The recession has put a lot of Seattle-area coffee shops on the market, and one was bought this fall by former banker Steve Cousins.

The old Sip Coffee at 16108 Ash Way in Lynnwood reopened this week as Starling Coffee, a venture that Cousins, who was laid off by Seattle Savings Bank (now Seattle Bank), financed by converting his IRA into a self-directed 401(k). By putting the business inside the 401(k), he avoids the massive tax penalty of withdrawing retirement money early. Sounds like something a banker would know about, eh?

Cousins also did his due diligence at Sip, spending a month hanging out in the cafe and watching how the business worked.

It took about a month to remodel, and Cousins chose Bellevue roaster Kuma Coffee, whose owner, Mark Barany, is among the first in the country to disclose how much he pays for his green coffee beans.

Starling offers Kuma's Red Bear Espresso Blend and a single-source espresso that will rotate each month. This month it's from Ethiopia.

Consultant Sarah Dooley trained Starling's baristas, including Courtney Keane, who's in the photo above taken by Barany.

Now that Starbucks has said it wants to grow through acquisitions, everyone is guessing who it might snap up. Starbucks says only that its expansion will be international and in sales to grocery stores, which makes speculation about the chain buying Peet's Coffee somewhat confusing.

Other ideas:

• Dean Foods, per an interview I did with Smead Value Fund manager William Smead. It's cheap right now, and it sells milk, which Starbucks buys by the truckload.


• Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, whose single-serve Keurig brewers have far outshone Kraft's single-serve Tassimo brewers, to which Starbucks was tied before it decided to fire Kraft as its coffee bean distributor. Morningstar analyst RJ Hottovy wrote, "Although a potential merger is by no means a certainty, management admitted that it's been intrigued by the growth potential of this category and has seen improvement in the quality of Green Mountain's coffee assortment."


• A host of small food companies and distributors we've never heard of.


• Who am I missing?

In other coffee news:

• In the realm of real rather than speculative acquisitions, Cherry Street Coffee House bought Seattle Bagel Bakery, where it had been a customer for nearly 18 years. "When we caught wind that this 24-year-old bagel bakery had fallen on tough times and were leaning towards closing their doors, we had to do something about it. For the past 6 months I've been rebuilding the bakery from the ground up and as of the Oct. 1st, I own it," e-mailed Cherry Street's AJ Ghambari. Check out the video celebrating bagels by Mitch Mattraw at Cabfare Productions.
  

  Seattle Bagel Bakery from cabfare productions on Vimeo.



• A new group called the Seattle Coffee Society will hold its first meeting at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 9, at Seattle Coffee Works on Pike Street across from Pike Place Market. "This is a club for coffee professionals and the most passionate amateurs," according to organizer Daniel Humphries. "We will brew coffee, look at some video from origin, and have a discussion on how different coffee origins distinguish themselves in the specialty coffee market."


• Ezra Fieser's article in last Sunday's Seattle Times looked at how and why Starbucks ships green coffee beans from Central America to the U.S. for roasting, then back again. The company told Fieser, "The challenge we face is that many coffee-producing countries don't allow the importation of green coffee to protect their local industry. Given that we blend coffee from 25 countries, it would be difficult to offer our wide range of products with such restrictions." However, neither Guatemala nor El Salvador -- the countries he was writing about -- restricts green coffee imports, customs representatives in those countries said.


• A judge in Illinois threw out a lawsuit that alleged Starbucks was to blame for a customer's tea burns, The Consumerist reported.


• Starbucks completed a pilot test in which it and International Paper converted used Starbucks cups into new coffee cups. That's one more hurdle cleared in the obstacle course toward a goal of having all the communities where it owns stores to be able to recycle coffee cups by 2015. The biggest challenge is convincing the recycling industry that its cups are worth recycling. (Photo of one day's recycling at Cascade Recycling in Woodinville by Seattle Times photographer Erika Schultz.)


• Finally, I'm back from vacation and assignment, and I miss the coffee and fresh basil lemonade -- like fresh from the cafe's back porch -- at Revolutionary Grounds Books & Coffee on North Fourth Avenue in Tucson. Its beans are roasted by Gadsen Coffee in far-flung Arivaca, which gets its coffee from organic, shade-grown farms in Chiapas, Mexico. "Old Bisbee Roasters are also amazing," said Joy Soler (pictured below), who opened the leftist cafe and bookstore two years ago with her husband, Paul Gattone. Their ethos appears at Marxism study groups and on the menu with drinks like "Hot Sasha," a thick hot chocolate with cayenne pepper.

  

Kraft Foods said Starbucks will have to pay if it wants to back out of a partnership in which Kraft distributes the coffee company's packaged coffee and other products to grocery stores.

Their corporate agreement is "perpetual," Kraft said in a release Thursday, and requires Starbucks to pay fair market value and possibly a premium if it backs away. The business has grown to $500 million in annual sales from $50 million 12 years ago, Tim McLevish, Kraft's chief financial officer, told investors during a quarterly conference call with investors, AP reported.

Kraft was responding to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's announcement earlier in the day that the coffee chain is ending its 12-year partnership with Kraft.

"A month ago, we informed Kraft that we plan to discontinue our distribution arrangement," Schultz told analysts during its call with analysts regarding strong fourth-quarter profits (which some take as another sign of economic recovery).

After Kraft's volley, Starbucks issued a release saying Kraft mischaracterized the agreement, including its term. "It has been, and continues to be, our intention to keep these conversations private. There is a specific mechanism within the agreement for the resolution of disputes. As we said in our earnings call, we will ensure that our mutual customers remain well-served," Starbucks said.

In other coffee news, before I disappear on assignment until Thanksgiving:

• Starbucks opened its first Central American coffee shop this week, in El Salvador.
• Synesso said its digital shot timer was a big hit at Coffee Fest. Most cafes use a free-standing timer if their machines don't have a shot-timing system, Synesso's Sandy Schneiter explained to me. A timer that's integrated into the machine, like Synesso's starts and stops when the shot is being pulled.
• Dillanos Coffee Roasters was named macro roaster of the year by Roast Magazine. The Sumner-based company, owned by David Morris, Chris Heyer and Howard Heyer, has 68 employees and roasts more than 3.2 million pounds a year. (Conscious Coffees in Boulder was named micro roaster of the year.)
• Watertown Coffee closed, but no one seems to know the details and I haven't reached the owners. Can anyone shed light on that sad event? They were apparently at Coffee Fest (per this Sprudge.com post), but I missed them. And I miss them.

Coffee Fest's Seattle show opened today and runs through Sunday at the convention center downtown. There are about 300 exhibitors and so far almost 6,000 people registered to attend, organizers said.

The trade show includes lots of coffee beans, syrups and equipment. Here are a few pictures, starting with Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman, who write the mostly indie coffee web site Sprudge.com. When they're not writing hilariously snarky headlines, telling you where the Coffee Fest after-parties are, and reporting on important issues like the questions surrounding a high-scoring entry in this year's Cup of Excellence competition in Colombia, Carlsen works at Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco, which doesn't allow WiFi and as a result is a boisterous cafe, he said.

"Laptops have killed coffee shops, turned them into libraries," Carlsen said.

"Laptops and smoking bans," added Michelman, a Seattle musician who writes songs and plays guitar in the Mill Kids, and plays sax, keyboards and other instruments for Iji and Megabog.

One of Sprudge.com's sponsors is Espresso Parts in Olympia, which revamps old La Marzocco and other espresso machines. "They're the classic cars of the coffee world," say the Sprudge guys. The Espresso Parts booth had a cool old garage feel:

The booth next door was La Marzocco itself, with a new machine called the Strada. There are two types of Strada -- one that's still in production and this one, the MP, that began shipping a few months ago. The very first MP machine went to Stumptown's newly remodeled store on Division Street in Portland. "It's great," said Stumptown roaster Adam Koehler.

About half of the green coffee that spins and pops in Mark Barany's roaster in Bellevue comes from farms he knows. Barany (in photo by Seattle Times photographer Steve Ringman) has not visited them yet. His roastery and Seattle cafe, Kuma Coffee, are just a few years old and do not throw off lots of cash and free time for trips abroad.

He meets farmers online, and if their coffee sounds like a fit, they send samples. Then he draws up contracts to pay them and finds an importer who charges another 30 to 50 cents a pound to move the beans from Central America to Puget Sound.

It takes time and work, but Barany considers the effort worthwhile, because he is paying farmers what their coffee is worth and cutting out the middlemen.

If that sounds like Fair Trade, think again.

Barany and a growing group of coffee roasters have become disenchanted with the Fair Trade model and think they can do better. Known as direct trade, their movement is small and does not having uniform definitions or guidelines. Customers often have to take the roaster's word for it that growers were paid fairly.

They crave greater legitimacy, and for that reason a handful - including Barany - have publicly disclosed the prices they pay for coffee.

Check out the highlights of a brewing battle between Fair Trade and direct trade in a story I wrote for Friday's paper. I didn't include a lot of details and arguments from both sides, so please voice your opinion, set me straight, whatever needs to be done to keep this discussion going.

Counter Culture Coffee, one of the best coffee roasters in the country, has no customers in Seattle.

The closest you can buy it is at Billy Wilson's BARISTA, which opened last year in Portland. South of there, you have to drive all the way to Napa Valley for a Dean & Deluca shop.

Why not open a West Coast roastery and Seattle training center?

"There could be another Billy Wilson in Seattle, or Billy Wilson himself in Seattle, and in that case we might do it, but we're not making a push in Seattle until we have roasting on the West Coast and a training center in Seattle," said Peter Giuliano, Counter Culture's co-owner and director of coffee. "We have no immediate plans to do those things."

Some of Counter Culture's East Coast customers: Peregrine Espresso, Washington, D.C.; Abraco and Everyman Espresso in New York City; Octane Coffee in Atlanta; and all Dean & Deluca stores.

The Dean & Deluca account means people can get Counter Culture Coffee in Kansas. But not Seattle.

Kuma Coffee has become the first coffee roaster in Seattle to issue a transparency statement regarding its coffee buying and to publicly disclose how much it paid per pound for all the beans in its inventory -- part of a growing movement away from Fair Trade-certified coffee and toward a model called direct trade that many roasters say benefits coffee farmers more.

There have been questions about Fair Trade coffee for years, and they have grown more pointed as spikes in commodity coffee prices mean that some farmers who pay to be Fair Trade certified are now getting more money for coffee sold on the regular commodities market.

Mark Barany (pictured), who owns Kuma Coffee with his wife, Elizabeth, said he decided to disclose his prices after Counter Culture in North Carolina issued its transparency statement earlier this summer.

Transparency is a way to legitimize direct trade. Barany has a Master's Degree in Science and Information Systems Management that included a lot of reading about transparency "and how truthful and up-front business is good business," he said.

"Putting it out there kind of says, 'It can be done, and this is sustainable,' and also says to the competition, 'Who else out there feels so good about their business practices that they could do the same?" he said.

