Gift your friends and nonprofits at the same time this holiday season with these coffee goods.
BY KATRINA YENTCH
BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE
At Barista Magazine, we’re always on board to support the coffee community—and the same holds true for the rest of our people-forward industry. This year, we wanted to put together a set of gifts that wasn’t just full of awesome products, but also one that simultaneously promotes other charitable causes. And so, we present this small gift guide to spark inspiration of how you could gift with altruism and caffeine. A portion of the sales from these products go toward nonprofits that are doing great work for others in need.
RISE is a new U.K.-based coffee subscription box from Ben and Alice, who were dearly missing their morning flat whites during the pandemic. This subscription box was their way of filling that void, plus a coffee service that had a little more variety of goodies than what they were seeing at the time. The basic subscription provides two different 250-gram bags of coffee, along with exclusive content by their roaster partners and other tangible treats. If you’re not feeling the commitment of a subscription, they also offer several types of one-off gift sets with similar items.
For the month of December, RISE is donating 1 Euro of every sale to Crisis, a charity that provides support to individuals experiencing homelessness in the U.K. “Crisis is such an important charity to us,” RISE explains in a public statement. “Living in London we see homelessness almost every day and can often feel helpless to the problem. Alice recently helped Crisis during lockdown with an innovation project and found it very rewarding, every single person she spoke to had a real passion for ending homelessness, and seemed positive that one day soon we could make it happen. We hope that this small initiative will go some way towards helping this important cause.” You can also donate to the cause via Just Giving here.
The Biden Blend Steeped Coffee Bags by Bixby Roasting Co. + VoteVets
“Like Biden, this coffee is grounded” couldn’t be any more of a pun-tastic way to introduce these presidential-themed instant coffee tea bags by Charlie Melvoin and Bixby Roasting Company. Using Steeped Coffee, the blend promises to provide a taste that is balanced and smooth—a flavor “that many Americans know and love. Biden Blend was born, a private initiative with no formal ties to the campaign,” explains Charlie on the page’s About column. “We took Bixby’s delicious coffee + my love of puns and democracy, and here we are, hustling because we care deeply about the future of our country.”
This gift is totally profit-free, as all sales go to support VoteVets. The group focuses on energy security, veterans’ unemployment, and opening military service to life-long Americans born to undocumented immigrants, as well as continued investment in care for other veterans.
Temple Coffee Roasters’ Honduras Clovis Vasquez Coffee
When in doubt, always gift a coffee bag. A pressing issue at the forefront of the industry right now is the damage left by Hurricanes Iota and Eta, and several initiatives have launched to support the work of repairing destroyed infrastructure. Sacramento-based Temple Coffee Roasters is giving $1 of every bag of Clovis Vasquez sold to 25 farmers and families that have been affected by this tragedy, by relocating and rebuilding their homes. Saint Frank Coffee in San Francisco is spearheading the official GoFundMe initiative, which is distributing the money to Beneficio San Vicente in Honduras. Saint Frank’s Bonaventure Coffee Project also benefits coffee farmers in Honduras affected by the pandemic.
Square One Coffee Roasters’ Colombia for a Cause + Mental Health America
Mental health awareness continues to grow and help those recognize the support they’ve needed, even before the pandemic. Square One in Lancaster, Pa., is donating $1 of every bag of this washed Colombian coffee to Mental Health America’s Lancaster County chapter, which promotes mental wellness through community programming, policy and legislation, and education.
If there’s one thing we couldn’t cover extensively enough, it is holiday gift blends—so see if your local coffee shop is offering a bag of beans with its sales going toward a good cause!
