Hello, friends. And welcome to a new episode of Making Coffee. This is episode 68. As I record this, it is December. Nick and I are preparing to host the next cohort of FTCs and begin a new harvest, which is wild because a coffee from the last harvest has only just arrived in the United States. Shipping from Guatemala to the United States shouldn't normally take this long, but there were some unexpected shipping delays, so it's taken almost a year for this coffee to get to its destination.
The green coffee will be available for purchase from Yellow Rooster Coffee Imports out of Tampa, Florida. I'll share more information in the coming days on availability and quantities. You know, I often get asked why I chose to leave the wine industry and hop over to coffee. There are many reasons, but one important one was that at the time coffee came calling, I was working for a very expensive winery, a very exclusive winery. And exclusivity has always made me feel a little uneasy.
I like making things, and people love wine, but due to the price point, not too many people could taste the wine that I helped make. During my time at Opus One, a single bottle was 250. Today, a single bottle is 525 Perhaps even fewer people are able to taste this wine today compared to 10 years ago. There are a lot of wine drinkers in the world, but one allure of the coffee industry was that there are so many more coffee drinkers.
I thought that if I made the move to coffee, I felt like I would have more in common with more people. And making coffee, processing coffee, is one of my favorite ways to spend my time. But it doesn't feel fully satisfying unless other people get to taste it.
So all that to say, I am eagerly awaiting when I can share when this coffee from Guatemala will be available, and in a few months I will also have some coffee from the previous FTC in Kenya available in the U. S. So if you're in the United States and would like to buy green coffee or roasted coffee, please sign up to my newsletter, which is where I will announce coffee sales and all that information on how to get samples.
And I'm directing you to my email newsletter because this podcast is not on a regular schedule, and this will be especially true for the next few months. Like I said, we're hosting two fermentation camps. I have a private consulting client that I'm going to go visit, so I'll be traveling for that. We are starting a new coffee harvest, uh, let's not forget Christmas and the end of the year holidays. And then, of course, during harvest time is when we have a lot of visitors.
So all of those things contribute to keeping me from making new episodes. However, I do want to say that even though the podcast is taking a break during this busy harvest time, I'm still regularly doing office hours for our community. So office hours definitely don't take a break. And office hours are, I don't know, it's been, it's been a really fun, surprising evolution of the podcast because it's like a live podcast, but with listener participation.
So I'm not just speaking to myself into a void. And in fact, today's episode was first workshopped during a recent session of office hours. and the newsletter is also where I announce future office hour dates, and then where I send the replay in case you missed the live session. Alright, that's enough introduction. What are we talking about today?
Well, you clicked on this title because it's about fermentation versus germination, and yes, that is the subject matter, but the over story is about the evolution of coffee appreciation. And I hope to inspire coffee appreciation in you through a historically ignored medium, coffee drying. I have been trying to make this episode for years, but I couldn't figure out how to make it come together. Coffee drying is tremendously important to quality, but it's often overlooked because it's Well, dry.
Which is a synonym for boring. Well friends, this is not to be a dry episode about drying. So if you're skeptical that copy drying can be fascinating, please hold your judgment and stick around. But before we talk about the final stage of processing, We must first review how we got into this perspective. Why have we ignored coffee drying for basically the entire history of specialty coffee?
Most of you who hang out in this corner of the internet will agree that specialty coffee is a young industry. Most of you will also agree that quality has not been the principal driving factor in coffee prices. Coffee was mostly about caffeine, the functional effects, not the pleasure of flavors. And when coffee drinkers did begin to care about taste and quality, the first place they looked to was the roasting. The older history of coffee is that quality was largely ascribed to roasting style.
Brands would use words like Italian roast, French roast, or city roast as a quality differentiator. How the seeds were roasted mattered more than where the seeds were grown or even the genetics of the coffee. You could buy green coffee from anywhere, at whatever price, because it's not what made the coffee special. The thinking was that how you apply heat to transform the green coffee is what made it taste different.