Barany started roasting in small batches in Magnolia in late 2007, and the next year installed a five-pound roaster there and opened a cafe at 4110 Stone Way North. Last fall, he moved the roastery to Bellevue.

About 90 percent of Kuma's beans are sold in Seattle. Accounts include Cafe Bambino, Seattle Pie Co., Magnolia Thriftway, Ballard Town & Country Market and Whole Foods stores at Westlake, in Interbay and Redmond.

He buys half Kuma's coffee directly from farms, although he has not visited them in person. He meets them online, "stuff I didn't htink was possible when I started two or three years ago." He tells them what he's looking for, and they send samples.

During a trip to Guatemala and El Salvador during the harvest this coming winter, Barany hopes to meet farmers who are not online as well. He's going with Shannon Neffendorf of Oak Cliff Coffee Roasters in Dallas.

Sometimes direct trade coffee costs more, and sometimes less than Fair Trade or the commodities market, Barany said. The key is to be attuned to the farmers' needs. He recently paid 20 percent more than he was initially quoted to a Guatemalan farmer, who explained that natural disasters had caused the cost of food and fuel to rise and that he wanted to keep that from hurting him and his workers.

"Once he gave me the well-thought-out idea, I didn't even think twice," Barany said. "I said, 'That's fine. Whatever it takes for them to feel like they're getting what they need to live well.'"

Here's a map showing Kuma Coffee's cafe, which was named after Barany's dog, who is named afer the word for "bear" in Japanese:

View Kuma Coffee in a larger map

Photo courtesy of Kuma Coffee.

• Standard & Poor's Ratings Services upgraded Starbucks' debt to BBB+ from BBB -- which is just below A -- this week, MarketWatch.com reported. S&P expects sustained strength through the end of the year, tempered by weak revenue growth in the sluggish U.S. economy. S&P rates debt, not stock, and did not cover itself in glory in the run-up to the recession, but they're almost all we have.
• The Wall Street Journal takes a look at equipment for making cold coffee.
• The Korea Times goes after Starbucks for using so many disposable cups (it says 4 billion a year; Starbucks has said 3 billion) and not putting calorie counts on its Korean menus. Meanwhile, The New York Times points out the eco-unfriendliness of those single-use coffee pods from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters of Vermont. The pods, also called K-Cups, are neither recyclable nor biodegradable.
• The San Jose company mypressi, which makes a hand-held, manual espresso maker called the mypressi TWIST that's popular with baristas, has created a program through which anyone who buys a $189 TWIST can pay $10 more to donate a TWIST to a coffee farmer. A big problem for some small-scale coffee farmers is that they don't have the equipment to taste their own coffee, and thereby improve it and market it to high-end coffee clients. Mypressi's web site has more information about the "Give One, Get One" program.
• Albert Barrientos, a 65-year veteran of the coffee industry, died in New Orleans last week. He retired in 2005 after a long career with Westfeldt Brothers, which bills itself as the oldest green coffee importer in the U.S. He had been president of the Green Coffee Association of New Orleans, the New Orleans Board of Trade and The Southern Coffee Association, as well as a board member of the National Coffee Association and chairman of its Armed Services Committee (who knew?).
• Finally, StarbucksGossip.com dug up an interesting press release about Starbucks' 2007 effort to partner with Apple in offering iTunes to coffee shop customers across the country. It fizzled, and this fall Starbucks plans to unveil a similar but expanded home-page feature for its WiFi customers in partnership with Yahoo.

Dunkin' Donuts coffee exited the Northwest years ago, but next week it will reappear in a Barbie-pink, coffee-dispensing RV at the Taste of Edmonds.

The Dunkin' Turbo Big Taste Tour will be at 6th and Bell streets in Edmonds from Aug. 13 to 15, giving away free coffee and coupons for Dunkin' Donuts coffee beans in grocery stores.

It'll be interesting to see how Northwesterners like Dunkin' coffee, which has a big fan base in the eastern U.S. and has been known to take swipes at Starbucks.

The RV is part of the J.M. Smucker Co., which distributes Dunkin' Donuts, Millstone and Folgers coffees to U.S. retailers and said this week that it's raising retail prices by 9 percent after wholesale coffee hit a 12-year high, the Financial Times reported. Photo courtesy of the J.M. Smucker Co.

An editorial comment about the RV via Twitter:

Jared Linzmeier, the Portland-based head of Northwest sales for Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea of Chicago, is visiting Seattle this week, looking for restaurant and cafe customers who are dedicated to high-quality ingredients.

Intelligentsia, which is known for its champion baristas, says it has only one customer in Seattle at the moment -- Aster Coffee Lounge.

Linzmeier, who was a barista and a roaster for Intelligentsia in Los Angeles, started his Northwest sales gig last November. Until now, he's focused on Portland, including Red E and Barista.

Intelligentsia also opened its third Los Angeles-area location today, in Pasadena. Thanks to @espresso911 on Twitter for the reminder.

Update 4:25 p.m.: Jared e-mailed to update the Seattle customer information I got from Kyle Glanville a couple weeks ago. There are two others, Jared said: People's Republic of Koffee on Capitol Hill, and a few Specialty's Bakery Cafe & Bakery shops around town.

Fonte Cafe and Wine Bar is celebrating one year in business with weekly deals on the things it does best. They are:

August 1 to 7: $1 scoop of F2 Gelato made locally with ingredients that include the cafe's signature blend

August 8 to 14, 4 p.m.-6:30 p.m.: $1 glass of sangria

August 15 to 21, 2:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m.: $1 coffee tastings including Ethiopian Nekisse and Guatemala El Socorro Cup of Excellence.

August 22 to 29, 4 p.m.-6:30 p.m.: $1 wine samples during happy hour

The deals are at 1321 First Ave., across from the Seattle Art Museum.

Update 8/2/2010: In response to the reader comment below, a Fonte spokeswoman wrote, "We extend our apologies for the confusion at the cafe yesterday. We had one employee who was not clear about the promotion when it started yesterday. I assure you that the staff has been briefed and welcome everyone down for their $1 gelato today!"

After eight days trying to suss out the best coffee in Seattle, the posters at Reddit.com haven't gotten very far.

They've listed Espresso Vivace, Portland-based Stumptown Coffee, Seattle Coffee Works, Caffe Vita and Trabant Coffee & Chai. They've done a bit of Starbucks bashing, including touching on 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea and Clover brewing machines.

But there's not much depth. Lighthouse Roasters, anyone? Herkimer Coffee? Zoka Coffee Roasters? Come on, let's clue them in about Seattle coffee!

Post your ideas on this string at Reddit.com.

(Many thanks to Seattle Times researcher David Turim for pointing it out.)

Update 3:15 p.m.: CoffeeHero.com recently posted a list of the best coffee spots downtown, recommending Seattle Coffee Works, Trabant and Stella Caffe.

Update 7/29/2010: Here's what I got for telling Redditers that there are more than a handful of great coffeehouses in Seattle: "I couldn't decide if I wanted to punch her in her smug little face before or after I read the article."

Nekisse is known as an extremely tasty, high-priced Ethiopian coffee. It has sold for $12 a cup in New York City, but can be drunk for less than $3 at Fonte Coffee Roaster and Wine Bar, 1321 First Avenue.

Unlike Harrar, Yirgacheffe and Sidamo, Nekisse is not a region in Ethiopia.

"Nekisse is a made-up word, a name to identify a style of coffee," said Fonte master roaster Steve Smith.

The Nekisse style was created by Ninety Plus Coffee of Colorado, which has a difficult-to-penetrate web site and did not return a message last week. Ninety Plus also developed the Beloya style of coffee, which created a ballyhoo a couple years ago but is no longer available for complicated reasons involving the Ethiopian coffee exchange.

After Ninety Plus creates a style, it finds a farm or farms that will grow it. In the case of Nekisse, it's a farm in the Sidamo region in southern Ethiopia, Smith said.

Issaquah-based Coffee Fest, which holds coffee trade shows all over the country including an annual show in Seattle each year, is battling the Specialty Coffee Association of America's plan to hold its annual convention in Seattle most years over the next decade.

Coffee Fest has hosted a show in Seattle every year for the past 19. Last fall, its show included the Northwest Barista Competition, which is sponsored by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA).

Now SCAA says Seattle looks like a sweet resting spot. After rotating its big annual shindig among various cities, it's looking to settle here in 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018, and possibly 2020 and 2021.

Why's that? The president of the SCAA, Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee in North Carolina, wrote last night on the group's Facebook page that Seattle (the convention center and visitors bureau) has made an attractive offer that would free up time and resources.

"The way things stand now, there are only a handful of cities that can handle our show (our show is unusual; we need to roast and brew coffee for example, and we need a very high ratio of classroom space for all of our educational classes). Cities like New York, D.C., Chicago and San Francisco aren't well suited for us, are super expensive, and frankly aren't that attracted to our event," he wrote.

Coffee Fest is fighting back. Its social media expert sent a letter alerting SCAA members.

"While Coffee Fest certainly doesn't own Seattle, we do object to the SCAA's plan to all but permanently locate here and expect that given the details and facts, you may object too," reads the letter, which launched a spirited discussion at BaristaExchange.com.

The shows cannot be held together, Coffee Fest founder Alan Silverman wrote in that string.

"The problem is we share many of the same vendors and if we split the revenue neither of us come out in the black. That is actually the crux of the problem. Vendors will have to choose which show they will exhibit in because it does not make sense for them to come to the same city twice a year and two years in a row," Silverman wrote.

There's a fair bit of discussion on Barista Magazine's Facebook page, too.

"Sounds like a whale," hip-hop artist Madlib told Kyle Glanville of Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea after hearing the slurp of the professional coffee cupper. "Don't be surprised if you hear that on one of my records."

Glanville, who warned Madlib that the sound could be "jarring," said he was "certifiably star-struck" during shooting for an Adult Swim video (below) a few months ago at Intelligentsia's roasting plant in Los Angeles. "I'm a big fan."

Glanville cut his teeth in the mid-2000s at Victrola Coffee Roasters in Seattle, where he was head of training. He's now director of innovation for Intelligentsia, which has five stores in Chicago and Los Angeles and is working on a new shop in Pasadena.

The chain also runs a training lab in a high-rise in New York, but has no plans to open retail shops there or in Seattle.

"I think putting a coffee bar in Seattle would be like putting a coffee bar in Rome," he said.

"Seattle coffee culture is very ingrained; it's kind of like the paint is drying on Seattle coffee culture, and a lot of the players are already in place, and it kind of is what it is, whereas in a town like Los Angeles, when we came here [opening in 2007], there was nothing."

Although it's become known for its competition-winning baristas -- including Glanville, who was the 2008 U.S. barista champion, and Michael Phillips, who last month became the first U.S. winner of the World Barista Championship -- Intelligentsia has decided its baristas will no longer compete.

Founder Doug Zell explains on his blog, "Our hope is that in 2011 we can work with qualified Baristas from our wholesale customer base to help foster regional champions and perhaps a national champion that does not necessarily come from a roasting company. You can expect to see a number of folks from Intelligentsia become more involved on the other side of the table as judges."

