COFFEE NEWS ROUNDUP: WEEK ENDING SEPTEMBER 14TH

The Moral Cost of Dubai’s Coffee Boom

The coffee scene in Dubai is thriving, and the city is set to welcome the Specialty Coffee Association’s World of Coffee event next month. But underneath the glitzy facade and marketing buzz lies a moral quagmire.

Coffee Conversations: Biggby's Bob Fish on Challenging Corporate Coffee’s Status Quo

The co-founder of the chain Biggby Coffee talks about building a successful company with hundreds of franchised locations, only to switch to a new way of doing business—one that prioritises more than just growth and profit.

A macchiato in a ceramic cup sits atop a newspaper

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Coffee News Roundup, where this week—luckily—there isn’t a lot of news.

I say luckily because during the week I managed to hurt my hand, which makes typing painful, which makes writing a blog tricky.

So we’re going to keep this one short, snappy, and then we can all go about our day and I can take some more ibuprofen.

Coffee shops are as unhealthy as fast food chains, says chief nutritionist - via The Telegraph

In news that will surprise absolutely no one, eating what is essentially a giant cake and drinking a gallon of milk for breakfast isn’t healthy.

I’ll still take a lemon poppy seed muffin over a Big Mac any day.

Read the full story here.

This coffee roaster in Berkeley supports poets, one bag of beans at a time - via Berkeleyside

Freshly roasted beans cooling in a coffee roaster’s cooling tray, seen from above

In the most Berkeley news of all time, there’s a coffee company in the California town that doubles as a poetry publisher.

Every bag of coffee you buy from Nomadic Coffee comes with an individually printed poem, sometimes by the owner of the company—himself a poet—or from a number of contributors as well as the occasional classic. Each week they roast a new batch, and include a new poem.

There’s even a dial-a-poem hotline—(415) 484-7919—where you can be introduced to the person who wrote your poem and hear a reading.

I absolutely love this, I have to say, and will probably be buying a bag to try it out.

Read the full story here.

Ryan Gosling visits cafe that went viral for its Ryan Gosling cutouts - via Mashable

That’s right, kids—it turns out that if you want it badly enough, and put enough effort into your online campaign, Ryan Gosling might just show up to your coffee shop and have his photo taken with you.

And if that isn’t the point of the internet, I don’t know what is.

Read the full story here.

Verb Energy Bars Want To Replace Your Coffee - via Forbes

Do they want to? Sure.

Will they? Definitely not.

Read the full “story” here.

Is coffee good for you?

As we saw earlier, according to the United Kingdom’s chief nutritionist coffee shops in general are bad for you. Full of fatty food items and calorific mega-chinos, they’re helping fuel the British obesity crisis. And that’s undeniably true (who am I to disagree with a chief nutritionist?). But, at the same time, coffee itself keeps making the news for its many, many health benefits.

Two hands holding two cups of coffee on a marble table, seen from above

This week, it’s kidney disease.

Research published in the journal Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation has shown that people suffering from chronic kidney disease who drink coffee will, in general, live longer than those who don’t.

According to Daily Coffee News, “Among study participants with chronic kidney disease, people who regularly consumed more caffeine were nearly 25 percent less likely to die from kidney disease or any other cause during the study period than those people who consumed less caffeine.”

So that’s good.