For paid subscribers: What happens when the melodramatic language of social media and political discourse begins to impact how we discuss the coffee industry.
Coffee roasters are expensive and slightly intimidating, but they are also fundamentally simple machines. As startup costs increase, no wonder people are building their own.
Despite evolving tastes and increased competition, India’s oldest and largest coffee chain—a communist-founded, worker-owned cooperative—is still going after 70 years.
For many, elite coffee competitions represent the pinnacle of the industry. But the huge costs to compete prevent those without financial support from participating—and harm the industry as a whole.
Coffee collected from the droppings of civets is sought after by the rich and deplored by animal welfare advocates. Caught in the middle are the farmers who produce it.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that all the money that has flowed into specialty coffee over the past decade or so is warping the industry in ways that we haven’t yet begun to grasp.
