8 O’Clock Coffee Mug is Gr8!

Y’all might remember that a few weeks back I ordered up a coffee mug from Eight O’Clock Coffee ’s Accumul8 Rewards program. It just arrived and the first thing I did was have the girl-child snap a picture of it with her phone (my camera grew legs and walked away a couple of months ago) so y’all could see it.

I will tell you that the photo does not do it justice. It’s a lovely 12 ounce mug - heavy enough to knock someone out with. The walls are thick - perfect for keeping coffee hot - and the handle is big enough to hold comfortable. And it’s black, a totally favorite color of mine. The only way it could have been better was if it was red.

Included in the package is a coupon for a free 11.5-12 ounce bag of any kind of Eight O’Clock coffee (up to $6.99) and - an unexpected bonus - a delightful white ceramic stirring spoon that slips through holes in the handle for easy serving. It’s adorable!

What did it cost me? The five minutes it took me to access the Accumul8 Rewards web site, fill in a few details, and enter the product code numbers on the two 3 lb bags of Eight O’Clock coffee I bought two months ago. No shipping fee, no nothing - just a few minutes of my time. AND - I’ve got two more bags sitting here, and will be buying another two when I do next month’s shopping in a couple of days. At this rate, I figure it will take me a few months to collect a full set - and just to tell you how much I love this mug… I’m ordering 3 more Eight O’Clock coffee collectible mugs instead of a $25 Visa gift card (2500 points).

Starbucks announced this morning that the company’s UK outlets will be offering its first 100% Fair Trade certified coffee from Rwanda starting in 2010. The company also announced its commitment to making all of its espresso from FairTrade certified coffee across the UK.

According to the press release:

The Fairtrade certified Rwandan coffee comes from the Dukunde Kawa co-op first visited by Starbucks coffee buyers in 2005 and Fairtrade certified since 2004. The selected coffee, which will be available in UK stores for a limited time due to the size of the production, is a fully-washed Bourbon arabica coffee coming from high-altitude farms

Starbucks isn’t the only big name promoting Rwandan coffee recently. Rwanda, devastated by Civil War  in the 1980s and 1990s, is still slowly recovering from a genocide that killed as many as 1,000,000 Rwandans in 1994. Coffee is the country’s major export and one of its most important economic sectors. For many of the country’s women, coffee represents a future for their children and their families. FairTrade certified coffee means that their work results in more than bare subsistence returns for their coffee.

Last year, former U.S. president Bill Clinton and Scots philanthropist Sir Tom Hunter worked together with Rwandan coffee farmers to establish their own brand of coffee, Rwandan Farmers Coffee. Rwandan Farmers Coffee brand is available in Sainsbury’s stores across the UK. It’s not available yet in the U.S., so if anyone out there with a local Sainsbury’s has tried it, I’d love a review!

Bialetti Cafe Concerto on Sale?

Y’all might remember this very sexy machine from way back in the winter when I put it on my wish list. It’s the Bialetti Cafe Concerto espresso machine, styled after the stage in a traditional Italian opera house. Beautiful, but price-y, I said at the time - not terribly expensive for an espresso machine, but at $349, definitely out of my pocketbook’s range, even if it did come with a bunch of cool extras like espresso cups and three kinds of coffee.

Well - the Bialetti Shop dropped by to visit here at Coffee Break Blog and left a comment the other day with a heads up - keep your eye on Bialettishop.com for an upcoming deep discount on the Cafe Concerto, it said. Like.. really deep discount - about 40% off the regular price.  For anyone out there who’s thinking of me kindly and wants to shower me with gifts, the Cafe Concerto is -still- on my wish list.  If I getmy hands on one, I promise to give it a real review!

credit: just4you@stock.xchang

Free Coffee in the Office - 13 Reasons to Give Your Boss

Do you drink coffee at work? When I was working at the homeless shelter, one of the nicest perks I had was access to unlimited, high quality free coffee - because my boss was a true coffee lover and one of our micro-businesses was a coffee roasting business. If you’d like to get free coffee at work, here’s a list of reasons you can use to help convince your boss that it’s in the company’s best interest to offer an office coffee service for employees.

