Welcome!

Students in two sections of The Secret Life of Coffee have created this virtual coffee tasting as a culminating activity in their second-year seminar. We welcome you to enjoy this event, the culmination of a semester spent learning with each other at a distance through books, films, Zoom, Blackboard, and Flipgrid.

Each student has prepared a presentation related to coffee in a single country: not just what is IN the cup, but what is BEHIND the cup. In some of these presentations, you will hear the student voices; in others you will only see the images and words with which they tell stories of coffeelands and coffee people from the wide girth of earth's coffee belt.

Coffee Belt 101 / Cafe Britt 

You are invited to enjoy the presentations while sampling recommended coffees, chocolates or tea from our shopping guide or with your own favorite beverages. Afterwards, scroll below for more features of this virtual event.

Africa

 Humans began in Africa and so also did coffee. One might even ask which came first!

Just kidding -- we know that it was the people of Abyssinia (now part of Ethiopia) who discovered arabica around 1800 years ago. The origin myth of Kaldi and his goats is well known among coffee enthusiasts; recent scholarship on the true stories of these origins is told by Jeff Kohler in Where the Wild Coffee Grows.

The origins of robusta (Coffee canephora v. robusta) in West Africa a few centuries later are not nearly as well studied, even though this variety now comprises 30 percent of global coffee production. This is the first BSU tasting event to include any country-specific research from that part of the continent.

Jebena

Ethiopia and the Coffee Trade by Nicholas Bethony

Human Rights in the Ethiopian Coffee Industry by Livi Fontaine

Ethiopia: Scientific Aspects of Coffee by Joseph Gogan

Kenya: "The Best Coffee in the World" by Will Halben

Coffee in Uganda (video) by Maddie Jacques

Ethiopia and Its Fair-Trade Coffee by Tori Kalisz

Nigeria and its Coffee by Charlie Katz

Uganda by Chloe Savaria 

Uganda by Ilka Zaniewski 

The Americas

Some species of the Coffea genus grow naturally in Latin America because they evolved before the Atlantic Ocean separated the Americas from Africa. Really! We have seen truly wild coffee in Nicaragua.

Coffee as we know it originated in Africa, but a majority of both arabica and robusta are produced in Latin America: Mexico, Central America, several Caribbean islands, the northernmost regions of the Andes, and of course Brazil are known for quality and quantity. Students have found rich grounds for research here.

Chorreador / La Rueda

Café Nativo (Brazil) by Weverton Alves

Coffee in Mexico by Ashley Chartier

Coffee Production in Mexico by Kelsey Craig

Growing Coffee in Mexico by isabella Christensen 

Coffee of Brazil by Juliana Daigle

Coffee and Climate Change in Peru by Alex Henrie

Coffee of Colombia by Kayla Keith

Guatemala by Melany Kiwan

SOPPEXCCA and Fairtrade in Nicaragua by Jacob Micciantuono
(Note: this is the Coffee Maven's default brew)

Nicaragua by Brianna Monaghan

The Impacts of Plan Colombia (video) by California Muratore

Coffee in Guatemala: Antigua (video) by Steve Mylonas

Dominican Coffee by Leana Ravelo

Mexico's Coffee by Mitchell Rice

Nicaragua: Major Events & Factors (video) by Amanda Romaine

Coffee in Ecuador by Samantha Santos

Coffee in Peru by Ashley Schepis

Colombia & Coffee by Casey Strobel

Coffee in Hawaii by Sarah Tack

Asia

 Most of the coffees grown in Asia are robusta, for two reasons. The first is that the coffeelands of Asia tend to be lower in elevation and higher in temperature than many of the coffee-growing areas of other continents. Moreover, some areas around the Indian Ocean that did produce arabica suffered such severe crop diseases in the late 19th century that they permanently switched either to robusta or to tea.

Some of the student presentations in this section focus on those robusta producers, including some that have increased dramatically in recent years; others focus the distinctive arabicas of the region -- small as a percentage of total harvests, but very widely known to buyers of specialty coffee. 

Dallah / Tea & Linen

 Vietnam's Coffee History (video) by Maria Cummo

Indonesian Coffee by Julie Glavin

Coffee Production of the Vietnamese Highlands by Trevor Hart

Indonesia's Coffee: The History and Future of Production by Chloe Schiller

Coffee Production in Vietnam by Rory Sneyd

Ben Linder Café

The URL for this online event was chosen in recognition of the Ben Linder Cafe. It was both a very real place in León, Nicaragua and a place that has lived -- so far -- in the imagination of many Bridgewater State students who have learned about the world through coffee in this course and in our travel courses to Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

BSU coffee students at the site of the power plant
Ben Linder was developing at the time of his death.