This attitude created the anonymity and interchangeability of commodity coffee that this new brand of specialty coffee seeks to rectify. We now know that roasting of course matters to flavor and quality, but also where the coffee seeds are grown and the variety also matters to quality. All of these things come together. And if you listen to this podcast, we might take for granted that coffee from different countries tastes different. Different.
Of course Kenyan coffee tastes different from Sumatran coffee. Of course Brazil tastes different from coffee grown in Ethiopia. It's easy to forget that for so much of its history, coffee was just coffee, a single aroma note. Many years ago, I was listening to an interview with a popular fiction author. I don't remember much about the interview except for a part where the author was describing his love of chocolate.
His new book had nothing to do with chocolate, but the author mentioned it as a new hobby of his. He was talking about his favorite chocolate origins, how he could taste the difference between chocolate from Nicaragua and chocolate from Ghana. It wasn't a brag, just a fact. But the interviewer was stunned. He treated this information of tasting a chocolate bar and guessing the country of origin as if this author was getting information directly by communicating with spirits.
So like, you just taste it and you know where it's from? He asked. This was about 15 years ago, and I have to admit that at the time, I identified more with the interviewer. I too thought it was really special. Wait, you can taste something and just tell me where it's from? The interviewer and I both felt like we had witnessed a magic trick. Which reminds me of the following quote by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke.
Which is, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Shortly after hearing that interview, I started sensory training in my previous life as an analogist in Napa Valley, and I learned not only to identify chemically synthesized compounds like vanillin from the natural aromas like vanilla, but also to identify the origin. I trained my nose to identify Mexican vanilla, Tahitian vanilla, or vanilla grown in Madagascar. And well, that's it.
That type of practice turned what originally felt like magic into something quite ordinary. I lost some of that magic. So much so that it's hard for me to remember what my experience of coffee was before I started working in coffee. I feel too close to it. It's like trying to remember my life before my siblings were born. I am the oldest. I've lived many years before they existed, but now I can't remember that time. I only remember my life with them in it.
I came to coffee later in life, later than most people, and yet it's hard for me to remember my experience of coffee in the before times. And while that's true for coffee, Even today, all these years later, I can clearly remember the feeling of being amazed that someone could identify the origin of cacao from tasting a chocolate bar.
And this is particularly embarrassing to admit, because at that point I was already familiar with connecting how Sauvignon Blanc grapes grown in New Zealand or California or France were completely different. Grapes felt familiar, but somehow cacao still managed to invoke a sense of awe in me. I took grapes for granted then. I take coffee for granted now. But somehow, cacao has managed to escape this fate. Do you take for granted that coffees from different countries taste differently?
Do you know that there are many people for whom that geographical identification is still a mystery, and can still be considered in the realm of magic? Whether or not it feels like magic to you or is old hat, we can agree that more consumers are learning to value and identify the noticeable flavor differences associated with different countries. So besides roasting profile, another early challenge for appreciating coffee flavor was a country where the seeds were grown.
In our appreciation of coffee, we have graduated from valuing roasting to noticing origin, and today we find ourselves in a place where a podcast like this one can exist because we know the importance of processing. That's what we talk about the most together. The fermentation and the microbes of coffee. Processing can be a powerful way to add value and complexity to coffee, and I have advocated for using microbes as a way for producers to have more flexibility in their offerings.
For example, most of you listening will have a flavor connection to dry process or natural coffee. Something like a heavier body and more fruit forward. And perhaps you also have a flavor connection to washed coffees as being brighter and maybe cleaner tasting, higher acid. Very clearly, these two methods produce different tasting coffees. And once people learn which profile they like, they tend to seek one out and maybe stay away from the other.
However, these coffees are not just different in flavor. More importantly, the amount of labor, effort, infrastructure, climate, and general resources it takes to produce these methods are also very different. And the skills to know when you've made a good version of that are completely different skills. This is why I care about this topic. Not because of the flavor, but because of the effort.
