Roasting your own coffee is not just an enjoyable part of the overall coffee experience, it allows you to drink the freshest cups available anywhere, anytime, and a round-bottomed cooking wok makes an excellent tool for roasting green coffee beans!
In these early days of the COVID-19 pandemic physical distancing is a must, we’re spending time with our family out in nature while making this wok roast coffee video. It’s spring melt … we’re at the roadside … we’re choosing a wok inside a wok (double-wok technique) for a no-trace campfire … and roasting coffee is a natural part of our lifestyle.
Our intention for sharing these moments is to inspire other coffee consumers to roast their own coffee using something they likely already have at home—a wok; and more importantly, start paying attention to how freshness in coffee is really defined, as well as the source of their green coffee beans. (And all of our posts/ads are made by real people who are a part of us).
Try Wok Roasting Yourself Using Our Certified Green Coffees
We sell certified fair trade and organic green coffee for home-roasting, and organize green coffee shipments on our website. Buying our green coffee supports coffee growers, forest restoration, and further educational coffee content from us.
Beautiful, jasmine-scented coffee flowers for all the mothers out there in celebration of Mother’s (Earth) Day! As a company, we made the decision to celebrate only universal holidays; and we can’t help but feel that Mother’s Day is essential on the principal that mothers are special and need our attention. We work to celebrate mothers today and every day, and coffee flowers (+ an environmental coffee message) are our way of showing that we care.
Learn More About Coffee Flowers and How Coffee Grows
Good green coffee thrives naturally in biodiverse forests because coffee grows on trees! Well, technically coffee trees are an evergreen shrub that grow amoung the dappled shade of other tropical trees and serve as an under-story canopy layer in tropical forests.
“Coffea Arabica” (the Latin name for coffee trees) produce one harvest of coffee beans per year (sometimes two, depending on the location and the season). Leading up to harvest season the trees burst into flower, which smells incredible and fills an entire growing region with the sweet scent of jasmine. Coffee flowers are self-pollinating by nature (which means they don’t require insect pollination with other coffee trees’ flowers); however, studies show that when pollination does occur (from bees, birds, and bat activity) coffee trees produce more cherries of a higher quality.
After flowering the trees produce fruit, known as “coffee cherries”, and inside of each cherry are two seeds. These seeds are coffee beans! And (fun fact) the average coffee tree on a farm yields approximately 1,500 cherries; which equates to 3,000 beans; which is about 1lb of coffee beans per year. This makes it easy to figure out how many coffee trees it takes to provide the average household with coffee for a year, and the answer is thirty. Thirty coffee trees means tens of thousands of coffee flowers. This is a side of coffee that we don’t often think about or have the pleasure of seeing, but one which connects us to where coffee grows, the people who grow it, and inevitably to the most important mother of all … Nature.
The carbon calculations to produce coffee are done, and consumers can afford to offset the production of coffee’s carbon footprint … and it adds up to less than $0.02 per cup.
Today, April 22, 2020, Merchants of Green Coffee and the Mesoamerican Development Institute are announcing a first-of-it’s-kind agreement (years in the making) to allow coffee consumers to purchase carbon offsets created through coffee farmers adopting Integrated Open Canopy™ (a land-sparing coffee cultivation system that conserves and restores forest habitat on coffee farms).
The Climate Change Coffee® program provides additional revenue directly to the growers adopting Integrated Open Canopy™ (IOC) production.
The Carbon Offset program is a key feature of the Yoro Biological Corridor initiative (another name for Cafe Solar®’s restorative production model), which combines forest-friendly coffee cultivation with clean processing using renewable energy technology. This program will unlock the power of the consumer and lead to a rapid scaling up of the program’s restorative impact throughout coffee growing regions.
The Carbon Offset program is fully transparent and will be proudly sold as “unverified” and will thus be offered by the program at the low rate of $8.00 per metric tonne of CO2. Once the program has transitioned to “Verified Carbon” offsets, the rate will increase from USD$8.00 to USD$20.00 per metric ton of CO2.
The coffee carbon calculations are done and consumers can afford it .. It adds up to less than $0.02 per cup!
