Upper Midwest Gourmet

Many of you may be familiar with our Italian product line Fabbri, which produces a variety of gelato and pastry ingredients. The most common application for these products, specifically with the delipaste, is to flavor gelato. Well, this weekend I went home with a few samples of the Pistachio Fine delipaste, some rose extract oil and a mind set on experimentation. I love baking and I really don’t do it often enough, yet I have all of these exotic and delicious ingredients at my fingertips. Well, I decided enough is enough. It’s time to start taking advantage of the Fabbri products and commence experimental baking.

On Friday, I found a recipe for Pistachio cupcakes and Rose Petal buttercream online. I tweaked the recipe in order to accommodate my flavoring ingredients and improvised on quantities a bit. I’m a true believer in “to taste” baking, at least with flavoring ingredients. This recipe is a chiffon-style cake and can be labor-intensive and/or tricky, but never fear. The end result is delicious and well worth the effort.
So here it is: 
Pistachio Cupcakes
36 regular cupcakes / 350 degree oven
*2-3/4 cups cake flour sifted
1-1/4 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
**1/2 -3/4 cup grape seed oil (or vegetable oil)
8 egg yolks (approximately 6 ounces)
1/2 cup water
4-6 ounces pistachio delipaste
10 egg whites (approximately 10 ounces)
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cream of tarter

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Wisconsin Food Expo Milwaukee, WI; March 8th through the 10th, 2010 - Booth 748

Ah yes, the show season is soon to be upon us. For starters, Upper Midwest Gourmet will be showing off our duds again this year in Milwaukee Wisconsin at the Wisconsin Restaurant Associations annual Expo to be held at the Airline Center in downtown Milwaukee on March 8th trough the 10th (Mon-Wed). Go to www.wirestaurant.org/expo/ for more details on this show and to register. As in the past years, UMG has a boat load of FREE PASSES for Wednesday the 10th, the last day of the show. Please contact us direct at 612-728-7208 or contact Kevin direct at 612-250-8277 or Kevin@umgcoffee.com and we will mail you the tickets. You will need to register them once you have the ticket code. This can be done the day of the show at the door. This year we will be highlighting our new line of Ce Organic and Fair Trade, all natural flavoring syrups, our new International Paper Insulated Hold & Go Hot cups, Angela Marie’s Mega Marshmallow Munchies crisp rice bars, Pacific Foods Organic Simply coffee & tea ready to drink products, Deep River all natural chips and snacks, and our new Flamenco Organic Coffee Direct coffees. We will also have a new espresso machine on hand for your review, use and sampling of our espressos.

This is one of those shows that our staff ALWAYS looks forward to because of the amount of you that take the time to visit with us there and the many new customers we are lucky enough to meet each year. Of the many food & coffee shows that we show at, this has always been the best run and most fun to attend so I encourage you to try to make it if you can, you will not be disappointed!

Coffee Fest Minneapolis, MN, June 04 – 06, 2010

We are very excited to announce that the folks at Coffee Fest have scheduled one of their 2010 show right here in Minneapolis this year in June. Coffee Fest is still one of the better coffee focused shows in the industry so we expect nothing less at this show. We among many other local, regional and international companies will be showing. This Upper Midwest region of the country is finally getting the recognition we have so rightfully earned in the coffee world so this show should be full of useful information for any café owner in this market. As more details come in, we will continue to pass them on to you so please stay tuned or go directly to www.coffeefest.com for more details and to register for this show.

We always love to see our customers at every show we attend so please do come and say hello at one or both of these shows. Upper Midwest Gourmet will also be announcing our annual picnic/open house very soon so please stay tuned for that date to be made.

We thank you all for your continued support and patronage. We are nothing without our great customers and we are driven by your support to continue to improve our services and offerings to you!

See you at the shows!

All of us at Upper Midwest Gourmet would like to wish you, your family, your friends, and your staff a very Happy and Healthy New Year in 2010! We truly believe that your success creates our success and we promise to continue to support and serve you as much as possible!

Please always know that we are just a phone call or email away. UMG has been on the cutting edge of the coffee shop and cafe industry for almost 20 years! We have seen the latest and greatest fads come and go, but there are a few constants that will always remain the same. Coffee drinks and blended beverages are your bread and butter because  of their great profit margins. I agree with my previous statement, but I’ve learned that to be truly successful offering retail sales and food is a must.

One constant that makes any businesss successful is a self-motivated staff with ambitious goals along with a desire to always work hard no matter if it is within their job description or not. This is something amazing that I witness everyday working at UMG, but also something that is very obvious in many of the most succesful cafes that we work with. Striving to always be better is something that rarely breeds anything, but success.

