Since 1996, the Coffeecrew.Com website has been Canada’s caffeinated creative coffee culture team – reviewing equipment, coffee, trends in the business and covering special events.
Our team is spread out from coast to coast in Canada. Your editor and creator of the website, Colin Newell and his wife Andrea (Associate editor and chief financial officer) are located in Victoria, B.C. –
Dave Reimer (photo below right on the Mekong River in Vietnam), one of our most traveled coffeecrew writers is based in Vancouver, BC.
Dave Anderson monitors the cafe-culture scene in Ottawa, Ontario, our nations capital.
Glenn is in semi-suburban Ontario keeping watch in the Waterloo region.
Our Cafe-Roaster expert, Sara Lee Spector lives and works in Toronto, Ontario at the historic Saint Lawrence market on Front Street.
Joachim Oster – Agri-consultant – Blue Horse Kona, Kealakekua, Hawaii
Joachim was raised in the wine growing regions of Germany’s Rhine & Moselle. He experienced hands on field-, forest-, and orchard labor in his youth, while seeing the world of family farming rapidly changing to fewer, large, centralized and automated operations.
He studied calligraphy and restored thousand-year old parchments in a medieval Benedictine monastery, always ready to lend a hand in the monks stables and gardens. From the monastery at the lake to the city that never sleeps, he worked for nearly two decades in Manhattan.
Photo Right: Joachim Oster is a proud sponsor of the CoffeeCrew.Com website and is our primary media contact for issues facing coffee farmers, pest control, horticultural practices, trends in the coffee trade and so on – you can contact him over here at Blue Horse Kona.
Sipping his espressos with bigwigs from American Express, Hershey, illy cafe, PRADA, or General Motors, creating products and designs for their needs. To connect his youth with his professional career he explored the idea of running a ‘boutique farm’: Find a value-added premier food product one can grow and market without middlemen. A place where life itself is rewarded by surrounding natural beauty.
Where a happy customer calls and you’ll hear the compliments when all sweaty from work. No metal detectors in the school for the kids needed. Where a neighbor drops a fresh caught tuna unexpectedly. Where a family is a company as well. Since 2004 Joachim, his wife and daughter, own and operate successfully their small Kona coffee family-farm in Kealakekua, Hawaii. Joachim helped found the Kona Coffee Farmers Association (KCFA).
Their farms’ coffees are part of the Hawaii Seal of Quality program of the Hawaii Department of Agriculture. Plus he serves as the Agricultural Chair of the Big Island Resource Conservation & Development Council.
Coffee is a holy trinity for Joachim: Taste, company, locale are inseparable for its enjoyment. A lousy coffee in good company is often perceived as OK. A good coffee in a bad place makes the surrounding much more tolerable. A great coffee, in great company, in a great setting is simply spectacular!
Senior Contributor: Dave Anderson has been writing non-stop from Ottawa for several years now, finally graduating from the dark and inhospitable recesses of the guest book.
Once a lonely coffee lover banished to the alcoves of frustrating Krups espresso servitude, Dave graduated to a gaggia pump powered machine in reward for his endless assistance and dedication to the cause. Now Dave has a Baratza Virtuoso grinder – review to follow!
Dave’s day-thing is a world of software, hardware and ideas development.
Dave finds some extra time to dabble in the caffeine arts and these gifts he shares with the coffeecrew readership. Our readers can look forward to many witty observations and articles from Dave in 2012!
The ‘Crew are starting to talk about a Toronto or Ottawa based Summer or Fall roadshow – stay tuned folks. Our desire is to get Frederick, Dave, Sara and Glenn in the same cafe at the same time. It has never been done!
Senior Contributing Editor: Glenn S., senior-financial adviser working in Southern Ontario, has been writing for the coffeecrew since 2003, which in the big scheme of things is almost a life sentence.
Glenn returned in 2006 after a year of relaxation and rest from the rigors of the caffeinated frenzy that the crew provides. Glenn is a Gaggia user, a Gaggia Classic in fact and his sense of style and expertise with these machines is without comparison. Glenn is very familiar with the Gaggia product and can now strip his unit apart with his eyes closed. He is the author of the very popular and timely series on the Innova grinder and its many follies!
