Welcome to The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis.

This series will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show.

Each episode takes one part of the farming business — agronomy, processing, fermentation, storage, quality, sales — and lays out what the best farms are actually doing. 

In this first episode, we cover the fundamentals of what makes a coffee farm viable. We look at how farms measure success and why so few know whether they're actually profitable. 

Please spread the word about Filter Stories!

Follow us on Instagram - James (@filterstoriespodcast)  and Lucia (@lluciasolis) - and tag us in an Instagram story. 

Discover how I make these Filter Stories episodes by subscribing to my Substack newsletter

Stay up to date with Lucia through her newsletter

Write a review on Apple Podcasts

Leave a 5 star rating on Spotify

Support James’ work directly by buying him a coffee at Ko-fi.com/FilterStories

Related podcast episodes:

Lucia:

James:

People mentioned in the episode:

Resources:

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is made possible by these leading coffee organisations:

The Coffee Quest | BWT | Descamex | InterAmerican | Pinhalense | Novonesis | GrainPro

Specialty coffee changes the story for the indigenous people of Guatemala. Coffee as a tool of oppression finally offers hope....and then something a bit more complicated.

This episode explores the tension between the values of the Mayan communities who grow coffee, and the values that drive the specialty coffee movement.

Many of the signals we typically look for in our coffees - super-specialty flavours, Fairtrade certification, “5th generation family farm” - might actually exclude coffee grown by indigenous Guatemalans. 

This episode might change what kind of Guatemalan coffee you buy. 

Please spread the word about A History of Coffee!

Follow us on Instagram - James (@filterstoriespodcast)  and Jonathan (@coffeehistoryjm) - and tag us in an Instagram story. 

Write a review on Apple Podcasts

Leave a 5 star rating on Spotify

This free educational content for the coffee community was made possible by Mahlkönig, manufacturers of world-leading coffee grinders for 100 years for your home and cafe. 

Read Jonathan’s book, Coffee: A Global History

Support James’ work directly by buying him a coffee at Ko-fi.com/FilterStories

Read James’ article on Dieseldorf, the famous German plantation owner, in Standart 

Pick up a copy of Prof. Ted Fischer’s excellent book Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Taste Makers Create Value

Follow Juan Jose on LinkedIn to keep up with his PhD on coffee farming in Jacaltenango exploring how ecology, generational memory and ritual all shape how Jacalteco farmers tend the land. 

When you buy a bag of coffee labelled fifth-generation family farm, it feels like a good choice. 

But in Guatemala, that label might actually be a signal for a more uncomfortable truth.

This episode explores how land has been understood, used, and eventually fought over in Guatemala for centuries between indigenous people, Europeans and those in-between.

It’s a story of what happened immediately after Guatemala won independence from Spain. This pivotal period of history gets less attention in the history books, but the suffering of the indigenous people of Guatemala gets arguably even worse.

Fair warning: it's a dark story, and it will make you think twice about what you're really choosing when you pick up a bag of coffee from Central America.

Please spread the word about A History of Coffee!

Follow us on Instagram - James (@filterstoriespodcast)  and Jonathan (@coffeehistoryjm) - and tag us in an Instagram story. 

Write a review on Apple Podcasts

Leave a 5 star rating on Spotify

This free educational content for the coffee community was made possible by Mahlkönig, manufacturers of world-leading coffee grinders for 100 years for your home and cafe. 

Read Jonathan’s book, Coffee: A Global History

Support James’ work directly by buying him a coffee at Ko-fi.com/FilterStories

Read James’ article on Dieseldorf, the famous German plantation owner, in Standart 

Pick up a copy of Prof. Ted Fischer’s excellent book Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Taste Makers Create Value

Follow Juan Jose on LinkedIn to keep up with his PhD on coffee farming in Jacaltenango exploring how ecology, generational memory and ritual all shape how Jacalteco farmers tend the land. 

What happens when coffee disappears?

This is not a thought experiment! It’s happened many times in history: War, blockades, tariffs, ideology, health panics, sanctions, supply shocks. 

When coffee is not around, people still need something warm, comforting, and familiar. And throughout history, people have reached for coffee surrogates: roasted plants and grains engineered to look like coffee…but do they actually taste like coffee? 