Our guarantee to you, our customers, in this new year and decade is that we will continue to strive to always be better. In fact, we will be taking a coffee origin trip to Dominican Republic to meet our Flamenco Direct Relationship coffee friends and their families in February. This will give us a better understanding of all aspects of coffee production, but will more importantly build a stronger relationship with people we care about, just like our customers. We want you to know that there may be other companies that sell similar type products, but you will never find a company with more personal dedication to their customers than us.

We aren’t just a Midwest distributor of coffee shop products or just a Fair Trade Organic coffee roastery in Minnesota or just a gelato equipment and ingredient company. We are so much more than all of those titles and all we want is a chance to prove that to you this year!

Please Contact Us if you have any questions about what we can do for you.

Thanks for your support!

Welcome to Fall!

Please check out our newest Brewsletter – Volume 39 - Fall 2009

Also, please go to the Brewsletters Page on our website to download and read previous Brewsletters. They contain lots of useful information!

Enjoy and thanks again from all of us at UMG!

Hello Summer, please stay for awhile.

Please check out our newest Brewsletter – Volume 38 – Summer 2009

Also, please go to the Brewsletters Page on our website to download and read previous Brewsletters. They contain lots of useful information!

Enjoy and thanks again from all of us at UMG!

Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring!

Please check out our newest Brewsletter – Volume  37 – Spring 2009

Also, please go to the Brewsletters Page on our website to download and read previous Brewsletters. They contain lots of useful information!

Enjoy the new format and thanks from all of us!

As UMG finished our last show of the season in Milwaukee, it was in no means the end of the work to be done. There are many months of follow up to be completed. We look forward to contacting those of you who requested us to do so.

We wish to take a moment to offer our thanks and appreciation to those of you who took the time to stop by and say hello at the Wisconsin Restaurant Expo a couple of weeks ago in the lovely city of Milwaukee. As usual, this show was a great success for UMG. We especially appreciate the opportunity to meet with many of you face to face each year, and to meet some of you for the first time. It’s funny though how our mind can create an image of what you think someone is supposed to look like prior to ever meeting them face to face. Sometimes you are right on, and some times you are way off course! (I am usually the off guy). Either way, it makes a relationship that much more rewarding once you can actually place a face with a voice.

If you missed the show this year, here are some of the highlighted products that we were offering samples of; Zola Acai in Ready-to-drink, blender and concentrate formulas, Pro Bar meal supplement bars, Wally Biscotti (Mr. Wally himself graced us with his presence at the show this year), Dirty all-natural potato chips, Boosta shot pure all-natural energy, Cappuccine blender/frappe mixes, Rancilio Leve manual Lever espresso machines (this truly was the hit as we sold 2 of them off the show floor) and of course, our very own Flamenco Organic coffees. Jesse our Roast Master has been busy since last year and was offering some of our award winning coffees for sampling.

Without gloating, I believe that we were the hit of the show this year with our product offerings. We were just informed that we are to be on the front cover of next years Expo Info packet handout.

Take a look at this cover by clicking the following link;

http://www.wirestaurant.org/expo/exhibit/index.htm

You can also take a look at some of the photos we took ourselves at the show.

Again if you took the time to stop by, we say thank you a thousand times over. If you missed us this year, we say shame on you (OK, that might be a little harsh!), no, we do encourage you to try to make next years show if you are within 4-6 hours of Milwaukee. This show is definitely worth your time.

For all of our customers, we say thank you very much for your continued patronage and support. We would be nothing with out all of you! We strive to ensure the success of every customer that we have a relationship with. It is our goal to be able to always offer you the products and tools needed to meet that success. Please feel free to contact any one at UMG with any comments or concerns, we are ready to listen.

Your Bean Head staff thanks you

Hello all you lovely customers.

Let us extend an invitation to attend the Coffee Fest Chicago this year. It’s comming upon us very fast!

The dates for this years show are February 20-22, Friday-Sunday at the Navy Pier downtown Chicago.

UMG will be in attendence assisting several of our vendors including Cappuccine. Please make an effort to stop by and say hello while your walking the floor.

We still have some FREE or DISCOUNTED passes to offer you if you act quickly. Give Kevin or David a call @ 612-728-7208 for details. But HURRY, you must act soon to get the FREE or discounted prices.

After calling for the code number, go to Coffee Fest web site direct to register on line for quicker results

That link is: http://www.coffeefest.com/Event/Attendee/Default.aspx

Hope to see you there this year. We love to meet with our customers Face-to-Face so stop on by if you can.

