Sweet Maria’s Raw Coffees
Whether you roast your own coffee beans or not, Sweet Maria’s green coffee store
makes for fascinating reading for the coffee enthusiast. Be sure to check out
their Thumbs
Down page, in which they sell—and describe, in vicious
detail—70¢/lb. commodity-grade coffee:
cite="http://www.sweetmarias.com/coffee.thumbs-down.html">We offer Vietnamese Robusta as an educational experience
for our customers and ourselves. When you hear that the coffee market is
at 60 cents, this is the coffee we are talking about. This is the
coffee that has become the second largest coffee producing nation
behind Brazil in a short course of 8 years, and all this crappy coffee
is coming to the U.S. for use in low-grade canned coffee, and
freeze-dried or spray-dried usage. But it is also used in some
medium-quality commercial blends and is hidden quite effectively using
a new technique: steaming. […] any type of highly processed
coffee beverage made from a powder at your local coffee boutique, such
as Mochachino and Caramel Iced Frappelatte are made with Vietnamese
Robusta. And all those bizarre “cappuccino machines” and truck
stops… you guessed it. Institutional coffee suppliers use this for
large, low quality office coffee.
Their premium organic coffees are quite reasonable—most come in at
$4.50/lb, and even the Hawai`ian Kona is only $15/lb!