In this episode, Jonathan and James time-travel by taste testing a truly alarming number of coffee substitutes. 

Spoiler: you will hear a lot of spitting! 

Which leads to the bigger question: can anything actually replace coffee—or will we always come crawling back?

Please spread the word about A History of Coffee!

Follow us on Instagram - James (@filterstoriespodcast)  and Jonathan (@coffeehistoryjm) - and tag us in an Instagram story. 

Write a review on Apple Podcasts

Leave a 5 star rating on Spotify

This free educational content for the coffee community was made possible by Mahlkönig, manufacturers of world-leading coffee grinders for 100 years for your home and cafe. 

Read Jonathan’s book, ‘Coffee: A Global History’

Support James’ work directly by buying him a coffee at Ko-fi.com/FilterStories

Read James’ article on the history of decaf technology in Standart

See Colin Smith’s amazing coffee museum at Smith’s Coffee in Hemel Hempstead, UK

Get nerdy about the intersection of AI and the occult on Karin’s Subtack, Mercurial Minutes

Do your own surrogate taste test!

Postum

Atomo

Orzo

Fig

Dandelion root

Dateseed

Acorn

Chickpea

Chicory Root

Camp Coffee

Most coffee is grown on vast plantations using machines, pesticides and fertilisers. 

But in Ethiopia, coffee grows wild in humid forests surrounded by birds. 

And that wild coffee matters more than most of us realise. It is the genetic ‘library’ we can turn to find new varieties to help us keep coffee thriving in the face of climate change. 

But the communities who live alongside them and have safeguarded this genetic treasure often don’t earn enough from coffee to make preservation the obvious economic choice.

Could a great story be the answer to earn higher premiums for these communities? Could that story be that all the coffee we drink today can actually be traced back to a single “mother tree” in Ethiopia? 

This episode is about the history of coffee in Ethiopia, how far back the evidence goes, what counts as evidence, and what we should celebrate (and pay for) when we buy “wild” Ethiopian coffee today.

Please spread the word about A History of Coffee!

Follow us on Instagram - James (@filterstoriespodcast)  and Jonathan (@coffeehistoryjm) - and tag us in an Instagram story. 

Write a review on Apple Podcasts 

Leave a 5 star rating on Spotify

This free educational content for the coffee community was made possible by Mahlkönig, manufacturers of world-leading coffee grinders for 100 years for your home and cafe. 

Read Jonathan’s book, ‘Coffee: A Global History’ 

Support James’ work directly by buying him a coffee at Ko-fi.com/FilterStories

Discover how James makes these Filter Stories episodes by subscribing to his Substack newsletter

Enjoy James’ Standart article about Avicenna and the earliest (supposed) written reference to coffee

Read the scientific paper pinpointing where wild coffee forests are in Ethiopia 

Follow Solomon Tselele's work through his Facebook page

Learn more about the Ethiopian coffee ceremony on the Adventures in Coffee podcast

Series 3 of A History of Coffee is a collaboration between documentary maker James Harper of the Filter Stories coffee podcast and Jonathan Morris, Professor of History and author of ‘Coffee: A Global History’. 

Ethiopian forest sounds curtesy of George Vlad. Hear more nature sounds here.

On a long walk through Hamburg, somewhere between the fish markets and giant cranes, you might stumble a giant bronze coffee bean looks like its crash landed from space. 

But this giant coffee bean represents a staggering fact: one in every three cups of coffee drunk in Europe has passed through Hamburg. 

In the first half of this episode, we explore the many profound ways coffee shaped one of Europe’s most important cities. 

But then the story flips because, once coffee changed Hamburg, Hamburg began to change coffee.

Series 3 of A History of Coffee is a collaboration between documentary maker James Harper of the Filter Stories coffee podcast and Jonathan Morris, Professor of History and author of ‘Coffee: A Global History’. 

Please spread the word about A History of Coffee!

Follow us on Instagram - James (@filterstoriespodcast)  and Jonathan (@coffeehistoryjm) - and tag us in an Instagram story. 

Write a review on Apple Podcasts 

Leave a 5 star rating on Spotify

This free educational content for the coffee community was made possible by Mahlkönig, manufacturers of world-leading coffee grinders for 100 years for your home and cafe. 