Most producers still believe that the only way to get a flavor of a washed coffee, meaning a clean and bright cup, is to do the washed method. And conversely, the way to get a heavy bodied and fruit forward profile is to make a natural. Most coffee buyers think that these methods are interchangeable, so they frequently ask producers to make one or the other, as if they are arriving in a bakery and are choosing between a cake and a muffin.
But these methods are so different and require different skills and climates that it would be like going to a bakery that specializes in desserts and asking for a burger. For many small coffee producers, they have been processing coffee one way, either washed or natural. It's very rare that historically they produced both, had the equipment for both, and did both styles well. So usually asking them to make the switch is not as easy as swapping some ingredients.
And even though it's not easy, many producers still do it want to differentiate their coffee. They want to reach new markets. They build a new facility, they buy stainless steel bioreactors, or build a hundred new raised beds. They buy new equipment and construct washing channels. They approach it by changing the external environment, the infrastructure, the equipment. I'm not saying this doesn't work, of course it does, but I do believe for many there is an easier way.
One central thesis to my work with coffee producers is that changing processing protocols is not the only way to get a new flavor profile. Instead of changing the whole environment and equipment, often we can just swap microbes to achieve a similar result. This matters because most Central American coffee producers have traditionally produced coffee in a washed manner. The wet mills are built to be efficient in this system.
But now that natural and fruity coffees are popular, the advice is to change the style of processing to meet the consumer trends. This is challenging for many producers because our Central American climates are more humid than areas in Africa where the natural process is traditionally used. Central America also has a general lack of labor that I haven't seen during my work in Africa.
When producers in humid climates, used to making washed coffees, are asked to make naturals, many face mold issues and see their quality decrease instead of increase. The coffees don't behave the same way because the climate is not adequate for that type of processing. This leaves coffee producers with the option of risking the quality of their coffee to potentially reach a new market, or maybe not participating at all. But there is a third option.
Instead of changing the infrastructure of processing, instead of ditching your fermentation tanks and washing channels for endless raised African beds, I propose to use your wash method and change the microbes. I propose to keep using the wash method and change the microbes to get closer to the flavor profile of a natural. By swapping microbes, we can make wash coffees that taste more like naturals, or conversely, natural processed coffees that taste more like washed.
This efficiency has been interpreted by some as trickery. This leads us to a tension we have in specialty coffee about process forward coffees. the term process forward to encompass a style of processing where the country of origin or the genetics of the variety are secondary characters in the flavor story. An example would be anything that can be described as funky. When you get more funky flavor than genetic expression, That's a process forward coffee.
If any of the flavor notes include the words whiny, alcoholic, boozy, or whiskey, this is a process forward style. But I think this could also refer to something like a geisha processed by carbonic maceration. The carbonic maceration is a method that imparts a strong character that can often overpower the delicate genetics of a geisha. In fact, one criticism I've heard of so called anaerobic coffees is that they are starting to taste the same.
An anaerobic Bourbon from El Salvador is often indistinguishable from an anaerobic Castillo from Colombia. The process that was supposed to pluck these coffees from obscurity by creating differentiated flavors is the very thing that is dragging them back into interchangeability. Process forward coffees were supposed to be the answer to give producers a visible role and to differentiate them from commodity coffee. And yet, we find ourselves in a very similar place where we started.
Which is, Buyer's looking for trendy buzzwords to put on a label instead of an identity. So there is a tension here with processing. There's a strong reaction against process forward coffees. And I believe at the heart of the matter is the question of authenticity of flavor. No one wants to feel like they have been tricked. And if we can use processing to make one thing taste like another, isn't this trickery? How would one even do this? Let me introduce you to my friend and FTC alum, Julie.