Intelligentsia's only wholesale account in Seattle is Aster Coffee Lounge, Glanville said.

And now for our feature presentation (with thanks to Zachary Carlsen of Stumptown and Sprudge.com for the link on Facebook):

Just in time for July 5, the official start of Seattle summer according to various bromides and the current forecast, local coffee fanatic Michael Allen Smith at CoffeeHero.com has posted a list of coffee ice creams made with locally roasted beans.

Not that you have to wait until Monday to partake. Molly Moon's Handmade Ice Cream, which also has been a boon to local Girl Scouts with a $10,000 Thin Mint habit that powers its Scout Mint flavor, had a line out the door for hours in Wallingford last night despite the chilly temperature. Molly Moon's also just rolled out an ice cream truck that customers will be able to track online.

Others on CoffeeHero's list: Old School Custard, Peaks Frozen Custard and Bluebird Homemade Ice Cream & Tea Room. Check his post for addresses and roaster partners.

Aside from Starbucks' ice cream lineup, did he miss any coffee ice creams with locally roasted beans?

The rumors started in February, when paychecks for Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea workers in Kirkland bounced. Owner Jeff Babcock said the company had just changed banks, and the new bank tried to pull money from the wrong account. Zoka switched banks again to avoid further problems. "We tried to explain, but they have a point that their paychecks bounced, and it was several days before it got fixed," Babcock said.

Add to that a fair number of barista layoffs at the small coffeehouse chain over the past year, and the tales and conjecture grew. Today, Sprudge.com reported a list of rumors about the company's financial situation that it says Zoka representatives denied off the record.

Babock says Sprudge didn't call him for comment. Here are his responses to me:

Rumor 1: "Zoka is rumored to be dramatically downsizing its green buying practices."
Babock: Green coffee buying is up, and he remains a judge for the prestigious Cup of Excellence mentioned in the rumor. Zoka will continue buying up to three COE coffees a year. Zoka does not buy them in vast quantities because "sales volume is only so high" for such pricey coffees, especially in a recession, so they sometimes run out before new orders are placed.

Rumor 2: "Zoka is rumored to be closing its Kirkland store."
Babock: It's been profitable for the past month with record sales every day, after breaking even since it opened last August. Sales are up 15 to 20 percent since nearby Kahili Coffee went out of business.

Rumor 3: "We've received multiple tips from high ranking sources that Zoka's current financial situation is dire." (And suggestions that ownership will change.)
Babock: Zoka sold its Snoqualmie coffeehouse late last year to help pay for the new Kirkland store. "It's been tight times, but the stores are all profitable, and the wholesale business is profitable, and we have good things to look forward to in the future." A business partner in Japan pays licensing fees to use Zoka's name, and Zoka is teaching them to roast coffee, but "they don't own any part of our company," and no ownership changes are in the works.

And a couple thoughts on Sprudge.com's facts:

Fact 1: "For years, Zoka was the official coffee service for KEXP's pledge drives. This year, Zoka pulled out completely...."
Babock: Zoka used to make coffee during pledge drives. "When you tighten up, you don't have the extra staff to do that," he said.

Fact 2: Zoka employees are embroiled in tax disputes.
Not Babock, but me saying: It's unclear how an employer's financial situation would create a tax problem for employees.

Fact 3: The bounced checks mentioned above, including a one-day employee walk-out.

Fact 4: Some people were laid off, or otherwise ticked off, by Zoka, and they have a Facebook page.

Update 5/26/10: Seri Ann Christina Shaw, who worked as a barista at Zoka in Kirkland until Feb. 28, said she does not recall a walk-out. She started the Facebook page, which "is about connecting circuits and making new roads to travel on."

• The comic strip Betty took a few swipes at Fair Trade coffee this week, saying it doesn't taste good even if it's doing good. Of course, there are questions about whether Fair Trade is as good as its marketing.
• Caffe Vita coffee is fueling three guys who left Seattle this week on a mission to document the American urban farm movement. Called Breaking Through Concrete, the project will take a photographer, writer and videographer through 15 cities before ending in Grayslake, Ill., on July 4. The material will go into a book to be published next year. You can follow the trip on Caffe Vita's blog and at BreakingThroughConcrete.com.
• Coffee Strong, a coffeehouse just outside Fort Lewis that is run by the non-profit G.I. Voice, is trying to raise $6,000 to advertise its services to the roughly 10,000 soldiers who will return there from Iraq and Afghanistan over the next three months. The coffeehouse is staffed with G.I. rights counselors and makes referrals to mental health counseling services and veterans benefits advocates. "We need your contribution to ensure that any soldier who needs help will get it, and many are denied services due them. Together we can save lives and make sure that no one falls through the cracks because nobody is there to listen," G.I. Voice and Coffee Strong Executive Director Seth Manzel said in an e-mail to potential supporters. Donations are being taken on its web site.
• The G.I. coffeehouse also has a Facebook page with nearly 1,000 people who like it, far less than Seattle's biggest coffee company. In the Facebook switch from fans to "likers," Starbucks' following dropped dramatically from last summer to 1.9 million, once again putting it behind Coca-Cola.
• Sprudge.com is stoked about the Nekisse beans that recently arrived at Seattle's Fonte Coffee Roaster from southern Ethiopia. Rather than charge $12 a cup like one New York cafe, Fonte will sell the coffee at its usual prices -- $2.69 for a 16-ounce cup of drip coffee or $2.85 for a personal French press. The beans can be bought at the downtown cafe (and by June 1 online) for $24.50 a pound or $12.50 a half pound. Fonte's roaster, Steve Smith, estimates the supply will last through August, depending on demand.
• Duane Kapovich, who works at Starbucks' 7th and Pike store in downtown Seattle, will throw out the first pitch at the Mariners game tonight, launching a five-week promotion in which the company is giving away free tickets to summer events after 2 p.m. on Fridays. It's one ticket per person while supplies last, which was 5 or 10 minutes this afternoon, when shops gave away Mariners tickets. Give-aways on future Fridays are for (May 28) free tickets to the Seattle International Film Festival, (June 4) free tickets to the Seattle Art Museum, (June 11) free child's ticket to the Seattle Aquarium and (June 18) free tickets to "Burn The Floor" at The Paramount Theatre. Kapovich and his son, Barrett, are serious fans, having attended the groundbreaking for Safeco Field and the July 1999 opening game, when the Mariners played the Padres as they are tonight. Maybe it has something to do with Barrett's birthday: April 3, 1989, the day Ken Griffey Jr. debuted in the Major League.
• Starbucks' lobbying efforts pale next to the banking industry's, but its spending more than doubled to $180,000 in the first quarter from $80,000 a year ago. It's on track to spend roughly the same on lobbying as it did last year.

David Schomer, the founder and owner of Espresso Vivace in Seattle, will be a speaker next month at Caffe Culture, an industry event in London that will include the World Barista Championship.

More than 10,000 visitors are expected from June 23 to 25, and exhibitors include the Seattle-based (but Italy-made) espresso machine maker La Marzocco. A special exhibit will pay tribute to classic Italian espresso machines from La Pavoni's 'Ideale' (1905), to Victoria Arduino 'Venus' (1910), to the 'Lollobrigida', a San Marco machine from the 1950s named for Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida.

Schomer is being billed as an "internationally renowned cafe bar operator and innovator," and will give presentations on espresso bar design and on "Espresso Vivace - an artisan business model." He said a peek at his blog gives some idea what he'll be discussing.

Schomer was chosen because "he has led the way in so many ways within the cafe bar industry," said event spokeswoman Helen Marriott. "When we decided to dedicate a day to where the cafe bar industry is heading in the next ten years (in terms of design, functionality and customer requirements), David was a natural choice."

In the photo, by Seattle Times photographer Ken Lambert, Schomer is the bespectacled man in the middle demonstrating how to make a great espresso drink at one of his rare Seattle workshops.

In the market for Kitchen Aid Mixers, mixing bowls, a baker's rack, a tomato slicer or an ice cream display case? Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea Co. is selling those items and more at a "garage sale" at its roasting location -- 1220 W Nickerson St. -- on Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Cash and checks only, says general manager Patrick Mazzuca.

Zoka has all this spare equipment now that it buys baked goods from Essential Baking Co. rather than baking them in-house.

That address is also where Zoka holds public tastings every Friday at 11 a.m.

View Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea in a larger map

The marketing whizzes at North Star Fine Coffees hope to open their first cafe in Columbia City in the next few weeks. More accurately, they are licensing the brand to the shop's owners, whom North Star founder Bryan-David Scott declined to name for now. He also declined to give an address, saying the paperwork should be finished next week. Sounders soccer luminaries are expected to attend the eventual grand opening, in part to promote a blend called "Kick Coffee" that the team co-brands with North Star.

Founded in 2006, North Star sells coffee direct to consumers, mostly through the company's web site. Scott plans to open several local cafes in the coming months, some run by North Star management and others by people licensing the name. He hopes to be in White Center and University Village by fall.

To help with growth, the former furniture broker appointed consultant Nate Silverman as CEO last month. Silverman's background is in business, including an MBA from the UW and credentials not often seen in the coffee world, like "Certified Hot 100 Business Advisor." Although he looks just fine, the "hot" is a reference to his relationship with the site Hot100Business.com. (Photo courtesy of Silverman.)

Scott talks about his decision to get into coffee in terms of markets and feasibility studies. When he realized the furniture market was headed south, he and his wife liked the idea of a coffee business -- a passion they share -- but didn't want to enter a saturated market. Feasibility studies determined it's not saturated, and they entered the high-end coffee market.

North Star's green coffee is hand-checked before being shipped to the U.S., which Scott says is one of the measures his company takes that are rare in the coffee industry. When I asked if he's comparing his methods to specialty roasters in Seattle or big companies like Folgers, he recommended checking the competition's stock for broken beans and other flaws to see the difference.

North Star's beans are roasted in Stanwood, and Scott said he's on track to sell 2.6 million pounds of roasted coffee this year. The company recently came out with "Kick Coffee," which is co-branded with the Sounders, and expects to release a Seahawks blend closer to football season.

Dan Ollis, owner of Victrola Coffee Roasters and Whidbey Coffee Co., has hired Jerry Kaloper as the company's first controller to get the books humming in preparation for future growth. A Huskies quarterback in the '60s, Kaloper (photo courtesy of Victrola) worked for Stewart Brothers Coffee -- now Seattle's Best Coffee, or SBC -- for eight years, first in sales and operations and later as general manager of the company under Jim Stewart, one of the best-known names in Seattle coffee.

In 1992, Kaloper left SBC and became an owner of Mukilteo Coffee, a wholesale business where he was involved in all aspects of operations including purchasing, roasting, packaging, finance and sales. Mukilteo Coffee founder Gary Smith and his wife, Beth, bought out Kaloper's interest in 2006, when he started a residential real estate firm with his son just before the real estate bubble burst. This month, Kaloper's non-compete contract with Mukilteo expired and he's back in the coffee business.

