STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

GEOG 298-001: Secret Life of Coffee
(keep scrolling for GEOG 298-H01 and GEOG 287 projects)

Students in GEOG 298-001 were required (among other things!) to prepare slides that tell some part of the coffee story in a given country. Ordinarily each group of 2-3 students would work together on a poster. The Spring 2020 is a set of slides for each such group.

Three cups offered by the farmer at El Toledo Coffee Plantation
during the BSU Costa Rica travel course in January 2020

Please visit each slide set in turn (you can press <SHIFT> when clicking to open each set in a new window.

When you open SLIDES,
Click <Present> for
the best viewing.

BRAZIL -  Jake Anderson, Brooke Gonsalves
COLOMBIA - Brian Damon, Erin Hallam
GUATEMALA - Bruno Tamurrini, Nate Irwin
MEXICO - Mackayla Gouvia
NICARAGUA - Pedro Reis
PERU - Shaniely Fernandez-Chico, Zak Labonte
VIETNAM - Alexa Shearns, Katie Yanchuck, Tayla Sypek

We have recommended a particular coffee for each country; students had the option of referencing the specific coffees in their presentations. These are the coffees each group would be serving in tiny cups at an in-person tasting. Please visit the BYOB page if you would like to order these single-origin coffees for your home -- with the exception of the Vietnam coffee, these all come from Massachusetts roasters.

The Secret Life of Coffee explores geography both globally and locally. In addition to the tasting event, students are required to visit and study local coffee shops. Because social distancing began just as students were beginning to make those visits, the assignment became one of studying cafes that were local ... but at a distance. Each student identified a café in an assigned state outside of New England and prepared a digital presentation. In addition, each student prepared an entry for the course blog that has featured student (and professor) reports on approximately 200 independent cafés since 2011.

After the tasting, you can listen to
 Coffee Talks by the professor and by

alumni who started their
 coffee professions in this class!

GEOG 298-H01: Secret Life of Coffee, Honors

The Commonwealth Honors section of Secret Life of Coffee connected the local and global themes of the course by drawing on two ongoing endeavors at BSU. The earlier of these is the proposal for a Ben Linder Café at Bridgewater State. The proposal was initiated in 2010 by students in our coffee courses, some of whom were able to visit a café of the same name that was built in Nicaragua with the support of a social entrepreneur with a graduate certificate from Bridgewater State.

Students in the 2012 Geography of Coffee travel course (several of whom also took this Secret Life of Coffee
seminar) visit the hydroelectric plant in Bocay, Nicaragua. Ben Linder was doing survey work
 for this project when he was assassinated. More than 100 BSU students have visited his grave in Matagalpa,
where he remains an icon of sustainable development and social justice,
two institutional values of Bridgewater State University.

The other major initiative is the United Nations Global Goals for Sustainable Development, which have been the subject of much interdisciplinary curriculum development in recent years. The Global Goals, as they are more commonly known, are also increasingly important in K-12 curricula in our region.

Students in this small Honors class chose some of the goals, researched examples of those goals in action, and discussed how a campus café could operate in ways to advance these goals. Their progress suggests that most or ALL of the Global Goals could be incorporated into a visionary café that would allow BSU not only to teach about social and environmental sustainability, but to exemplify it.

Global Goal 4: Quality Education 
The Ben Linder Cafe & Education - Marissa Bradstreet
How the Ben Linder Cafe at BSU Would Impact Students’ Education - Jade Monte

Global Goal 8: Decent Work & Economic Growth
How the Ben Linder Café in BSU Supports Global Goal 8 -- Kaue Gabriel-Dasilva

Global Goal 12: Responsible Consumption

A Cup to Satisfy Everyone -- Matthew Cady

Global Goal 13: Climate Action
The Ben Linder Café and Climate Change - Nicholas Herd

Global Goal 17: Partnerships
Creating Cultivation and Collaboration with COFFEE - Lorrhan Ferreira

GEOG 285: New Orleans, Global City

This is not a class about coffee, but it is a one-credit symposium for Commonwealth Honors students, in which coffee was sometimes discussed and always served! I will be leading a similar course in the fall: Detroit, Arts City.