Julie manages a 1. 5 acre diversified agroforestry coffee orchard in Oahu, Hawaii. Julie's personal preference is washed coffees, but 1. 5 acres is not big enough to build a wet mill facility. And even if Julie had infinite funds to build a wet mill, I doubt that she would, because we all know how water intensive the washing process is. A traditional wet mill can use up to 3, 000 liters of water to produce a single bag of green coffee.
And, uh, In this case, I'm talking about the really big operations that produce several containers of coffee per year. A small holder using manual equipment uses much less water, like 400 liters for one bag of green coffee. But if you do a natural process and manually sort instead of floating your cherries, you could easily use zero water, which means zero waste water, zero pollution, and it's a much more environmentally friendly process. way of processing coffee.
Julie has a Bachelor's of Science in Tropical Agriculture and Environment, with a concentration in Environmental Soil Science from the University of Hawaii and a Master's in Science in Tropical Plants and Soil Science from the University of Hawaii, specializing in agrovoltaic systems. Julie prefers a flavor of a washed coffee, something with higher acidity, brightness, and clarity, but she can't justify the wash process both financially, but also philosophically. So Julie turns to microbes.
She can use very minimal water to process her cherries with added microbes to approximate the flavors of a washed coffee. This leads to significant water savings, equipment savings, and a natural that tastes more like a washed coffee. Efficiency or trickery? For me, this falls squarely in the category of efficiency, of, using your resources well. Anything that would consider this type of processing trickery, for me, really misses the point. It really misses the larger possibilities.
We have come a long way in our appreciation of fermentation. So much so that many of us may have forgotten that the word fermentation actually used to be a negative word in coffee, because it signaled a defect. And even today, many can still use the word fermento to describe something that has gone wrong, an overactivity of microbes, of higher acid production, basically putrefaction. And for many, the word fermentation is interchangeable with rot. or rotting.
Because fermentation is a process by which microbes found naturally on the skin of fruits remove the mucilage for free and liberate the seed to be able to dry it. The fermentation step was seen as a high risk step. The goal was to avoid defects. The worst case scenario is that the fermentation step ruined the coffee and gave it a defect that made the coffee taste rotten or spoiled. Conversely, the best a producer could hope was to not ruin the coffee.
Those were the two options facing a producer regarding fermentation. Either ruining the coffee or preserving the assumed quality of the fruit. Making the fermentation be neutral or undetectable was the goal of most producers, and continues to be the goal of most producers in the commodity space today. For much of the history of coffee production, fermentation has been seen as a necessary evil and an unfortunate reality of coffee production.
This is one of the biggest cultural shocks I experienced in 2014 when I started working with coffee, because I could not disagree more with this idea. The place where fermentation takes place, the wet mill, in Spanish is called a beneficio, translated to a benefit. And yet the fermentation was still demonized, and most producers wanted me to help them shorten or eliminate the fermentation altogether.
My work in the last 10 years has been to turn the beneficio into a place where we can benefit the coffee, where we can improve the coffee using the same tool that most producers have avoided. I think we're finally there. I feel very comfortably there in, in that concept. We are at a place where specialty coffee and fermentation are friends and not enemies. Fermentation is no longer seen as a necessary evil, but an opportunity to add complexity, value, and identity.
And why have we made it, I don't know, 20 minutes into this episode when I said that this episode is about drying and not fermentation? Well, it's because drying is still seen today like we saw fermentation 15 years ago. Fermentation was seen as a step that at worst ruined coffee and at best did nothing, was neutral. And I have noticed that we believe the same of the drying phase. We're treating it in a very similar way. We were wrong then and we are wrong again.
Most producers I have worked with see the drying phase as an inconvenience. It takes the longest and therefore creates a bottleneck for workflow. Everyone I know is always trying to speed up drying and shorten this phase of processing. And it's in seeking speed that most of the damage is done. I think the seed is seen like wet laundry. A wet item of clothing is pretty useless. Only when it's dry do we recognize its value. To get value out of the item, we just need to get the water out.
