Sustainability breeds creativity
Looking forward to experimenting with a bunch of free samples we are receiving from Metolius Tea out of Bend, Oregon this week. We haven’t heard of them before, they just sent us a message on instagram. Their offerings are complete with beautiful, bulked out detail on their website and customer service has been impressive thus far. Product descriptions include little drop downs for Region, Flavor Profile, Impact, Steeping Instructions, Recipes and Variations, Caffeine Level, and Ingredients. Pretty much all you would need to know or be curious about you can find right there. We are miles away from that on our website, but we have recently added links to our importers website for all of our vendors. :) As alluded to in my prior blog post, we need to be more diligent about keeping these origins updated as the market fluctuation has caused us to switch out origins that have stayed the same for years.
We haven’t changed the origin of Stormcat medium origin since before Jarrett and I were together (that’s mid-2019). The origin has been Mexico for years, as many of you are well aware (stormcat is the most popular, hive jive following shortly behind). We recently did a major update on our bags, which has been rolling out over the past month, and decided to print the origin on this particular bag, for the very first time. Up until this most recent printing, we have been underlining the origin for this offering. At one time the origin rotated more often..Currently stormcat is an Ethiopian Grade 2 washed coffee. Ethiopian coffee has historically been the most expensive to get ahold of, so in saying that I am also trying to communicate to you are getting a great deal in the grand scheme of things.
Warm weather is happening and that’s great and all, but I think some of us have found this change shocking to the core. I love springtime and like to say my body is always “ready” for each season and that it needs 4 seasons to thrive, but this winter has been, in a nutshell, very odd! Last week the highs were near zero and now a week later it’s like 55 degrees? Cute to be able to enjoy the outdoors of course, but my midwestern raised self has this undeniable knowing that something here is very wrong. The intense temperature fluctuations and days above freezing have been more than I’ve ever experienced in an Iowa winter. I was living out of state for 2012-2016 winters..
I often used to ponder the climate change response a lot with my journal looking at all the trees and being present with the bugs, bees, birds, butterflies, grasses, and wildflowers in our old, rural backyard.. I had this daydream slash vision of people caring less about environmental issues because the felt sense of warmer temperatures on the days that aren’t bludgeoned by natural disasters (the seminal reality at play) will become so intoxicating that communities will care less and less. And I’m not immune from having cracked jokes about this very issue. Inhabiting a jaded, individualized attitude because “I can’t change what’s already happening” is exactly the kind of understanding that can be flipped on its head and approached as the glass half full. If you stay open and engaged, a clearing in your mind will settle in, yielding pathways for weeds to sprout and linger. Some of these weeds will become wildflowers, bearing fruits of wonder and awe, all thanks to the gentle fostering of its growth. The practice of patience is important here. Instant gratification is not nature’s way.
In saying that, it is near impossible to be a person in the 21st century without adding to the landfill. And when you’re running a business that includes a service and retail component? The likelihood of not contributing to the landfill drops to zero. This intimacy with waste needs to be cut with a healthy amount of distancing oneself from it entirely.
The healthy jumping off point of approach is to just absorb this reality and of course not be so hard on ourselves and our contributions. Self flagellation isn’t fun for anyone involved. This challenge invites creativity from us all. This predicament begs the question: what can we do that would help the planet? In large amounts, spent coffee grounds release methane gases. We want to try to lessen our load in this area. Enter: composting! We have recently started saving and giving gallon sized bags (compostable bags of course) filled with our coffee grounds, banana peels, and coffee filters for free. If you live in the Des Moines area with a green thumb, check out our google sign up form for picking up free compostable material at our shop!
We don’t have recycling for the building where our shop is located and have been taking it home, which is something we’re technically not supposed to do (and it would be so lame if someone told on us for that). I was really moved and inspired by the passion, drive, and work Sweet Tooth Farm does for area and this idea was partly inspired by their work. Check them out! We do also have an idea for a refill bar situation at our shop..One of my favorite shops in town is The Collective over in Highland Park. Their focus is entirely on sustainability and includes vegan and ethically made goods, along with their bulk refillery. Piecemeal, we’ve been switching over a lot of our products at our home with the products they stock. The soap in our bathroom at the shop is from there, as well. It’s tangerine clove scented and is so very lovely. I like to joke that you need to stay long enough to use our bathroom here so you can have the opportunity to wash your hands with that soap.
The elephant in the room for us, in the area of being transparent and kinder to the planet is our packaging. We are committed to switching out our bags with a kinder to the environment material, whether that be recyclable or compostable. The tricky thing for us is maintaining our iconic logo design, so this switch over that we thought was coming along with the recent bag content upgrades has been delayed. In no way do we want our iconic flashy designs to dissolve with this switchover, but it’ll likely mean that they won’t be quite as bright. I think we all can compromise with a less bright wake up Iowa coffee bag for the sake of more environmentally friendly packaging! We hope to make this upgrade with our next bag order over the summer.
It’s not easy for small businesses to make this change, especially when you you have the amount of customers and wholesale partners as we do. It doesn’t mean we don’t care, but it does mean that we need to tread slower and plan the change over a longer period of time for financial reasons.
Two things that we are specifically shopping for to get to the shop asap is an ice machine and a mini display fridge. Since we opened, we have used the freezer on the big fridge to get ice, which is a little clunky and is simply less efficient. With the warmer temps we know there will be more requests for iced drinks! And the mini fridge. This will make the kombucha cans and our cobra verde, as well as the upcoming thc offerings, more readily assessable to our customers. The mini fridge and ice maker have always been things we knew we would be getting around now-ish, it all just hit us this past weekend that it’s the end of February! Time flies when you’re having fun. And spring might just have already arrived, whether we like it or not.