Fresh Cup Magazine

Several years ago I attended a trade show for the coffee and tea trades (very heavy on the coffee, light on the tea), and that's where I first became familiar with Fresh Cup magazine, which calls itself "The Voice of the Specialty Beverage Industry." I read it for about a year, but since the annual subscription price is a bit expensive for a casual reader ($38), I did not renew. I received two recent issues at the tea expo, and here's what I found.

The April 2007 issue has features on fair trade tea and on the Sri Lanka tea market. In an article about coffee and tea in movies titled "On the Big Screen," I learned that a movie is coming later this year called "The Darjeeling Limited," in which three brothers visit India after their father dies. Natalie Portman and Owen Wilson will star. The May 2007 issue has an article on the history of Russian Tea and an article by James Norwood Pratt on 2007 trends in the U.S. tea market. Fresh Cup also publishes one tea-only publication, its annual Tea Almanac, which I have purchased a couple of times and found packed full of tea info.

Fresh Cup seems to be about 75 percent coffee, 25 percent tea (at best), and the ads reflect this. There are ads for various coffee machines, coffee flavoring syrups, coffee roasters, and only the occasional tea ad, perhaps showing a mix for something like a tea smoothie. My recommendation is to read the tea articles as you can find them online (the entire magazine is not available online) at freshcup.com, and then to just order the Tea Almanac published in December.