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Sunday, December 17, 2006 In the Food and Beverage class at my Western college The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, the world famous coffee company Starbucks decided to drop in to give us a new depth of knowledge on the globe of coffee, lead us through our premiere professional coffee tasting and so much more! A cluster of managers and assistant managers from across the city of Edmonton's locations came together in our student led restaurant. They had incredible passion for the subject, almost coffee beans themselves. These people have several mugs of coffee at dawn, work with the beans and related coffee products all day long. They then meet together and drink even further cups of coffee upon the end of their work day.  Hard core coffee tasters at work, this is esentially what we looked like! These coffee fanatics from Starbucks that is now a major coffee chain across Canada, the USA and across the world. They began with a Power Point with great enthusiasm on their beloved product. They introduced to us some very fascinating facts that you would otherwise not know about coffee. I was very taken aback to learn that the world drinks so much coffee, that it's the second most consumed item on earth. It falls only second to oil!We learned the ways of the proffesional coffee taster. We were given a series of cups of specific liquids to compare with the coffees. We had an orange juice, Coke, Sprite and Apple juice as well as several different milks and creams. These were all to be compared with the appropriate coffees so as to understand what goes with them and what doesn't. Normally if you are a coffee drinker (myself I go for tea and the occasional pop) you just guzzle down your morning wake-up or midnight oil drug, because indirectly that's what it is for our bodies. Not when you are doing a professional coffee tasting. You need to take it step by step starting with the shaking. Be sure to shake the coffee around in your cup for a few moments. This allows the coffee's aroma to infiltrate throughout your nose and the full flavour to come out. Then it's time to smell the nose. No don't be shy and pretend you are smelling a boquet of daisies, because no you're not doing that! You need to plant as much of your face as you can into the cup and let it waft through your sinuses. Once you've done this you are ready for the major drink. You take in a large amount of the steaming brown gold at once, if wanting to be truthful to the testing you let it go all over your tongue and spit it out. Spit it out into these silver narrow spitting pots. There are different flavours and appropriate pairings that you can do, say the full bodied chocolate tones of the Starbucks Kenya coffee is perfect with a hearty brownie or nanimo bar.  Coffee workers picking the coffee cherries from the bushes that are 4-6 feet in high at a coffee plantation in Uganda The entire class did their best going through this often akward and intense yet intensely fun experience. We then headed over to the espresso machine. To do this you need to ensure you beat the milk just enough in the high speed blended of the espresso machine while ensuring you don't beat so much air into it that it will cause too much cream for the coffee. Adding the right amounts of flavouring syrups, the finest coffee and the right topping of cream is important in ensuring the perfect espresso. Seeing my fellow classmates working away with this loud crazy machine trying to get the right amount of cream was a riot. This really shows you how much goes into each and every sector of our world without us even knowing. We learned all about how coffee is made and saw countless pictures of Starbucks coffee plantations in Brazil, Kenya and Costa Rica among other coffee growing nations of the world. To see the immense work and effort that goes into simply picking the product which in this case is the coffee bean really inserts a appreciation. These people will spend long hours picking, roasting, sorting and packaging cofee beans because it's what they know. It's there livelihood, it's their lifestyle and it's what gets food on the table for them. What I found both fascinating and inspiring is what these mangers had to say when questioned about the quality of their lives. Starbucks instead of giving them part price for their product, they are constantly monitoring the global market of coffee beans and how much the growers can get for them. Instead of simply furnishing these often destitute villages that are growing the coffee with cash, Starbucks does something to change their community and improve the local lives of the workers and their fellow friends and family.  My all time favourite coffee we had, Starbucks Kenya! They have done such things as built a school in Kenya where their school was a shack with very little. They built a small hospital and furnished it with the proper modern equipment medical supplies in the rural coffee growing countryside of Brazil where they had been having to travel more than 50 miles to a underfunded hell of a hospital. For a company to literally be so compassionate and caring about their workers in countries with little structure and to be giving to them is something rare and beautiful in our globe today. Next time you drink your coffee think of these amazing people and what they are doing in our world. There is a woman who works mighty hard in the heat with four children getting the beans for that coffee cup of yours. For every 1 pound bag of Starbucks coffee there are approximately 20 equivalent bags picked! Coffee tasting and growing, a true adventure into the lesser known! Teague Neal blogged on 12:57 PM
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