The essence of the fabric and the function is the same. But getting the water out is what makes the t shirt useful. Similarly, a wet coffee seed is not useful. Only once dry can it be sold and roasted and enjoyed. Drying is seen as this annoying step, a barrier to turning something unuseful into something useful. It is this reasoning that has lowered the potential of so many good coffees. The need for speed has led to a brutalizing of coffee seeds.
High temperature, high air flow, no rest, racing to dryness. And true. Most specialty coffee knows that it's best to lower peak temperatures and slow down a bit. There is an emerging consciousness, a movement towards gentle drying. But this approach is still about reducing risk, about damage control, we know we can ruin coffee with bad drying. And the best case scenario is preserving inherent quality, being neutral, with our drying so that we don't ruin the work that Mother Nature did.
Many still think of drying like we used to think of fermentation. We know we can really screw up our coffee if we do it wrong, but we still don't see how we can use it to make our coffee better. And friends, how you dry the coffee can absolutely make your coffee better. A producer's choices are no longer to either be neutral or ruin coffee. There's always a third way. We can improve coffee with the choices we make during drying. How? Well, because drying is not just a removal of water.
Coffee seeds are not like our t shirt. Fabric plus water. Coffee seeds are alive. And life plus water equals change. While the seed dries, it is not inert like clothing drying in the sun. As the seed dries, there are complex metabolic reactions that occur and contribute to the coffee's longevity and quality. It's been challenging enough to get the industry to pay attention to coffee processing and the role microbes play, but drying might be an even bigger challenge.
One of the biggest mistakes I see producers make is investing in fermentation protocols, new tanks, microbes, etc., and then keep the same style of drying as they have always used. Specialty coffee needs specialty drying, and the way that we have been drying coffee historically is as limiting as when we thought the best way to have high quality coffee was to skip the fermentation. We know that naturals and washed coffees have a different flavor profile because we can taste the differences.
Those processing methods have different microbes associated with them, and we know that microbes through fermentation create acidity, mouthfeel, and flavor compounds that can change the coffee. A natural processed coffee, because it's in a lower humidity environment, is home to a certain species of yeast that are not usually found on washed coffees. Yeast break down the sugar in the fruit and create acidity, mouthfeel, and flavor compounds unique to natural coffees.
But all of this that I'm describing, all of this is happening in the mucilage layer, outside of the seed. And, what many don't know, is that in addition to changes happening on the outside of the seed, there are also internal changes happening to the seed itself, on the inside of the seed. So, washed and natural coffees taste different because of the microbes found on the outside, And also what is happening to the seed inside. And how do we know that anything is even happening inside the seed?
How do we know that the coffee continues to change over time? Because, This is not what most people Many believe that the peak of coffee expression is found in a perfectly ripe cherry. And this is the basis of terroir. That what nature provides is perfection, and our human activity is more likely to ruin instead of improve upon nature. This is the purist point of view of wanting to harvest a coffee cherry at peak ripeness and essentially freeze those attributes and place that fruit in our cups.
The purist believes that good processing should aim to get as close to this ideal as possible. I think this is what is meant by trying to make processing transparent. The philosophy is to make coffee processing as minimal as possible. As non intrusive, as clear and transparent as possible to be able to taste nature's fruit. Long time listeners know I have never liked this way of thinking, and I wrote three episodes and made a YouTube video about the fallacy and the pitfalls of terroir.
I haven't liked this way of thinking because of how it neglects the human element and dismisses the hard working microbes that provide flavor and make coffee more complex. So those of you who know how I feel will know that I was also very excited when I learned that one of my coffee heroes, Dr. Flavio Borem, designed an experiment that proves this theory, but from a different angle. Borem is a godfather of drawing and my secret mentor.
It's not a secret that I've kept from you guys, the listeners. But he has no idea that he's been my secret mentor for the last 10 years. His experiment challenges the idea that the ripe coffee cherry is really the highest expression of flavor. Historically, the idea of pressing pause on nature to preserve the perfect fruit was not possible.
