Archives for posts with tag: coffee

Coffee’s Carbon Cost

March 8, 2024 //
A burlap bag of roasted coffee beans. Photo by Tina Guina on Unsplash

Like >90% of the world1, I’m a caffeine user. I enjoy a cup or two in the morning, but I often find myself thinking about the cost of a cup.

I’m not talking about the $4 a day that everyone apparently is spending on coffees – that they could be saving instead to become a millionaire in… just 75 years2. I’m talking about the cost to the climate of getting that cup from the ground to your hand.

And you might be surprised by the answer. It’s not ditching the single serving k-cups. And it’s not even the plastic bags most beans and grounds are sold in.

I personally like buying coffee in paper bags. This is easy enough buying beans from the grocery store, but I’ve also been (slowly) putting together a list of Portland-area roasters that sell their coffee in paper. But packaging is really not the variable to try to fix if you want to have low-carbon coffee. (Though it is throwing another flattened-coffee-bag-sized grain of sand on the landfill problem.)

Transportation might seem like a big source of carbon from coffee, and it isn’t a trivial part. But, since most people live in countries where coffee is imported, there’s no big difference in the choice of coffee. Unless you consider – gasp! – not having coffee at all a choice.

No, the biggest contributor to coffee’s carbon footprint is how it’s grown. So for a person trying to have their morning fix, the largest difference you can make to lower your coffee’s GHG emissions is to make sure it is “shade grown”. Shade grown coffee is grown in the, well, shade of trees. This is similar to how coffee bushes grow naturally in their jungle ecosystems. There are some different types of shade-grown practices, but you don’t really need to worry about that – they are all better than clear-cutting, plantation style coffee growing.

Oh, and did I mention it helps with preserving biodiversity and lowering chemical pesticide and fertilizer use? Cuz it most definitely does.

So, next time you buy some coffee, reach for the shade-grown. You’ll have it made in the, um, penumbra.

  1. I’m getting this figure from Michael Pollan, but I’m not sure where he got it. And when I look up how many people consume caffeine around the world, I get links to a few studies that say it is the most widely used psychoactive substance. None of them seem to offer figures for what percentage of the world population are caffeineheads. ↩︎
  2. How long it takes to save $1mil with 5% return and 3% inflation, from this calculator. ↩︎
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The Word on Coffee

August 7, 2008 //

I was surprised by a few of the findings in this collection of modern studies about coffee from the New York Times.  Especially this one, “It was long thought that caffeinated beverages were diuretics, but studies reviewed last year found that people who consumed drinks with up to 550 milligrams of caffeine produced no more urine than when drinking fluids free of caffeine. … Drinks containing usual doses of caffeine are hydrating and, like water, contribute to the body’s daily water needs.”  I have always been careful to drink water before my morning cup of joe because I felt like drinking water after coffee was a zero-sum game.  And, we hsould keep in mind that, like other stimulatns, coffee does increase gastrointestinal motility.  Which can be really useful sometimes.

On Monday, I caught the Amtrak train down from San Jose.  On my way down from San Mateo, William and I stopped to get coffee at Bean Street Coffee.  (Link goes to their overwhelmingly positive yelp* page)  I’ve noticed before that they advertise kopi luwak for sale, but this time I happened to see it on the menu: only $39/cup or $635/pound!  This is the only cafe I’ve ever seen that offers it.

William and I went with slightly more quotidian choices.  They were worth every penny.

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The lost weekend

November 19, 2007 //

So, I’ve been dishonestly backdating some of my previous posts. I just thought it would make sense for you, dear reader. The continuity of these posts which I write and then sometimes never get around to posting needed to be considered.

To catch you up, there’s a weekend that I haven’t talked about yet. That’s the last weekend of October. I was spending a lot of time with these two Swedish journalists who were here to do a story on Jamii Bora. They are two young guys who have done a few stories in some pretty interesting places as a writer/photographer team.

I went with them out to see a Jamii Bora’s branch in the coffee-growing area of Kiambu. We we taken around by the young branch manager, Ms. Alice Gathua. We drove out there in a taxi that took us down these dirt roads that, I think, delineate the different plantations. The taxi ran out of gas on the way back and the driver hitched a ride to go get some more, came back with a jerrycan and proceeded to use a creased shilling note as an impromptu funnel.  We ate bananas while we waited, bought from a local woman sitting at the crossroads under an umbrella.

It was really interesting to finally see coffee plants growing in their natural state. Some of the coffee cherries were red and some were already black and dried, on the same plant. Each type of cherry provides a different grade of coffee. They are all picked by hand.