"Victrola reminds me of when I was starting in the old days with Jim Stewart, who was all about the coffee, really high-grade coffees, brewing them Melitta-style and individually for customers," Kaloper said. "That's what Victrola is doing right now, really cutting-edge with single-origin coffees and French press presentation and single-origin through espresso machines, which was unheard of back then."

Single-origin coffees are like varietal wines -- they come from one area and have flavors unique to their regions, or even the estate they were grown on.

The business side reminds Kaloper of his early days at SBC and Mukilteo, too.

"The position Dan is in now is similar to where we were at Seattle's Best way back when, and when I went to Mukilteo, where we were starting from scratch and grew that company. I've been through the growth process twice, and now Dan wants go to next level," he said.

Whidbey Coffee Co., which Ollis started as a cart in 1989, now has 10 cafes and drive-throughs. A couple years ago, Ollis bought Victrola Coffee, which has a Seattle roasting facility, three coffeehouses and a reputation for high-quality beans and baristas (like Stephen Robinson, pictured practicing pours with the help of Stumptown barista Liz Phung for a latte art smackdown last summer). Together the chains have 120 employees, and Ollis decided it was time for someone to focus exclusively on the financial side of the business.

"When you're trying to build an organization, you need an operations guy, and with his wealth of knowledge in the coffee world and knowing the numbers, he was an absolute perfect fit," Ollis said. They met when Kaloper worked at SBC, and Ollis later bought beans from him at Mukilteo Coffee.

After remodeling the Oak Harbor location of Whidbey Coffee this year, Ollis hopes to open another cafe. Next up: Outsource the marketing function, or hire someone to do it in-house.

For those who love tasting coffee, Victrola head roaster Perry Hook holds a free public cupping at 11 a.m. every Wednesday at the Roastery location, 310 E. Pike St.

Jeff Babcock,owner of Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea, has been all over the world judging coffee, buying it and visiting coffeehouses. Every hour until 3 p.m. today, Zoka will post a new photo from Babcock's travels and ask Facebook fans to guess where it was taken. Six commenters will be randomly chosen to win organic coffee gift sets, with the winners announced Friday on Zoka's blog.

Guesses on the first two photos are for Costa Rica, where Zoka buys coffee, and Japan, where it licenses stores. Six commenters will be randomly chosen to win organic coffee gift sets, with the winners announced Friday on Zoka's blog.

A journalist friend once said that if someone thanks you for writing a story, tell them it's your job and that if they're charged with a crime the following week, you'll write about that news too.

It's not often that crime news makes the coffee blog, but today SeattleCrime.com reports that city prosecutors have charged Michael McConnell, founder of Caffe Vita and a big name in Seattle restaurants, with assault, DUI and hit and run after an incident last week at Broadway and James Street. McConnell entered not guilty pleas on all charges.

The alleged incident happened on March 31, the day before Caffe Vita opened its Pioneer Square location.

I confirmed the charges and McConnell's not guilty pleas, but have not confirmed other details reported at SeattleCrime.com.

I finally met Zachary Carlsen of Stumptown Coffee Roasters today. He's also the coffee brains behind Sprudge.com, billed as "The Internet's Only Coffee Website," kind of like The Stranger is "Seattle's Only Newspaper." Jordan Michelman is the writing brains, and they put together some fun stuff, occasionally ripping on me.

Carlsen is going to Amsterdam shortly to head up quality control at a temporary (pop-up) shop Stumptown will open there May 1. If you're lucky enough to be in the area, it's at 101 Albert Cuypstraat, on the map below. Stumptown founder Duane Sorensen told The New York Times he's packing music ranging from Black Sabbath to Townes Van Zandt for the shop.

Carlsen is on the left in the photo. On the right is Andrew Daday, who runs Stumptown's Seattle locations. He knows coffee and lots of other foods -- including chocolate, having worked with Kent Bakke of La Marzocco and now Claudio Corallo Chocolate.

I learned a few hundred things talking to them that I hope to write about in various ways. But for now, the map:

View Stumptown in Amsterdam in a larger map

After you cast a wistful glance at the now-closed Elliott Bay Book Co. in Pioneer Square and pick up your free pizza and coffee at Caffe Vita's grand opening a few blocks away, check out Teatro ZinZanni performers at Caffe Umbria, 320 Occidental Avenue South in Pioneer Square.

Peter Pitofsky, Juliana Rambaldi and Sergiy Krutikov will perform free from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Umbria describes Pitofsky as a "human cartoon," Rambaldi as an "opera diva," and Krutikov as a "gentleman juggler and accordion player."

Umbria is co-owned by Emanuele Bizzarri, whose grandfather and father were coffee roasters. Its other location is in Portland's Pearl District, where Vita also plans to open a coffeehouse and pizzeria in the next month or so. Umbria's coffee also is served at other cafes and venues like Bellagio Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas and the Culinary Institute of America in Napa.

"Unfortunately due to local noise restrictions, building residents and management concerns, we have decided to postpone the late night portion of our Pioneer Square Opening Party, thus going against the usual Caffe Vita grain of partying first and answering questions later," the company said in an e-mail.

While Elliott Bay Book Co. packs, the nearby opening celebration for Caffe Vita and Pizzeria Napoletana at 125 Prefontaine Place South (near South Washington and Fourth) now goes like this:

6 a.m. to 9 p.m. -- Free coffee
11 a.m. to close -- Free pizza
6 p.m. to 8 p.m. -- Music by The Tarantellas.

Donations benefit Vita's new neighbor, the King County cultural services agency 4Culture.

The new pizza and coffee spot is run by Chris McConnell, the son of Michael McConnell, who founded Caffe Vita and Via Tribunali.

Caffe Vita will celebrate its new Pioneer Square location with free coffee, pizza and music at various times on April 1. It's the roaster's sixth cafe and will share space with Pizzeria Napoletana. Both are run by Chris McConnell, the son of Michael McConnell, who founded Caffe Vita and the Via Tribunali pizza chain.

Caffe Vita & Pizzeria Napoletana is in the former All City Coffee space at 125 Prefontaine Place South, near the corner of South Washington Street and Fourth Avenue South.

Caffe Vita has owned the space for a while without changing the name, and you can buy coffee there now. The pizza's coming next week.

Donations to the all-day celebration will benefit Caffe Vita's neighbor in Pioneer Square, a King County cultural services agency called 4Culture.

On April 1:

6 a.m. - 11 a.m. = free drip coffee
11 a.m. - 4 p.m. = free small pizzas from Pizzeria Napoletana
6 p.m. - 8 p.m. = 4Culture hosts free performance by The Tarantellas
8 p.m. - Late = free food, drinks, and music for ages 21 and up. Performances by Trent (Head Like a Kite / Fresh Espresso), Thomas Hunter (Kay Kay / Wild Orchid Children), Fatal Lucciauno and others.

A few things I didn't post while sneezing my head off this week:

• Remember that rooibos espresso I mentioned a while back? Inner Chapters Bookstore & Cafe in South Lake Union/Cascade ordered some, and they're using it to make everything from Mexican mochas to soy cappuccinos with honey and cinnamon, and -- if you even remotely like tea -- the stuff is tasty.
• "The current state of specialty coffee retailing bugs the hell out of me," coffee veteran Kevin Knox writes on his blog, Caffeinated Calm. Knox was in charge of coffee quality for Starbucks from 1987 to 1993, then a coffee buyer for Allegro Coffee in Boulder, Colo. The post includes great historical notes, like how appalled George Howell was at Starbucks' dark roasts during a Seattle visit in 1990, but mostly it's a criticism of the too-cool-for-you coffee community. "What I see in the coffee offerings of most of the so-called 'third wave' roasters is an approach to retailing that at its worst is both solipsistic and narcissistic," he writes.
• Coffee consultant Sarah Dooley e-mailed to say that Rosettas for Relief, a latte art competition last month to benefit Haiti, raised $2,375.97 in Seattle. Andrew Milstead of the Urban Coffee Lounge had the winning pour.
• Starbucks spent $740,000 lobbying in Washington, D.C., last year, according to OpenSecrets.org. One person, Lori Otto, did most of the work, but a cadre of lobbyists at K&L Gates also pitched in. About $190,000 was spent in the fourth quarter on foreign trade, corporate accounting issues and other matters, according to a report filed with the House clerk's office, AP said.
• If the charms of Facebook, Twitter and your Android phone lose their luster, check out what the marketing wizards at Foursquare have cooked up: It's a partnership with Starbucks that gives customers -- free coffee? free Wi-Fi? No! A barista badge, whatever that is. The New York Times blogged about the arrangement, which goes beyond letting the world know what you had for breakfast and how it's sitting. With Foursquare, you can broadcast where you are, and get a barista badge after "checking in" at five separate Starbucks shops. Frequent customers will get rewards, Starbucks' Chris Bruzzo told the Times, but it might be something "more meaningful" than free coffee -- like invitations to special events, photo sharing or online reputation scores.
• The New York Times also wrote a nice piece on efforts by Counter Culture and other roasters to bring better flavor to decaffeinated coffee.
• "The KICK of coffee without the cup!" is the promise from Le Whif, a new coffee from Paris that you inhale rather than drink, the Chicago Tribune reported. To be clear, you breathe Le Whif through your mouth, so it's not cheap cocaine. The brainchild of a Harvard professor, it debuted in New York and Cambridge, Mass., this week.

• The Tribune also reported that Costco is no longer roasting coffee at one of its Chicago locations. Who knew they roasted anywhere?
• Someone drove from London to Manchester -- almost 200 miles -- in a car powered by coffee beans.
• Because of the name, I feel like I should mention that it's Coffee Party weekend. On Saturday, thousands of people around the country will gather at coffeehouses and other locations to craft an alternative to the Tea Party movement -- or a lot of alternatives. At the Coffee Party web site, you can plug in your zip code and find a meeting nearby. Looks like events are planned at Cafe Allegro in the University District, near Urban Coffee Lounge in Kirkland and at Starbucks' Roy Street Coffee and Tea on Capitol Hill.
• Many thanks to Seattle Times content director Cory Haik for the photo capturing the feisty cup message from Short Stop Coffee in Ballard.

"What all the third wave coffee people have in common is a thinly veiled revulsion at Starbucks and its rivals, in particular the way they overroast their beans," Josh Ozersky writes in Time magazine.

His description of third wave coffee -- a term even die-hard third wavers can't agree about --sidesteps the sticky definition and gets right into personality: "Wait, you haven't heard of the third wave? Get with the program! In cities across America, a fervid generation of caffeine evangelists are changing the way we drink coffee. They tend to be male, heavily bearded, zealous and meticulous in what they do. And the coffee they produce is as much an improvement over Starbucks and its rivals as Starbucks was over Taster's Choice."

Besides quoting Stumptown founder Duane Sorenson, Ozersky lists Intelligentsia, Counter Culture and Dallis Coffee as third wavers, saying they "were seeking to import beans from single farms, roasting them less rather than more and generally doing the things that separate this movement from its Seattle-based progenitors in the '70s."

