Wednesday, August 07, 2002


caffe umbria

even before i've finished this current half-pound, yet another seattle coffee roaster has emerged for my growing list of coffees i must try. caffe umbria, run by the bizzarri family, who made waves with their torrefazione italia coffee before they sold it to a conglomerate a few years ago. even zoka praises their coffee.

that would definitely recommend it even if emanuele bizzarri hadn't uttered what has to be the quote of the day: "bread, wine and coffee -- those are the basic things."

this makes sense to me. what doesn't make sense to me is the continuing uproar over proposed coffee initiatives in seattle and berkeley: one to tax espresso to fund city-wide child-care programs; the other to enforce the sale of fair trade coffee. as i've said before, while the berkeley initiative has its heart in the right place, it would too difficult to enforce to be meaningful. as for the seattle tax, that seems primarily a local matter. why does anyone outside of seattle care how they fund their social programs?

why they need it is also confusing to me -- everyone i know in seattle has a dog, a kayak, and a gps system, not kids. . .still if the national coffee association, the trade group for the heavy-hitting multinationals that are ruining your supermarket canned coffee by replacing the good arabica with cheap robusta while still charging you top dollar, is against it, i'm almost instinctively for it. but i'm wacky. . .and a member of the good guys, the scaa, the association supporting local specialty roasters and coffeehouses who want to bring quality back into your cup!

still, as a prominent local brooklyn roaster said to me recently: maybe coffee is too small a thing to bear all this political freight. while fair trade coffee sales appear to be slowly increasing on their own, maybe it's because we american coffee-drinkers have a conscience or because we understand that what goes around comes around. guilt-based legislation, as proposed by in berkeley, is unnecessary -- people will do the right thing if they only know about it. thus i suggest the supporters of the berkeley intiative re-direct their energies to public education on quality coffee and fair-trade issues.

posted by fortune | 6:32 PM | top | link to this | email this: | | | 0 comments