This is a formal agreement with our partners; the participating coffee growers and Green Merchants Technologies, that all coffee sold as Climate Change Coffee® will involve direct payments to producers to purchase their annual carbon offsets. MDI’s portion of the carbon sales (50%) will be used to map and document additional IOC™ farms and to finalize the IOC™ protocols and requirements to transition to fully verified carbon. This is our co-opportunity.
New! US Forestry Services Report on Cafe Solar®’s IOC® Agroforestry System
On this Earth Day 2020, we also published US Forest Services Scientist Dr. David I. King’s most recent environmental report from the Cafe Solar® coffee farms in Yoro, Honduras.
Background: After a week of fact-finding in Honduras, Dr. King’s flight was cancelled due to the COVID-19 outbreak so he spent another week in the forest conducting extra bird research. Eventually the US embassy arranged a chartered flight, and so David wrote this report during his 14 days of quarantine from a cabin in Maine. The report does not spell out good news for the future of Honduras, but it does identify our market-based land-sparing coffee growing approach as one of, if not the most promising solution.
Better Coffee For Us and the Planet Starts with Paying Sustainable Prices
Click the image above to download a copy of our 2020 Vision
In our 2020 Vision Document, we publish today’s sustainable price of coffee, based on the real costs of growing coffee (by grade), as well as details about our company vision for better coffee for us and the planet within the next 10 years.
There’s no debating or denying it, 2020 will be a decisive decade. Our world offers an abundance of information, but our ecological time clock is running out. We’re more connected than ever before, and yet this vast network can feel so vacuous … this is there coffee comes in!
Coffee is about discussion and holds a special place in our culture and our daily lives. It is, and has historically always been, a thinking beverage; one that physically brings people together for conversation. Coffee is the example product. It fuels us.
It is for these (and many other reasons) that the Merchants of Green Coffee business plan aims to turn the ubiquitous cup we’ve been served these past decades into a smarter, thinking cup that benefits all.
We Drink Coffee, and We Consume
Alongside our shared love for coffee, is something everyone has in common. Academics, full- and part-time workers, entrepreneurs, students, climate activists, our wonderful elders … we’re all consumers; and most of us recognize that we live in a privileged world where we’re able to wake up every morning, drink a coffee, and choose how we spend our money throughout the day.
As we sip our coffees this morning Australia is still ablaze (11 million hectares impacted by wildfire thus far) and well over a billion animals have already burned to death. Yes, the guilt should start setting in. It’s 2020 and toilet paper is still being made with virgin tree fibre …
We’re all responsible in some way and we’re all needed to power the change. Governments are responsible for implementing change; businesses need to start writing change into their articles of incorporation; consumers need to do their research and put their money where their values are—of course, this also requires truthfulness and transparency in the marketplace; and we all need to challenge ourselves to rise up above our more trivial human squabbles.
Can We Cooperate Under Shared Principals and Values?
For us here at Merchants of Green Coffee, 2020 is about bringing 25 years’ worth of groundwork, based on UN Millennium Development environmental goals and targets, into mainstream coffee.
In this decade, with our Cafe Solar® program well underway and with the security of its supply, we will start by actively engaging in direct outreach to major companies, organizations, and investors to make restorative coffee an everyday cup in both the specialty and broader markets. We will also be ramping up our consumer outreach to sign up more households across Canada and help grow Climate Change Coffee® awareness worldwide.
For more details about our plans, and for today’s sustainable coffee price (vs. the commodities trading price) and real costs of growing coffee (accounting for social and environmental costs), read our 2020 Vision:
In true spirit of environmental campaigning we spent Saturday August 24th, with our friends at the Patagonia store in Toronto collecting names and support for our upcoming Climate Change Coffee program!
We are so grateful to have been welcomed on as regular participants in Patagonia’s pop-up food festivals over the years, and we’re thrilled that the Toronto team is committed to supporting a greener, fresher coffee supply.
Local Consumers Can Cause Global Change
If you are a coffee drinker within our local (Toronto) market, your opportunity is now! And even if you don’t drink coffee, you still know someone who does …
By signing up to Climate Change Coffee, all consumers can now take the first step in voting “Yes” to a coffee supply chain that does not destroy forests; and instead, actually grows forests and sequesters carbon.
By signing up to Climate Change Coffee all consumers can now vote “Yes” to replacing wood-burning coffee dryers to solar-powered dryers.