It's a quick and lively look at the third wave, with no mention of present-day Seattle, as if Starbucks is all we have to offer. Have we really fallen that far, or did Time just forget to mention Espresso Vivace and other great Seattle roasters?

Now that Portland-based Stumptown is roasting coffee in Red Hook and serving it in Manhattan, and Blue Bottle Coffee of San Francisco is getting ready to roast and brew in Williamsburg, doesn't it seem like time for Seattle to represent in the Big Apple?

The city is definitely open to West Coast coffee. New York magazine ran a profile of Stumptown founder Duane Sorenson last year with the headline "The Messiah Hails from Portland."

And today's New York Daily News says, "The anticipation for Blue Bottle was only matched in New York by the excitement surrounding the opening of Stumptown, which imported much of its tattooed staff from its other cafes -- not surprising, since each barista has to go through rigorous training."

Blue Bottle is known for the pour-over, which is essentially hot water hand poured over coffee grounds in a ceramic filter, but involves more technique than it might seem and can produce a great cup of coffee. People have used them on camping trips for ages, and they're a growing trend at upscale coffeehouses.

Thanks to coffee obsessive James Rodewald for the photo from the soon-to-open Blue Bottle in Williamsburg. It's a 1970s La San Marco Leva that will be used for single-origin espressos -- another trend that's developing as coffee drinkers get in closer touch with their beans and the people who grow them.

Any ideas about who from Seattle will be the first to roast in New York?

Does Portland brew -- and roast, and buy -- its coffee better than Seattle now? That's the theme of a KUOW report today by Chantal Anderson, who quotes Sprudge.com co-founder Jordan Michelman: "Seattle is very stuck in a mold of what coffee culture was like 20 years ago and third wave coffee is very, very different from that."

What's third wave? Michelman told KUOW: "It works on much more of a thinking about it almost from a gastronomy stand point of being really, really obsessed about seed to cup, where it comes from, who's roasting it, where it's roasted, the duration of time, having the choices, seasonality, all these kinds of things. There's nowhere that does that here."

Sprudge wrote on Twitter that "npr took us out of context." (Disclosure: Sprudge does not dig my coverage of Fair Trade, among other things.)

Either way, Michelman would not be the first to say Portland has passed us, with high-profile Stumptown Coffee leading the way (pictured: its flagship store in Portland). Sam Lewontin, who goes by coffeeandbikes on Twitter, wrote a thoughtful post about it on espresso machine maker Slayer's web site last month.

In the KUOW report, Lewontin mentions the shackles of street food regulations in Seattle, which the city and county are working to change. Their efforts are largely aimed at opening up carts for vending beyond coffee, popcorn, hot dogs and flowers. But one proposed change would get rid of city restrictions on cart size and defer to more liberal county guidelines, said Gary Johnson at the Seattle Department of Planning and Development. And, he said, he welcomes comments about cart rule changes.

So, what do you think? Has Portland eclipsed Seattle at coffee?

Taking the holiday to wrap up loose ends, like:

• The New York Times calls the Seattle-built Slayer espresso machine charismatic and beautiful.


• A reader wants to know where she can find a cup -- not a pound -- of Kona coffee around here. Anyone know?


• Mighty-O Donuts hosts free tours on Thursday and Friday (Feb. 18 and 19) at 10 a.m. Sign up at 2110 N. 55th Street (where the tours are), or 206-547-0335, or info@mightyo.com.


• Lincoln Graham represents Seattle with his photo of a Caffe Ladro barista reflected in an espresso machine at PictoryMag.com (scroll to No. 20).


• Sarah Gilbert at Daily Finance considers how blending coffee and turning up the roaster can save money and hurt flavor.


• Starbucks draws attention from the research firm Morningstar, which gave its debt an A-, and TheStreet.com, which says its stock is overpriced.


• A Starbucks customer with Tourette's syndrome sues for alleged discrimination after an outburst, The Palm Beach Post reports.


• And someone actually writes a blog about putting weird things in coffee -- eggs, curry, salmon cream cheese. There are photos.

In anticipation of Valentine's Day, I wrote about the increasing popularity of organic flowers.

Because all roads in Seattle lead to coffee, I ended up quoting Sam Stabler, assistant manager of Neptune Coffee in Greenwood, about how good pesticide-free flowers smell. He's the one on the right with Neptune's college intern, Yuki Mim, and a fake-flower bouquet from Terra Bella Flowers.

A lot of people who buy eco-friendly flowers don't even realize it, including Neptune owner Dan Baumfeld, who loves Terra Bella's designs and traded coffee for floral gift certificates to give his employees last Christmas. It's not that Baumfeld doesn't value organic. He just doesn't buy flowers very often.

Coffee, he buys, and Neptune's decaf blend is certified organic and Fair Trade. (He roasts with Victrola Coffee on Capitol Hill.) Its other eco-friendly creds include composting and recycling. "We have the expensive corn, compostable cups," he said.

How important is organic coffee to you?

Afternoon update: Check out this study abstract that says organic coffee farming isn't sustainable and doesn't serve producers and consumers as much as advocates say. (Thank you, as always, Jimmy.)

And if you hunger for more organic news, the USDA just put out its long-awaited, much-bickered-over pasture rules for dairy cows and other ruminants.

Here's Neptune's location, in the heart of Greenwood:

View Neptune Coffee in a larger map

Caffe Umbria is selling a limited-run Haiti Hope Coffee Blend online and at its cafes in Pioneer Square and in Portland's Pearl District. It's contributing $5 from the sale of each $10 bag to Mercy Corps, a leader in Haitian relief efforts. Jesse Sweeney at Umbria said its goal is to sell 1,000 12-ounce bags for a donation of $5,000 to the cause.

For something more nostalgic and less affordable, check out Vashon Island Coffee Roasterie's $375 Wet Whisker Finca El Gato. It's a limited-run coffee from the Costa Rican farm of Jim Stewart, co-founder of the Wet Whisker, later known as Stewart Brothers Coffee, later known as SBC and Seattle's Best Coffee.

$350 of each purchase is a tax-deductible donation to the Vashon Island Coffee Foundation, a non-profit Stewart founded that has provided support for the coffee growers in Guatemala and elsewhere.

"This coffee bears the name of my coffee farm and original company that I started way back when in 1969," Stewart writes on the site. "Old-time 'Seattelites' will remember the place down on the waterfront. I hope you have gathered that this is more than coffee, it is an experience from cherry to cup that you deserve to fully savor."

Wicked weather in the eastern U.S. makes me happy to be in mild Seattle.

My recent trip east was delayed by a storm, but eventually I made it to Columbus, Ohio, where Cup O Joe is still the most happening coffee shop in German Village. Its coffee is roasted locally by Stauf's Coffee Roasters in Grandview, which now owns Cup O Joe, according to my barista that night, Randy Niemi (top photo).

Other photos from the trip: I couldn't figure out what the coffee truck (below, somewhere in Kentucky) was carrying. Brewed coffee? How old? And, at the bottom, a Seattle's Best Coffee in Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport was selling ice cream sundaes with frozen yogurt from Freshens ($4.10 a sundae). Is that common at SBC? I'd never seen it before.

While I was gone, I missed Starbucks' announcement that it will sell ready-to-drink beverages in Europe. It didn't name which drinks, but its biggest RTD beverage is the Frappuccino. And CEO Howard Schultz told the Mirror that the U.K. economy is rebounding faster than the U.S. Starbucks will open 30 locally focused shops there this year, the paper reported.

Starbucks also asked mayors and other city leaders nationwide to improve commercial and residential recycling systems, which is interesting in light of the current recycling proposal before shareholders. The great variance in recycling programs across the country "presents a significant barrier for a business with more than 11,000 retail locations in the U.S. alone," Starbucks said in the release.

Jones Lang LaSalle wrote in a release that vacancy rates continue to go up in this area because of changes among big tenants. "In the fourth quarter of 2009, Whirlpool and Starbucks vacated over 1.1MM sf of warehouse distribution space negatively effecting vacancy rates for the Puget Sound area," it said.

A recent customer loyalty study by Brand Keys puts Starbucks behind Dunkin' Donuts, and while I was in the Midwest, photographer and traveling coffee blogger Rob Casey was checking out java in Hawaii. Nice!

Update 2/9/2010: Freshens' advertising director e-mailed to say that it co-brands locations with Seattle's Best Coffee at airports in Atlanta and Orlando.

What on earth are the people at Consumer Reports drinking (before they tell me which car to buy)? Big names, for the most part. The highest ranked caffeinated blends, receiving "good" ratings, were Starbucks House Blend and Green Mountain Signature Nantucket Blend Medium Roast.

"Both have an earthy, woody taste, but Starbucks was found to be a fairly bitter to very bitter darker roast, while the Green Mountain has green/sharp flavor," the magazine said in a press release.

The best decaf ratings went to Allegro Organic Decaf Blend Medium Dark, Peet's Decaf House Blend, Caribou Daybreak Coffee Morning Blend Decaf, and Bucks County Decaf Breakfast Blend.

"Some coffees from revered companies like Maxwell House and Folgers languish near the bottom of Consumer Reports Ratings," the magazine says. "In rating coffee, Consumer Reports experts look for smoothness and complexity, with no off-flavors. The beans should be neither under-roasted nor charred, and the brew should have at least moderate aroma and flavor, and subtle top notes. Some sourness and bitterness are desirable, too, to keep the coffee from tasting bland."

Being Consumer Reports, it also talks about pricing. Some coffee that costs more by the pound actually costs less in the cup, because of varying densities and the amount you need to get a good cup of coffee. For example, Green Mountain Signature Nantucket Blend Medium Roast costs $11.21 a pound but just 23 cents a cup, while Archer Farms Breakfast Blend Decaf is $9.05 a pound but 34 cents a cup, the magazine found.

"The average coffee drinker consumes 3.3 cups a day, or about 1,200 cups a year, so those pennies can add up," it said.

For coffee drinkers on a budget, it recommends Melitta Classic Blend Road (11 cents a cup) or Seattle's Best Breakfast Blend (15 cents a cup) for caffeinated coffee and Seattle's Best Blend Decaf Light Roast (15 cents a cup) or Sam's Choice Organic Blend Decaffeinated Medium Roast (18 cents a cup) for decaf.

Sam's Choice is from Wal-Mart-owned Sam's Club, just another indication that these experts need a trip to the Northwest, where we have Costco -- and excellent coffee.

The Guardian (of London) figured that out. In an article today about what's cool in Seattle, it named Caffe Vita and Stumptown as two of the best roasters in town.

A few dozen people crowded into a room this afternoon at the Northwest African American Museum in the Central District, taking part in a ritual from the birthplace of coffee: Ethiopia.

Five women -- Alem Abate (first photo), Zelalem Yilma (second photo, with the tray), Menkeli Kanaa, Yobi Guma and Yobi Mulugeta -- roasted, brewed and served coffee from Kanaa's brother's farm in Ethiopia, and shared their home country's rich tradition of coffee.