1. Coffee increases productivity among workers.
2. Coffee gets you through the afternoon slump.
3. Coffee gets your workers started earlier in the morning.
4. If you have free coffee in the office, no one is wasting time doing a Dunkin run or heading out to Starbucks.
5. Free coffee is one of the top-requested perks in surveys of office workers.
6. Providing free coffee for your staff makes them feel like you care about them and their needs. It’s a little luxury that’s really appreciated.
7.  A Bnet article on business in down times suggested that quality office coffee is sacrosanct, even when you’re slashing budgets. If you cut out the coffee, the article suggests, you’re messing with a beloved perk and ritual, and leaving your employees thinking things are worse than they are.
8. Free coffee is a very cheap way of boosting company loyalty.
9. Coffee increases alertness, especially in employees doing detail-oriented work. In one study, employees doing data entry work made far fewer mistakes if they’d recently had a cup of coffee. One cup of coffee could save your business millions if it prevents a big mistake in accounting.
10. If it’s good enough for Microsoft, it should be good enough for our employees! (Yes, Microsoft serves free Starbucks to its employees. Not my favorite, but better than the usual office coffee)
11. The owner of a plumbing company in Framingham, MA says that when he switched and started offering free Green Mountain Coffee from a Keurig in the break room, his employees were around more often - instead of running down the street to grab a coffee.
12. You’ve always got good coffee on hand to offer to clients and customers.
13. If you’re nice to your secretary, she may even bring you a cup of coffee from the break room.

Dunkin Does Tech Right

While Starbucks turned to technology to “improve” their brewed coffee by installing $10,000 Clover 1 coffee machines in some of their stores last year, Dunkin Donuts is putting tech know-how where it matters to their customers - making it easy to do a Dunkin Run.

If you’ve ever been the guy or gal on the run end of the Dunkin Run, you know what it’s like trying to keep all the orders straight. Large French Vanilla with one sugar? Iced with skim and 3 Equals? A double turbo iced plain with half a sugar and extra cream and a… gah! Even if you’re only picking up three coffees at Dunkin’s who can keep it all together?

Well now, thanks to Dunkins embrace of technology, you don’t HAVE to. All you have to do is aim your browser at www.dunkinrun.com and follow the simple onscreen instructions. Basically, it goes like this:

You enter the cell numbers or email addresses of your friends/coworkers who are ordering coffee.

You choose what you want from the menu and hit enter.

You have just volunteered to make a Dunkin Run and sent out mail asking all of your friends to place their orders. In a few minutes, you can print out your order list straight from your computer, or access it on your iPhone.

Head out to the nearest Dunkins - if you’re not sure where it is, there’s a Store Locator right on dunkinrun.com - and when you get there, just hand the list over the counter (if you printed it out) or read it off your iPhone (if you didn’t).

Yeah, you could do it with a slip of paper and a pen, but hey - it’s more fun this way. And really, what did you get that iPhone for if not for this?

Jordan and Cara Berg Powers

Hingham, MA

June 21, 2009

I’m baaack! Didja miss me? The photo above is the reason that I’ve been mostly MIA from the Coffee Break blog the last few days - the wedding of my daughter, Cara Lisa, to her soulmate, Jordan. The wedding took place Sunday afternoon on the bandstand at Hingham beach, with high, strong winds coming in off the water and rain slashing sideways. The damp day did nothing to dampen spirits, though. As you can see from the bright smiles, the bride and groom didn’t let the weather affect their joy in the least.