City of Music - Paul Goldring

Hurricane Katrina - Yalinet Mantilla

Crime Rates - Lia Cocomazzi 

Indigenous Tribes - Jalila Waller

Latin American City - Paul Landry

Race and Ethnicity - Marc Bercy

Population Fluctuations - Ashley Carpenter

Shrinking Land - Kaue Gabriel-Dasilva

We sincerely hope you have enjoyed this virtual tasting event. As soon as conditions allow, we will organize an on-campus reception to share coffee in real life and to celebrate the contributions of the students in these three classes.

Coffee Talks

Giant coffee cup/planter at Casa Hayes-Boh
#thankthefarmers and #thanktheartists
Custom pottery by Just Claying Around

This online tasting event features the work of undergraduate students, most of whom are very new to the study of coffee. And as always, they have a remarkable amount of knowledge to share, especially considering the short tenure of their coffee studies so far and the fact that most of them are not majoring in geography, though some may switch!

Please have a look at the student presentations if you have not already. After that, please return to this page for some words of my own, and before that for some from previous students in the class.

Of course, students who have studied The Secret Life of Coffee this semester will never look at coffee in the same way again. One of the most extraordinary examples of what can happen once coffee is the focus of sustained attention is Danielle Robidoux, who first enrolled in The Secret Life of Coffee in 2009. She continued to work for a well-known coffee retailer and to major in economics. But she also took the January 2010 travel course to Nicaragua and continued her study of fair trade in directed studies at Bridgewater State and eventually in a master's thesis at UMass-Boston.

Danielle now holds a very interesting position in one of the world's most important coffee companies, which is conveniently located five miles from the BSU campus. Equal Exchange is one of the pioneers of fair-trade coffee in the United States, and it was an Equal coffee expert who started me on my journey with a classroom visit in 1999.

When Equal Exchange decided to begin organize its customers to foster alternative approaches to the entire food system, they let me know they were hiring a couple of people to lead that effort. I was delighted that they agreed Danielle would be perfect as part of the new Action Forum team. The journey came full circle recently, as Danielle traveled to Chiapas with an Equal Exchange delegation, and invited me to take part in a presentation about that amazing journey. Pour yourself a deep cup of coffee and settle in for her story.

Another student whose connection to coffee began in this course and deepened in a Nicaragua experience is Sullivan Cohen, who grew up in Bridgewater and knew me before I was teaching coffee courses. Like Danielle -- and about a dozen other Coffee Achievers over the years -- Sullivan took both the on-campus seminar and the travel course to Nicaragua. I remember that during a visit to my home kitchen to learn about brewing (yes, I sometimes do that with small classes), Sullivan had unusually specific questions about how I was grinding the coffee. A few years later, his mother sent me a story from Daily Coffee News, about Sullivan's new coffee program at a baker in Boulder. I knew that Boulder was an important coffee town and that Sullivan was working in coffee there; I did not know that "coffee program" was a thing, and the only way to stand out in such a serious coffee market.

But Sullivan had done it, and his journey had started in Bridgewater coffee classes. You can learn about his journey directly from him, in this video I recorded at one of our favorite coffee farms. When we organized a special 10th-anniversary coffee tour, we were delighted that Sullivan was able to join us.

You can learn his story from this video recorded during our 10th-anniversary Coffee Reunion in Nicaragua.

And now a few videos from the Coffee Maven. 

First is a short piece recorded by one of my coffee students in November 2015. She was working at the time for one of the university's social-media offices. I am very grateful that she persuaded her supervisors to include me in a project they called Humans of BSU.

"For me, coffee is a way to connect our students to the wider world." -James Hayes-Bohanan, geography professor #HumansofBSU
Posted by Bridgewater State University on Friday, November 13, 2015

A few months prior to that, I had given a talk about a vision for the future of coffee on our campus; the context of the talk is explained on my Coffee Belwethers post. Because my confusion about the spelling of bellwether is part of the talk, I have left it in place!



Just last week was my latest public lecture on coffee,  a Zoom event entitled #ThankTheFarmers, which I presented together with my wife and colleague Pamela Hayes-Bohanan as part of a One Book One Community series.



I cannot end this post without a plug for Coffee Week BSU, my summer course in which we are especially hoping to enroll in-service teachers. In fact, the course was designed with such an audience in mind. The video below was put together by the clever outreach folks in our summer session office, before the plague. The summer version of the course will capture the same spirit, but at a social distance.



