30 Interesting Coffee Facts From Intelligentsia State of the Cup

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Coffee Seminar

Geoff Watts shared some of the wisdom he's learned about global specialty coffee production.

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21. When you see customers coming in and getting upset that you’re charging $3 for a cup, and then you realize how much work it took to create that one little cup, it takes about five pounds of cherry to produce a single pound of green coffee, and then we roast it, you lose more weight, so it goes down to 80% of the original weight. So it actually takes tons of coffee to sell coffee during the week at your store.

22. The drying process, really important. If you want a great result, you have to be turning the coffee constantly as it’s drying. Otherwise it gets over-dried in some parts and other parts it ends up being not uniform, and it doesn’t roast right, and you end up having – there’s a taste, sort of like a starchy taste, a gritty texture, or dryness, that can result from overheating coffee…You’ve got to pay somebody to be out there all day long, for seven to 10 days, raking the coffee over and over to make sure it gets dry uniformly. Africa typically uses raised beds, which is a great system, because air can come underneath and it’s easy to apply shading over it to reduce the impact of the sun.

23. This is a particular urban common site in Sumatra. This is how a lot of coffee around the world is dried, but it’s not really ideal because you have chickens around in the coffee, you’ve got kids playing on the coffee, you’ve got dogs sleeping on the coffee because it’s nice and warm. You’ve got cars driving through it and you’ve got exhaust fumes blowing on the coffee. Unfortunately that describes a lot of coffee that’s being produced in the world.

24. We’ve been working with the farmers all along, trying to get everything right. Then at the end we have to sit down and roast each sample, one by one. Sometimes we’ll get as many as 300 samples from a single country in a single harvest season, and we have to taste each one individually, grade them and we’ll typically take just the top 20%.

25. Direct Trade is something that we restarted back in 2003 because we were very dissatisfied with what the other options were out there. We’d been working with Fair Trade for many years back then, and the more I traveled to producing countries, and the more I got involved directly with the cooperative, the more I saw that all the things I assumed to be true weren’t necessarily true, and really it wasn’t enough for me from a quality perspective or a sustainability perspective. It wasn’t enough, so we decided to try to figure this out ourselves. We developed a Direct Trade program…We are trying to work directly with specific producers – not just in a buyer/seller relationship – but as partners in quality coffee, where we each have a job to do. Our job is to take care of the coffees here, to roast them well, to find good markets for them, and to teach people about coffee. Their job is to do all the things they need to do to actually produce a great coffee. And by working together we can accomplish a lot.

26. Tiered pricing is critical because it rewards coffees that turn out better. We don’t just pay one farm one rate. We pay different prices for coffees from the same farm because of specific qualities that the coffees have. Ultimately the quality and the price are linked together in a linear way, so as the quality goes up, so does the price. We have different tiers. If it scores an 88, they get 30 cents more per pound than a coffee that scored an 86, and you keep moving up like that.

27. I spend a lot of time in east Africa, and I’ve learned a lot about some of the coffee processing techniques there that bring out these really vibrant characteristics in the coffee and go back to Honduras and teach a farmer there how to do that with their coffee, and vice versa, so we’ve become sort of a carrier of information, importing information and sort of best practice techniques form place to place. Transparency, thus, is critical. We use something called the Transparency Contract, which is designed to basically upend the traditional chain, open up that black box. There’s a traditional supply chain in coffee, where coffee goes from a farmer to a collector to miller to exporter to trader to broker to roaster and then the retailer, and then to the consumer. It changes hands sometimes up to eight times, and each time, the transparency stops with each step it takes. So the guy that’s buying doesn’t know what happened before it got to them. Most coffees that are bough and sold in the world, it’s impossible to say exactly what the primary producer, the farmer, was paid.

28. Coffee is harvested in most countries only one time per year, just like most fruits. Coffee is a perennial that has one main harvest season, so in Guatemala, they harvest from November until March. That means that those coffees are going to be arriving here in about a month, and then they’re going to be really fresh the next six, seven, eight months, but if you buy a Guatemalan coffee in January or February, chances are that you’re drinking a coffee that is well over a year old already, that was harvested a whole year ago, and let me tell you that coffee is not like wine, in that it does not get better with age. It just gets worse and worse and worse and worse, because there are all these organic acids and sugars in the coffee that degrade over time. They slowly degrade, and at the end of it, all you’re left with are starches, cellulose, basically, and that’s why old coffees tend to taste woody, because everything else is gone.

29. What we try to do is manage our inventory in a way so that we’re selling coffees in their peak, when they’re at their prime vibrancy, they’ve got all their life in them, they’ve got all their sugars, and we try to run out of them before they fall off. So what we do is focus during this period of the year – from March to November – we’re going to be focusing mostly on coffees from the northern hemisphere, from Latin America, from parts of east Africa, Central America. Once we get to December, we’ll switch and start using coffees from below the equator, from the Southern Hemisphere, from Bolivia, from Peru, Colombia, Brazil, from Tanzania, other parts of east Africa. So that way, by following the harvests, we can always have fresh coffee, and we’re not selling old coffee. Coffee, it’s not like a Twinkie.

30. coffee really is one of the most complex beverages known to man. They say that wine has 180 to 200 individual organic components that contribute to aroma and flavor. With coffee, they’ve identified over 800 different components that contribute to aroma and flavor. In a way, you can say that it’s four times as complex a beverage as wine. You’ve seen how many different things can go wrong along the way, and usually do. So it’s very difficult to process coffee. It’s more difficult than creating a great wine or great beer or any other beverage known to man.

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Joshua Lurie

Joshua Lurie founded FoodGPS in 2005. Read about him here.

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