Zero Prophet Coffee

the ideal

nb — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:58:12 +0000

Laziza Sweets, 25-78 Steinway Street, Astoria Queens

la taza de oro

nb — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 22:14:52 +0000

moto•head / la colombe

nb — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:29:14 +0000

It often seems that few places retain their sense of what made them cool & quality at the outset, when they hit the big time and start opening branches in Kharkov and Chelyabinsk. La Colombe in Philadelphia is one of the few. Their cappuccino is world-class. Here’s Gianni (moto•head), in the original cafe just off Rittenhouse Square just the other day — which is fitting, because he’s another who’s kept his original sense of cool, from Castrovillari through many changes. We owe him huge thanks for showing us the coffee back in the day & now again. Alla salute!

A clear path to the bar!

pack carefully

nb — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:08:01 +0000

When you hit the road for a week, how much of your coffee apparatus do you bring with you? What was once a quandary or vexation is actually a simply solved practical matter, with every room/house coming with its own Proctor-Silex basket-filter item (always looks like 1983), which couldn’t work, except it does (just don’t try to mess with it till it’s finished with its business). At least, P-S is the company that seized Dukes County. When the ground beans brought from home run out, consider getting some beans roasted by Chilmark Coffee Company (you can find them at the Beetlebung farm stand a mile out of Chilmark on Middle Road, which is a great place to visit anyway). The labels will make you smile and coffee will go great with your calamari.

Hm, come to think of it, you might want to bring one of those miniature silo grinders on your trip. Also, you probably know this already, but if you need a cappuccino in Vineyard Haven, you’ll be mad stoked to discover Beetlebung.

mixology

nb — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 01:06:27 +0000

For some time now these have been the blends on offer at Zero Prophet:

sure bett robust yet smooth (e)

nerveanna built for filter. wired and complex with smooth result

r o m f o r d built for the moka pot. smooth lift-off (e)

mocha java earthy and rich. ideal for turkish coffee

bat guano intense. deep. more intense (e)

andrezzi multi-toned, motor-humming (e)

These remain available most of the time, but keep in mind that coffee changes to some extent with every new lot. For now this post will be linked to on the List while we tinker in the lab…

on this day five hundred years ago in Mecca

nb — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:39:14 +0000

’…there was a woman in the town who had been going around unveiled…’ read more in Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses. The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: Univ. of Washington P., 1985.

farm gate

nb — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 12:55:16 +0000

Farm Gate Coffee is the ‘direct trade coffee buying program’ of Sweet Maria’s, the source of over half the beans at Zero Prophet. Many of our beans come by this direct trade route (right now, the Papua New Guinea, Colombia, and Guatemala decaf coffees). I just started indicating this on the List. Below, a quotation from Sweet Maria’s.

Farm Gate Coffee™

Farm Gate Coffee is the name we give to our direct trade coffee buying program. Farm Gate pricing means that we have negotiated a price directly with the farmer “at the farm gate,” that is, without any of the confusing export and import fees. The prices we pay for our coffees are above Fair Trade minimums, and with our Farm Gate coffees we can easily verify that the good price we pay makes it to the people who do the work, and are responsible for the great cup quality of our coffee. Farm Gate is a simple principle that allows coffee producers to make premium prices in reward for coffee quality, and to reinvest to improve quality even more in the future.

We guarantee that Farm Gate prices are 50% over Fair Trade (FT) pricing, but often they are 100%+ more that FT minimums. We support FT, and continue to offer FT lots. Fair Trade is a co-op certification – that is, it does not allow certification for small independent farms – it is for co-ops only. We do support coffee co-ops, but they are often not what consumers might think. There are many excellent co-ops, and many that are large, powerful, corrupt, and mired in bureaucracy. We avoid the bureaucracy of coops that sometimes do not share premium prices with their farmer members. Fair Trade certifies that the co-operative received the FT price, but it does not guarantee that the men and women who produce your coffee were paid the FT price. Fair Trade is also not based on the quality of the product, so in many ways it has a commodity mindset at its core, that coffee is coffee, just like corn is corn.

On the flip side, bear in mind that FT is a global standard, is verified by certifiers that make regular (if infrequent) visits to the coops. We don’t have a third-party certifier. Instead we substitute our direct involvement at ground level in the buying process with farms, and we know what they received if we are paying them through a middle-person. In this scheme, exporters and importers have a changing role, offering a service as logistics coordinators (and an important one at that) rather than coffee resellers. Any coffee bought off an importer/broker list does not qualify for Farm Gate, and we do still buy some coffees that way because they are good quality. Further, lots from origins where hundreds of tiny farms contribute to even the smallest importable lots, such as Sumatra, or Yemen, can’t qualify for Farm Gate in many cases nor can Auction Lot Kenyas, even though we pay extremely high prices for all these coffees, and know from direct observation that a premium reaches the farmer.

Please enjoy our crude Farm Gate Logo with the knowledge that it doesn’t cost 10¢ to put it on a coffee bag, the FT advertising fee on top of all other fees, that goes to Transfair USA.

following previous post…

nb — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 01:15:42 +0000

click here for the 3/10 NYT article on climate change and problems with coffee in Colombia.

through the roof

nb — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:40:32 +0000

“Coffee is about to get ridiculously expensive.” This is the opening line of Sweet Maria’s 2/11 newsletter. The owner goes on to explain what’s happening where he’s writing from, which is Kenya. Prices have doubled, and more.

Obviously the price of coffee worth drinking will soon go up again. Prices already seem ridiculously high, when I look at some of the 12-oz bags from specialty roasters – and often the bags themselves don’t look cheap, either, by the way.

It’s like a bubble in the real-estate market. Will there be a crash in the specialty coffee biz soon? Will people go back to their paper Greek diner cups and the sizzling, scalding sensation that accompanies (or used to accompany) the pow! of bacon eggs and toast?

What’s that you say?! No. I guess not.

Instead, it could be a terranova di caffè that takes over (yeah, I wrote terranova). And that would be Yunnan. Tom at Sweet Maria’s writes “Rumor has it that Starbucks is actually buying coffee farms in Yunnan, China, which promises a huge increase in lower quality ‘specialty’ coffee, just as the shift to robusta did some years ago.” I’ve noticed coffee from China before on the list of a purveyor of green beans to home roasters, but it’s not there right now. It will be mildly horrifying to see how the mass roasters of specialty coffee handle this. No one questions the quality of tea from Yunnan. But the sudden appearance of coffee from China is hardly likely to enthuse consumers. No one is marketing coffee from Vietnam, but it’s supposedly dominant in the corporate blends that load bulk coffee makers.

Ok, so what’s the point. I already jacked up the price from $11 to $13 for most coffees since 2007 in reaction to rising costs in general, and now it looks like it might get worse for the innocent, coffee-gulping bystander. I’ll keep the faithful updated on how it goes, and I won’t be snagging any low-cost beans unless I hear good things about the product from a reputable source. The story of each coffee is complicated. Here we go again…

nb — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 22:23:27 +0000

That photo’s from Guatemala, Acatenango, Finca La Soledad, from which I have gotten beans through Sweet Maria’s, although I don’t have any right now. I just got some beans from another Finca in Acatenango, which you can find on the List.

In February I like to add a note to this blog about a bean or two that has wowed me lately. Rather than do that this time, I’ll just register my happy surprise at the consistently excellent quality of the beans on the List lately. It’s been quite a while since I’ve gotten something weird from my very dependable purveyors of green beans! Thanks to all of them!

To all you espresso drinkers out there, you are especially in luck — notice the great number of beans marked (e) on the List because they’re rockin for espresso, and that’s without assigning the letter to the beans listed that come from Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Java, all of which make tremendous espresso but might be best used in a blend, unless you like to experiment with extremes, in a cup.