I recently decided that I needed to stop spending so much money on lattes, and concentrate more on drinking good coffee. So I purchased a thermal cup with a built-in French Press, and some fresh ground coffee, and started experimenting. I liked the results. Then the latest Starbucks brouhaha became public, and that was the final nudge I needed to decide I didn’t need to give them any more of my money.

So, I walked down to Coffee Plant this afternoon in search of a half-pound of fresh ground coffee to feed my addiction. As you may know, Coffee Plant gets their coffee from Stumptown Coffee Roasters, and I had a few varieties to choose from. I’ve been preferring a more mild cup of joe lately, so I ended up getting a half-pound of Guatemala Finca el Injerto.

You can find the El Injerto farm in the upper left section of this map. Out of a total of seven hundred and fifty (750) hectares, three hundred and fifty (350) hectares at the farm have been preserved as a thousand-year-old virgin forest, providing a beneficial eco-system.

The farm grows coffee without fungicides, herbicides or insecticides. For example, they utilize competitive plants instead of herbicides to control weeds, and earthworm-generated compost. The dry mill they use to process the green coffee generates enough hulls to make up 90% of the fuel they need to operate the coffee drying furnace. What a great business model to support.

And if that wasn’t enough reason to try it, Finca El Injerto won the “Presidential Award” in the 2006 Cup of Excellence. Stumptown says that this coffee has “flavors of sage blossom, kumquat, huckleberry and cherry tomatoes”. . . Okay. I don’t really think about my coffee tasting like cherry tomatoes, but I’m going to remain open-minded.

I’m really looking forward to broadening my coffee horizons, and Portland is the best city in the country in which to do so.