It was my second Ethiopian coffee ceremony, and it's still the best coffee I've ever had.

20/20 reported on Friday that an Orange County barista is suing Starbucks for allowing a 24-year-old manager to have sex with her while she was still in high school. Reporter Brian Ross says that Starbucks denies culpability and said the two hid their relationship.

The original report showed part of a deposition by Jana Rutt, a Starbucks human resources executive in southern California, whose comments riled readers of StarbucksGossip.com and other sites. That footage seems not to be online as of early Tuesday afternoon, but I found video comment by Starbucks HR chief Kalen Holmes, who says the company condemns the conduct of the barista's co-worker, who was not her supervisor.

A side note: That was the second report last week (here's the first) referring to Howard Schultz as Starbucks' founder. It's a title the board once bestowed on him and that for a while was on Starbucks' web site -- but no longer. Still, you have to wonder how those references in news reports make real founders Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl feel.

In the lineage of coffee masters, Steve Smith is two degrees away from Alfred Peet, and it shows.

Ask Smith whether he roasts light, medium or dark, and, like Peet, he is ready to teach. The master roaster for Fonte Coffee Roaster in Georgetown gets out a pen and paper and draws three lines showing how roasting develops a coffee's acidity, body and aroma, and describes how roasters use heat, time and their experience with the weather and various types of coffee beans to bring out the best qualities in any particular batch.

From light to dark, Smith gives the range of roast profiles -- cinnamon, institutional, American, city, full city and French (or other European country) -- and explains the nuances of those labels. In general, he said, Fonte has a full city roast, and by the time he gives me that answer I have a full context for understand it.

Much of what I learned while cupping coffee with Smith yesterday (top photo) will be lost by tomorrow, obliterated by new deadlines and too much caffeine. But I'm glad he -- and so many other Seattle coffee people -- have the interest and patience to share what they know with the rest of us.

Unlike many Seattle roasters, Fonte operated for years without a cafe in which to showcase its product. The company started as a small chain in 1991 that eventually had several cafes in Los Angeles, Chicago and Anchorage. Then owner Paul Odom (second photo, with a 240-pound Probat roaster) decided the roasting business would be simpler and more profitable.

He hired Smith, who had been Starbucks' head roaster and was trained by Jim Reynolds, who was trained by Alfred Peet. For the past decade, Fonte has been too busy filling orders for hotel and restaurant customers like the Four Seasons, Wynn Las Vegas and Houston's on Park Avenue South in Manhattan to make much of a splash in Seattle.

But earlier this year, Fonte opened an elegant cafe on First Avenue across from the Seattle Art Museum that is run by big names like former U.S. Barista Champion Bronwen Serna and former Herbfarm sommelier Tysan Dutta.

An article in this week's East Bay Express examines the essence of "third-wave coffee," a term coined around 2002 that aims to define an evolved coffee scene in which baristas, roasters and farmers know each other and are connoisseurs of a product to which they're all passionately connected.

"At a cafe purporting to be third wave, the barista can tell you not only what country a particular coffee is from, but in many cases even the specific farm or plot of land," writes Luke Tsai. The third waves also tends to prefer light or medium roasts, "as opposed to the darker roasting style popularized by Peet's and Starbucks."

Some people find third-wave coffee intimidating, and Tsai describes tussles with customers over iced coffee and confusion about what "macchiato" means now that Starbucks has tried to redefine it as a caramel latte.

Others find the third wave arrogant, including Greg Sherwin of CoffeeRatings.com, who recently promised to limit his third-wave mockery to one post a week.

"Step into a family-owned operation in Italy that has made pretty damn good espresso for the past half century -- noting their attention to detail and quality controls in their operations -- and the concept of this 'third-wave' business being new suddenly seems a bit absurd," Sherwin wrote to Tsai in a recent e-mail.

Even James Freeman, who started Blue Bottle Coffee in 2002 and is considered a leader of the movement in the Bay Area, told Tsai he doesn't like the third-wave label.

"For Freeman and, one suspects, for most folks who have dedicated their lives to making coffee in what they believe to be the right way, it still comes down to the simple pursuit, at the start each day, for that one delicious, perfectly satisfying cup -- a cup that, even for a skilled barista like Freeman, might take three or four tries to get exactly right," Tsai writes.

Most coffeehouses use one roaster for their beans. An exception used to be Seattle Coffee Works, but earlier this year last year it began roasting only its own coffee and stopped carrying the others.

Now Tougo Coffee -- at 1410 18th Avenue in the Central District and at 2113 Westlake Avenue -- is adding roaster -- and city -- variety, with coffee drinks and beans from Stumptown, Intelligentsia, Ritual Coffee and Ecco (owned by Intelligentsia). Tougo's former roaster, Caffe Vita, is not part of the new mix.

Stumptown is headquartered in Portland, but has a roastery in Seattle. The other coffees -- Intelligentsia, Ritual Coffee and Ecco -- come from three different parts of California.

Tougo owner Brian Wells (pictured) said he wants to "introduce coffees from different cultures and different cities to the Seattle palette. I want to give Seattle an opportunity to taste different roasters and have those roasters be able to tell their stories from different source trips (to coffee-growing regions)."

Customers will be able to choose from four espresso blends each day -- and on weekends, "single-origin" espressos that have the flavor of just one country. Wells also is adding brewing methods and is pictured here with (left to right) a Melitta drip brewer, a French press, a siphon or vacuum pot and a Chemex coffee maker.

A reader e-mailed to ask where she can find sample sizes of several Seattle coffees to take to her family in England for Christmas. She wants coffee from Caffe Vita, Espresso Vivace and probably Starbucks.

All I could think of were grocery stores and Seattle Coffee Works for the variety, but I just called to check, and even Seattle Coffee Works carries only its own beans these days.

Any ideas?

Jeff Babcock is coming off a big weekend. The owner of Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea is just back from Japan, where he licenses three stores called Zoka and one that has a different name.

Babcock also sold Zoka's Snoqualmie location to another resident of the ridge, Steve Pennington, who plans to turn it into Steve's Doughnuts in late January.

Pennington will keep all the baristas who want to stay and continue selling Zoka coffee in drinks and in whole-bean coffee bags.

"We need to focus on our great new location down in Kirkland, where things are really crankin'," said Babcock, who has had the Snoqualmie store for about two years. He opened the Kirkland shop this summer and still has stores in Tangletown and behind University Village.

Zoka coffee is roasted on West Nickerson Street in Ballard, where Babcock says he might someday open a drive-up shop.

Pennington, a former program manager for Microsoft, plans to make doughnuts at the Snoqualmie store using all natural ingredients (including palm oil) from as nearby as possible.

"We want the the cows and chickens to be local and the flour to be Washington flour," he said. "Within reason, we want to make sure we're supporting local agriculture."

Why doughnuts? "I love doughnuts," Pennington said. "Our motto is, 'Doughnuts make you happy.'"

David Schomer, one of Seattle's premier coffee experts, is the only person I know who taste tests his beans using an espresso machine.

Most people taste (or in coffee parlance, "cup") by pouring hot water over coffee grounds, removing the grounds or "crust" from the top and using a spoon to slurp from what's left. (If you've never seen it, this video might help.)

Schomer, who owns Espresso Vivace, prefers the precision of Synesso espresso machines. On Fridays, he and head roaster Dan Reid (pictured in reverse order) meet at Vivace in the Brix building on Capitol Hill to make sure their latest beans and roasts are up to snuff.

He also doesn't spit after tasting, like most coffee and wine connoisseurs. The result is more flavor and a fairly hopped-up day.

Here are the coffees that go into Vivace's blends ("Vita" for coffee drinks with milk and "Dolce" for those without milk including their small Americano drink called "Mitch"):

Brazil: A mix of citrus, pine, fresh alfalfa and salt. "I want to call it grassy, but if you've ever tried green grass, it's bitter and dank," Schomer said.

Sumatra: Typically "deep, dark, brooding," he said, it was sour this morning, possibly because of how cold the beans were before they were roasted this week.

Ethiopian Sidamo: Dark chocolate with a blueberry aftertaste. An enjoyable aftertaste is important for coffee because it lingers so long, Schomer said.

Indian Malabar: I've never tried or even heard of coffee from India, but there it was, sweet as Schomer promised. It also lacks complexity, he said, "like a Christmas tree with one-color lights."

It's important for northern Italian roasts -- which are lighter than Starbucks, Peet's and others -- not to have acidity, Schomer said. Acidity works with brewed coffee but not espresso, where it turns sour.

Side note: If you're in the market for an espresso machine, someone has been trying to sell a La Marzocco GS-1 that Schomer used to own. The post on Craigslist begins, "Come on, you geeks...where are you? This machine is gorgeous!"

You wouldn't know it from the web site, but Jerome Montalto of Zoka confirms that the company is taking 10 percent off online orders for gift baskets, including a single-origin basket, an organic basket and a Cup of Excellence basket.

There's also a coupon code -- SOCIAL25 -- that he said takes 25 percent off a bag of coffee beans until Jan. 1. If you prefer that someone else make your espresso drink -- including single-estate espressos on its new Slayer machine in Kirkland -- there's a buy one/get one printable coupon.

That goes for items bought at cafes and online, including a limited-time coffee from Panama that becomes available Friday at $20 a pound.

By my math, you'd get free shipping if you bought a pound of the Panama and two Theo chocolate bars, which Vita also sells.

The Panama coffee is so good that Vita doesn't have to publicize it much, but coffee buyer Mason Sager included some at a cupping last Friday (in photo, Sager is third from right).

It's a sweet coffee with a lighter body than the others on the table (which were from Ethiopia, Peru and Papua New Guinea).

Maybe he'll have some out again this morning. Vita offers free public tastings at 10 a.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays. They're in the cupping room, which is up stairs behind the roasters.

Theo Chocolate sometimes joins the tasting, and last week Nathan Royston of Theo shared chocolate knowledge and samples -- and said the company recently bought one of Scharffen Berger's chocolate holding tanks at auction. Sadly, the Scharffen Berger factory in West Berkeley was closed by Hershey, which also owns Dagoba.

After a weeks-long bidding war, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters won the bidding war for Diedrich Coffee. It will pay $290 million, which is $35 a share, up from Peet's Coffee's initial $26 deal in early November.

Green Mountain is the company that earlier this year paid $40.3 million for Tully's Coffee's wholesale business.

Fonte Coffee Roaster got hold of some of the world's best and rarest coffee and will donate all the proceeds from its sales to the Pike Place Market Foundation.

The Fonte crew -- including owner Paul Odom, former U.S. Barista Champion Bronwen Serna and master roaster Steve Smith -- celebrated La Esmeralda Geisha at Fonte's new cafe and wine bar on First Avenue on Thursday afternoon. It's being sold by the half pound alone ($49.95) or in a gift pack with a Fonte mug ($59.95). Limit is one half-pound per customer.

Fonte coffee has been roasted for more than 20 years in Georgetown, but just this summer opened its first Seattle coffee shop (and wine bar, with sommelier Tysan Dutta, but that's another story).

