#12: The Dark Side of Seeking Fresh Coffee

'Cause it's like, you know, hashtag priorities. Uh and bringing coffee from home would mean that towards the end I was drinking coffee that was about two months old. And generally I don't like to drink coffee that is over two months old. because I don't like stale coffee. Um but what I found is that many of us do drink stale coffee. And maybe not on purpose, but if you're not actively paying attention to your coffee, I can assure you you're drinking stale coffee.

And then we train ourselves to like it. As I mentioned in a previous episode, we prefer what is familiar. So if we constantly drink stale coffee, we tend to prefer that profile. We think stale is normal. We think stale is normal. Familiar. And then freshness is kind of elusive, more of a concept instead of something that we actually experience. And if you buy coffee for home or others, I hope you seek whole bean instead of ground.

I admit I have bought ground coffee as a gift because I was 100% sure the recipient didn't have a coffee grinder and I did not want to buy them one, but it still hurt my soul a little bit to do that. And another thing that hurts my soul is excessive packaging in our consumer goods. So I love shopping in bulk and reducing the plastic in my life. I buy seeds and beans and grains, oils, nut butters. I even buy some beauty products in bulk to avoid excess packaging.

I make my own toothpaste because I'm trying to avoid excess plastic packaging, but where I draw the line between environmentalism and taste preference is actually in coffee. And I get so sad to see the giant barrels of bulk coffee in grocery stores. And it it's just like this tension because as much as I wanna buy things in bulk and I will buy some tea in bulk, some uh chamomile or mint, um, I've just never been tempted to buy coffee in in this way.

And by the way, this episode is not about packaging or the environmental impact. That's for another day. Today I want to talk about another aspect of quality, which is freshness. So even though I'm trying in as many areas as I can to buy in bulk and reuse my containers, I mentioned I wouldn't buy coffee in this way because first of all

It's rare to see a single origin or even a worthy blend sold this way.'Cause yes, I don't only drink single origin coffees. There's a lot of blends that I really like and I think blends can be very powerful. Um But the coffees that I like are usually not sold in this bulk way. But also, second and and more importantly, the coffee has got to be so stale sitting in that open container for who knows how long.

I d I just can't imagine that it's good. And full disclosure, I haven't actually tried it, so this is just my um my opinion, my imagination that the coffee can't possibly be good because I have not tried it. So today I want you to consider the freshness of your coffee and what you value when you drink it. And I'm going to tell you about some coffee shop visits in my search to replenish my home coffee staff. So what is causing staleness? Or put another way, what is a barrier to freshness?

In Coffee's case, oxygen is the enemy of That's why we try to keep it in the whole bean format as long as possible. So even though ground coffee is more convenient, the trade-off is that it has a lot more surface area for flavor molecules to interact with oxygen. Those molecules bind with oxygen and if they're bound up, they're no longer available for us to perceive them as aroma or flavor in our cup, and this leads to stale and less flavorful coffee.

And I think about this a lot because most of my work is trying to pack as much flavor into the seed as possible. All my fermentation protocols are designed to increase the concentration of these flavor molecules. But too much oxygen at the wrong time and those flavor molecules that we created in the tank can be lost. And grinding the coffee way before it's ready to drink is one of the ways most of my work is lost. If you buy preground coffee, the chances of staleness increase dramatically.

Besides oxygen, another important gas to consider is carbon dioxide. As coffee is roasted, it releases carbon dioxide gas, and we can see this bubbles, uh the gas bubbles escaping when we're brewing a coffee that was recently ground and roasted. As time passes, the carbon dioxide will volatilize on its own, and as you grind and brew your coffee, it will release fewer and fewer bubbles when we pour hot water over the ground.

So you can notice this. Next time you make coffee, notice how many bubbles come out the first time you make coffee when you first open that bag compared to coffee made from the last few grams. In the typical coffee bag, the coffee's own carbon dioxide can protect it against oxygen, and it protects it by displacing any oxygen that may be around in the environment. But this supply eventually runs out.

When we want to preserve green coffee, and green coffee meaning the coffee seeds before roasting, we vacuum seal them. So we remove the oxygen to prevent them from getting stale. And it's still rare for green coffee to be exported from producing countries this way, but the roasters that are very serious about quality and can afford the extra expense are increasingly asking producers or exporters to ship their green coffee in vacuum sealed bags.

in an effort to preserve the green coffee as long as possible and avoid any aromas that could contaminate it on a journey. So remember that green coffee can sit on a truck or warehouse for several weeks before getting on a container ship, also for several weeks, and then can sit in a warehouse at its destination, again for several weeks before it's ready to be roasted.

