#10: What Do Coffee Producers Drink?

Welcome to Making Coffee, a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making one of the world's favorite beverages. I'm your host, Lucia Solis, a former winemaker turned coffee processing specialist. Thanks for joining this week's episode. Welcome to episode 10. I'm recording this for my Airbnb in Antigua Guatemala. I have been on the road slash away from home for the last seven weeks.

Last week I was in a remote part of Guatemala visiting a farm and was not able to record a new episode. But now I'm back and I have internet, um but I'm still in a city, so you may hear some city noises behind me. Anyway, today's episode is actually inspired by something that profoundly bothered me on this most recent client visit. It was this brief moment, a single sentence uttered by a coffee producer over breakfast.

And if I had been sitting just one seat over, I may not have even heard the comment. But I did hear it, and now I want to share it with you. So to give context as to why what he said was so upsetting, I want to go back about a year. So last year in the beginning of twenty eighteen, I was hired by a European roaster to create a unique fermentation profile for them using my eyes.

My preferred method is to be hired directly by the producer, and so it's it's rare for me to be hired by roasters, but you know, in speaking with them I saw that their situation was uh was pretty unique. This roaster worked very closely with a mill in Honduras, and they had been investing in this mill for many years, so

They had a very long relationship with them and the other thing that's rare is they purchased a hundred percent of what the mill produced. So not just specific lots that they asked for, but kind of everything that was produced.

And then they also invested in infrastructure. So they bought the mill new equipment like pulpers and dryers. And so A more common approach that I've seen is for a roaster to ask for a specific process, but they don't always agree to buy the entire lot or to even purchase the equipment needed to make the new process.

So I realized that this roaster was a little bit different, a different situation, and they were very committed to the partnership, and now that they wanted to take it to the next level of quality by having me design a fermentation profile for them. And in addition to this, they wanted to film the process to help communicate the work that they were doing, that they were doing in Honduras to their consumers in Europe.

So they hired a videographer and a photographer to film me in Honduras while I was processing the coffee. And we gathered a lot of footage of picking coffee cherries. and the yeast process at the mill and kind of my normal normal structure. Um, but they also wanted to share some elements of Honduran culture. So for example, they wanted to show the natural beauty of the country and the cuisine.

And everything on the itinerary made sense to me until I came to the last item. So the last item on this like long, like um like a shot list was uh they wanted to share the local coffee culture. And initially I thought this was very funny because I knew there wasn't a strong kind of native coffee culture in Central America. But I forgot that not everybody knows that. I think they thought that they could compare Honduran coffee culture with their European coffee culture.

And I think they thought it would be more like wine, like how French wine culture differs from American wine culture. And maybe, you know, talking about tradition versus innovation or trends. Or maybe they were looking for something more quirky, like how Americans like all their beer ice cold and are put off by room temperature beer options in England.

But this thing that they were looking for was very difficult to do because Honduras doesn't have a coffee shop culture like the United States or Europe because it's predominantly a coffee producing country, not a consuming country. In both wine and beer, both the United States and Europe have strong producing and consuming cultures. But in terms of coffee in Honduras, the locals mostly drank instant coffee, and there's not a big show about it.

And any coffee shops or coffee shop culture that exists is still developing and has been largely imported from the consumers. The coffee shop culture that I've seen is more of an interpretation of what they see in movies and television. So for me, I thought the idea of comparing American or European coffee shop culture with Honduras would not be very interesting because it would be like comparing a picture to a photocopy of that picture. Anyway.

We still had to do it. It was on the script. Uh the script called for us to film in a coffee shop, so The chute was ten days long and it took us the entire ten days and several cities to find a coffee shop that was photogenic enough and well lit enough for some footage. So I'm not saying they don't exist. It's just not a native spontaneous business. Um it's a place in the world that hasn't had a chance to develop this part of the industry, and it's just beginning.

So quick sidebar, when most people hear that I'm going to Central America for work, they often say some version of how cool, you're going to have such great coffee. Which is actually true, but only because I haul most of it myself from the United States back to Central America in my suitcase. So consuming countries pay a higher price for good coffee. So by design, the best coffee leaves the countries where it was produced.

The coffee that remains is the stuff that wasn't good enough to export and sell, so by design the locals drank the lower quality coffee. which is not the case for wine or beer. Can you imagine going to France and bringing your own wine? Or taking your own beer to Germany? It's absurd, because the best stuff or really, really good stuff is already there. But in terms of coffee, if you want to drink the best, you usually have to bring it with you.

