Hi Everyone,
How are you all?
I’ll roast this weekend on Sunday the 15th and deliver and ship Monday. Please send your orders by Sunday morning, though we’ll have some extras available if you don’t get this until later in the weekend.
I’d like to ask a favor of you. Attached is a new flyer we’ve developed to explain our fundraising coffee program. If you know of a school group or non-profit organization that may be looking for a fun and easy way to raise some money, I would be grateful if you would forward this flyer to them and ask them to give me a call. Thanks in advance for your help with this.
This week, I carefully, carefully raise the lid of the Pandora’s Box of social issues in coffee. This is a broad area that encompasses every side of the human condition, to include economics, health, human rights, markets, education, weather, kindness, misery and every emotion and effect in between. And necessarily I’ll take this in small pieces in the coming weeks and months, because every side of these issues deserves to be told and understood if you drink coffee.
Today, I’d like to share some thoughts on the farmers in the world who are working to elevate the quality of coffee to its highest potential.
The best analogy to coffee quality I can think of is that of wine, perhaps now more so than ever. We know there are gradations of wine quality, starting with the stuff in the really big bottles on the bottom shelf at the store that taste just OK but get the job done, moving up into smaller bottles with marginal improvements in quality that might be in the $5 range, and upward to the $8 - $10 bottles, where we’ll stop for a moment.
These wines, often marketed under a name something like Green/Red/Blue/Orange Turtle/Bicycle/Frog/Frisbee, now seem to have achieved some level of mainstream drinkability, so they have become the “new black” of wine. You see lot of variations of these for sale now in our stores.
Then we journey on to the better wines, bearing the names of wineries and better growing regions and specific vineyards and vintages.
Coffee falls into similar categories. On the bottom shelf (with the big bottles), we have instant coffee and the lowest grades of pre-ground supermarket coffee. Alongside the $5 wine, we might find pre-ground coffee with the name of an origin country (most often Brazil or Colombia) or sometimes a roast level (dark or light). And with the Blue Duck wines are the better grades of mainstream coffees, sold ground or in whole bean form, from fancier roasters or brands and usually with a better pedigree (an origin country, of maybe even a region).
Then on the top shelf in most stores, you’ll find an empty spot next to the best wines – the best coffees out there aren’t found in mainstream stores. And honestly, most of the country hasn’t seen the best the coffee world has to offer because it is slow to arrive in the hinterland. Here, I am talking about coffees traceable back to a single grower or very small groups of growers. These are coffees that have been held apart and processed outside of the large processing plants that dominate every major growing region in the world. And most importantly for this discussion, they are coffees being grown by farmers who are very consciously working to make their coffees taste better.
These are farmers who know what their coffee tastes like (most don’t), and how to evaluate it on a scale of quality that gives them a reference point for moving their quality higher and then ideally garnering the higher prices that come with improved quality.
But here’s where the risk lies.
I have massive respect for anyone who farms for a living and does it well. Weather and bugs and hard work and the vagaries of soil conditions and unforeseen climate changes make the lives of those who grow foods for a living a challenge. Coffee farmers then layer on the gyrations of the global coffee market, where bumper crops in the major producer countries can send prices screaming downward, and in confronting these challenges, there are a number of avenues they can take to elevate the net income of their farms.
This includes steps that can be taken by any food farmer, increasing crop yields, making the farm more efficient, recycling materials from the farm to cut costs and being more careful with labor costs and supplies.
For coffee farmers, the route to a better bottom line can include certifications that translate into higher prices from buyers. You know about these, and they include organics, fair trade, shade grown, bird friendly and a new form of private certification schemes practiced by more socially conscious large roasting companies. I’ll dig into all of these in future articles.
And then there is the quest to elevate the quality of the coffee itself.
Here, I am talking about quality from the standpoint of the farmer and the inherent taste of the coffee. This is not about the quality of the roasting or the freshness of the roasted coffee or the way it is ground or the water that was used for brewing or the amount of the coffee or the brewing method. It’s about the beans.
