au naturale, anyone?

This is the part that I love about this job – adding new coffees to the menu.  Especially naturals, a particular favorite of mine.
For those wondering, a “natural” is also known as a dry-process coffee because the fruit is dried in the sun instead of dunked in water (which results in a “washed” coffee), which [...]

Read Full Post »

New Mexico Decaf in the house!

By now you may be getting the idea that I REALLY like Mexican coffee.  One clue is the fact that I have more Mexican offerings than any other origin – five Mexicans at current time!  Right now I’m stocking don Eduardo (also back in the house after an absence!), Oaxaca Mixteca Organic Fair Trade, Chiapas [...]

Read Full Post »

The Green Coffee Blues

If there is one thing I’m good at, it’s inventory management.  My graduate degree is in a field related to Operations Research, which is essentially the study of industrial efficiency.  My specialization was in mathematical models, which are used to predict demand, calculate safety stocks to avoid backorders, etc.  For many years, things I learned [...]

Read Full Post »

When Pigz Fly

Attention all you North Raleigh customers looking for retail outlets for our coffee!  You can now purchase Muddy Dog coffee at When Pigz Fly, a cool little eclectic artisan shop located at 11125 Six Forks Road.  It’s just north of I-540 on the left side.  It’s kind of easy to drive past (I did the [...]

Read Full Post »

Watch “Black Gold” and Other Free Movies with Your Coffee

Remember the olden days, when there was lots of great stuff on the Internet for FREE?  That was like, what, eight years ago?  Well, welcome back to 2000.  Jaman is an online movie site with an incredible assortment of movies for downloading (rental) and streaming, including an amazing selection of FREE movies.  And when you [...]

Read Full Post »

New Coffees Out of Africa

I’m excited to have a couple of African coffees on the menu, for the first time in a while.
First is a Fair Trade from Rwanda. What makes this coffee special is the fact that it is purchased from a women-run cooperative. While that may not seem like such a big deal here, it [...]

Read Full Post »

They’ve Got a Lot of Coffee in… Peru

It was Brazil that Old Blue Eyes sang about, but probably because he never made it over to Peru.
We have a couple new Peruvian offerings loaded on the web site, now that I’ve figured out the sweet spot for these coffees.  In addition to being brilliant coffees in their own right, they are both Fair [...]

Read Full Post »

Believe it or not – more new coffee!

Remember when Mom used to tell you “your eyes are bigger than your stomach”? Boy, is that ever the way I feel right now. But I still can’t get enough!
This time we’ve added a superb new Central American. Direct from the nation of El Salvador, we have just added the coveted “El Jabali”, a Certified [...]

Read Full Post »

Local Coffee of the Week – March 6

Quick note… the Local Coffee of the Week is Guatemala Organic Maya Ixil; read about the coffee at this link.  Scroll through last week’s blog postings if you missed how this works.  This is a certified Fair Trade coffee, and is the best deal in the Triangle at $9 a pound.   Please place orders by [...]

Read Full Post »

Is Fair Trade Fair?

It’s certainly not simple, is one observation I’ve made. Sure conceptually it is – make sure producers are paid a fair price (e.g., above the cost of production) for the product. What sympathetic human being could argue with that? Certainly not me. But in practice?
Over the past few days, and for the next couple coming [...]

Read Full Post »