All this time it's subject to its environment and the smells of trucks and chips and warehouses, so preserving the coffee during its journey is important for cup quality.

And you'd think you could apply the same idea to preserve roasted coffee, that is, to vacuum seal roasted coffee to keep it fresh longer. However, this tends not to work because as you vacuum the oxygen out, you can also pull out the carbon dioxide gas that protects the coffee against becoming stale. So you inadvertently end up accelerating the process that we're trying to prevent.

So what we can do instead of vacuum sealing is add another inert gas, like nitrogen, to displace the oxygen, but it also creates positive pressure so that it doesn't draw the carbon dioxide out of the roasted seed. And as I was going to be gone for four months, this method made the most sense to preserve the coffee I was bringing with me.

So I was lucky enough, um Phoenix Coffee in Cleveland packaged about eight ounces of whole roasted coffee with nitrogen to prolong the shelf life. And I don't mean eight ounces total, we had a couple pounds in eight ounce packets that were And despite this extra effort, by day sixty the coffee I brought was showing its age. And what I mean by that is that most of the fruity component was gone. It was tasting a little bit flat and like paper.

I think it could have lasted longer, but the coffee was in my carry-on and I was moving around a lot, subjecting the bag to frequent dramatic temperature fluctuations. So imagine it sitting in the back of a truck as we're in the back of a truck with the sun hitting it as we're driving back and forth to two different farms.

So the gases inside were expanding and expanding in the heat and then contracting whenever uh like the sun went down or when it was nighttime. And this this temperature cycling accelerated the aging process. So for me, consistency is the key to quality and I had very inconsistent temperatures and therefore very low quality. Talking about temperature and aging reminds me of when I worked in the wine industry and I would get asked about you know what is the best temperature to store wine.

And this depends on the type of wine you are storing, whether it's red or white, and then also the purpose of that storage, long-term cellaring or normal consumption. But what I found was that most people would make their wine cellar too cold and while cooler temperatures are best at preserving and slowing down the aging process, right, so if we're thinking low temperature, slow down the rate of reaction.

What happened was if it was too cold, it would be hard to maintain at that really low temperature and the cooling system would sometimes fail or lapse. And in my opinion, it's better to be slightly warmer but maintain a temperature consistently than to strive for really cold but not be able to sustain it and then subject the wine to cycles of cooling and then slight warming and then cooling again when it kicks in. Because again we're talking about that expansion and contraction of of gases.

You know, it's funny. From my previous days in the wine industry, we thought about aging in a very different way. In wine, it's generally desirable to allow your product to age, and with specialty coffee, we are obsessed with freshness. Freshly ground, freshly brewed, freshly roasted, fresh harvest, And while I wholeheartedly agree with the importance of a freshness window for roasted coffee, I think our singular focus on freshness has a dark side.

Alright, maybe that's a little too dramatic. Not a dark side, but at least a flip side, at least another facet to to the concept. I think this obsession with freshness can be disproportionately valued to coffee quality. I've noticed more cafes try to roast their own coffee because if they roast it in-house they can guarantee it to be fresh and then use that freshness as a selling point.

I think shops can do a really good job of roasting, but probably not as good as a full-time roaster, someone who is dedicated to the craft. If all you do is roast coffee, if you were trained and that's your only job, you're going to have to be better at it than someone who does it sometimes. And this concept of roasting your your own coffee values freshness above roasting skill or even the quality of the green coffee.

For example, it may be a low nutrient, underripe fruit, it could be poorly roasted, but if a business can claim it's freshly roasted, it can overshadow the other qualifiers. As if something roasted recently can make up for it being roasted with less skill. I personally would prefer something roasted a week ago by a skilled roaster than something roasted today by an amateur.

The fact that it was roasted more recently cannot make up for the lack of skill in a novice roaster's technique. Yes, freshness is important, but it shouldn't overshadow the craft and skill of roaster. I'm gonna work on an episode about home roasting machines. I find this topic you know very interesting and again I'm seeing this kind of come up more with new models that are released on the market or will be released soon. So if you have any experience with them or your thoughts I'd love to hear.

Like do you have one? Would you buy a home roaster? Are you interested in roasting your own coffee and haven't done it because there's no machine yet? Or is this something that you would never consider and you'd like to leave it to the professional? Um please send me your comments to lucia. Anyway, back to aging coffee.

