August 2010 Coffee News

-Coffee Has Arrived
-Summer on the Coffee Farm
-Guillermo Featured
-Links to Coffee Recipes

Coffee Has Arrived
WithWe are relieved to report that our 2010 coffee (all 16,950 pounds of it) is finally safe and sound at our roaster's warehouse in Le Center, MN. We learned a lot about the customs and transportation process (particularly the value of patience) which will serve us well next year when we begin the process all over again. Until then, we'll be focused on selling all that coffee over the coming months. Our efforts towards this end were helped along nicely by an article that was written about Guillermo recently. A link to the article and news about what the family is busy doing on the coffee farm can be found below.

Summer On the Coffee Farm
With the coffee harvest wrapped up for another year, Guillermo's coffee farmer family members are turning their attention to cleaning and pruning their farms. To control weeds, crop farmers here use cultivators and/or herbicides. Coffee farmers generally (including our family) hire a few guys with machetes to head into their fields to hack away extra vegetation between the coffee trees. Guys with machetes also come in handy with pruning coffee bushes, something that is needed every 4 or 5 years or so to restore their productivity. In any given year, about a quarter of their coffee bushes are out of production while they regrow. Also during the summer, sweet-smelling, white coffee flowers appear followed shortly by the first small green coffee berries. (See a picture and read more about the flowers here.)

Guillermo Featured in U of MN Newsletter
As we mentioned above, Guillermo was featured in a July article in the Brief, the official University of Minnesota news digest for faculty and staff statewide. You can read the nice piece written by coffee customer Adam Overland here and learn more about Guillermo's "other job" at the U growing barley.

Links to Coffee Recipes and more
Over the years, we've collected a few iced coffee recipes that we've shared in the hot summer months. We've collected them together, along with links to other useful coffee references, on our newly updated Links page. Stay cool!