For nearly 25 years, the Starbucks coffee stamp has been part of the romance of the whole bean.  Once upon a time, if you bought whole bean coffee, a barista scooped it out of the bins, and then put a coffee stamp on your bag (and dated the bag so you’d know to use it in seven days).  By the mid-1990s, coffee started coming in one-pound FlavorLock™  packaging.  When partners sold an amount of coffee less than a whole pound, again the coffee stamp would be used to label the bag for the customer (and hopefully the partner would still write the date on the bag).  The coffee stamp is also used in coffee passports to signify that the barista has tasted that coffee.  And, baristas used to hand out a few coffee stamps here and there to children in the stores, as a fun sticker to play with.

I still think the coffee stamp is pretty fun.  I have a small collection of them, mostly from recent years.  I took them to my friend Molly at Seattle Custom Framing, and we talked about framing the stamps with her leftover mat-boards and moulding in the store.  Custom frames are built from moulding, and after the framer has cut the moulding to the right size, he or she is left with a pile of shorter pieces:

 

Actually, the same is true with mats.  After the mats have been cut to size, Molly is left with a number of much smaller scraps.  Using just the scraps she had around her business, she framed all the coffee stamps in this blog post.  She does gorgeous work.  Each framed stamp uses Conservation Clear® picture framing glass. I hope you will like them as much as I do.  She has more coffee stamps to frame, but she is squeezing them in around larger projects with firm deadlines, so it may be a while before there is a sequel to this post.  By the way, I recall the Organic Serena coffee very well.  It was discontinued by Starbucks in 2008, shortly after the Clover was launched in downtown Seattle.  It had a lively,  palate-cleansing property to it, and it was really great off the Clover.

Here are the framed coffee stamps – I just want to share them: