Blue Moose Coffee House

With snow falling outside and the wheels of our Jeep at a standstill, we now have time to look back over the past two and a half months and to reflect upon what we discovered. The last stop we made before heading back to northern B.C. a week ago, was also the first stop we had made at the beginning of our road trip. A town with the name of Hope seemed to be an appropriate place to start a journey called “Looking for Hope. “

So we begin and end with the Blue Moose Coffee House where they serve “Ethical Bean” fair trade organic coffee, and genuinely care that the small-scale farmers receive a fair price for their efforts.

THE BLUE MOOSE Coffee House (12 September 2007)

We were in Hope, B.C., the first major stop on our road-trip. We were looking for a place to get some coffee and an internet connection. Good and fast respectively. We found the Blue Moose Cafe, which had both. Very good coffee, some of the best food in town, and the friendliest staff you could find anywhere. In the course of occupying a pair of comfortable over-stuffed chairs in a small back room out of the way of the main customer traffic, we met Wes Bergmann, the owner of the Blue Moose. Wes was the kind of person that we had hoped to find along the way but really didn't expect would just sit down and introduce himself on this Saturday morning. A drop-in from a very kind universe, thank you. Wes is one of those people that speak plainly and directly and with an openness of feeling that gives the kind of authority to his opinions that is so needed and is so lacking in contemporary public discourse. Wes talked about the sad attitude of greed in business today, the politics of fear as practiced by the radical right, and the rampant exploitation of people and resources. And Wes acts on those opinions in both his business and his private life. Every one of his staff that we talked to were enthusiastic about working for Wes. "The coffee business" has extra meaning for Wes and his staff. It has to do with fair trade dealings with the people who grow the coffee, insisting on ethical suppliers, on through to serving the consumers of the end product at the Blue Moose. Fair and ethical dealings and service to others in his business practice and sharing of his time and profits with those in need. ... Bob

When we returned to the Blue Moose last Monday, Wes welcomed us back. He told us he had just watched a documentary called “Black Gold,” an expose about the coffee industry in Ethiopia. The Black Gold website describes the movie: “Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil. But while we continue to pay for our lattes and cappuccinos, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields.” Wes said that after seeing this film he would never drink another cup of Starbuck’s Coffee. And he is planning a visit to the Guatemala coffee fields in the near future for a first hand look.