Brewed Daily on Parade.com with Tips for Upgrading Your Office Coffee

Brewed Daily was featured on Parade.com as part of a piece titled 9 Ways to Upgrade Your Office Coffee!. Offices are not known for having great coffee, and although the bar is higher than it was a decade ago, a coffee break usually involves a trip across the street to a local Starbucks or enduring some pretty rough brew. Fortunately, there are a few ways that you can upgrade your office coffee without a lot of special ingredients. My favorite has got to be Nutella Coffee (with Nutella Whipped Cream, if you can swing it!), but I contributed some tips for easily infusing some spice into your coffee for the article.

One last tip: If you’re in charge of brewing the coffee in your office, you can add spices directly to your ground coffee before brewing and the coffee will have the aroma of those spices – cinnamon and nutmeg are great choices – when it is brewed.

Chefs taste test Astronaut Coffee

Coffee is one of the most popular drinks on earth – and it is popular in space, too. Unfortunately, the astronauts have been drinking coffee of questionable quality for the past few decades, since the brewing processes that we use down here don’t work quite the same way up there. The Space Food Systems Lab at the Johnson Space Center in Houston has been doing a little R&D to see if they could come up with some better quality coffee to offer future astronauts. They came up with a few options – Kona Coffee With Cream and Kona Coffee With Cream and Sugar, packed in Capri Sun-style pouchs with built-in straws – and called in a few well known chefs to give them a taste test. David Chang of Momofuku and Traci Des Jardins of Jardiniere both sipped as though they were aboard the space station – and gave fairly good reviews to the new coffee.

I would bet that it tastes better than freeze dried astronaut ice cream, and I could see a fan market for this starting down here. After all, with space tourism in the future, the market for space-appropriate coffee might actually see some growth in the future!

Smuckers launches Life is Good coffee

Coffee always makes a day look a little bit sunnier, but a new line of coffee from JM Smuckers – makers of Folgers, Millstone, and Dunkin’ Donuts packaged coffees – literally says “life is good” on the packaging. The new coffee is an extension of the popular Life is Good lifestyle brand, better known for their clothing products bearing their logo, and its first UTZ certified sustainable coffee. UTZ promotes more environmentally friendly farming methods, as well as improved working conditions for farmers and their families. Smuckers is one of the largest coffee buyers in the world and moving towards farmer-friendly coffee potentially could have a big impact for both small and large coffee growing operations.

The new Life is Good coffee line is being launched with five flavors: Light Hearted light roast; Happy Medium medium roast; Dark & Daring dark roast; S’more to Love s’mores-flavored coffee; and Banana Bread Bliss banana-bread-flavored coffee. 10% of the net proceeds from the sale of the coffees will go to the nonprofit Life is Good Kids Foundation.

Pay it forward with Suspended Coffee

“Suspended coffee” is a concept that is catching on across the European Union. The term refers to when one customer pays for two cups of coffee – one for him/her and one for someone less fortunate who might come through the cafe later in the day. It’s doing a good deed for someone you don’t know, and it’s not a new concept. The tradition has been around in Naples for more than 100 years.

Caffè sospeso, as it is know in Italian, was a tradition that marked the generosity of the Italians, but it waned in popularity during World War II and after the reconstruction. It got to the point where coffees were only shared during the Christmas season and not the rest of the year. But the past few years have seen an upsurge in the trend in Italy and other EU countries, and more and more people are taking part. There is even a movement to start suspended coffee at Starbucks, which just illustrates how much interest there is in such a program. Time will tell if it does catch on at the coffee giant – and if we end up seeing it at US cafes.

This does remind me of a social experiment that Jonathan Stark did some time back, where he loaded up a Starbucks card and put the code online, so people could use and recharge it at will. There were times when it was empty, but in the overall scheme of things there were just as many people who added to the crowd-funded card as those who used it to get drinks. Going global with the suspended coffee movement would test the system, but perhaps this small-scale experiment is a good illustration that things might work out in the long run.

Pro Coffee Tasters Compete for National Title

There are barista competitions that get a lot of press because consumers are interested in fancy coffee drinks, perfectly poured lattes and a little bit of flair that goes in to giving a customer a good experience. But tasting coffee comes before making coffee, and professional coffee tasters have their own championships, too. The U.S Cup Tasters Championship, held in Boston this past weekend, was a relatively low profile event by contrast. The event featured importers and buyers who pick out some of the best coffee beans in word competing to see whose palate was the best.

The two dozen competitors – from all over the country – had to taste eight three-cup sets of coffee and identify the odd one out in each set. “Some cups are so similar they come from the same region but from a different farm,” according the the Wall Street Journal. At the end of the day, one taster rose above the rest with a perfect score and a time that was nearly twice as fast as her closest rival, 26-year old Erin Wang, of ED&F Man unit Volcafe. Wang will be representing the US in the World Cup Tasters Championship in Nice, France, in June.

You really do need to be a pro to compete, but there are plenty of ways to practice by developing your own palate. Tasting coffees from the same or similar regions and comparing the differences – just like with wine tasting – will help you fine tune your palate for picking up those differences from one cup to the next.