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Have you joined the growing club of coffee connoisseurs? Joe Farthing, local owner and roaster of J&S Coffee, discussed “The New Connoisseurship: Specialty Coffee and Tea Industries in the 21st Century” in our Public House lecture series recently (what is it?). You can watch a video of his talk here.

Coffee producers should be able to make a living wage and conscientious U.S. customers should be willing to pay a few cents more for their daily mocha to assure that. These are the premises behind the concept of fair-trade coffee. Signs of Life has always offered some excellent fair-trade products, and according to a recent Seattle Times article, the trend is rapidly expanding to the mainstream coffee market. That’s a good thing, right?

Well, perhaps not. Cato Institute senior fellow Brink Lindsey says the economics of fair-trade are not that simple. Summarizing his paper Grounds for Complaint: ‘Fair trade’ and the coffee crisis, Lindsey writes: “However well intentioned, interventionist schemes to lift prices above market levels ignore . . . market realities. Accordingly, they are doomed to end in failure—or to offer cures that are worse than the disease. There are constructive measures that can help to ease the plight of struggling coffee farmers, but they consist of efforts to improve the market’s performance—not block it or demonize it.”

This photo shows how we like our crema at Signs of Life espresso bar - a dense, ruddy brown foam with tiger flecking that holds the promise of a perfectly pulled shot of espresso. Is it a polyphasic colloidal foam? Find out that, and so much more than you ever wanted to know about crema from one of the world’s best baristi at Coffee Geek.

On Monday, October 2, the weekly Public House “Culinary Culture Lecture Series” featured Tom Wheat, director, farmer, importer, and roaster for Nueva Mission, Inc. in a talk entitled Thinking Locally in a Supranational Industry: Venezuela Biointesive Coffee Farm Communities and the American Consumer. Nueva Mission is a non-for-profit organization which links the people of the Caripe region in Venezuela with the community of Lawrence, KS, by growing, producing, importing, and roasting Venezuela coffee for the Lawrence market while using organic, sustainable, and community-focused methods. Wheat’s talk focused on the sharp distinctions between “conventional” farming techniques and “sustainable” farming techniques, and the impact each technique has on rural coffee-growing communities.

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This fall, Signs of Life in downtown Lawrence is offering a new series in its free Public House weekly community forum entitled, Culinary Culture: Pursuing Excellence and Sustainability from Farm to Plate. Each Monday night at 7:30 pm starting September 11, the series will feature one of our community’s foremost authorities on issues surrounding our pursuit and appreciation for local culinary culture and agriculture. Below is a description of the series:

“Excellence is a God-given virtue of a mature, sustainable, and fruitful culture, and should be pursued in all areas of life. This especially includes humankind’s relationship to the earth and its fruit. The pursuit of excellence has implications for the way we prepare our food and the way we eat, especially in relation to the intimate connection between sustainable, local agriculture and healthy, quality culinary culture. In order to explore these ideas in the context of our community, this fall, Signs of Life is offering a free, weekly lecture series that showcases some of our community’s foremost authorities on excellence in culinary culture.”

Speakers and topics will include:

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