Okay, so back to Guatemala with the group of smallholder farmers. And this term smallholder farmers To me it seems a little bit uh vague and ambiguous because what constitutes small can be different in whatever country. So the actual area of land that qualifies one as a smallholder is different in each country, but we can define a smallholder as Farmers owning a small base plot of land in which they grow subsistence crops.

and one or two catch crops, relying almost exclusively on family labor. So several groups of these farmers, both from Guatemala and even a group from Honduras, gathered this week in a remote part of Guatemala, For a training on processing practices that I teach. We were all together seated along this table with about twenty people eating breakfast. And for the last three days we had gathered twice a day at the same restaurant to eat.

And the food was phenomenal. I eat really well in Guatemala. I grew up on black beans and I challenge anyone to find better black beans than the ones made in cast iron over a wood fire. And while the food in Watemala is exceptional, the coffee was unsurprisingly terrible. To me it was undrinkable. I've mentioned that I travel with my own coffee, so each day that we ate here I brought my travel kit to the restaurant.

And this may seem rude, but it's not just something I do in Central America when I'm traveling. I've also done this at home in Cleveland, so I'm an equal opportunity offender. So but usually at home I brew um I brew it at home and then I bring my to-go mug and then I can discreetly drink that. But in this case I didn't have the time to brew beforehand, so I took it to the next level and brewed my own coffee at the table in the restaurant.

And it's hard to be discreet when grinding whole seeds at the table it's it's quite loud. And initially I felt a little self conscious about it, but I got over it because it's important to me. We like what is familiar, and most people like crappy coffee because it's what's familiar. You know, Sorry, sidebar. I I find it really annoying when I see an article asking if the price of wine really matters.

because when they do a blind taste test and compare a ten dollar bottle of wine to a two hundred dollar bottle of wine, the results will be that most people prefer the ten dollar bottle. And then the conclusion is that expensive wine is not worth the large price tag.

Now I argue that it's not because there is no quality difference, but because they are probably polling the average American whoever that is, quote unquote, the average American. But The average American doesn't regularly drink two hundred dollar bottles of wine, and so in a blind taste test, when they taste a ten dollar one, it's more recognizable, it's familiar, and therefore they say they like it better.

So I bet if you had an audience that regularly drank two hundred dollar bottles of wine and then gave them a blind sample of a ten dollar bottle, the results would be different. I remember my mom once admonished me because before I started working in the wine industry, she bought whatever value wine was available and she enjoyed it.

And then I started working for nice wineries at Napa and bringing home really nice wine and her standard change, which was okay because she wasn't usually paying for the really nice bottles. But then I left the wine industry and she lost her hookup and when she tried to go back to her value brands she found she no longer liked them and she was quite annoyed. She was upset that I had ruined her because she no longer found the same joy in cheap wine. So dear mom, I'm sorry, and you're welcome.

Anyway, Despite coming across as weird or rude, it's important for me to keep low quality coffee unfamiliar and to make high quality coffee familiar. So the more you drink something of low quality, the more it reinforces that it's a positive experience and the more you enjoy it while you do it.

For example, I also had this friend who worked at a tasting room in Napa, and she told me that even though she loved kombucha, she had to stop drinking it because it skewed her palate to liking higher levels of acetic acid, which is also known as vinegar. which is a defect in wine.

And her job was to stay sharp and detect that defect in the bottle she was pouring for customers, but her love of kombucha was compromising her ability to detect it, because she was inadvertently training herself to like a wine defect. So if you love kombucha, you probably also enjoy naturals or dry processed coffees. But anyway.

There we were, a group of producers and some coffee buyers, and to my disappointment, everyone at the table was drinking the low-quality restaurant coffee. And this drives me nuts because we were not a group of average people or even tourists. This was a group of twenty people who made a living, in some form or another, from coffee. I mentioned in episode three that if there is not good coffee to drink, I will not drink it for a while. Except at one time in Honduras and I was very sad about it.

But I will always try the coffee because there's a lot to be learned about the brewing and preparation, but I don't finish drinking it. So this morning, instead of going without my coffee, I had my kit and I decided to make my own at the table. So most people at the table saw the presentation, and it was a bit of a show. I had my own tiny jewelry scale to weigh out the seeds, 17 grams, and then I used a shiny stainless steel Japanese hand grinder, the Porlax.

Uh I asked the restaurant for a carafe of hot water and I poured the coffee and the hot water into the aero press and then took out my phone to time the extraction. And all of these things were new to the table. It looked kind of like a magic trick. Because their standard coffee preparation involves dipping a spoon into a jar of instant coffee and pouring in hot water.