When I talk about this topic in my presentations, I represent this with a drawing of a coffee cherry trapped inside of an ice cube so that it can be taken from the farm directly to the cup without the interference of pesky machines or humans. It's still not possible to do this on the farm, but it is possible to do this in a laboratory setting. And that's exactly what Dr. Borrem did. A natural coffee can take anywhere from three to four weeks to dry down to 11 percent.
Borrem's experiment took coffee cherries at peak ripeness and interrupted the drying process at several points along the journey from 50 percent moisture down to 11. He took a ripe cherry and eliminated the processing and drying, essentially freezing the flavors of the fruit in time. Then he took another batch and let it go down to 30 percent moisture content before interrupting the process. Then another batch went longer, down to 20 percent before interrupting the drying process.
And another batch went down to 18 percent before its process was interrupted. And of course there was a final batch where it was not interrupted at all and it got to have its entire drying journey as we traditionally see on patios or raised beds all over the world. By interrupting the drying process, he was able to answer the question, when exactly does a natural take on the flavor of a natural?
If a coffee cherry has an initial moisture content of roughly 50%, and we need to get it dry down to 11 percent to be stable, at which point during its journey does it resemble the flavors that we are familiar with? This method of interruption is the equivalent of putting raw batter in an oven and every few minutes asking, are you a cake now? How about now? Are you a cake now? When exactly does the raw material resemble the product that we consume?
While there is a case for the deliciousness of raw cake batter, most of us agree that the raw version is not the highest expression of quality. But for some reason, we think of coffee this way. We romanticize the raw coffee cherry as the highest expression of quality and believe our human work can only preserve or ruin Mother Nature's effort. Have you believed this? Have you believed that the ripe coffee cherry is the highest expression of flavor?
Maybe you have, and you hadn't even considered that you believed this to be true. That any processing was essentially a lesser version of what Mother Nature provided. If you believe this to be true, then when we analyze the coffee, you would see that the least amount of dry time, the closest to the fresh cherry, would yield the highest flavor concentration.
You'd see a peak, like we all imagined, as close to harvest as possible, and then perhaps a slow degradation, like a gentle sloping curve going down and to the right. Because if nature provides the maximum expression, and all humans and processing do is get in the way, then we should see the flavors and complexity decreasing with time, the way we imagine coffee fading with age.
The further you get away from a ripe cherry, the lower the flavor complexity should be, Because all we're doing is ruining our coffee, right? All we're doing with extra time and extra processing is getting less of the good stuff, right? What Perrin was able to show with chemical analysis is actually the opposite. When those coffees were chemically analyzed, the one frozen at peak ripeness has the least flavor expression. It was the least recognizable in terms of flavor profile.
It's essentially the most boring coffee. My words, not his. And even the ones that had been allowed to go through the partial drying process and down to 30 percent or 20 percent or even 18 percent didn't have the expected profile that we recognize and value. The seeds had to go through the entire drying process to arrive at the flavor profile we associate with a natural or dry process.
Even when science and tools of a laboratory allow us to metaphorically press the pause button on nature, The result is now what we expected. Basically, you have to bake the cake the whole way to get it to taste like cake. To get it to BE cake. The drying process is adding value to the final coffee. Not just because it's removing water and making the coffee stable for storage and shipping, but because it's creating flavors and adding to the complexity.
I think this experimental design is really brilliant because he specifically didn't use a washed coffee. In washed coffees, we see and smell and hear the fermentation. We see bubbles, we can measure temperature and pH changes. Anyone who has seen a coffee fermentation knows that the raw material is changing. We can easily accept that washed coffees are changing and improved by the fermentation. But a dry process or a natural coffee go from the tree to a raised butter patio.
