Showing posts with label south africa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label south africa. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

ICO report shows the real coffee lovers

Worldwide Coffee Consumption

The international report by the International Coffee Organization is reproduced in a far easier format via wiki here:


List of countries by coffee consumption per capita - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The first African Country is Algeria, in 38th place, followed by Ethiopia in 69th place. The Italians are beaten by their neighbours Austria and Switzerland easily. In fact most of middle and Western Europe consume way more than Italy, since it is in only 15th place.


South Africa is not even in the top 100, sis

The dominance of Dutch culture is apparent, all countries linked to them love coffee, with the Swiss being major producers of automatic machines, you would expect them to be as high up as they are.

Exciting Times 4 Coffee in South Africa


We live in exciting times for the coffee industry here in South Africa. In the over 4 years since I tasted my first brew of specialty grade coffee; things have progressed at a slow but steady rate. With more and more people becoming aware that we can find good coffee and now over 4 years later there are about 20 specialty coffee micro roasters, roasting coffee to order. Not all f them are in pursuit of the highest grade, and have become price and profit based, but I am happy to say that there are a few purists that still hold quality at a premium.

The other good news is that it you can find fresh roasted specialty grade coffee at reasonable prices. If you consider that in green bean (unroasted form) specialty grade coffee is 50-100% more that expensive than the traditional coffee market, the fact that you can find specialty grade pure Arabica, at about 25-35% higher than the going rate for the budget coffees, it makes you realize that this is good value. Even more so when you realize that imported coffees in the South African market are much more expensive and paying over R200 per kilogram is a possibility, when the winner of the Specialty Coffee Associations coffee costs R240.00 per kilogram, it is highway robbery that lower quality coffees that are in most cases not even pure Arabica, can get away with charging these over inflated prices just because they are branded. That is the cost of marketing.

With the increase in the number of people purchasing higher quality brewing equipment in South Africa, we believe that we are seeing more South Africans take to heart the quality of the product that they invite into their mouth to tantalize the senses.

Over the next few blogs entries I will go through some of the required knowledge that more and more coffee lovers are requesting.

Although some of this information is available on the site by Quaffee, some will be in more detail.