A video I recently prepared for that class is available to all -- Alien Coffee explores the mystery of why I recently put cream in my coffee!

Summer bonus -- on June 26, 2020, I participated in a discussion of the connections between coffee quality and the values of fair trade. It is part of an occasional series of discussions with the citizen consumers of the Equal Exchange Action Forum. The discussion was facilitated by Danielle Robidoux, one of the former students in this class who is mentioned above.




Lagniappe

See the Coffee and Tea Cinema page for many more coffee stories, including both documentary films and feature films with a coffee theme. Not included on that page (because I do not know how to update BSU web sites any more) is perhaps the best of all the coffee documentaries: Connected by Coffee. I was at the Boston premiere (in a coffee shop) and started showing it in my classes. During my fourth or fifth viewing, I decided I should try to find the Las Diosas (The Goddesses) cooperative in Nicaragua. Thanks to my remarkable guide and friend Freddy Membreño, I was able to visit them in 2018. No thanks to the dastardly president of Nicaragua, I have not been able to return yet. Emphasis on yet: I will take students back to Estelí. Meanwhile, I recommend this film.

And finally -- coffee films will be featured and discussed in depth during my five-day Coffee Week online class, June 15-19, 2020.

BYOB*

*Bring Your Own Beans

As explained in the introductory post, we invite you to order coffee a week or two ahead of our May 6 event, so that you can taste coffee from one or more of the countries whose coffeelands you will be learning about.

All of these coffees are single-origin coffees purchased through fair-trade or direct-trade arrangements that ensure quality in the cup, sustainable practices in the field, and fair compensation for the farmers.

These are the coffees I would have ordered for my students if we were having the traditional live event in the science building atrium. 

Brazil: Karma Coffee Barra Grande
Colombia: Dean's Beans Colombian
Guatemala: Dean's Beans Guatemalan Medium Roast
Mexico: Jim's Organic Chiapas Finca El Chorro
Nicaragua:  Dean's Beans Nicaraguan French Roast
Peru: Dean's Beans Peruvian Carbon-Negative
Vietnam: Grit Peaberry
*New Orleans: Café du Monde

As with the live event, some student presentations will include information about the specific coffees I have chosen, but others will not. All of these coffees will convey something of the terroir in the subject countries.

*New Orleans is not a coffee producer, but it has long been a major port of entry for coffee and other tropical crops. Originally used to stretch the product, the addition of chicory (which my students have compared to burnt cork) to coffee became so traditional in New Orleans that the blend is now a sought-after local product. The link above is to the best NOLA-style coffee; I recommend preparing it with cream for a Big Easy experience.

Secret Life of Coffee -- Virtual Tasting

Welcome to the BSU Virtual Coffee Tasting!
(Opening on this blog May 6, 2020)

Bouncing along unpaved roads of the Coffeelands of Nicaragua in January 2007, a student in Dr. Hayes-Bohanan's Geography of Coffee travel course shared an idea for a campus event. By April of the same year the idea was a reality, and before long it was a Bridgewater tradition. Sometimes featuring the work of a half-dozen students in a summer course and sometimes swelling to an event drawing hundreds of people to the Campus Center, once even squeezed into my church when no campus space was available, the BSU Coffee Tasting has taken a number of forms and this year, it is taking yet another:

A virtual coffee tasting (BYOB optional)

Because our campus is closed, we will not be providing samples of coffee to represent the countries whose coffeeland stories we tell here. But we do provide suggestions (see the BYOB post) so that visitors can have one or more coffees at home that correspond to the countries whose coffees are the subject of student research in this class.

The tasting features two main areas (all "posters" are in the form of PowerPoints or Google Slides):

• Traditional posters by small groups of students, each about coffee in one of seven different countries in the Coffee Belt
• Topical posters from our Commonwealth Honors section, in which students make connections between the UN Global Goals and the elusive Ben Linder Café
• Lagniappe: Selected posters from my Commonwealth Honors colloquium New Orleans: Global City

When the posters are ready, each link above will point to a different section of the event.

And in late April 2021, we hope to see you back on our campus in Bridgewater!