A Blue Bottle Coffee location in San Francisco’s Financial District. Daily Coffee News photo by Nick Brown.
Blue Bottle Coffee is planning to open a coffee shop in Chicago, which would make the Windy City the second new market for the craft coffee company since it was acquired by Nestle in 2017.
The Blue Bottle Chicago location is expected to open in the Wolf Point East apartment tower in the River North neighborhood, with a 400-foot outdoor patio. Other locations are expected to follow in the city, according to a Chicago Tribune report.
“It’s also our number one city in terms of number of Blue Bottle Coffee at-home subscribers who don’t yet live near a cafe, so we wanted to bring our cafes to them,” the company said in a press release obtained by the Tribune.
Daily Coffee News photo.
The nonprofit lender Root Capital and publicly traded coffee and beverage giant Keurig Dr Pepper today announced a partnership to support small-scale agricultural coffee businesses that have been negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The three-year program, called the Partnership for Sustainable Supply Chains, involves a $35 million loan guarantee from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). The DFC, which was formally established in 2019 through the bipartisan BUILD Act, is designed to facilitate financing for U.S. businesses in emerging markets overseas.
Root Capital said the DFC loan guarantee will improve its lending capacity in the three-year Keurig Dr. Pepper supply chain resiliency project, which is designed to affect some 150,000 farmers in 12 countries throughout Africa, Latin America and Indonesia.
Coffee Processing Styles and Terminology (Plus Flowchart)
Daily Coffee News photo by Nick Brown
Led by zeitgeisty processing methods such as anaerobic fermentation or carbonic maceration, new ways of developing flavor and removing fruit from coffee seeds seem to be emerging every day.
Even relatively straightforward terms like “fully washed” or “natural” don’t fully convey exactly what’s happening when a coffee producer sends their coffee cherries from the tree to the drying tables.
In anticipation of a class on fermentation and processing styles in coffee, I asked my colleague Evan Gilman to help me create a unique visualization tool to accurately and quickly convey what people mean when they say things like “pulped natural” or “triple washed.”
Confident Coffee Roasters Founder and Roaster Amber Dietrich. All images courtesy of Confident Coffee Roasters.
Confident founder and roaster Amber Dietrich now runs her Diedrich IR5 machine inside a roughly 1,600-square-foot space, about half of which houses the retail cafe, in the town of Johnson, just north of Fayetteville.
Dietrich told Daily Coffee News that the cafe opening comes a bit sooner than was originally planned for the company, which roasted its first batches in March of last year.
“It was my intention to build the roasting side of my business for a few years before jumping back into cafe operations, but COVID changed that,” Dietrich told DCN. “The majority of my sales were from offices, co-working spaces and cafes, so when the shutdown happened, I lost most of my business overnight.”