
August 2012 Coffee News
-Birds of Honduras
-New Partnerships
-Updated Web Presence
-Brewing Options
In our June email newsletter, we invited you to share questions to pose to our Honduran coffee farmers. One of our customers wrote back with the following, "I would ask about the bird life that the coffee farm might be helping or hosting." We haven't done a study of birds on the farm, but we do have several resources to share, and a fabulous Birds of Honduras website whose creator Robert Gallardo will be speaking in Saint Paul on Friday, August 17.
Birds of Honduras
There is growing evidence that shade-grown coffee is important to birds. The website Coffee & Conservation: Are your beans for the birds has many great articles about this connection. We talk about our family's efforts to protect the forest and maintain shade in their coffee plots on our website. But since we are not birders ourselves, we were excited to learn this past month of Robert Gallardo who has been studying birds, butterflies and orchids throughout Honduras for the past 20 years. His website birdsofhonduras.com is a treasure trove of photos, audio and other avian documentation. As far as we know Gallardo hasn't visited our family's farm in the Comayagua mountains, but you can get a sense of the birds that might be there by knowing that our farms are located in Rainforest habitat in the central Honduran department of Comayagua which he includes in the Highlands area of his field work.
Robert has identified close to 700 species in Honduras, including species not before documented as occurring in the country. He has been pivotal in the founding of the Honduran Ornithological Association, a non-profit dedicated to the conservation of the country's bird species. He is presently creating the first comprehensive field guide to the Birds of Honduras, and he is traveling in the US in August to highlight conservation efforts in his adopted country. You can support the publication of this guide with a donation through his website.
For those of you who want to know more, Robert Gallardo will be speaking in Saint Paul on Friday, August 17, 2012, at 8 PM, at Founders' Auditorium, Metropolitan State University, 645 East Seventh Street, on Saint Paul's Dayton's Bluff neighborhood. He also leads tours throughout Honduras which because of its size and relatively lower population density offers many excellent birding opportunities.
New Partnerships
**We are excited to be working with SteveBe's Yarn Garage an innovative fiber workshop and yarn emporium at 3448 Chicago Ave in Minneapolis where they are now carrying an exclusive "SteveBe Blend" of Velasquez Family Coffee! Felting, spinning, weaving, knitting and crocheting. They have an amazing selection of yarns and ideas and classes to spur your creativity.
**We are also pleased that our family's coffee is roasted and sold by Furnace Hills Coffee Company in Westminster, Maryland. We are impressed with their commitment to hiring developmentally disabled employees, supporting programs in the Ukraine and Indonesia that work with the developmentally disabled, and their efforts to purchase all of their coffee directly from the growers.
Updated Web Presence!
Our upgraded website shopping cart is working wonderfully and as we reported last month, now allows postage free Website orders within our free home delivery area. Feel free to use it to either place a new order - or pay for a past order. (Just make sure we know which it is by explaining in the notes.)
If you haven't yet, visit our new Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/VelasquezFamilyCoffee for a recent photo of Guillermo's parents, Maximo and Natalia and other resources we've posted in the past few weeks. While you are there, make sure to "like" us to get our future posts and share Velasquez Family Coffee with your friends.
Brewing Options
Unfortunately, the single cup pods we were trying out to go with the Keurig Machine didn't work as well as we'd hoped. So we will not be offering this product. However, you can still use our coffee in a Keurig machine if you purchase a "K-Cup" filter and basket.
We also ran across a few great coffee articles in the May 2012 edition of the Twin Cities Metro Magazine on various brewing options. Brew Your Best explains the best way to use a French Press. Cappa-What-Now? explains all of those fancy coffee and espresso drinks you might get at a coffee shop.