They usually don't go into a tank or have any microbes added to them. We think the actions in the natural process are simply a removal of water. But if this were true, then the results would have shown that skipping the long drying process would preserve nature's work best. But what we see is that a ripe cherry is not the peak of flavor, and everything else is a slow, steady decline towards staleness. As if we are standing on a diving board and our only option is to go down.
So instead of a peak, A ripe cherry is the foundation, it is the baseline, it is the bottom, and we can treat it like a trampoline where we can joyfully bounce upwards in search of bursts of flavor expression. Now that I hope you're willing to see coffee drying in a different light, we can start to talk about the why and the how. If fermentation is the outer transformation of the mucilage, then what is happening inside? This is where using the term coffee beans limits our imagination.
Not beans, but seeds. And what is the purpose of a seed? The purpose is not to be consumed by us but to become a new plant. When a seed germinates, when it prepares to become a new plant, it needs to undergo a complex cascade of reactions. reactions have consequences for shelf life and coffee quality. And the ability to germinate is a huge difference between washed and natural coffees. In 2014, I was in Peru, running yeast fermentation trials on cacao, in addition to coffee.
I was opening the cacao pods to remove the inner seeds for fermentation. This is the equivalent of the pulping step in coffee, basically removing the outer layer to expose the inner seeds. Most of the pods were cut open and the cacao seeds were easily scooped out. But suddenly, I opened a pod that looked like it had been infected with worms. Not like little maggots, but long and thick worms winding themselves around these seeds. But the cacao wasn't infected with worms.
It turned out the cacao was quite mature. It was the end of the harvest, and the seeds were already germinating, and the radical, the baby roots, were pushing their way, were forcing their way out inside of the closed cacao pod. I don't think you will ever see this in coffee. Because the outer peel, In coffee, the cascara inhibits the seed from germinating.
If the outer peel is still on, it's a signal to the seed that it's not an appropriate time to use its resources to become a new plant because conditions are not correct yet. However, when the coffee cherry is pulped, when the outer skin is removed, the inner mucilage layer is exposed to microbes in the environment, which break down an additional protective layer. When the outer layers are removed and there is high humidity, the seed has better chances of becoming a new plant.
So washed coffees, lacking their restrictive exocarp, have much higher rates of germination than dry process, which maintains its protective outer shell for several weeks. Higher rates of germination are positively correlated with a longer shelf life. If the embryo is dead, the coffee fades more quickly. You'll see this when coffee seeds turn pale or even white.
But if the embryo is alive, the material in the seed stays viable because a whole point of the seed is to be a little lunchbox to feed the embryo so that it can become a new plant. As anyone will tell you, coffee is dead. Cacao that has germinated makes terrible tasting chocolate. We are still trying to catch coffee in that sweet spot when the embryo is alive and the seed material is still viable, but not wait so long that it tips into the seed becoming a new plant.
I think this, this balance of trying to find this sweet spot of, Enough viability, but not too much, is a skill that not many have explored in drawing. So where does that leave us? Naturals and washed coffees taste different because of the environment and the microbes that ferment them, but also they taste different because of what's going on inside the seed as well as outside. We give fermentation a lot of responsibility for flavor quality, a lot of credit.
But it's a step that takes on average 12 to 48 hours, maybe in some extreme cases 100 hours. But what about the things that we do for two to three weeks? like drying. The thing that we do for that much longer must have an increased capacity to impact coffee quality. The step that we have never questioned quality is the roasting, where the transformation from green to brown is obvious. Clearly, what you end up with is better than where you started.
In fermentation, we have a similar chance to create new flavor compounds and precursors that don't exist in the genetics of the coffee. The seed after fermentation is different and more complex. And in drying, once again, there is an opportunity to create new compounds in the raw material. A properly dried seed is transformed and can be better than how it started. Thanks for making it to the end of another episode. On coffee drying, no less.
And like a good coffee seed, I hope you are a little transformed from how you started. Will you think of coffee drying differently now? What questions do you still have about drying? Let me know by joining our live discussions or leaving a comment on Patreon.
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