Every November, Yunlin County is cast into the national spotlight with its Gukeng Coffee Festival, which showcases Gukeng Township’s (古坑) coffee industry, farming history and unique coffee culture. During weekends in every November since 2002, visitors have flocked to the hilly area for a taste of the smooth, mild brews made mostly from Arabica beans, and for a chance to explore the world of coffee in greater depth than ever before.
Now in its 10th year, the festival has this year added a “Taiwan Coffee University” program that will hold classes at Huashan Elementary School to help visitors learn more about coffee and the crop’s evolution in Taiwan, a Gukeng official said.
“We will teach people how to roast coffee beans and how to brew coffee from scratch,” said Sun Wang-tien, head of the agricultural economy department of the Gukeng Township Office.
The new program has three “schools” — the school of agriculture, the school of history and humanities and the school of music — that will give visitors free instruction on topics ranging from how to grow coffee trees to what music goes best with a leisurely cup of coffee, Sun said. Visitors to the festival, running every weekend from last Saturday through to Nov. 24, can also learn about the history of coffee’s development around the world and in Taiwan, and how it is an important part of people’s lives, he said.
“We have found that tour guides and education are the most effective ways to spread the value of a culture,” Sun said.
“Since 2003, quality has been our priority while deciding how to promote our coffee industry and how to highlight the quality of coffee grown by our farmers at the annual coffee festival,” he said.
Every year since then, the township has held contests during the festival to select the best fresh coffee beans produced by local farmers, as well as those from other parts of the country, the best coffee-roasting master and the top coffee-making experts. Through the competitions and the participation of foreign experts invited by the county to share their expertise with local farmers, “our skills and techniques in handling the crop have improved considerably,” said Sun, the man in charge of this year’s coffee festival.
Gukeng is recognized as the nation’s cradle of coffee cultivation. Coffee farming there goes back to the Japanese colonial era and reached its peak between the 1940s and 1960s, before falling off due to high production costs and high prices for the coffee, Sun said. When it was in vogue, Taiwan-grown coffee was mostly drunk at imperial residences in Japan and at homes of senior government officials in Taiwan, he said.
Though the industry went through a dry spell, coffee continued to be planted in the Gukeng area and the industry was revived on a wider scale during the past decade as coffee drinking became fashionable in Taiwan.
Coffee beans are currently planted on 50 hectares of land in Gukeng, a negligible size when compared with coffee farms in South America and Africa.
Therefore, local farmers have been encouraged to focus on growing the highest quality beans possible, Sun said.
That has meant high production costs, which is why Gukeng has eschewed marketing strategies aimed at mass-market coffee shops and instead geared them toward linking high-end coffee to the travel and fine dining sectors, hotels and even bookstores, Sun added.
“We are dedicated to creating an atmosphere conducive to drinking coffee,” Sun said.
Instead of getting a cheap cup of latte, he added, visitors will be served coffee with the unique characteristics of the brewers, and premium pure coffee from local and world-class coffee farms in other countries.
“People are offered many ways to enjoy coffee here,” Sun said.
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked
Labor rights groups yesterday called on the Ministry of Labor to protect migrant workers in Taiwan’s fishing industry, days after CNN reported alleged far-ranging abuses in the sector, including deaths and forced work. The ministry must enforce domestic labor protection laws on Taiwan-owned deep-sea fishing vessels, the Coalition for Human Rights for Migrant Fishers told a news conference outside the ministry in Taipei after presenting a petition to officials. CNN on Sunday reported that Taiwanese seafood giant FCF Co, the owners of the US-based Bumble Bee Foods, committed human rights abuses against migrant fishers, citing Indonesian migrant fishers. The alleged abuses included denying
RSS