The Coffee and Tea Festival! (#1)

Hello and welcome to the first Coffee and Tea Festival! Thank you to everyone who submitted to this first edition. I wanted to try and keep it small with hopes to grow it to 10-15 articles each week. If you do not see your work, please keep sending them in each week. I hope there will be many more festivals out there in the future! Lets get this started.. Ever wondered how the rest of nature feels about coffee? Coffee and Conservation brings us this post about birds and the coffee planation. This blog takes us closer to the coffee and habitate connection. Traditional, shade-grown coffee plantations harbor a diversity of many taxa -- orchids, insects, and mammals, for example. But it is the research that showed the importance of shade coffee plantations to birds that caught the attention of the public, and really kick-started the shade-grown coffee movement. Certified coffees have been on the minds of many consumers lately and this is a nice post about why these bird friendly coffees are so important. The next attraction of this Festival comes from Elaine Magee of WebMD. She offers her thoughts on a new healthly habit that she has added to her life. The secret to my success? I think starting this habit in the middle of winter certainly upped the odds of sticking to it. It also helped to have several different green tea flavors available that I really like. I kept the tea bags right on my kitchen counter (next to the tea kettle) to remind me about this no-calorie beverage option. You know, tea can be bought fairly traded as well! I think this is an interesting look at tea as it is becoming a very strong market presence. There are tea rooms popping up all over the place. This is not happening quite as quickly as new coffee shops but I would bet that you will begin to see more and more and many teas can be good for you. We will make a stop with a blogger, Denise, who reports on her home roasting trials. We've had three pots of the TW and Kids Popcorn Popper Roasted Coffee (TWKPPRC is how we'll refer to it from now on, folks) and it's awesome! The lighter roasted beans (the first batch) had a really smooth taste. The really really dark roasted beans was soooo strong, I loved it too! The medium roasted beans were not my favorite of the three but the 1/2 child raved about it on the way to work this morning. You can really TASTE the flavor or some such thing was said over and over again. The word FRESH was also used. Home roasting is a great way to try different beans and test your creativity. This is not an easy process and master roasters will work for years to master their art. Buy some beans and try it out. You will have some great fun. This concludes this week's edition of the Coffee and Tea Festival. I will be hosting next week's festival as well so please get your submissions in by next Sunday at 2:00 pm so I can get it posted by Monday. Thank you again to everyone who submitted an article to this festival. Keep them coming. If you are intersested in hosting, let me know. You can also find more information by clicking here or by going to the Coffee and Tea Festival's home page here. ...be bold Tagged: Coffee, Tea, Coffee and Tea Festival