The Coffee Trail

The Guardian has an interesting article on coffee. They start with growers in Ethiopia, through the buyers, inspectors, roasters and on to the coffee shop.

Things are a little better now: last year, Mekonum made 35p for each kilogram of coffee. This year, when he hired a donkey to take the family's beans along the hilly road to the village - the first stage in an extraordinarily complex journey that would end, months later, in the supermarkets and coffee shops of Britain and elsewhere - he found that the figure had risen to 48p

I like my coffee, and we buy Fairtrade coffee in work, but I had never thought about making sure to ask for it in coffee shops. I think I will in future.