We usually hear about coffee from roasters or even people like me, who work with coffee producers but we are not producers ourselves. One of my podcast goals is to bring you directly to the source. Whether it's scientific research or hearing directly from coffee producers.

Often we leave it to coffee professionals and educators to speak about coffee producers but it’s rare to hear directly from coffee producers about their motivations and challenges. And even when we do hear from them on their social media channels, there is a hidden pressure to present a rosy version of reality.

 Today’s conversation is with Mark from Finca Rosenheim in the Villa Rica region in Peru.

 This conversation is an honest look at some of the challenges producers rarely get to talk about. I asked Mark about organic certifications, climate challenges, coffee competitions, crop diversification, and what happens when markets can’t rebalance themselves.

To get samples or buy coffee from Mark:

Website: www.fincarosenheim.com
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @fincarosenheim

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Cover Art by: Nick Hafner
Into song: Elijah Bisbee

Mentioned in the Episode:

Vox Video: Coffee Crisis in Colombia

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What is left behind when coffee moves to new locations. What is the trade off for innovation?  This episode looks at what else we potentially leave behind when we introduce new plant material to non-native locations.

The inspiration for this episode was a beautiful book by Peter Wohlleben called The Hidden Life of Trees. In it, Peter talks about native forests vs planted forests and the differences we (humans) are able to perceive.

One of the example trees in Peter's book are oak trees. This was an interesting cross over for me because oak is very important for winemaking. Most of red wine is aged in oak barrels and many Chardonnay's too.

This episode is filled with wine information on barrels, tastings and stories of my time in the wine industry.

I enjoyed putting this episode together and I hope you enjoy listening to it. If you would like to support the show and help me make more episodes, join the Patreon community.

Support the show on Patreon and get access to research papers.

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Cover Art by: Nick Hafner
Into song: Elijah Bisbee

Mentioned in the Episode:

Video: How A Barrel Is Made

Video: Dr. Susan Simard Ted Talk

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This week I want to talk to you about where native coffee yeast come from.  If you are concerned about coffee flavor manipulation by yeast, I hope by the end of the episode you have a broader understanding of where "native" yeast originally came from.

To help illustrate the point, we start with non traditional coffee growing regions like Southern California.

In the episode I will also be sharing research from Dr. Amiee Dudley.

I met Dr. Aimee Dudley in 2017 during SCA EXPO in Seattle when we were on a Re:CO Panel together talking about yeast. I was offering the perspective of practical application of yeast, how coffee producers in situ could use it and Dr. Dudley was presenting her research on yeast genetics. She runs a lab at Pacific North West Research Institute and she is an expert on yeast genetics.

Support the show on Patreon and get access to research papers.

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Cover Art by: Nick Hafner
Into song: Elijah Bisbee

Mentioned in the Episode:

The Coffee Podcast: Jay Ruskey

Frinj Coffee

Dr. Aimee Dudley's Research Lab

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Aurora is back for another tea chat.

Unfortunately I think coffee and tea are often lumped together in similar categories but they have very different histories and I think it’s worth trying to de-couple these beverages.

Join us as we discuss how:
-tea is largely consumed in it's botanical origins and coffee is not.
-the different flavors of stress (positive and negative)
-over extraction and the role of color
-my thoughts on Cascara tea

Mentioned in the Podcast:

Support the show on Patreon and get Aurora's curated tea flights and download the research paper on Leafhoppers and Oriental Beauty oolong tea.

Aurora's Website

Tea Reading List 2020 located at worldcat.org, curated by Aurora Prehn

How to Taste by Becky Selengut

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What happens when the best in the world can't tell if a wine comes from the Willamette Valley in Oregon or Burgundy, France? What happens when the experts can't tell if the bubbles are from Champagne or California.

Does a place really have a taste? Can we find it in the glass?

That is the premise of terroir, tasting the land, localizing the product. But often, when put "terroir" to the test it cannot be found. 

Today's episode starts with the story of the 1976 Judgement of Paris tasting, a famous part of wine history that pitted French terroir-driven wines against terroir-less California wines. The competition had a blind tasting for red wine and for white wines. The red wines were predominantly Cabernet Sauvignon and the white wines were the Chardonnay variety.

We are also going to see what happens when Terroir is used as a basis for certifications. I'll share with you some of the limitations of the "geographic protectionism" and the Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) system.

Certifications are usually protective tools but sometimes they can work against the producers they are meant to protect.

How can such a romantic and noble concept, tasting the land, respecting nature - work against producers?

To pick future podcast topics, get access to the scientific papers, ask questions that I answer on the podcast, and help me continue making episodes: consider supporting the show by Joining Patreon Here

Mentioned on the podcast:

The historical origins are from the book Terroir and Other Myths of Winegrowing by Mark A Matthews.

Bottle Shock Movie

A Cougar

Racist Champagne

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Welcome to the next installment of terroir in coffee.

This one little word contains a whole world of history and has an important role in the economic viability of certain agricultural products.

After the last episode I heard from some of you who wished I had talked about soil minerals and plant nutrition from soil. Others also asked about the wine making regions like Bordeaux where Terroir is regulated by french law. I cover both of these concerns in todays episode before we get to discuss what I really wanted the episode to be about: microbes and morality.

There is an unspoken understanding that products that express terroir are more moral than others.

I wanted to give you an episode that focused on microbiology, that talked about the yeast and bacteria that contribute to a "taste of place" but I couldn't do it without including the human perception that products that express terroir, products that are "transparent" are superior.  

I think we need to be really careful because science doesn't support this view. Any moral component of terroir is a choice to see it through a religious and political lens.

I want to challenge your views on "transparency" and "intrinsic quality".

