Grinding Your Own Coffee With Fresh Whole Bean Coffee

Fresh whole bean coffee can fall into any category, like fair trade, organic or regularly-grown. That's because it doesn't really specify any particular kind of bean or a method of growing it.

So why do retailers, whether they are fair trade or regular stores, like to make a special point of letting you know whether a coffee they're selling you is whole bean or already ground?

That's because it tends to be fresher than pre-ground. That's a key to why it actually works well as fair trade coffee.

What many people think of as the superiority of fresh whole bean coffee comes from one simple fact; whole beans keep their flavor and aroma longer than if they are ground. Once ground, they have more exposure to air and humidity, and the freshness begins to evaporate.

It doesn't matter what sort of gourmet coffee you might be dealing with, if the beans are pre-ground, you'll lose freshness in the package much more quickly than if they're left intact until just before brewing.

Fair trade wholesale buyers may recognize a slight advantage in fresh whole bean coffee, if they are able to take the coffee from the farmer to the end consumer more quickly than normal coffee brokers can.

The coffee already has a good likelihood of tasting better if it's been grown organically. Combine these two factors, and many fair trade brands of coffee have a good chance of being fresher and more delicious than coffee grown in a more mass produced setting.

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Sustainable Farming And Certified Organic Fair Trade Coffee

While many people believe the fair trade movement began with coffee, it has actually simmered behind the scenes since the 1950s, with church organizations like Ten Thousand Villages promoting the handmade crafts of poor third world artisans.

It eventually resulted in the certified organic fair trade coffee that people know today. The beginning of fair trade came in answer to the plight of coffee growers being squeezed almost literally to death by many a large profit-guzzling coffee company. For the sake of those farmers, the fair trade movement really took off.

Once fair trade took off with coffee, it wasn't long before the same concept was applied to other products. Fair trade tea followed soon afterward, and the movement spread to other foods like sugar, fruit, juice, rice, spices and so on.

But as the fair trade idea spread around the world, the environmental movement began exerting an influence as well, as the concept of environmentally friendly and sustainable farming methods began taking hold.

That was when the movement involving coffee began to help farmers learn sustainable farming as well, and organic fair trade coffee finally came into its own.

Now there are fair trade retailers carrying full lines of products from all over the world, including organic fair trade coffee. The movement has been so influential that even some corporations are recognizing that this could be the wave of the future, and are trying to get involved in buying and promoting fair trade products.

Whether this will help or ultimately hinder the progress of fair trade remains to be seen. But treating smaller producers of goods fairly is becoming a mainstream idea, and while it started with coffee growers, it clearly applies to everyone, whatever they grow or create.

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Producing Pollutants With Coffee Roasting

You may think that coffee roasting isn't of very much concern when someone is producing organic, environmentally and socially responsible coffee through the fair trade system. After all, on the one hand great care is taken to make sure coffee growers are paid properly and are able to maintain a decent life from their profits.

On the other hand, one element of fair trade practices is to help the farmers learn to use environmentally friendly and sustainable farming methods to produce the crops. So aren't the most important environmental aspects of fair trade coffee pretty much taken care of by the time harvest rolls around?

Although it sounds so innocuous, coffee roasting is quite an involved process and produces pollutants as byproducts. The smoke alone from the roasting carries alcohols, organic acids, and nitrogen and sulfur compounds. Most roasters use ovens that are powered by natural gas.

There is usually a second oven meant to clean the air of all the pollutants, which adds to the gas used and the CO2 emissions. Even though steps are now being taken to use just one oven and even recapture the heat from the cleaned air, your morning cup of fresh coffee is definitely looking less green by the minute.

Fair trade and environmentally responsible farming may result in organic coffee beans, but that's just the first step in turning the coffee industry completely green.

If the subsequent coffee roasting and other processes continue to be energy hogs and go on wasting vast amounts of resources, what good does it ultimately do that the beans themselves are organic?

It probably makes some small difference, but the good is undone unless all the steps between the field and your morning cup of coffee are equally environmentally responsible.

To read more Producing Pollutants With Coffee Roasting

Fair Price For Producers With Fair Trade Organic Coffee

The idea of fair trade organic coffee is a good one. With coffee industry profits second only to the oil industry, it's hard to fight big conglomerates, but the fair trade movement has tried.

Often farmers who produce coffee barely live at a subsistence level because big corporations don't pay fair prices. So many farmers have banded together into co-ops, negotiating for that fair price and providing a better living.

The certified fair trade product is often also produced with more organic farming methods, so it's better for the land, the farmers and even the taste of the coffee.

One reason why some doubt that fair trade coffee will survive the entry of big corporations into the movement is that these companies retain the same motives for consolidating everything into a huge organization that will short-change the smaller farmer all over again.

Whatever a large organization has to do to squeeze out the last penny of profit, it tends to do no matter what smaller player is hurt. Fair trade organic coffee may end up just the same old coffee under a new name, unless corporations change their own motivations and inner workings.

The push for fair trade organic coffee is part of the wider movement for fair trade food and other products. The aim is for the producers of products to be given a fair price for what they produce, rather than be pressured to live at subsistence level so end users in a more prosperous country can consume the product really cheaply.

That arrangement, as promoted by mega corporations, amounts to little more than slavery or a sort of feudalism. It's not yet clear whether those same mega corporations can now enter the fair trade movement without pushing everything back into the same kind of feudal system.

