With all this talk of coffee, one would almost forget that Pu'er is also renowned for his tea. Saturday saw the start of the 13th China Pu'er Tea Festival, a biennial event since 2005. Tea industry experts from over 30 countries and regions are present at this meeting. With a forum and seminar on tea industry development, tea safety, tea trade and new tea varieties to name a few of them, it promises to be an event-packed meeting. If you want to join in, you will have to hurry though, as today is the third and last day.
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Coffee smells good, there is no doubt about that. But now it turns out that you can actually use coffee to help smell other things better too. It'll probably sound familiar to the ladies among you: when you go out shopping for a new perfume and you have tried out a few fragrances, you can hardly tell one from the other. It all has to do with nasal fatigue, the receptors in our nose getting less and less sensitive to certain smells, hence making it more and more difficult to distinguish one from the other. Neuroscientist Noam Sobel from the UC Berkely has now proven that smelling coffee in between will cleanse your nasal palate so you can take in all the sweet odours to their fullest again. So next time you want to buy perfume, take your cup of coffee along! And for those out to shop for coffee beans, this trick works the other way around too: after a few sniffs of coffee beans you can clean your nasal palate by sniffing your very own skin.
A few days ago it dawned on me that I kicked off this website just over three years ago. Without intending to do so, my previous post came exactly three years after the very first one. All this time I stuck to the original lay-out, but to celebrate its third birthday, I figured a face-lift was in order, hence the total new look. I hope you like it. And of course the initial intention of posting something once a week still stands (even though the past has proven life sometimes got in the way of blogging).
Over the past three years a great number of fun, clever and catchy citations found their way to the weekly coffee quotes, but slowly I am running out of new ones. I'll still be keeping my eyes and ears open for them, but to make up for the loss of a weekly quote I'd like to introduce a new section on this blog: the photo of the week. Every week my wife and I will be going through the vast amount of photos we collected over our years abroad and pick one we want to share with you. It can be just a snapshot we like, a photo with a little story behind it or one that brings back memories. We sincerely hope you will like this new addition to this website.
The Yunnan coffee industry is in full development and the past few weeks I have been travelling from one event to the next. A few weeks ago there was a Pu'er Coffee Event in Shanghai where Nestlé China signed a memorandum with the Pu'er Government and announced a major investment in the coffee industry of Pu'er with the construction of a Nescafé Coffee Centre. This centre will include a training centre, a demo farm, a consumer centre and a green bean collection centre, with the aim to further assist the sustainable coffee development in the region. In the mean time we also continue to roll out our 4C implementation. We carry on with verifications at farmer level, training of those interested to join, and follow up workshops. We also celebrated the license of the first 4C unit! The achievements we realised in such a short period of time and the readiness of our suppliers to participate and change their practices never cease to amaze me. This weekend I attended the inauguration of the Specialty Coffee Society of Yunnan, where I gave a speech and presentation. The establishment of this society will take Yunnan's coffee industry another step further. The term specialty coffee was first used in 1974 by Erna Knutsen to describe beans of the best flavor which are produced in special microclimates. Today the term is commonly used to refer to "gourmet" or "premium" coffee. Specialty coffees are grown in special and ideal climates, and are distinctive because of their full cup taste and little to no defects. The unique flavors and tastes are a result of the special characteristics and composition of the soils in which they are produced. Each stage, from plant husbandry to coffee cup is important to create the specialty coffee. And last but not least, this coffee is also defined by all this being done in a responsible way that adds value to the lives and livelihoods of all involved. In between all these events I had a chance to visit our E&D Farm where not only the coffee trees were flowering, but also the jacaranda trees were covering the farm in their purple flowers.
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AuthorI wouldn't be surprised to find out I was born with a passion for coffee. For the life of me, I can't remember not loving coffee. And by that, I don't just mean drinking it, but everything involved from its cultivation over the processing to the final product that is my loyal companion throughout the day. Archives
February 2014
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