A portion of sales from other gift sets will also go to the foundation, including packs with El Socorro y Anexos from Guatemala, a coffee blend called Bin 16, and Fonte holiday blend.

View Fonte Coffee Roaster Cafe and Wine Bar in a larger map

The benefit for the Give Seattle music project is at 8 p.m. tonight (Thursday) at The Crocodile (also owned by Mike McConnell). Tickets are $15, with performances by Grand Archives, D. Black, Grant Olsen, Kinski, Gabriel Mintz, Fences, Tea Cozies and M.C. Tilson. Proceeds benefit Arts Corp, Ballard Food Bank, Rainier Valley Food Bank, University District Food Bank and West Seattle Food Bank.

Give Seattle, a compilation of downloadable songs, has sold more than 1,000 copies since its Nov. 17 release. The mayor's Office of Film and Music puts Give Seattle atop the list of local best-sellers for the week of Nov. 23 to 29, based on figures from Sonic Boom and Easy Street.

Friday morning, Vita hosts a joint tasting with Theo Chocolate in a free yet rich tasting event that's become a monthly tradition at Vita's 1005 East Pike Street location. It's in the cupping room, upstairs and behind the roasting machines.

Vita coffee buyer Mason Sager says he's planning to cup coffees from Africa, Indonesia, Central and South America alongside organic and Fair Trade chocolates from Seattle-based Theo.

I've been meaning to do a round-up of free weekly coffee cuppings and need your help. Off the top of my head:

10 a.m. Wednesdays and Fridays at Caffe Vita, 1005 E. Pike St. (upstairs behind the roasters)

3 p.m. daily at Stumptown Coffee, 1115 12th Ave. (downstairs)

10 a.m. daily at Starbucks' Roy Street Coffee & Tea, 700 Broadway E.

11 a.m. daily at Starbucks' 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea, 328 15th Ave. E.

Smith Brothers Farms, the Kent-based dairy and home-delivery service, will replace Tully's Coffee with beans from The Vashon Island Coffee Roasterie next month, the roastery said in a press release today.

It's owned by Eva DeLoach, who also owns the organic health food store next door and bought the roastery from Jim Stewart (also the founder of The Wet Whisker originally of Whidbey Island, Stewart Brothers Coffee and Seattle's Best Coffee). She roasts with the help of Peter Larsen, who was Stewart's roast master.

The news comes just as The Vashon Island Coffee Roasterie prepares for the premier of the next Twilight movie, New Moon, on Nov. 20. This summer, the roastery launched its Twlight Series coffee blends, including Bella's Blend (medium light), La Tua Cantante (classic Italian), Volutri Italian (medium dark) and New Moon Rising (medium dark).

They're sold online for $10.95 for 12 ounces and at area grocery stores. Whole Foods Bellevue just wrapped up a promotion of the Twilight Series coffees (which seems like strange timing), and it's at Magnolia Thriftway, West Seattle Thriftway, Hill Top Red Apple, Bridle Trails Red Apple, Village Market Thriftway (Shoreline), and Mathew's Thriftway (Issaquah).

If tea is more your thing, the roastery points out that their friends at Luxe Tea in Bellevue have created Twilight tea blends: Bite Me Strawberry Seduction, Cullen's English Breakfast and New Moon Red.

Many Seattle coffee drinkers know the name Keurig because of Tully's Coffee. Tully's is one of the brands that makes K-cups for Keurig's single-cup coffee brewing machines, and earlier this year Tully's sold its wholesale operation to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters of Vermont, which also owns Keurig.

Now Keurig is making a bigger push for awareness in Seattle. It's giving away Tully's coffee during the commuter rush at the Bremerton ferry terminal today and tomorrow, and at the Bainbridge Island ferry terminal next Wednesday through Friday.

"Keurig is looking to become more involved in the Seattle community and is donating $10,000 to the Food Lifeline," said its Boston publicist, Julie Halzel Passo.

Here are the times for free coffee:

In Bremerton -- Oct. 22 and 23, 6 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. and 2:45 p.m. to 7 p.m.
On Bainbridge Island -- Oct. 28 through 30, 6 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.

That's Sadie LeDonna in the top hat, pouring hot water over Sumatran coffee that was roasted dark by her father, Michael, who owns Port Townsend Coffee Roasting Co.

He and a business partner opened Better Living Through Coffee -- where Sadie is a barista -- last spring. It's well-located, on the water in downtown Port Townsend, and its brewed coffee -- $2 for 8 ounces, $3.25 for 16 ounces -- is poured slowly over paper filters held in place by plastic cylinders (second photo).

Pour-overs are all the rage lately -- part of the slow coffee (nee slow food) movement -- appearing recently at Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea, Starbucks' 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea and in the past couple weeks at Tougo Coffee (which also started using a Chemex brewing method that I hope to see soon).

I'm sure some shops have done pour-overs forever, but the first time I saw them was earlier this year at Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco, and now they're everywhere!

Is the taste really that much better? And how many people brew this way at home?

Updated 2:35 p.m.: David Kastle of Zephyr Green Coffee in Seattle (and New Orleans) e-mailed this great perspective:

- David

That would be news to the people who love northern Italian espresso, including Espresso Vivace's David Schomer, along with the hordes of East Coast coffee drinkers who prefer Dunkin' Donuts' light brew.

But that's the claim by Starbucks, which says on its web site that, "You see, most coffee is lightly roasted as a way to cut costs."

Starbucks roasts darker to add flavor, it says. Fair enough. But does that mean companies that roast lighter are skimping? Is that true of Starbucks' lighter-roasted Pike Place Roast?

(Thanks to Ryan Smith's tweet on Starbucks' claim.)

Update: A closer reader than me pointed out that Starbucks might be talking about big(ger) commercial roasters who roast very light (before the second pop of the beans?).

People who taste coffee all the time learn to appreciate characteristics from various countries and use them to spice up, sweeten or tone down their blends.

We asked six experts to describe some of their favorite coffees from around the world. They met recently at Atlas Coffee Importers in Seattle to taste the coffees they'd described.

Here's the video by Yvonne Leow:

Check out our interactive map and take the poll about coffee from different countries, including individual videos of the people we brought together for the cupping.

And here's my story about Coffee Fest yesterday.

Chris Webb at Fremont Coffee has stopped buying beans from Lighthouse and is roasting his own.

The flavor wizard (pictured in his lab below the coffee shop) has sold Chinese herbal medicines for years, and more recently concocted root beer, ginger brew and hibiscus ginger soda that flies out of his coffee shop's refrigerator case.

Now, with the help of a roaster from the East Coast named Aric Annear, Fremont Coffee is selling a single-origin Tanzanian peaberry that Webb calls "killer" even though it was overroasted by about eight seconds.

He's a month or so away from perfecting the espresso blend, Webb said, sounding Schomer-esque about flavor precision. Michael Allen Smith, organizer for the Coffee Club of Seattle, had "great espresso" there this week. "It was much better than anything I've had there before."

Although roasting your own coffee saves money -- green coffee begins at $2 a pound, compared to $7.50 for wholesale roasted coffee, Webb said -- he started roasting to gain more respectability with coffeehouse customers and to work with the flavors.

He and Aric are roasting with a 25-pound San Franciscan roaster he bought more than a year ago from Pioneer Coffee Roasting in Cle Elum. Rumor is it's Caffe Vita's first roaster, Webb said.

Coming soon: Fremont Coffee cuppings.

View Fremont Coffee in a larger map

Trophy Cupcakes will open its third shop this fall, across from Neiman Marcus' cafe at The Bravern in Bellevue.

Seattle Times reporter Nicole Tsong has the details, and said Trophy's coffee will come from Lighthouse Roasters in Fremont (photo).

Plenty of roasters have cafes to showcase their beans, and plenty of cafes start roasting for various reasons.

Some pros and cons:

Dan Baumfeld, owner of Neptune Coffee, who started roasting coffee for his Greenwood cafe this week: "I feel a little fake when I have this great coffee shop but we use someone else's coffee.... Free time is the one resource I have, not ton of money to do things with."

Tatiana Becker, co-owner of Trabant Coffee in Pioneer Square and the University District (pictured above), bought and sold a roaster a couple years ago: "We played around with it for about three months and found out just how involved roasting was and decided that was going to divide our attention too much from having very well trained baristas and executing well at retail.... If you just have one or two shops, you're buying a pretty low volume of green coffee, so you can't buy a container of coffee at origin.... It's a romantic idea to have a roaster in the cafe, but it can make a cafe really smokey and you can have too many distractions."

Sebastian Simsch (pictured at right), co-owner of Seattle Coffee Works near Pike Place Market, hopes to soon be using his new Diedrich machine to roast all the coffee he brews and sells: "We can make a name for ourselves by making better coffee, improving freshness, saving money on roasting and knowing better where our coffee comes from.... [Asked if roasting dilutes the cafe business:] I think it makes it better. Otherwise, we're just middle people, and there are already enough middle people in the coffee business. I'm less confident that I can serve really good coffee if I don't roast it myself."

Rob Wilson, co-owner of Stella Caffe Coffees, who once said he didn't plan to open a coffeehouse because it would compete with his wholesale customers. He opened Stella Caffe (pictured below) across University Street from the Seattle Art Museum seven months ago: "We have clients within blocks of us who say it's augmented their sales.... I'm very stretched right now, because I didn't count on both [the roasting and the cafe] going so well."

What do you think?

Seattle Coffee Works took delivery today of its new carrot-colored Diedrich roaster, which will be a highlight of its new location, set to open Monday in the old Johnny Rockets at 107 Pike Street. "Buy local," said co-owner Pipo Bui, posing below with the roaster from Sandpoint, Idaho.

Below is a picture of the space this afternoon, which is going to keep Bui, her husband Sebastian Simsch and other co-owner Katie Shaw busy this weekend. The Johnny Rockets sign is still above the store, but will be replaced in a couple weeks by a 16-foot espresso-drinking man. The owners decided to light just the coffee cup from which he continually sips. Lighting the whole display day and night would have kept awake the folks next door, at the Green Tortoise Hostel.

More information here about Simsch's vision of Seattle Coffee Works as a coffee experience center.

COURTESY OF MICHAEL ALLEN SMITH

Coffee Club of Seattle's new chief organizer.

The guy sending the e-mails is self-employed computer programmer Michael Allen Smith, and he tries to keep the groups between 15 and 25 people to encourage conversation and not overwhelm any coffee shops.

Smith moved to Seattle from San Diego a couple years ago and took over the coffee club meet-up in January. He tries to schedule four or five events a month, about half of them casual get-togethers at local coffeehouses and the rest educational fare like brewing demonstrations, coffee cuppings and roasting tours. Recent meet-ups have been at Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Makeda Coffee and Trabant Coffee & Chai.

Smith drinks four to five double espressos a day, plus tea. He also likes a good French press and rarely orders a drink with milk, although he made an exception on a trip to New Zealand, where the milk comes from grass-fed cows.

He got into coffee during college (Ohio State) and began home roasting in 1998. He knocked that off after moving to Seattle, where "they can do it much better than me."