We don't talk about coffee vintages, and by vintage I mean coffee from different harvest years. And if we do, it's generally negative and we call it past crops. And we would never use a term like this in wine. The older harvests are interesting, they are revered, they are time capsules that hold valuable information for the winemaker. Tasting several vintages is an important tool for quality control in the wine and

When I worked in Napa Valley, at least once a year, but usually more than once, we would sit down and open bottles from as far back as available. Sometimes it would only be the last five years, and other times we could have twenty years of the same wine side by side. And this was incredibly helpful to taste the grapes from the same farms over the years and see the effects of nature.

We could look back and taste the effects of a drought or too much rain too late in the year. We could taste an early spring or a cool fall. We could taste when a new winemaker was hired because of how the style had changed. But we were also able to taste the intrinsic qualities of the fruit, the elements underneath winemaking style or climate differences. For example, the variety and the characteristics of the soil.

Regardless of the season, there were some blocks of Cabernet Sauvignon that had an unmistakable bell pepper quality, and there was another block of Cabernet Franc that we could recognize by its tannin structure. The specific growing climate and the winemaking style could turn the intensity up or down or add other qualities, but there were some elements that were always there underneath all of it that allowed us to recognize

Of these, uh some of these blocks and some of this fruit. And this practice of tasting many vintages side by side is helpful to discern if you were a skilled winemaker or if you were just geographically lucky. This leads me to one of the biggest wine misconceptions I've come across. I think it's a misconception that aging wine will definitely improve it, because some wines are made to be consumed quickly and aging them will significantly deteriorate the quality.

While aging can improve and change the wine, it's not always true for all wines. So the formula of inexpensive wine plus time equals better wine is a false one. Or perhaps this works if a wine is so defective that time dulls and fades the defects, but it's not actively improving wine. It's passively making it less bad.

I talked a little bit about this in episode four regarding uh coffee, the double fermentation or kind of the soaking in the Kenya process. So like the coffee, I don't believe the wine is improving. It's just becoming less offensive. And part of the barrier for the coffee industry to examine vintage coffee is that the preservation methods don't exist yet.

Not only is it difficult to preserve roasted coffee as we've already talked about, but it's even difficult to preserve the viability of the seeds. And this is surprising because green coffee is significantly more robust than roasted coffee. So for example, we can keep an apple seed in storage much longer than an apple fruit. But apples have orthodox seeds, which means we can do that. We can store them for years or decades. But unfortunately, coffee has recalcitrant seeds.

meaning they do not survive freezing and drying, making them difficult to store beyond two or three years, which is better than the two to four weeks of roasted coffee, but it's still not long enough for a vintage evaluation. However, as freezing and drying technology catches up, I think this will change and I think it will be very positive for producers and consumers to have the opportunity to taste coffee from the same farms year over year side by side.

But let's get back to me and my depleted stash. So halfway through the trip, here I am, and I don't have any more coffee. And the positive part of running out is the need to explore more coffee shops around. Usually I enjoy exploring just out of curiosity, but now I'm visiting shops on While I have been on this latest trip, I have been to several specialty coffee shops in Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

And I'm a little disappointed by what they are borrowing from our American coffee shop culture. So I want to encourage higher consumption of quality coffee in producing countries. And coffee shops are key to that. Coffee shops are where people will find the higher quality coffee and the preparation. I think another crisis facing the coffee industry is the aging population of farmers.

The average age of a coffee farmer is in the sixties. The younger generation doesn't want to farm coffee. And who can blame them? It's hard work and an insecure living. But the younger generation is interested in the roasting side, and I think having high quality shops to introduce the next generation to coffee is key to coffee survival.

I've heard of a few young people who start with the art of brewing, then progress to roasting, and then take an interest in their family's farm and begin to produce and process coffee. So my overall hypothesis is that more coffee shops in producing countries are essential and a positive thing. However, there is something that continually bothers me when I visit most of the coffee shops in producing countries.

While specialty shops in producing countries are helping to elevate coffee drinking culture, which is important, don't get me wrong, um I find a missed opportunity to elevate coffee itself and more specifically coffee production. Which is the strength of the coffee shops in producing countries. It's something that they have that coffee shops in America don't have access to, and I've noticed that very few are leveraging that advantage.

Most shops are elevating the coffee drinking experience and the art of brewing, but they are failing to also elevate one of their biggest strengths, which is the cultivation and production of coffee. Most shops I have visited, like many shops in the US, have a strong emphasis on brewing. The list of methods is featured more prominently than the coffee they serve.

I see large sandwich boards and menus filled with cute graphics of a French press or V sixty or Arrow Press or Clever Dripper or a Siphon or a Chemex or a Kalita or a Mochapie. In addition to latte, cappuccino, and flavored coffee options. I've been to cafes with menus that look like books because there are so many options. I think an average US coffee drinker can identify more brewing methods than they can identify coffee-growing countries or even coffee cultivars.