Thanks for your continued support and patronage, we greatly appreciate it! 

Artista Gourmet Flavored Syrups and Sauces are authentic flavors that are as good on the first sip as the last. Artista flavors are perfectly balanced to perform well in anything you’re making with them…hot, cold, you name it.

UMG has conducted countless blind taste-tests comparing Artista’s flavoring syrups with some of the competing brands like Torani, Monin, Routin 1883, DaVinci, and more. Artista continues to make us proud as the hands-down winner! Not only is Artista a better overall syrup than the competition, but it has a price point that will end up making your cafe more money than your current syrup line!

If that wasn’t enough, Artista offers a bottle-swap program! That means that if you are waiting to make the switch to Artista because you have a large stock of the other brands syrups in stock, you can wait no longer. Just agree to buy Artista in the future and we will swap out up to 24 bottles of any competing brand for 24 full bottles of any flavor Artista syrups you would like!

Feel free to Contact Us for more information or Order Yours and make the switch to a higher quality syrup for less cost per serving today.

Happy 2009!

FREE S/H on 1st order made by new customer! No Minimums! Must be 1st order ever made with UMG.

UMG would like to extend a special New Year’s offer of FREE SpeeDee shipping/handling on the FIRST order made by any NEW customer in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Illinois.

Offer only good on 1st orders made between January 1st-31st, 2009.

 Please Contact Us to set-up a new account and make your first order with FREE shipping and handling today!

I came across this article in one of my favorite magazines: ODE.  The article: ‘Death of a Paradigm’ sheds an interesting view on the current state of our economy.  If you’re one of our Fair Trade Organic Eco Conscious regulars or just someone who works hard for a living, than I’m sure you’ll find the article interesting.

Here’s the link:

http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/59/death-of-a-paradigm/

Cheers,

David

Flamenco Organic Coffee Company is proud to announce that we WON 1st place regular coffee and 1st place decaf coffee at this years Calhoun Coffee Fest!

We love taking part in the Calhoun annual coffee festival in Minneapolis every year and are ecstatic about our 1st place finishes in the coffee competition. The festival is a great cause (raises enough money in one day to feed 20,000 homeless people) that showcases Minnesota’s top coffee roasters.

Here are the results: http://www.calhouncoffeefest.com/vendors.php

Feel free to Contact Us for more information or Order Yours today.

If you are a customer that is already ordering, there is a good possibility that a sample of the winning coffees will be in your next order.

Happy Holidays!

Upper Midwest Gourmet & Flamenco Organic Coffee Company are extremely proud to be involved with the ECO and SOCIAL actions being taken by the University of Saint Thomas and Concordia College of Moorhead, MN.

Both schools are strong supporters of Flamenco Organic’s mission of only serving Fair Trade and Organic coffee. Coffee has historically been one of the world’s most exploitative industries. Fair Trade helps to insure the quality of life for workers and helps to prevent cost-cutting practices that hurt the quality of coffee. Coffee, which is the world’s second largest traded food commodity, is also one of the most unregulated and chemically treated. That is why Organic and Fair Trade coffee is SO important to all of us.

UMG, Flamenco, UST, and Concordia also strive for sustainability. That means that we are all working to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. We do this by only selling and using Eco-conscious supplies, like cups, napkins, etc.

Some examples of our sustainability are:

UMG has solar panels on our facility which help to power the roasting equipment of the Flamenco Organic Coffee Co. UST has switched to corn-oil based cold cups and 100% recyclable napkins on campus. Concordia, Moorhead has focused on five themes: food, water, waste, energy, and transportation and are working as a WHOLE campus to make serious “green” change.

Please check out this great article below about Concordia’s sustainability 

Please check out these pictures below from the new Concordia dining facilities

Please check out these pictures below from the UST Appreciation Day 2008

Thank you and please Contact Us if you would like to learn more or would like to get your Business, College, University, or Cafe on board with the Eco and Social movement!

This can be a tuff subject to deal with for most cafes.

I ran accross this aritcle today with what I think is an excellent idea. However, as I was taught to say during my military stint; “I can neither deny nor confirm my endorsement of this idea.”

I do think this topic should be addressed as you all know too well, so think deep and hard about addressing the issue and hopefully this article will inspire some ideas.

Click this link to read the full article:  http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/127402,coffee-company-brings-on-the-guilt-trip.aspx

Thank you all for your continued support and patronage. Please do not hesitate to contact any member of our staff with any need or question. We are hear for you and your business!

Your “True” Beanhead Staff