I arrived at the wedding venue - the town beach at Hingham Harbor - with the groom and the bride’s sister about two hours before the ceremony. It was wet, windy and wild, with the spray off the ocean combining with the intermitten driving rain. It was also the chilliest first day of summer we’ve had in a few years. The entire wedding party - or at least the female part of it - was wearing strapless dresses and no stockings. Most of them had the presence of mind to bring along something warmer - the wedding pictures don’t show the fact that the entire wedding party - not including the bride and groom - were wearing hoodies!

About forty-five minutes before the wedding was to start, we went in search of coffee. My intent was to buy a couple of Boxes of Joe from Dunkin Donuts so that guests could grab a cup of somethin’ hot when they arrived. Unfortunately, we discovered that Hingham may be the only town in all of Massachusetts that -doesn’t- have a Dunkin Donuts. You have to go to N. Hingham or to Weymouth to find one of the ever-present coffee chain stores. Nor was there a nearby Starbucks, and the two local coffee shops - including a very upscale, chi-chi coffee boutique where I got a hot chai latte - required 24 hours notice to put together coffee-to-go for an event. So… the guests got no coffee at the wedding. Not that any seemed to mind the oversight.

After the wedding, we scrapped the plans for a take-out feast on the common as planned, and were lucky enough to find that the small cafe where we reserved a room for a cocktail hour didn’t have anyone else booked for that room at all for the day - so we had an impromptu wedding reception at the lovely Tosca’s - where we had drinks, but … no coffee!

I finally managed to get a cup of coffee on the way home yesterday evening when we stopped at a Dunkin Donuts drive through. My body is still recovering from the dearth of good coffee vibes yesterday, but I should be back to my usual coffee-blogging mojo tomorrow when I’ll tell you all about the marvelous flavor of local Honey Dew coffee and donuts. Till then - mazel tov!

Healthy Coffee

Today, it’s all about coffee goodness. If you’re a coffee lover who’s been feeling guilty about indulging in your delicious decadence, you can stop it right now. Apparently, coffee is nowhere near as bad for us as we originally thought - and there’s lots of scientific evidence that drinking coffee could actually have health benefits.

Should this really be so surprising? I mean, when you come right down to it, coffee is a ground up, toasted berry seed. Haven’t we been learning for years that berries - especially the darker ones - are chock full of antioxidants and other good stuff? Okay - so that may seem like a stretch when you consider that we don’t actually EAT the berries or drink coffee berry juice, but those things have to come from somewhere, right?

So… what’s the good about coffee this Friday?

Harvard researchers say that drinking 1-3 cups of coffee a day (that’s 6 oz cups, folks) can slightly reduce your risk of diabetes. Drinking 6 cups of coffee or more a day, though, will reduce men’s risk of diabetes by 54% and women’s by 30%. (Yeesh, even mother nature is sexist?)

Regular coffee drinkers are 80% less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease.

Two cups of coffee a day reduce your risk of developing colon cancer by 25% and cirrhosis of the liver by 85%, and cut your risk of developing gallstones in half.

Coffee also seems to give the liver and heart a little bit of armor. Studies show that smokers and heavy drinkers who also drink a lot of coffee show less heart and liver damage than those who don’t drink coffee.

Coffee can pinch-hit for other drugs in an emergency. I’ve got firsthand evidence on that one - my 17 year old son keeps Nescafe coffee sticks on hand in the nurse’s office at school for those mornings he forgets to take his ADD meds. Any condition that can be helped by a stimulant medication may respond to a cup of coffee. That includes asthma, migraines and mild depression.

And my favorite - coffee may stain your teeth but it prevents cavities!

So go on, pour yourself a second cup - decaf if you must, though it’s apparently not as good for you - and enjoy!

Fathers Day is just around the corner - which means that you have to come up with a neat gift for dad, one he won’t just shove up on a back shelf, one he’ll really, you know, USE. And ENJOY. If your dad is a coffee lover, you’ve got it easy. Here’s 13 great picks for a coffee loving dad to enjoy on Fathers Day.

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