Organic Fair Trade Coffee

Organic fair trade coffee tastes good…on so many levels! It’s getting more popular because it does taste better than your everyday supermarket ground up bag of beans. People are finding out that knowing your coffee facts can help you know what to buy and why it’s the best!

First, it’s organic – produced free of pesticides and herbicides. Second, the “free trade” label means that it is marketed to help the farmers more than the middlemen. Businesses buy their coffee through a farmer’s co-op which guarantees a minimum price to the farmer.

Organic shade grown coffee means that there are trees shading the coffee plants. It tastes better for the same reason coffee grown at high altitudes tastes better. It slows down the growth of the coffee so there’s more sugar and chemicals produced that affect the acidity of the coffee.

Shade grown coffee also benefits from the “leaf litter” that results and is used as a natural fertilizer. The shade provides retention of moisture and a place for birds to live in those trees and other resident wildlife that can control pests. Having coffee plants and trees together on the same farm promotes biodiversification that is good for the environment as a whole.

"Bird friendly" coffee

There are a few ways to process coffee beans that result in organic decaf coffee. All decaf coffee uses water and some chemical to “soak out” the caffeine and then put the flavor back into the bean after the process.

The difference is that regular decaf coffee uses methylene chloride in the process and organic uses water and ethyl acetate ( a natural compound found in fruits) called the Swiss Water Process. The Sparkling Water Process and the C02 process uses varying amounts of carbon dioxide to extract the caffeine.

Certified Organic Coffee allows 5% of the ingredients from non-organic sources.

Learn more about Organic fair trade coffee.

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