Over
the past two years, Virtual Coffee.com has brought you articles and
photographs chronicling the three-year Odyssey of the making of "The
Passionate Harvest," the definitive video detailing coffee production
from seed to cup. We hope you enjoyed the journey as much as we did.
The video, produced by Kenneth Davids and Bruce Milletto, has just
been released to high accolades and is now available to the home consumer
from Bellissimo Coffee InfoGroup at espresso101.com.
It was a long-held dream of both Kenneth Davids
and Bruce Milletto to produce a definitive teaching tool about the
origins of coffee. They began to discuss the logistics of such a project
in 1997 when both were serving on the education committee of the Specialty
Coffee Association of America. Davids, a noted coffee writer, is the
author of Coffee: A Guide to Brewing, Buying & Enjoying, Espresso:
Ultimate Coffee and Home Coffee Roasting. Milletto is the
owner of Bellissimo Coffee InfoGroup, producer of specialty coffee
training materials, most notably the start-up/operational manuals
Bean Business Basics and Achieving Success in Specialty
Coffee, and the video-training tools "Espresso 101," "Espresso
501," "Everything BUT Coffee," "Spilling the Beans" and the "Art of
Coffee."
The
result of their collaboration is an historic video for the specialty
coffee industry and coffee consumers worldwide. It is a vision of
the worldwide specialty coffee community that recognizes and honors
the passion and commitment of its members. "The specialty coffee industry
is in the process of creating a genuine global coffee community, in
which producers and consumers come to understand their common interest
in creating better coffee and a better world," Kenneth Davids,
writer and co-producer of the video, points out. "By giving the
consumer and those who communicate directly with the consumer an intimate
and technically sound look at how coffee is produced and the people
who produce it, The Passionate Harvest will be a major contribution
to those goals."
The
video takes a detailed look at the inner workings of the diverse processes
involved in coffee production, emphasizing the enormous amount of
effort and care required to produce quality coffee. The video was
shot in four of the world's preeminent coffee-producing countries—Guatemala,
Brazil, Kona and Ethiopia—and provides an authoritative overview
of coffee botany, growing, husbandry, and processing methods, and
their relationship to cup character and quality. The video also discusses
the hot-button environmental, social, and economic issues connected
to coffee. The video features the unforgettable faces of the people
who grow and process coffee, showing how much care, intelligence,
and passion they put into their work to produce it right.
"The Passionate Harvest may be one
of the most important videos ever produced about coffee," says
Bruce Milletto, the video’s director. "It allows viewers
to travel around the world from their armchairs and learn about–as
well as appreciate–the thousands of steps and man hours that
go into the production of the brew known as specialty coffee."
A soundtrack from the video has also been released and is also available
from Bellissimo
Coffee InfoGroup. Entitled "Java Roads: Music from The Passionate
Harvest," The CD includes twelve original coffee-inspired songs
by Gordon David Kaswell,, including Sao Gotardo Heat, Yirgecheffe
Morning, Fernando's Dream, Latino Interlude, Teshome's Chat Chant
and many more.
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