At the farm level, there are fundamental aspects of quality, like picking the beans at the right time, processing the coffee before it ferments and properly drying the coffee, but then there is another level related to the cultivar (the variety of coffee plant), the terroir in which the coffee is grown (the special combination of geography, weather and soil related to a particular growing site) and the isolation of very special lots of coffee from other coffees grown on the farm.
When a farmer achieves the correct balance of these factors, the result is magical, a beverage on par with the finest foods and wines in the world.
And now with the new “third wave of coffee” (the first two being coffee’s beginnings as a commodity beverage and the second, the surge of awareness and quality that started in the sixties and seventies), growers and roasters are pushing coffee quality higher and higher. At the farm level, the more progressive growers have learned to taste (or “cup”) coffee with an eye to improving the quality in the cup. Small micromills (like those Tanji and I saw in Costa Rica) enable farmers to isolate individual lots of very special coffees that steer clear of the pooling of coffee by the large processors. Roasters have stopped over-roasting coffee and are working at lighter roast levels to bring out the underlying tastes of the coffee. And grinding and brewing to order (as they do at the Royal Bean) avoids the off tastes that come with pre-grinding coffee and using invasive brewing and storing methods.
So, this is a chain of respect, of the growing of the beans, the processing, the transport, the roasting and the serving.
In 2007, a microlot from the Hacienda Esmerelda farm in Panama won the “Best of Panama” competition and in the auction that followed, captured a high bid of $132 a pound (green) from a consortium of three boutique roasters from North America. This is the highest price ever paid for any coffee, but its an example of how far the quest for quality can take a farmer.
Today, nine countries reward their best coffees through “Cup of Excellence” (CoE) competitions that celebrate the very best coffees from those countries in a given year. The competitions entail both cupping (tasting) scores and auctions, and green coffee prices for the winners have ranged in recent years from just under $20 to $50 and beyond (these process go to farmers accustomed to receiving a dollar or less a pound for coffee sold into the pool system).
And perhaps most important of all, these competitions garner a lot of publicity, and raise awareness of coffee quality all over the world.
We often think of coffee in terms of a price per pound, but in actuality these very high end coffees often end up sold by the cup at prices in the $4-$6 range. This is not affordable for one’s daily cup, but I think this is a very reasonable price to pay for a cup of the very best coffee available in the entire world. Splurging on one of these great cups of coffee once a week or so would not be too much of a stretch.
But where this all starts is on the farm, and the farmers do this as their life’s work and need to get paid – and without premium payments for their investments in extra labor and micromills and sample roasting equipment and smaller batches, the whole system breaks down. The motivation goes away and growers return the relatively easier existence of growing commodity coffee.
Somewhere in the marketplace, these extraordinary coffees need to command a higher price. These higher prices empower the roaster to pay more for green coffee purchased from his or her importer, for the importer to pay more to the exporter in the origin country and for the exporter to pay more to the farmer or mill.
In densely populated urban areas and college towns where there is a lot of great coffee available, the awareness of the many facets of coffee is high and it is comparatively easy to sell whole bean coffee for $15-$20/pound and cups for $4 and more. It wasn’t always this way, and we can thank the pioneers like Alfred Peet (Peet’s Coffee) and George Howell (founder of the Coffee Connection chain that thrived in the Boston area before being bought out by Starbucks) for starting the progression of great coffee, education and availability that made this possible.
But get past these major markets, and the tastes of even the most aware of coffee consumers are still evolving.
Without the critical mass of foodie-oriented shopping streets and high population densities, higher grade coffee does not so easily sell itself. Education efforts like my newsletter and similar outreach by thousands of other small and midsized roasters are dedicated to raising awareness of great coffee – and with that, raising demand. And that demand then motivates the farmers in origin countries to try harder still.
And then the coffee gets better and better and we all benefit . . . all the way up the chain.
Starting next month, I will start to receive the new crop coffees for this year, and I’ll have some opportunities to bring you some amazing new flavors. Stay tuned.
And thanks for your support.
Enjoy the sun this weekend. We sure have earned it this winter.
Kent
