Liquid Agnostic

There is a new crop growing in Southern California’s famous avocado groves — coffee.

About two dozen farms between San Diego and here, just outside Santa Barbara, are nurturing coffee bushes under the canopies of old avocado trees, in what may be the first serious effort in the United States to commercialize coffee grown outside Hawaii, home of Kona coffees.

“When people hear I’m growing coffee, they typically make a face and say something like, ‘Well, how good can coffee grown in California be?’” said Jay Ruskey, the owner of Good Land Organics, who is widely regarded as the father of the state’s nascent coffee business.

via Your Coffee Is From Where? California? – The New York Times.

Then he added, “Why don’t you package your coffee in these K-Cups?”

Peters said she had thought about it but learned that Keurig, the leading maker of single-serve brewing devices, required coffee roasters to produce and sell volumes that were beyond her reach. Gorbatenko, who had been an engineer and patent litigator in his career, offered to build a machine that could package her coffee in single-serve cups.

She expressed interest, but she told him she wanted the cups to 100 percent biodegradable. “I thought it would be simple wimple,” Gorbatenko said.

Peters couldn’t afford the machine that Gorbatenko first produced. But he kept working on the idea, spending much of the past six years developing the product while looking for a partner to supply coffee.

Last year, he approached Peter Middlecamp, owner of Black Sheep Coffee in South St. Paul, asking whether he would be interested in purchasing his specialty machine.

“George’s machine is great. It’s fast, it’s easy … and it makes that dream totally a reality.” Peter Middlecamp, who rebuffed Gorbatenko’s small-scale coffee pod idea 20 times before coming aboard

via K-CUPS FOR LOCAL LABELS – Star Tribune, 2017-03-27.

Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti fired up the first espresso machine in space over the weekend. She posted a selfie on Twitter from the International Space Station on Sunday, sipping from a cup designed for use in zero-gravity.

via To boldly brew: Italian astronaut makes first espresso in space | Science | The Guardian.