Done. That's it. No grinding, no measuring, no timing. And this all leads to a very loose connection to the seed. So even though I think the arrow press method is one of the least flashy, For example, compared to a V sixty with a swirly gooseneck kettle action or even the beauty of a ChemX brewer. The arrow process is fairly simple, but what I was doing at the table was significantly more complicated than what anyone was used to.

And the part that blows my mind is that these are coffee people, in the purest sense. It's not like I was making coffee in front of a group of textile producers or ranchers. Their business, their livelihoods for generation is coffee growing and production. And yet watching me make coffee was a foreign spectacle. So over three days of making my own coffee, most of the table eventually got curious and asked for a taste.

I was drinking a coffee from a client of mine in El Salvador, a Bourbon variety fermented for thirty hours. It was underwater with selected yeast, then it was dried under shade on raised beds and expertly roasted by Phoenix Coffee in Cleveland. And what they had in their cups was anonymous, originless instant coffee.

This instant coffee was prepared without measuring the water, So actually everybody at the table, even though there was twenty people, well, eighteen people with a cup of coffee in front of them, everyone had a different experience because the concentrations were somewhere along a spectrum of too weak or too strong. And for me, I found the coffee was flat, it was lacking any acidity, body, or sweetness. The best way I can describe it is char flavored brown water.

And again, I'm used to this. This wasn't something new to me. I wasn't making my coffee to show off. I was making my own coffee because quality is important to me and I want to make high quality familiar and low quality unfamiliar.

But the reason this breakfast stood out to me was because after several people at the table had tried the coffee from the Aero Press, the general consensus was that the Aero Press was better for three main reasons. So the three reasons are it was sweet without adding sugar, it had a full body, and a strong fruity aroma. And I was glad to be showing a different example of coffee, because most producers rarely taste coffee from other countries.

and I was enjoying the discussion around the table of what people were tasting, and then there was a small break in the conversation, enough so that I could hear one voice saying, Pues claro, es porque ella lo hizo en esa cosa. He said, Well of course it tastes better. She made it in that thing. And then most of the table agreed. The consensus was that it tasted better because it was brewed in the aer. Not due to the varietal button.

not due to the nutrition program or farming practices, not due to careful select picking of ripe cherry, not due to the intentionality of processing, not due to microbe selection, not due to careful low and slow drying technique, No. In their eyes, it was because of the show I put on by brewing in the aeropress. You know, I'm used to consumers thinking that roasting and brewing are what make a coffee different and special.

I'm more likely to speak with a consumer and they tell me they like coffee from intelligentsia or blue bottle more often than someone who can name a cultivar or a producing region. As consumers, we likely think that coffee quality comes from who roasts it, not what they are roasting. But here was a table of farmers and producers who have also bought into the narrative that coffee tastes good because of roasting and brewing.

Even the people who dedicate their lives to growing and cultivating coffee, even they think that the key is in roasting and brewing, not in the daily backbreaking work they put into their farms and mills.

And this revealed to me a new facet of the quality problem. If this group of producers themselves think that what they are doing on the farm doesn't matter, how will the rest of the value chain appreciate the work done in producing countries? I don't know what the solution is yet, and that's why I'm offering it up for this discussion. I've mentioned before in other episodes how important I think it is for producers to taste their coffee and how this

you know, very basic element is r is really missing from a lot of of producers and producing regions. It's not a common practice. And that really indicated for me how important that is. It's not just for quality control. that producers should taste their own coffee, but it was to reinforce that the work that they're doing matters and impacts the quality. And if they don't ever get to taste that

that final product, then of course they think that what they do is not that important. They've never had proof of the importance of their work. So So I hope that next time you have a cup of coffee and you have the opportunity to to dig beyond just who roasted it or how it was prepared, and to find out what country did it come from, what region in that country, what cultivar is it? When is their growing season?

And to find out more about these other elements that go into the beautiful flavors that we have in our coffee cup. Thank you so much for hanging out with me this week. I really appreciate your time. And I have a newsletter that you can sign up for on my website where I share more in-depth um thoughts about these episodes as well as pictures. I have pictures of my coffee kit and that breakfast. And you can sign up for that at Lucia L-U-X-I-A dot coffee slash podcast.

Once on my website you can also see I have several videos and Um book recommendations, um other podcasts, other interviews, writings. I try to have as many resources available as possible on there. And I'll catch you next time. And remember, lights too short.