Like most businesses, coffee shops are always looking to expand their market. For smaller shops, this often means bringing in specialty desserts or coffee beans. For larger chains, this means looking for new markets. Peet’s Coffee & Tea has long been a West Coast favorite – particularly for those in and around the San Francisco Bay Area – and they are setting their sights on the East coast markets where they’ll compete with favorites like Dunkin’ Donuts for consumers’ morning cup o’ joe.

The biggest obstacle that Peet’s has to face, according to the Wall Street Journal, is not the popularity of Dunkin’s Donuts, but the popularity of a medium roast coffee with East coast consumers. Roughly 30% of nationwide consumers prefer medium roast coffees, while about 40% of East coast consumers due. Peet’s is known for their dark roasts and has even introduced two brand new medium roasts especially to appeal to that East coast market. The new roasts are blends called Café Solano and Café Domingo and they’ll hit grocery stores before they hit the coffee shops soon.

Clearly, not all Dunkin’ fans are going to switch to Peet’s, even as more Peet’s stores open, but it will be interesting to hear if those medium roasts do manage to pull in a few new fans as Peet’s moves east. Only time – and whether the company continues to launch medium roasts – will tell.

An Yashi is a man with a very unusual – and somewhat unappetizing – idea. He is a lecturer at Sichuan University in China and has been collecting panda poo to make what will be the world’s strangest and most expensive tea. He has collected over 5.5 tons of panda droppings to turn into tea. The method that he plans to use has not been revealed, but one could assume that the plant-rich droppings will be dried (and hopefully cleaned) before making into any teapots. Yashi has sampled the tea himself, of course, and says that “it has a mature, nutty taste and a very distinctive aroma while it’s brewing.”

As if the fact that it comes from the droppings of an endangered species didn’t make it sound enticing enough, Yashi also believes that the tea could have some amazing health benefits (although I have yet to see any research supporting these theories). Yashi says “Pandas have a very poor digestive system and only absorb about 30 percent of everything they eat. That means their excrement is rich in fibres and nutrients…Just like green tea, bamboo contains an element that can prevent cancer.” Personally I would wager that the 30% of the bamboo that pandas do manage to digest is probably the part containing nutrients. Perhaps Yashi would consider simply using undigested bamboo to make tea if he were only looking for health benefits, but bamboo alone would not warrant the $36,000 per pound potential price tag of the panda poo brew.

Coffee gets us going in the morning, but it also gets The Coffee Car going in the morning. The coffee car is a heavily modified Rover SD1 redesigned by a team of British engineers that is powered by organic waste – specifically, coffee grounds. Coffee grounds are a waste product in thousands of coffee shops and there is plenty of it to go around. Many shops will even pack up leftovers as “grounds for your garden” for people looking for fertilizer or compost. This coffee fueled car is sort of an extension of that. The coffee grounds are dried and turned into pellets, which are used to power a machine built into the car that turns them into fuel.

The record that the car set was a land speed record for a car powered by coffee. You can bet that there weren’t too many competitors, but the fact that they got that car up to more than 70 mph (average speed of more than 65 mph) says a lot for the success of the project. That said, I don’t think we’ll see a wave of coffee powered vehicles in the future – but I am hoping to see this one appear on an episode of Top Gear someday.

Those of you with Keurigs can now look forward to some new K-cup offerings in a couple of weeks because Starbucks is planning to introduce some of its most popular flavors in K-cups in November. The cups will be found at stores like Target and WalMart to begin with, and will be rolled out to other retailers and to Starbucks stores in the following months. The coffees offered will included Breakfast Blend, Pike Place Roast, House Blend, Sumatra, and French Roast. Tazo fans will be happy to see Tazo Awake Tea and Tazo Zen Tea, as well.

My biggest complaint about K-cups is the limited flavor options (prepacked, overlooking the do-it-yourself cups) and I’m happy to see that there are some new choices to look forward to. I’m not a fan of Pike’s Place, but Sumatra and French Roast are always welcome in my kitchen. I’ll be curious to see how the breakfast blend, a lighter roast coffee, will translate because I’ve had better results with my Keurig from the darker, bolder coffees I’ve tried.

Drinking large amounts of coffee might reduce your risk of prostate cancer, but it also might make you start hearing things. A research study conducted at La Trobe University in Melbourne found that volunteers who consumed very “high levels” of caffeine (say, more than five cups of coffee) were quite likely to imagine that they heard a song being played while they were listening to nothing but white noise. This would likely prove equally try if extended to other caffeinated beverages, such as sodas and energy drinks.

The study isn’t enough to say unequivocally that drinking coffee can make you hear voices where there aren’t any. There are also studies that suggest that coffee/caffeine consumption “improves alertness and concentration while delaying mental fatigue,” which makes it sound like you’re more likely to pay attention and realize that there is not, in fact, a song being played to you. But going overboard on caffeine can make you jittery and actually make it more difficult to concentrate after a while, and this seems to be where the study is heading with the conclusions.

I’m guessing that if you simply pace yourself when you’re sipping that cup o’ joe, you won’t have many problems with imagined songs.