It was in a hotel lobby in Granada, Nicaragua that we began to write a proposal  a campus café -- a place that would educate and inspire, nourish and employ members of the campus community, just as Ben Linder's life of service has inspired so many of us. The proposal was met with great enthusiasm, until it was dismissed. 

Because it is as fully aligned with the values of Bridgewater State as it was a decade ago -- sustainability, social justice, global thinking -- we have not been ready to give up on it just yet!

Special Features

The on-campus events have often coincided with related special events, such as coffee lectures or the famous Fair-Trade Fair, which attracted vendors from throughout New England. This year, we are proud to highlight a few special resources related to coffee and food systems.

First are the textbooks used in this course. Both sections read Javatrekker by Dean Cycon, founder of Deans Beans in Orange, Massachusetts. The Honors section also read I, Rigoberta Menchú -- the Guatemalan indigenous leader with whom Cycon learned about human rights in the coffeelands.

Many of the student presentations make reference to the Global Goals of the United Nations -- 17 ways to think about a better world at any scale. Explore these goals to find new ways of thinking about progress.

See the Coffee Talks section of our 2020 tasting event for videos about coffee and fairness you may have missed. It includes several videos we posted after the event was launched, including my discussion of coffee quality with an Equal Exchange quality expert.

Several related presentations are new since the 2020 tasting. As part of the BSU program on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Dr. Hayes-Bohanan recently presented Qahua to Coffee, about coffee throughout the MENA region. The MENA program is hoping to sponsor a Coffee Journey travel course to Jordan in the near future.

The final exam in this course includes a question about what other product students might want to learn more about, in the way they have been learning about coffee. (Yes, future students: I have just given away part of the final!) Answers include clothing (something we used to address as a sweatshop-free campus), chocolate, tea, and bananas. Fortunately, a BSU graduate who took this class about a decade ago organized a discussion of this very question -- bananas, that is -- just as we were organizing this event. 

Not All Food is Created Equal - April 2021 online event
Link to recording requires simple registration but no cost

Danielle Robidoux is an organizer for Equal Exchange, a global leader in fair-trade coffee that is headquartered five miles from our campus (what are the odds?) Her role there is as a leader of the Equal Exchange Action Forum, in which EE customers throughout the United States are organizing to make our food systems more sustainable and equitable. The lessons that Equal is learning as it applies fair-trade principles in the banana business are an important part of that work. Join her and her colleague Emily Gove of the EE Banana Team to learn about efforts to improve the conditions for the land and people of bananas. 

An Annual Tradition

The first campus tastings were held in the spring of 2007, when Bridgewater State College (as we were then known) was offering just a few second-year seminars as a pilot project. 

Because these seminars were originally intended to be speaking-intensive, coffee was a natural fit. And because the title "Geography of Coffee" was already in use for a travel course in Nicaragua, we named the new seminar "Secret Life of Coffee" and never would have guessed that it would be taught 2-3 times a year in every possible format for more than a decade.

It was a student in the second travel course (we have now had 13 and counting) who developed the tasting concept. As we traveled by van through the coffeelands of Nicaragua, she suggested what was to become a Bridgewater tradition. Students could do research about coffee in different countries while serving coffee from those countries. 

Drawing on her experience with student organizations and the  college-wide Program Committee, she helped to make the first event a success. We soon combined efforts with the Social Justice League -- a student organization that is the precursor to the Martin Richard Institute for Social Justice -- to host Fair Trade Fairs in conjunction with the tasting events. Often these drew vendors from throughout New England and hundreds of campus and community visitors. Photos from some of the most active years are in 2011 and 2012 Flickr albums. Early events were in the Campus Center ballroom; when that became inexplicably difficult to schedule, we moved the event to the atrium of the new Science & Mathematics building.

The tradition has continued through the Covid-19 crisis, in an online form. The spring 2020 course began on campus and we were just starting to prepare for the tasting event before spring break. By the end of spring break, the world had changed and we never met again in person. We scrambled to put on the 2020 tasting, which is still fully available. 

In the Fall 2021 -- as soon as conditions allow us to do so safely -- I will host a small version of the tasting to which I will invite just for the students in these four classes. They have been incredibly flexible, patient, and creative in studying coffee without any coffee flowing, and I look forward to sharing with them a cup or three.

And then in the spring 2022, we will be back with a bold tasting event for all!