Front Porch Coffee & Tea brings you the finest Certified Fair Trade Shade Grown Coffee. Fair Trade Coffee ensures that family farmers receive a fair price for their top-quality products. This allows people around the world to stay on their land, put food on the table, and keep kids in school.
Fair Trade farmers are also careful stewards of the environment. With Fair Trade Certified you know that what you're buying is naturally delicious and is grown with respect for the earth. It means that farmers are guaranteed a fair price for each harvest.This brings you the choice of conscious purchasing and brings global consciousness to local awareness.

The principal coffee species grown today in the most important producing countries are two: Arabica and Robusta. From their graftings have been obtained several subtypes differently indicated with the names of the producing countries.

• Coffee Arabica, a valuable species, has been grown and selected for several centuries and is used primarily in the specialty or gourmet coffee houses. As the name suggests, it comes from Arabia, and thrives in land rich in minerals and higher elevations. The Arabica makes a flavory full-bodied coffee, sharp in taste, with a rather low caffeine content. There are, however, different tastes, due to the different crop varieties.
  
  
• Coffee Robusta is a variety that can be over 12 meters high. It grows quickly in lower elevations and is more resistant to parasites. Discovered in the Congo in 1898, this hardy species is widely spread, especially in Africa, Asia and Indonesia, where the climate is unsuitable for Coffee Arabica. Overuse and/or improper processing can result in cheap- and bitter-tasting coffee, with pronounced "woodiness", a typical characteristic of natural Robustas from Africa. Typically a Robusta coffee has double the caffeine content of the Arabicas.
  
  

Different strains of coffee beans have their own characteristics that vary from country to country, region to region and season to season.

• Varietal and Blends- Single coffee originating form a particular growing region such as Sumatra, Kona or Guatemalan are examples of varietals or origin coffees. A coffee blend is a combination of single coffees blended together to combing the flavors of all coffees involved. Examples would be Mocha Java, a “House Blend” or “Morning Blend”.
  
  
• Espresso is generally a blend of several different coffees and is actually a brewing process. Espresso is produced when water is forced through a very fine coffee grind under high pressure for 15 – 20 seconds for maximum flavor, taste and aroma.
  
  
• Roasts- During the roasting process certain flavor oils, waxes and acids are burned off the bean, while others develop. That is why there is such different tasting cups of coffee when the same kind of beans are subjected to two different roasts, a mild and a dark for example.
  
  ~ There are approximately six different roasts; Cinnamon, Medium, City Full, City, French and Italian also called espresso. We will primarily be serving medium and dark roasts Arabica for our brewed coffee. Caffeine levels are nearly identical in all roasts but slightly lower in very dark roasts.