Besides scheduling meetups, Smith also has a couple blogs devoted to coffee -- CoffeeHero.com and INeedCoffee.com -- and a few that are not, including CriticalMAS.com (they're his initials, and it has nothing to do with bicycles), DeepFitness.com and DigitalColony.com.

You can sign up for Coffee Club e-mails here. The group usually meets on Sundays at 2 p.m. and occasionally during weekdays. So far, most of the meet-ups are free.

Several of the Northwest's best-known coffee importers and roasters will share thoughts tonight on consumer education, social and environmental responsibility and their obsession with the perfect cup of coffee.

Their discussion happens at 7 p.m. in 120 Kane Hall on the University of Washington's campus, and it's free and open to the public. You can pre-register at uwalum.com or 206-543-0540.

Here's the lineup:

• Kelsey Marshall, founder of Grounds for Change, a Poulsbo-based roaster of Fair Trade, organic coffee


• Matt Lounsbury, director of operations at Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which is based in Portland and has two Seattle shops


• Mason Sager, green coffee buyer and lead roaster at Seattle's Caffe Vita


• Fernando Seminario, director of importing at the Portland-based importer Sustainable Harvest International

THOMAS JAMES HURST/THE SEATTLE TIMES

Velton Ross worked for Bauhaus and Top Pot for years before breaking out on his own. He roasts in the basement of Lowell Art Works in Everett and hopes to someday open a coffee shop to showcase his beans.

In any case, it's an honor and often a sales boon to receive high marks, and Everett roaster Velton Ross has achieved both. His Bonsai Blend Espresso is the top-rated coffee (94) at CoffeeReview.com this month.

Bigger sales are already rolling in for Velton's Coffee Roasting, with GreatCoffee.com choosing Bonsai as May's coffee-of-the-month for its coffee club members.

A few notes from the blind judging at CoffeeReview.com: "On the nose, I got inviting, complex floral and strawberry notes. The body was vivacious - I could have said round, sweet, with a little savory edge, comforting, but vivacious will do."

Others found chocolate and malt, as well as cedar, butter, lemon bar and spice. They noticed "the big, sweet, chocolaty bloom in milk," which one taster "found was complicated by a continued, brightening hint of lemon zest."

How do you feel about such high-falutin' language for coffee?

MIKE SIEGEL/THE SEATTLE TIMES

Issaquah students look at a map of Africa to locate areas where money they raised was used to free enslaved people.

It's working through International Justice Mission, the Washington, D.C., charity that used $50,000 raised by three Issaquah schools last year to free 120 enslaved people, as described in this story by Seattle Times reporter Katherine Long.

Storyville's video, called "The Truth," is a few years old but still gets attention for lines like this delivered by a woman melodramatically distraught about overroasted coffee: "They got blistery, like if you were in the sun too long, like a bad sunburn, like you would have to put aloe vera on the bean, but of course you can't!"

MELISSA ALLISON/THE SEATTLE TIMES

Craig Holt "breaks the crust" on a cup of Colombian coffee.

To Oliver Stormshak of Olympia Coffee Roasting, the beans from a farm called La Esmeralda in Huila state were "all marshmallow." And that's a good thing.

The language of coffee is colorful, but it can be meaningless unless you've tried -- and tried to describe -- lots of coffees.

Enter Craig Holt, owner of Atlas Coffee Importers in Seattle. He asked the coffee buyers and roasters who attended a cupping this afternoon of 27 Colombian coffees that will be auctioned Thursday through the Cup of Excellence to fill out a form rating each coffee on a 100-point scale.

Holt travels all over the world for the Coffee Quality Institute, training coffee professionals to use a rating system from the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

"We're trying to create an objective language for describing coffee quality," he said. Hear, hear. Flawed as it is, the wine industry's rating system at least puts you in the ballpark.

MELISSA ALLISON/THE SEATTLE TIMES

Atlas Coffee Importers on NW 85th Street in Seattle.

"My mother used to smack me for doing that," Montgomery recalled. He started roasting coffee in a popcorn popper years ago, when his nephew who is also a pilot for United Airlines brought back green coffee from Nicaragua, Colombia and Brazil.

COURTESY OF HAGGEN

Self-service kiosks are being tested in Redmond, Federal Way and Kent.

Because of strong customer demand, Haggen will keep selling TerraVida coffee through its grocery stores and is testing self-service kiosks at Top Food & Drug stores in Redmond, Federal Way and Kent, spokeswoman Becky Skaggs. Concordia Coffee made the kiosks, which were installed last fall.

TerraVida coffee is roasted to Haggen's specifications by Tony's Coffees & Teas, a Bellingham roaster that started in 1971 and is the old-timer in Whatcom County's burgeoning coffee scene.

Other Bellingham coffee names include Hammerhead Coffee Roasters, a chain of 24-hour drive-through shops called Cruisin Coffee, Woods Coffee in Bellingham's popular Boulevard Park on the waterfront and Moka Joe Coffee, which roasts only beans that meet an ethical coffee triumvirate: organic, Fair Trade and sustainably grown.

ERIKA SCHULTZ/THE SEATTLE TIMES

Zelalem Yilma, right, pours coffee at Sunday's Ethiopian coffee ceremony at the Burke Museum.

Three native Ethiopians -- Zelalem Yilma, Yobi Guma and Menkeli Kanaa -- created a warm, invitating atmosphere for conversation and roasting, brewing and drinking some of the best coffee I've ever tasted.

"Once you get in the spirit of it, you don't want to leave," Kanaa said.

Here's the full story.

The women also talked about the difficulty that the farmer who grew the coffee we drank is having getting coffee out of Ethiopia right now. More on that subject here.

Don't forget tomorrow's 7 p.m. lecture by "Uncommon Grounds" author Mark Pendergrast at 210 Kane Hall, University of Washington campus. More information here.

The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture will host another Ethiopian coffee ceremony Sunday, June 7, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

U.S. coffee importers and roasters are worried that a new auction system in Ethiopia makes it almost impossible for them to buy coffee from the particular farmers whose beans they want.

The system, overseen by the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, mixes coffee beans from different growers before selling them for export.

That's a big deal to specialty roasters who prefer beans from certain growers and processors, and sometimes have worked with them to improve quality.

During a visit to the Ethiopian exchange in February, one Seattle coffee importer became concerned about how the new system would work.

"We spent a whole day going through the phases of grief -- anger, denial and acceptance -- just trying to get our arms around what's going on," said Craig Holt, owner of Atlas Coffee Importers.

Read the rest of the article here.

MELISSA ALLISON/THE SEATTLE TIMES

Joe Kittay, The Good Coffee Company

Just a few blocks south, you'll find one of Seattle's genuine old-time coffee roasters. Joe Kittay started The Good Coffee Company in 1971, the same year Starbucks opened its first store.

Unlike Starbucks, Kittay stayed small and kept scooping his coffee into brown paper bags.

I stopped by this morning for a pound of Ethiopian ($8.45) and told him I'd heard he roasts light to medium, which is becoming all the rage.

"There's too much information, and most of it is all wrong," he answered.

Kittay roasts for flavor, he explained, "according to the country and the bean, and some roasts are darker than others."

He pointed to a display case of roasted beans in the middle of his wonderfully fragrant warehouse of a shop, which has a roaster with bags of coffee beans by the front door. And he was right, they come in many shades of brown -- dark, light, medium.

In naming Kittay "best longtime underground coffee roaster" last year, Seattle Weekly called his espresso shots "impossibly smooth."

They're also hard to come by. Unlike Starbucks, The Good Coffee Company never started selling coffee by the cup. And the beans still come in a brown paper bag.

Here's where you'll find Kittay, at 818 Post Ave.:

MELISSA ALLISON/THE SEATTLE TIMES

Catching up on Coffee Talk's Daily Dose, I see that Seattle is the only U.S. city that rates on a new list of best cities for drinking coffee compiled by the travel site World Hum.

We're in good company, with Vienna, Amsterdam, Rome, Melbourne (Australia), Wellington (New Zealand) and Buenos Aires.

Contributing editor Terry Ward gives shout-outs to local roasters Espresso Vivace, Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea Co. and Lighthouse Roasters.

Lighthouse makes a latte, she says, that is "the closest thing this coffee-addicted writer has seen to a flat white this side of the Pacific." A flat white is a New Zealand drink that's one part espresso and two parts creamy, steamed milk.

Under "Rome," Ward says that Italians consider cappuccino a breakfast beverage not to be ordered after 10 a.m. What must they think of lattes?

This must be the one of the best kept coffee secrets in Seattle.

Every Monday at 3 p.m., Stumptown Coffee Roasters near Seattle University cups its most treasured beans for free.

The lineup rotates, and Stumptown cups coffee for the public every day at 3 p.m., but Mondays always include the best (what they call Grand Cru) beans. It's amazing that there aren't lines out the door.

Today, the star was a fruity, full-bodied, mouth-watering coffee from Panama that retails for $95 a half-pound. No kidding. It's too rich for my wallet, but the flavor was grand.

I thought another coffee from the same farm, Hacienda La Esmeralda, was close enough at $45 a half-pound. If you go, that's Esmeralda Especial Batch #3 with peaberries, which are coffee beans with a single seed, so they're round or pea-shaped instead of flat.

Another interesting comparison came from a farm in Guatemala, Finca El Injerto, that regularly wins the vaunted Cup of Excellence award, which brings prestige and high prices at auction.

Here's a case where I would not substitute -- but others might. I thought the 2008 Cup of Excellence winner -- at $65 a half-pound -- was much more vibrant than the same coffee picked at a different time, which Stumptown sells for $12 for 12 ounces.

Palates vary, and fellow cupper Xela Del-Campo (sniffing coffee in red, above) loved the $12 version.

It was her first cupping, which is coffee-talk for tasting. When she dropped by Stumptown for a latte, the super-friendly baristas told her it was about to begin downstairs.

Thinking they meant the Chinese medicine form of cupping, she thought, "that's kind of bizarre to have cupping down here."

But she meandered underground where roaster Wolfgang Klinker and apprentice roaster Adam Koehler do their magic, met them and Stumptown barista Zachary Carlsen, and discovered another form of cupping. "This is my first time, and I think it's pretty fantastic."

Who wouldn't? Even a couple of Starbucks baristas took part.

But a more pressing question is, on what occasion do you pay $95 for a half pound of coffee?

MELISSA ALLISON/THE SEATTLE TIMES

Delicious and pricey.

Fonte Coffee Roaster in Georgetown is shopping for a retail space in Seattle to showcase its beans. Shouldn't be too hard in this real estate market.

If you've never heard of Fonte, it's probably because owner Paul Odom has focused for 17 years on wholesale clients like Uptown Espresso, Four Seasons and W Hotels.

Odom recently doubled the size of Fonte's Georgetown roasting plant and opened a tasting room in New York City. He learned the beverage industry from his father Milt, whose Odom Corp. was known as the first bottling company to put Coca-Cola in a can.

View Larger Map