I've been a long-standing customer at Market of Choice on SW Terwilliger Blvd @ Taylor's Ferry and thanks to their persistence (and the most amazing boost from Andrea Spella, whose coffees are also selling great there and all their other stores in Oregon!) TOMORROW  will have the new Ethiopia YCFCU Yirgacheffe and excellent Sumatra "Tabu Jamu" in the coffee bins. Please check it out!  Great store and VERY supportive of the local roasting community here.

More coffees to come...rolling out some of the Deep Cello Coffee line there as well next week!

Cello-playing/cupping demo soon!

The three new offerings; organic and Fair Trade® Ethiopia Yirgacheffe (YCFCU), Papua New Guinea Onaka Agoga and Brazil WP decaf are outstanding examples of terroir. All cup beautifully, and the PNG Onaka is a rare treat which my importer sold out of completely in just a few days. It has gotten increasingly difficult in today's crazed, frenzied-buying green coffee market (prices have been through the roof!) to procure even small amounts of great coffee, but this is Badbeard's mission.

Check in the week starting Feb. 7 for some more delicious new crop offerings from Brazil, Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea!!

Thanks to Max Fuller of Royal Coffee in California (one of my key and esteemed purveyors of green beans) for his succinct and tragically-right on appraisal of where coffee "is" right now and the near-future.  If your cups of favored coffee are costing more these days, read this blog post to learn why.

    Badbeard's is trying to rein in pricing fluctutations with existing inventory but will be joining the ranks of the price-increasers soon enough.  The superior quality we are offering across the board makes your dollar spent-to-pleasure experienced ration even higher!

A simple necessary rebranding to avoid massive confusion with another operation I'm involved with called Deep Cello, Inc.

The espresso formerly known as Deep Cello now goes by Stradivarius Espresso, after my ultimate hero from Cremona, Italy.  

Crema=Cremona? You bet, having played on a few Strad cellos in my day, and the color of our Stradivarius coffee gets some inspiration from the varnish on the instruments of the arguably greatest violin maker of them all.

Willamette Week contributing journalist and coffee-lover Hanna Neuschwander spent a lot of time trolling the burgeoning microroaster movement here in Portland to give a nice overview of true coffee geekdom The article here.  Nice job Hanna!  We hope her caffeine jitters have calmed down by now....my only emendation as far as Badbeard's is concerned is her incorrect lumping me in with the "NW-style" espresso crowd, since I pointed out to her quite fervently my adherence to Northern Italian-school, Brazil-based blends a la Spella Caffe.

Nice front page article in today's Oregonian about the story reported here about the vicissitudes of an organ transplant.  In this case congrats to Lupe, Julio y familia y muchissima suerte! Jason Lett and the whole Eyrie family stepped up when it counted, and while the recovery process is ongoing, folks can still contribute.  La Luz is a WONDERFUL wine, filled with the hallmark boldness AND nuance which has made Eyrie one of our prized gems on the Oregon wine map for many years.  This is what community is all about, IMHO. Love the Letts!

No good quaff should go unnoticed in Portland, self-proclaimed "Beervana, USA", and hence no documentary taking an insider's look at the complex world of "Big Beer" should go unseen!  Writer/director Anat Baron's 2009 "Beer Wars" presents a sobering picture of the suds corporatocracy quite brilliantly, IMHO. The struggles and successes of the two featured indie enterprises, Dogfish Head Brewery (Milton, Delaware) and Boston Beer Co. co-founder Rhonda Kallman's New Century Brewing Company are so America...beyond the David and Goliath-like picture is the subtext of what it takes to be seen in the business world these days, nay be seen period.  If you love an underdog, this is the film for you.  If you want to understand the reach of a megalithic presence like the "big beer" juggernaut and what one faces as an entrepreneur and innovator, then see this movie. And then imagine what it would mean to actually undo the evils of the health insurance industry.