May 2009 Coffee News

-Great Publicity -- Great Response
-Living Green
-Traveling to Honduras in June
-How to store coffee

Wow! This has been an amazing few weeks for us. We've been busy planning for a trip to Honduras in June, getting ready for the Living Green Expo this coming weekend (May 2-3), and most exciting of all -- seeing our little business featured on the front page of the business section of the Star Tribune! You can read more about all of these things below.

Great Publicity -- Great Response
Last Wednesday, April 22, we woke up to see our faces on the front page of the business section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. We knew the article was coming because a few weeks earlier, we had met with business columnist Dick Youngblood. But it was certainly a thrill to read the wonderful article he wrote about us and the great quotes from some of our coffee customers. It all came about, thanks to one of our coffee customers, Kara McGuire who writes a personal finance column and blog  for the STrib who forwarded our February coffee newsletter to him. Equally thrilling has been the amazing response to the article. We have received 65 new coffee orders in just the last week! Also fun are the new contacts we have made with people who have connections with Honduras. Probably the most amazing was from a woman also named Cathy who also met a man from Honduras in Florida before moving back here to the Twin Cities. Guillermo even went to the same Honduran accounting school as this gentleman! It really is a small world. If you missed our article, you can read it on-line at http://www.startribune.com/business/43400127.html?elr=KArks:DCiU1PciUoaEYY_4PcUU.

Living Green
Just in case we haven't had enough publicity, we will be at the Living Green Expo this weekend. We've been at every Expo since it began in 2002, so we really couldn't miss it. If you can make it to this wonderful event that promotes resources for living more sustainably, stop by our table to say hi. We will be upstairs in the Community Food and Farm section. The Expo is open 10-6 on Saturday the 2nd and 10-5 on Sunday the 3rd at the Minnesota State Fair grounds in the grandstand. Hope to see you there.

Traveling to Honduras in June
As we mentioned above, we are also busy planning for our next trip to Honduras coming up June 11-21. For the first time, we are bringing a group with us from our church, Prospect Park United Methodist Church. The group of 15 adults and youth are looking forward to experiencing Honduras, spending several days on the coffee farm in the cabins that Guillermo's brother Abilio has made for visitors and enjoying the beautiful mountains and rain forest. We're not travel guides (at least not yet), so the group has been kind to let us learn with them. If they have a good time (and we think they will), our hope is to bring more groups in the future. We'll keep you posted.

The immediate impact for you, however, is that we will need to do our June coffee delivery one week earlier than usual (on June 5th). We'll get back on our usual 2nd Friday of the month schedule in July.

How to store coffee
We frequently get asked what is the best way to store coffee. Not really being experts ourselves (although we're learning quickly), we thought it would be helpful to share with you a link we've found to the National Coffee Association that tells you what the real experts say. The short version is to keep your coffee airtight and cool (but not necessarily in the freezer).

Happy May Day!