Glenn has been a valuable media liaison in the past, making an assortment of very useful connections to our good friends in the world of print media.
This year Glenn will be tackling an assortment of products new and old, digging deep to uncover the good, the bad and the downright unreliable! If there is a great machine to be found, Glenn will know where.
If there is a bad machine out there, count on Glenn to make sure you do not buy one!
Blogger: Dave Reimer. He is our youngest contributor to the coffeecrew web pages.
Dave is a geography graduate from the University of Victoria and holds a business degree from B.C.I.T Vancouver. Coffee and espresso are daily events in Dave’s life and he takes the bean very seriously.
Currently, Dave is a frequent visitor to some of the best cafes in Vancouver and is working on a guide to great coffee, espresso and cafe food in Vancouver. He lives in the West End neighborhood of Vancouver, and frequents the cafes and bakeries of Commercial drive.
Down time includes rowing (for which he won a gold medal recently), hiking, culinary interests, listening to all styles of music and making the occasional contribution to the CoffeeCrew blog.
Dave will be bringing a lots of new ideas to the pages of the coffeecrew website. Our readers can look for some unique writing as 2012 arrives.
In the photo at right, Dave Reimer enjoys a boat ride down the Mekong River in Vietnam. His favorite daily haunts in Vancouver include JJ Bean on Main Street and Commercial Drive, Prado, the Elysian Room and others. When we are in Vancouver, Dave Reimer is our primary guide to what is hot and happening in the Vancouver Food and Drink scene.
Cafe Consultant: Sara Lee Spector is owner and roastmistress at EveryDay Gourmet Coffee (and Tea), in the historic St. Lawrence Market, 95 Front Street in downtown Toronto. In an ocean of bad coffee, Sara roasts the freshest organic coffee in Canada’s largest city.
Her single-origin coffees are beyond compare and her espresso is superb. Sara and her friendly staff hold court at the market from Tuesday through Saturday. Sara can often be found tending her Turkish made Toper gas fired roaster and between roasts, she is always open to coffee-talk however basic or advanced.
Sara is a regular supplier of lab coffee to the coffeecrew labs in Victoria as well as our Cafe and Roaster consultant. If you are thinking of getting into the roasting game in Canada, you might want to have a chat with her. If you are of the mind to open your own cafe, then you could talk to her as well.
Again, you can meet Sara, talk coffee and walk away with some of Toronto’s best fresh roasted coffee by visiting her at: 95 Front Street E. St.Lawrence Market Toronto, Ontario M5E 1C2
Senior Editor and Creator: Colin Newell is the editor and creator of the Coffeecrew website. Colin started up his first internet-site, a gopher server, in late 1993. By the Spring on 1994, the web was unfolding and he created his first few pages on a University office computer.
Flash back to 1975 when Colin had his first cups of coffee in his father’s diner-cafe. Several bags of Murchies whole bean coffee later and the seed was planted for a future obsession. His first (really-bad) cappuccino was in 1979.
His first coffee road trip was in the summer of 1986 on the road between Victoria and Regina, Saskatchewan.
In summary, Colin can count over 25 years of experience playing with coffee in all its forms.
Colin is the CoffeeCrew’s regular media contact and has done dozens of newspaper articles, guest interviews on national radio as well as writing assignments for TV shows like CSI-Las Vegas (Season-3, Last Laugh) and an appearance on WTN’s “the Shopping Bags” TV show.
Radio/TV/Newspaper interviews can generally be scheduled with as little as 24 hours notice.
All in all, the writers in the coffeecrew.com team have seen it all and tasted it all – So if you are looking for someone to talk about the specialty coffee environment in the 21st century, we are all available – Our writers are located in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, and Los Angeles.
The CoffeeCrew.Com team are available for radio, newspaper and TV interviews on very short notice – if you need to talk to a coffee expert, send us an e-mail.