The Urban Tea Merchant, in West Vancouver, is celebrating its third anniversary on October 16th.

We’ve enjoyed all our visits there. We have bought many wonderful loose leaf teas, our fabulous kettle, and enjoyed their tasty scones. It’s a nice quiet little place.

More details will follow from their next newsletter - you can sign up here.

Tags: urban tea merchant

Today we moved Vancouver Coffee from MovableType to WordPress. Some of you may see the old pages until DNS servers expire their caches. But if things went well, you shouldn’t really notice any difference. Ok, some permalinks may have broken but I think most of them will continue to work.

Let us know if you find something wrong with the site.

Badgett’s Coffee eJournal links to an article about coffee futures, which I find interesting.

Did you know that coffee was the second most actively traded commodity. After oil. Wow! I would have thought that grains would top coffee.

Arabica coffee futures in Tokyo fell 3.1 percent, the biggest fluctuation of any commodity market today, after a report yesterday showed Brazilian exports increased last month, easing concern about a global shortage.

Brazil, which grows about 43 percent of the world’s Arabica, shipped 7.1 percent more of the milder-tasting beans than a year earlier, an exporter group said. Forecasts of a smaller harvest sent Arabica futures up 68 percent to a six-year high on the Tokyo Grain Exchange the past six months.

The content originally appeared on Bloomberg on May 6. According to the article, Arabica is popular with Starbucks. It is expected that supply may not meet demand this year - the worry stems from weather concerns in Brazil. What does this mean? Higher prices. The last time a crop failed in Brazil, prices went up 36%. Fun stuff.

The Morning Coffee & Afternoon Tea blog brings us this cool little roadside attraction. The tea and coffee pots are from Iowa. Apparently, there are plenty of these across the US, the eldest created in 1860.

The post notes that not all of these roadside attractions actually point to coffee shops. What a tease!

Look for an espresso machine that pumps out a pressure of about 9 bars. This is equated to 9 times atmosphere.

It’s Roll up the Rim time again at Tim Horton’s in Canada. For those of you who don’t know, this involves rolling up the lip of your cup to see if you win anything – food or prizes. We’ve even had some oh so Canadian commercials surrounding this yearly contest. But, from Darren Barefoot, we hear that winning this year may not be so easy. There are less prizes to go around, and more stores. The official chances to win and prizes per province are available over at xsamplex.

Darren points over to Brian Jones, who has won only once out of 17 cups of coffee. Not the greatest results. Now, I ask, why would you want to drink 17 cups of Tim Horton’s coffee?!? Ew! Tim Horton’s coffee is just about the worst coffee out there!

Now, Darren shows us that we have many less TH’s in BC than in Ontario (where you can find as many Tim Horton’s as you can Starbucks in Vancouver). According to the stats, there are 8395 people per TH in Ontario vs. 21,530 in BC. 

Maybe I didn’t grow up going to Tim Horton’s (actually, never did), so that could be why I don’t like the coffee. But not likely. I didn’t start drinking coffee up until about 3 or so years ago. And I had my choice. But, really, it’s just awful coffee. Really. So, I don’t think I’ll be doing much Rrrrrolling, good odds or bad.