By signing up to Climate Change Coffee all consumers can now vote “Yes” to a coffee supply line that is very carefully managed by women at all levels of production.
Because our future is at stake, and our forests (and coffee) can’t wait! In the region of Honduras where we are working on Climate Change Coffee, coffee production has tripled over the past 7 years and is the leading threat to forest habitat.
According to Conservation International, meeting future demand for coffee could require tripling coffee production by 2050. At current productivity levels, this would require an area 4 times the size of Costa Rica.
“Four times the size of Costa Rica! – That’s more than the entire area of Honduras! says Richard Trubey, Program Developer and Co-founder of Mesoamerican Development Institute (MDI). “Which is just crazy because at current rates, losing all remaining forests in Honduras is probably just 30 years out”.
No Greenwashing, Climate Change Coffee is Founded on Science
Richard Trubey has been a director of Climate Change Coffee program since its inception 25 years ago. He works alongside engineers, scientists, agronomists and other professionals in the field, and in partnership with UMASS’s Sustainability Department, to implement the Climate Change Coffee program’s Solar-powered Coffee Drying Technology and Integrated Open Canopy (IOC) restorative agricultural approach.
Spanning 25 years of development, Richard and partners have amassed a comprehensive, body of research and knowledge centred on coffee and forest destruction, migratory bird species habitats and population, energy efficiencies in coffee production, carbon sequestration and forest mapping, and the connections between coffee and climate change in general.
Listen to the first 10 minutes of the podcast to hear our CEO and co-founder talk about Merchants’ company values, our solar-powered coffee program, and the science of coffee freshness.
For over a decade, we’ve been developing and using this simple setup to brew our signature rich and sweet-tasting black cups of coffee. We’ve always referred to our beloved little tool as the “coffee spring” and our process for brewing “steep & filter”—simply because we felt they were the most natural terms to describe what we were up to.
Fast-forward to now and we’re launching our coffee spring at an actual target: World domination of better coffee! To make this happen, we’ve decided to name our brewing tool “ACE Brewer”. We’ve also officially dubbed our tried and tested method for brewing as the Two-Step Steep and Filter® process.
ACE Brewer Intro Gift Set Available Now For a Limited Time
Richard, Raul and Derek Zavislake (co-founder of Merchants of Green Coffee) have been working together for more than 20 years.
Restoration Cafe Opens Today
Today marks a special day in our history as we announced the official name of our cafe, along with our partners; the Mesoamerican Development Institute, who announced some exciting plans for the expansion of our flagship coffee program.
May we now welcome you to Merchants’ Restoration Cafe! Our cafe is meant to be the place where consumers can experience the embodiment of Merchants of Green Coffee’s value-set, coffee knowledge, and alternative coffee supply chain.
Restoration Cafe aims to be a true triple bottom line cafe; taking into account—not just profits and returns to shareholders—but also the business’s impact on the people in its supply chain and the environment affected by it. We now look forward to the cafe’s evolution as a platform for our education, environmentalism, and specially sourced coffees.
Our flagship coffee, Cafe Solar, uses off-grid solar-powered processing and is restoring essential forests with an organized system of farming managed by women.
Cafe Solar® Funding Announced
In addition to our cafe naming, we’re thrilled to announce that after more than 20 years with all of the incredible partners working together, we’ve finally received the funding to scale the capacity of the program from 1 solar-powered dryer to 10 solar dryers; which equates to million of pounds of coffee and one of the greatest opportunities for forest protection in Central America!
Today we’re thanking USA Today because they published a story about us and one of the 3+ Keys to Great Tasting Coffee (freshness of the roast) in their travel section this week. “You’ve probably been drinking stale coffee all your adult life …”, says Eat Sip Trip writer, Kae Lani … and it’s the truth!
Check out their video explaining the science behind coffee freshness (one correction to note: green coffee should be roasted to a temperature above 425°F not 500°F):
Around here, we’re calling it a Christmas miracle! As of today, the new Cafe Solar harvest is here in our shop, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring this supremely sustainable Honduran coffee to market.
The container endured one of the longest modern voyages of any coffee, and now that climate change coffee is here we need you to please buy, drink and spread the word. (By the way, 44,000lbs is approx. 1.75 million cups!)