Read Jonathan’s book, ‘Coffee: A Global History’ (https://amzn.to/3dihAfU)

Support James’ work directly by buying him a coffee at Ko-fi.com/FilterStories

Pick up a copy of Margrit Schulte Beerbühl’s book, Kaffee Ist Fertig! 

Read James’ article on Frederick the Great’s attempt to ban coffee in Standart

Go on your own Hamburg coffee tour!

Giant bean 

Speicherstadt Museum 

Burg Coffee Museum in the Speicherstadt

Becking, 100 year old coffee roasters

1950s Rebuilt Coffee Exchange - and an Instagram post coming on @filterstoriespodcast

Go deeper into the story of Mahlkönig’s grinders

Early EKs - post coming on @filterstoriespodcast

DK (aka Donkey Kong Dreiphasen Kaffeemühle)

Grind-by-Sync espresso grinders

EK Omnia

Guatemala

Matt Perger WBC routine demonstrating the EK

Filter Stories episode on grinding curves

We’re back with more stories about the tiny psychoactive seed that changed the world and continues to shape our lives today.

Press the ‘Subscribe’ button so you don’t miss future episodes.

For twenty years, the 2004 cupping form profoundly shaped the specialty coffee world.

But on the hillsides of coffee farms, some of the form’s byproducts have been disadvantaging producers. 

In this episode, we follow two producers whose lives collided with the myth of universal quality. These stories reveal how a single idea of “quality” can close doors for the people with the least power in the supply chain. 

The new coffee evaluation form, the CVA, is still young, and with any luck it will keep evolving. I hope for a form that can empower even the smallest producers. 

Please support my work directly at Ko-fi.com/FilterStories

Other ways you can help:

Leave a 5 star rating on Spotify

Discover how I make these Filter Stories episodes by subscribing to my Substack newsletter

Go deeper into the story of quality:

The original Filter Stories episode about Murray Cooper in Ecuador, Firefly

Specialty Coffee Association's new Coffee Value Assessment

2004 cupping form from the Specialty Coffee Association of America

SCAA Coffee Cuppers Handbook (4th edition, 2011)

Kenneth Liberman's book, "Tasting Coffee: An Inquiry into Objectivity"

SCA's video series on the CVA presented by Peter Giuliano

If you ask two specialty professionals what makes a high-quality coffee, you’ll likely get a surprisingly consistent answer: clean, sweet, juicy, bright. To an outsider, they would be forgiven for thinking coffee quality is universally defined.

But the truth is more sober.

In this episode, we examine how a simple cupping form helped create a universal idea of quality. We then look at the evidence that, in fact, it’s just the personal preferences of a small group of people masquerading as universal quality. 

Please support my work directly at Ko-fi.com/FilterStories

Other ways you can help:

Leave a 5 star rating on Spotify

Discover how I make these Filter Stories episodes by subscribing to my Substack newsletter

Go deeper into the story of quality:

2004 cupping form from the Specialty Coffee Association of America

SCAA Coffee Cuppers Handbook (4th edition, 2011)

Cup of Excellence cupping form

Kenneth Liberman's book, "Tasting Coffee: An Inquiry into Objectivity"

SCA's video series on the CVA presented by Peter Giuliano

For the longest time, coffees were dull and bitter. But then a small group of pioneers changed the world. 

In this episode, we travel back to the 1960s and ’70s to meet the trailblazers who realised coffees could taste distinctive: sweeter, brighter, cleaner. 

We discover how their personal preferences became a movement, then a form, and eventually a global definition of “quality”.

Please support my work directly at Ko-fi.com/FilterStories

Other ways you can help:

Leave a 5 star rating on Spotify

Discover how I make these Filter Stories episodes by subscribing to my Substack newsletter

Go deeper into the story of quality:

Specialty Coffee Association's new Coffee Value Assessment

2004 cupping form from the Specialty Coffee Association of America

SCAA Coffee Cuppers Handbook (4th edition, 2011)

Michael Sheridan of CQI discussing the inter-organisational politics behind the Houston Expo announcement on Lee Safar's Map It Forward podcast