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!