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Drinking coffee is more than just about the taste; it’s an experience to be cherished with all your senses.

Why else do you think something as simple as latte art has people crowding around in coffee shops, relishing a mug of coffee for hours, and snapping Instagram-able shots of these relentlessly.

On days when you don’t feel like dragging yourself to a café or if you’d rather put your creativity to the test, a little latte DIY project can be quite fulfilling.

If you weren’t already familiar with the term, latte art is created when steamed milk is added to a mug of coffee (typically an espresso), that is then woven into unique patterns resting on the coffee surface.

Here are some tips to make beautiful latte art at home.

When coffee ceases to be just a morning routine or a mere drink, many of us begin to invest more time and effort in developing knowledge of the same, diving deeper into the recesses of the coffee world.

If you ever find yourself at that stage, take the leap; you’ll certainly be better off for it.

What this does is further open you up to the diverse types and flavours of coffee, helping you expand the horizons of your tastes and preferences.

And before you know it, you’ve bought ten different coffees and a couple of coffee makers. But don’t worry, we’ve all been there, done that at some point in nurturing our love for coffee.

If you’re planning to get started with grinding your coffee at home, chances are that you are looking to experiment or want to become more involved in making coffee.

Here are some tips to keep in mind to make the process as effective as possible.

For the average coffee drinker, thoughts about how the coffee has been bought or what channels it has gone through before being placed on a store shelf are not high up on the priority list.

And that’s understandable.

You are ultimately concerned about the end product since that is what you’ll be consuming.

But if you are interested in knowing more, one term that you should be familiar with is direct trade coffee.

What is Direct Trade Coffee?

Trade models typically refer to how the coffee product has changed hands in the process of production and selling.

In a direct trade model, the roaster or coffee distributor directly buys coffee from the farmers without going through any organizations or importers supplying coffee.

Here, the aim is to ensure that farmers get well compensated for the efforts they put in, and customers have access to higher quality products. 

The alternative to this is fair trade coffee. In the fair trade model, there are middlemen involved between the farmer and the coffee distributor.

The purpose of the fair trade model is to create quality standards in the coffee market, to level the playing field, in a manner of speaking.

But the farmers inevitably end up with only a fraction of the price that the customers pay.

Is it an Efficient Model?

This is a highly debatable topic. A lot of people consider direct trade coffee to be the better alternative. And there are multiple reasons for this.

For starters, this model eliminates the involvement of multiple parties in the process. This can be either a boon or a bane. 

On the one hand, it is efficient because it is mutually beneficial. Farmers get a bigger cut as compared to the fair trade model, which in turn fuels their role in growing and harvesting coffee.

Roasters have better control over the quality of coffee since they are directly interacting with the farmers. This enables them to decide on crucial information that affects the flavour profile of the coffee. And, therefore are able to deliver more premium quality coffees to their consumers.

There’s also a lot more transparency and communication in the direct trade model.

As long as all of this is present, it can guarantee higher levels of efficiency.

However, it’s not without shortfalls either.

There is no one universal set of standards that all distributors and producers are required to follow. This means that distributors are not held accountable as per the quality benchmarks that fair trade coffee fulfils.

And so consumers must base their trust on the roasters and believe in their ethics if they are to rely on direct trade coffee.

Both the models - direct trade and fair trade - have a fair share of pros and cons. It’ll probably require more shifts in the coffee market for the two models to be perfected further.

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Pour-over coffee. The term itself sounds pretty self-explanatory.

But there’s a whole wealth of information you need to be armed with to truly appreciate the process and prepare your coffee the right way.

For a long time in coffee history, pour-over coffee reigned due to its several benefits (which we cover later in the blog) and also the context in which the method was discovered.

Even today, a lot of coffee shops will serve you pour-over coffee as it produces fresher coffee than machine-brewed one.