Of course what really opened my eyes were the conditions that the workers live in. These are the Jamii Bora members, so we got to spend a good bit of time talking to them. They come from all over Kenya to work on these plantations. Many of them have families in distant provinces that they’ve been supporting for years. In fact, one borrower gave his loan to his wife who is using it in their home province in Western Kenya.
The workers live in buildings that the plantation owners provide. The buildings are nicer in some cases than those in the slums, but some were quite dilapidated. They are small, with no running water, sometimes no electricity and they can house a single worker or a whole family. Fortunately, most of the people we talked to had a small garden plot that they could plant for themselves. Living out in the countryside has a small advantage, therefore, over urban life, but it’s still hard.

The coffee plantation system is very complex, but at its base it revolves around the workers. There are seasonal surges when the fields will be crawling with hired hands and then down time when there’s almost nothing to do. We met a few workers from a neighboring plantation that were planting their own vegetables in between the rows of coffee plants. It turned out that the owner of that plantation had run out of money keep his operation going. So, the workers were just making the most of the long wait until a new owner took charge.

The coffee is all mono-cropped. There is no such thing as shade-grown in this region. I’m not sure if it exists in Kenya, though I’d like to hope so. Our branch manager guide, whose family owns a few coffee-growing plots, had never even heard of “fair trade.” Hopefully it is an idea that will grow in popularity. I’ve suggested to Jamii Bora that they start a cooperative for coffee growers and obtain fair trade certification.

Maybe the Jamii Java House is next?

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Nairobi Java House

November 2, 2007 //

Last weekend I went to the Nairobi Java House.  It is a coffe shop founded by an American guy.  It sells premium Kenyan coffee and American style cafe food for prices that are on par with the U.S.  Around here of course that means, expensive.  Going there I found myself surrounded by mzungus in the parking lot of a shopping center – an experience not unlike one I could have in Los Angeles. 
The menu has things like breakfast burritos, iced lattes, and pancakes on it.  I went for a garlic bagel with cream cheese and some homefries.  The homefries were great, nothing to write home about but they got them right.  (Wait does this count as writing home about them?)  The bagel was pretty good, but there were two points where they missed the mark.  First of all, the bagel was not boiled.  At most it might have been sprayed with water mid-bake.  It lacked the chewy outside that really makes a bagel a bagel.  Second, the cream cheese was a spreadable slightly salty white cheese.  It was good, almost like a dry goat cheese spread on there, but it was not creamy.  Cream is in the name of the cheese for a reason.  There was a garnish of tomato and cucumber on both of my plates and I used that to put on one half of the bagel.  That made it very nice.

This Nairobi Java House is trying to bring an up-scale coffee diner experience to Kenya.  It’s a great idea except that it’s only for those with money, the upper class or mzungus tourists.  This is partly due to the fact that coffee, good coffee, is expensive here.  I think that the best coffees in the supermarkets are just as expensive as in the U.S.  That makes it really expensive comparatively.  That’s why the usual is nescafe.  The export market gobbles up all the good stuff and drives up the price for selling that same grade locally.  It’s a shame that the people here don’t get to drink the wonderful coffee that they are producing.  (Oh, I had two cups of coffee while I was there.  It was terrific; smooth, nutty and mellow.)

The people who are actually growing the coffee are getting the very short end of the stick.  Even with cooperatives for centralised processing, the plantation laborer sees very little of those 10 bucks you spend on a pound of coffee.  I visited the coffee growing region and met some Jamii Bora members out there.  I’ll post a whole story about that soon.

On my way out of the cafe, I saw Aaron and Carly from ultimate.  They were the ones who had given us a ride from the game the week before.  I said a quick hello and we said that we’d see each other later.

So after the coffee I had some other dehydrating drinkies.  Then I went to go play ultimate again.

Although I had been trying to get some sort of aerobic exercise doing burpees in my room, the dehydration and general lack of conditioning wreaked havoc on me.  Mostly in the hamstring area.

I didin’t stretch too much and just ran on the field as soon as I could.  On my first cut, I felt my left hamstring spasm.  Stupidly, I kept playing.  Which eventually lead to the right one also being pulled, although it wasn’t as bad. 

After that I sat out and just stretched.  It was sad.  For the rest of the week, I would feel that pain in the back of my legs.  It made sitting painful – but kind of in that good painful way that rubbing something sore can produce.  And any time I tried to move faster than a walk, I could really feel it. 

This week I didn’t get the chance to play because I was out on an outreach trip, but I think it would not have been a good idea to go out on the field anyway.  I’m going to work my way back into it slowly.  And hopefully more prudently. 

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