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Sunday Morning Summer Brunch
To Celebrate La Prima Espresso’s
NEW Organic Certification
What: Slow Food Pittsburgh’s Sam Patti will talk about his new organic certification and give us a tour of the roaster.
When: Sunday, August 26
Time: 11 am to 12:30
pm
Where: 20th and Smallman, across from Kaya, at La Prima’s roaster
Parking: Easy, on the street
Cost: $8. Proceeds benefit El Porvenir, a worker-owned cooperative in Nicaragua and other humanitarian projects in Latin America.
Reservations: Email
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Menu: Coffeecakes, frittata, fresh fruit and coffee, of course.
La Prima Roaster: 412-565-7070
www.laprima.com
Here’s the feature that the Post-Gazette ran last month.
Do a good deed when you get your caffeine fix today. Sip a cup of organic fair trade coffee, and you help to support a farmer while you promote organics.
Many Pittsburghers are familiar with La Prima Espresso, the hugely popular coffee bar and sidewalk cafe on 21st St. in the Strip District. The business end of the operation, the roaster, is in the long terminal building on the Allegheny River side of Smallman Street. La Prima recently received Pennsylvania Certified Organic certification. After owner Sam Patti applied for the certification, it took 18 months to get the certificate in hand.
“We’re a small-batch coffee roaster. That’s the coffee version of a microbrewery,” he says. “We’ve had organic coffees all along. But that’s different from being certified. We must follow strict rules about storing, roasting and cleaning.”
Once the green organic coffee beans are delivered to the dock at the Smallman Street operation, the sacks are stored separately from conventional coffee. Designated grinders and scoops are used. The area around the roaster is maintained with certified products.
“When it’s time to roast a batch organic beans, we purge the roaster of conventional beans,” Mr. Patti adds. “We’ll roast a half batch of organic beans, but bag it for the conventional side of the business. Then we’re ready to roast the organic beans.
“There’s a window of something like several seconds between when the coffee is roasted perfectly or ruined,” Mr. Patti says. “It’s like when you cook spaghetti. If you cook it just right, it is al dente, any longer and it gets mushy. If we roast our coffee seconds too long, we end up with dark French roast.”
La Prima’s organic coffee is also Fair Trade. Many food products we buy here in the U.S. are grown by farmers in developing countries. In the case of an agricultural product like coffee, that is often a Third World farmer working for extremely low pay. Fair Trade Certified coffee means that farm workers around the world are paid a fair price, there is direct trade between producers and importers and sustainable farming practices are used. La Prima also collaborates with Building New Hope - a Pittsburgh based non-profit organization -- which imports organic coffee from worker-owned cooperatives in northern Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Twenty six percent of La Prima’s coffee is now organic and fair trade. “We are slowly increasing those numbers,” Mr. Patti says. “In five years, we may be up to 75 or 80 percent.”
La Prima’s organic fair trade coffees are sold on the CMU campus, at Pick-Me-Up in Lawrenceville, 61c in Squirrel Hill and at all ten Crazy Mocha outlets in the Pittsburgh area.
“When the Pennsylvania Certified organization people came for inspection, they asked me, “Why do you want to do this?” says Mr. Patti. “I had to think before I answered. I said, at my house we love to cook and food is a precious thing. We get our weekly farm produce box from farmer Don Kretchsmann. I belong to Slow Food. And I care about sustainability for myself, my business and my community.”
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