Saturday, February 14, 2004


happy valentine's day

i hope everyone enjoys their chocolate today, unless of course you live in brazil, where apparently the equivalent holiday is celebrated in june.

of great interest to me today -- besides the hour-long talk with the great doug cadmus, who patiently listened to me prattle -- is a new coffee trade magazine, coffeeworld.

published in london, for a mere US$735 a year, this journal causes me to shake my head with both puzzlement and glee.

puzzlement, in that the majority of the magazine consists entirely of stories you could have google news' automatic email service send to you, with the exception of a few pix of business types.

the magazine does have a few original articles: the one that makes this first issue sparkle is by the founder of that great charity, coffeekids.

the magazine is mostly commercial java; the space given to specialty is small.

so i'm not sure what you really get for this huge price. but this newsletter also causes me glee in that it contains technical coffee market charts from someone i've been seeking a long long time.

i mean russian prince serge cantacuzene, who is supposed to be a hedge-fund rock star in europe. his analyses are said to move the market.

he caught the eye of coffee lovers a while ago when he predicted the beginning of the end of the 4-year-long world-price depression known as the coffee crisis.

this is a guy we cafénauts need to know. why are we coffee connoisseurs interested in someone like serge?

coffee is a unique and beautiful product. your morning cup of joe sits at your elbow -- and with it sits the coffee farmer who grew it, the roaster who roasted it.

we coffee lovers are more closely connected to coffee growers than we are to the producers of most other products. the farmers are not distant from us; the roasters are not distant from us.

and i would argue from my new perspective -- one i have developed thru education during my time with the great people at the scaa -- we are not distant from serge either.

those of us who love coffee and realize the depth of the problems the coffee crisis presents must ally ourselves with coffee professionals, coffee roasters ("brownies"), coffee importers ("greenies"), and finally with development agencies and market people such as serge.

this is a radical shift in coffee-thinking, but very crucial, very crucial. . .

on a less serious note, today i'm drinking americanos from batdorf's vesuvio espresso blend. yummy.

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