Which is also not the case in wine. Even the most novice wine drinker generally has an idea if they prefer Chardonnay to Sauvignon Blanc or Zinfandel. Knowing wine cultivars is part of knowing what style of wine you like. And the cultivars and coffee are also responsible for a significant part of the flavor profile, and yet very few people, very few coffee lovers, very few coffee enthusiasts can even name a single cultivar.

Uh except perhaps maybe gave me a little bit The fact that most people who call themselves coffee fanatics and coffee enthusiasts and who maybe even drink it every day

The fact that they can't name a single coffee cultivar is an obstacle to changing the coffee landscape for coffee producers. And that's something that is really core to my work. This is something that I'm really interested in is I don't think that we're going to make things better for coffee producers if we also don't change our opinion of the product that we're drinking.

And if people in coffee producing countries are showing up to coffee shops, in coffee producing countries, and the first thing they see is a giant list of brewing methods, I think this subconsciously reinforces the idea that the main quality determinant of coffee is the brew method, not the quality of the fruit. It lets us walk into a shop and say, I want a ChemX or I want a V60. And we're using those metrics to identify the coffee that we are drinking.

instead of using the region or the name of the farm or the name of the producer, the variety of coffee plant, or the processing method. And by processing method I mean whether it's a honey, a washed, or a natural. And if we use those metrics to identify what coffee we liked, we could start to make connections. We could start to connect these different attributes to the type of coffee that we liked, and then we would become more informed consumers of coffee.

Like what if instead of a long list of brew methods you had a long list of producers, or growing regions, or cultivars, or processing? And I'm to be realistic, I don't expect this to be the case when I walk into a Dunkin' Donuts. That's not the audience. But if we're going to a specialty shop In a coffee-producing country, I think there is a unique opportunity to change the conversation, and yet many are still copying the model that we have in the US.

Shops in consuming countries don't have access to raw material, so they have to focus on their strengths, which are roasting and brewing and presentation. But in producing countries they have a strength that consuming countries don't. they are uniquely able to talk about regions and climates and cultivars and processing, all of which influence flavor and make the coffee unique and interesting and that you can usually visit within a few minutes away from that coffee shop.

So I see that these shops are trying to elevate coffee, but they inadvertently end up reinforcing for newer audiences that what matters most is the brewing and roasting, not the cultivation, not the choices made at the farm and the mill. How will consumers and farmers alike value the seed and the agriculture when a large part of coffee culture ignores them in favor of pretty brewers and kettles and latteards?

And don't get me wrong, I like a pretty kettle and a chemics brewer too. I think the tools are important, but I think we put a disproportionate amount of attention on how we make coffee instead of what coffee we are making. I don't think the method should be more important than the quality of the coffee.

And there are two shops that I've been to that did this really well. There's Viva Espresso and Biscuit Factory in San Salvador. These two shops blew me away with the knowledge they have about coffee and in their presentation about this information. The focus was the coffee and education, and yes, the brewing was excellent, but it didn't steal the show. So if you ever find yourselves in San Salvador, I highly recommend trying to visit either or both of these shops.

Biscuit Factory had a menu that was as thick as a book, but the pages were filled with profiles of the farms and the producers who cultivated the coffee. When you walk into Viva Espresso, there is this huge map of the country over the brew bar and the cashier that identifies all of the regions where the coffee comes from and the flavor differences.

And they also have several brew methods, and you can ask for your favorite, but that's not what distinguishes the coffee. They're really playing to their strengths, they're saying that. They have access to these producers. They have access to these coffees. And these coffees are interesting and unique. And they're highlighting that.

And then they're letting the brewing be a supporting character in telling that story, brewing something well so that it doesn't distract from the product that you're tasting. And if you want to see some pictures from both of these shops, I took pictures of the menus and the coffee because I was just so impressed with what they did, you can sign up for my newsletter and that's at

lucia.coffee slash podcast and lucia is l-i-a. Or if you're listening to this after that newsletter has come out, I'll probably have some pictures up on my website because I just I'm so impressed with their work. Thanks for hanging out with me today and I hope next time you order a cup of coffee you'll see if there's any information you can find out to start identifying your preferences.

Try asking what farm it's from. Ask who the producer is. Ask about the cultivar. Ask about the processing style. And if they can't answer those questions for you, maybe try and find a shop that can answer those questions, that is interested in educating their consumer. Because remember, life's too short to drink bad coffee. I'll catch you guys next time.