To read more Fair Price For Producers With Fair Trade Organic Coffee

Giving Friends Fair Trade Coffee Gifts

If you're not a coffee connoisseur but know someone who is mad about their coffee, then you may be interested in the sorts of coffee gifts you might give, since you know that will really please them.

Hold onto your hat, though, because the massive coffee industry of growing beans and creating the drink has spawned an entire secondary industry of coffee-related equipment and gifts in which you can become quite lost. If you want to give a gift, it's likely not enough just to buy coffee at some specialty store. You'll really need to research accessories too.

When contemplating coffee gifts, the world of accessories is another wide arena to play in. If you know your friend wants a coffee grinder of their own, and you can afford a very expensive gift, you might consider one of the masters in the field, the KitchenAid Pro Line Burr Grinder KPCG100, that has 15 different grind sizes.

But you may prefer to be a little more modest, buying a sleek pot or a package of gourmet coffee in a gift cup.

If your friend has a green thumb, then you might even give one of the most unusual coffee gifts of all, a coffee plant of their own. Some plant nurseries provide these plants, which will grow the beans under the right conditions.

Your friend can harvest this fruit in the autumn, roast in a homemade coffee roaster, and then grind their own coffee. It won't be gourmet, necessarily, but it can be fun and interesting.

As you research the types of coffee-related gifts you might give your friend, be sure to explore these unique ideas as well as more traditional gifts.

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Farmers Paid By Roasted Coffee Industry

In the eyes of people who believe in fair trade, the elimination of the middleman from the roasted coffee buying and selling process was one of the improvements brought about by the movement.

Big corporations buying coffee were never familiar with actual growers because it was coffee middlemen who bought the beans from them, as the driving force in the process was to make huge profits with the lowest costs possible.

These "savings" always tended to come at the expense of the farmers, and the idea of fair trade food originated so farmers could be given fair prices and be treated fairly.

The system has helped many farmers in the past few years, yet some people now worry that coffee middlemen are reappearing. Online gourmet coffee clubs, with special offerings to their members of different coffees they can't find anywhere else, is just one example of the new form of middleman.

Internet companies are forming that employ a similar model to the previous one. Farmers are generally anonymous, and the costs of this intermediary are added to the process of growing and selling beans, turning them into roasted coffee, and then selling the coffee to the consumer.

Some coffee roasters have begun to bypass even the official fair trade certification process, instead doing something called direct trade.

Because they have seen the middleman reappearing, and seen too many concessions made to big businesses who became involved in the fair trade roasted coffee industry, these companies have returned to the original concept of fair trade: dealing directly with farmers, using fair practices, and paying fair prices.

It seems to be the nature of business always to produce middlemen and short-change original producers for extra profits. But people interested in the welfare of the farmers will apparently re-invent fair trade as often as they must.

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Trend Towards Growing Organic Coffee

There has been a big movement in recent years toward growing organic coffee. And for various reasons, this practice lends itself to certifying the coffee for fair trade as well. The two ideas of organic and fair trade are not in fact identical, but they dovetail very nicely.

The main reasons for going organic, of course, involve environmental concerns and sustainability. The latter has to include the possibility of the coffee growers themselves being able to make a decent living, sustaining not just themselves but the organic growing methods too. This is where fair trade certified coffee and organic certified coffee may become the same thing.

When a coffee company would enter the market in a big way in the past couple of decades, one big switch they pretty much always demanded would be to move from a shade-grown method of producing coffee to an open field, sun-grown method that would produce higher yields.

But because of soil depletion and erosion, this would also require a great deal of chemical fertilizer and pesticides. In growing organic coffee, some farmers are now going back to shaded growth, but even if they don't, they use much more organic methods for watering, fertilizing and pest control.

Not all fair trade coffee is also organic, but about eighty percent of it is. This indicates that some coffee companies are not just taking account of profits but are recognizing other costs involved in the more recently favored methods of mass production.

Organic coffee production can prevent environmental losses that will eventually lead to such depletion that coffee may not be able to be grown at all. If organic methods are combined with fair trade practices, then both land and farmers can be sustained in a healthy way, thus ensuring a future for both coffee bean crops and the growers.

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Ethical Commitments Made By A Fair Trade Coffee Roaster

One thing that distinguishes fair trade certified coffee from other coffee is that the fair trade company knows something about the farmers who grow the beans. This is very different from large corporations that often have no clue who the farmers are.

They only know they get beans from suppliers who have bought from the farmers, and the conditions under which the farmers live are not important as long as the beans come in at a low price. But this sort of ignorance of the source is not an option for a fair trade coffee roaster.

The fair trade coffee roaster indeed commits to certain things that center on the ethical treatment of farmers and the production of an environmentally responsible product.

It first commits to sourcing beans as directly from the original farmers as possible, bypassing the middlemen and paying a minimum fair price. Coffee roasters are also encouraged to give as much technical assistance as they can to help the farmers transition to more organic ways of growing the plants.

When the fair trade movement began and spread beyond the fair trade coffee roaster and into certification of other products, the coffee people didn't realize how much more life-and-death the issue would soon become.

Prices have recently collapsed, and the big corporations now buy coffee at the new prices while charging customers the old prices, thereby creating even more gigantic profits.

Proponents of fair trade believe the tragedy of the loss of livelihood and loss of life among farmers demonstrates more than ever that the coffee industry needs to be entirely recreated as a fair trade industry.

To read more Ethical Commitments Made By A Fair Trade Coffee Roaster