To pick future podcast topics, get access to the scientific papers, ask questions that I answer on the podcast, and help me continue making episodes: consider supporting the show by Joining Patreon Here

Mentioned on the podcast:

The historical origins are from the book Terroir and Other Myths of Winegrowing by Mark A Matthews.

How to Use a Pressure Chamber

Demeter Fragrance Library

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I'm so excited for you to join me in this discussion about terroir. Terroir comes from latin, for terra - soil. Also translated as land, or “taste of the land”.

Terroir is predominantly a wine concept, so why are we even talking about it in reference to coffee?

If you’ve listened to other episodes, you’ll know that there are certain concepts that the coffee industry likes to borrow from the wine industry. We’ve talked about some of the really bad ones, like using wine or beer tanks to ferment coffee or how a Q grader is not like a sommelier.

From the outside we see the concept used in wine to justify the high prices of a French wine, perhaps we associate it with valuing the land, a sense of place. We know it’s connected to soil, so maybe we assume that terroir also has to do with soil health.

This makes terroir seem like it would be a positive concept to adopt.

I see how tempting it is to think that coffee could benefit from adopting this way of speaking about coffee farms and how it can help sell the coffee beverages at higher prices. Also, it sounds so romantic, and the specialty coffee industry loves romance.

But similar to my argument about “anaerobic fermentation”, terroir faces a similar problem- the word is vaguely understood at best, and then repeated and made familiar by sheer repetition, not by true understanding.

Many of us have a hard time defining this word if we are asked.

I have made this episode to give you a background into the origins of the word so that before we dive head first into regular use in the coffee industry, we have a better understanding of what it means.

While most student of winemaking take terroir for granted, as a given, I was lucky that one of my UC Davis professors challenged the idea. The historical origins are from the book Terroir and Other Myths of Winegrowing by Mark A Matthews. I highly recommend this book for those wanting to go deeper after today's episode.

To pick future podcast topics, get access to the scientific papers, ask questions that I answer on the podcast and help me continue making episodes: consider supporting the show by Joining Patreon Here

Thanks to Patron Brodie for casting the deciding vote!

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Have you ever wondered what would happen if you introduced foreign yeast and bacteria into a coffee farm? Or maybe you're curious if we can speed up a long fermentation by warming it up. How does post harvest processing affect the density of the seed?

In today's podcast episode I’m answering listener questions like these and also sharing how I approach designing a fermentation.

When I was planning this podcast I knew that I wanted it to be a community supported project and that I did not want to rely on advertisements or sponsors that can be annoying or distracting to the information I want to share. 

The Patreon supporters are a group of individuals who care about coffee education and support me and this project. They made a monthly pledge to help keep this information free and available to everyone. With their help I can pay for equipment upgrades like a better microphone, I can pay the subscriptions for the editing software I use and cover the monthly hosting fees. Their contribution also allows me to take some time away from consulting so I can document and record these episodes. As part of their membership, Patrons submit questions—often I answer them privately in the message chats but today I wanted to share and record some of them here on the podcast so we can all learn from each other.

Other resources:
Christopher's Blog

My UCDavis Sensory Science Professor
Dr. Hildegard Heymann

Producers I work with:
Luiz—Fazenda California, Brazil
Ana—Finca Esperanza, Guatemala
Sophia—Mapache, El Salvador
Andres—Cayro, El Salvador
Tommy—Greenwell, Hawaii
Sam—Buff, Rwanda

Importers mentioned:
Balzac Brothers
Crop to Cup

To Support this Podcast and become a Patron CLICK HERE

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For those who know, it may not come as a surprise when I share how much I love tea. But professionally, today is the day I come out of the tea closet. I drink logarithmic levels of tea compared to coffee, and the more I confess that, the more other coffee professionals share with me that they too love specialty teas.

Unfortunately I think coffee and tea are often lumped together in similar categories but they have very different histories and I think it’s worth trying to de-couple these beverages.

Today's episode serves as an introduction the basics of specialty tea and will be the first of many episodes exploring the processing and history of this beverage.

Our guide through the world of tea is my friend Aurora Prehn. She is a researcher of people and plants. Her undergraduate work was a double major in Anthropology and environmental studies. She worked at Rishi Tea and Botanicals as a tea educator. In 2018 she then left to do a masters in ethnobotany in Canterbury, England, which she finished last fall.

Support the show on Patreon and get Aurora's curated tea flights.

If you are inspired to learn more about tea check out the following resources:

Tea Reading List 2020 located at worldcat.org, curated by Aurora Prehn

The True History of Tea, Victor H. Mair & Erling Hoh

The Tale of Tea: A Comprehensive History of Tea from Prehistoric Times to the Present Day, George L. Van Driem

The Soul & Spirit of Tea, Phil Cousineau & Scott Chamberlin Hoyt (Editors)

Tea: History, Terroirs, Varieties, Kevin Gascoyne, Francois Marchand, and Jasmin Desharnais

Plants, Health and Healing: On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology, Elisabeth Hsu & Stephen Harris (Editors)

Rishi Tea & Botanicals’s Lookbook https://journal.rishi-tea.com/catalogs/

How to Store Tea, Tea Epicure https://teaepicure.com/how-to-store-tea/

US Grown Tea, Specialty Tea Alliance https://specialtyteaalliance.org/world-of-tea/us-grown-tea/

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In today's Making Coffee Podcast episode, we're taking a deep dive into anaerobic fermentation and how language reflects values.

Specialty coffee is a young industry. In the consumer space we have only recently started to differentiate between processing styles like natural, washed and honey and now we’re jumping off the deep end into the microbiology of these processing styles. 

I wanted to record this episode because many Green Buyers ask me what Coffee Producers mean when they label their coffee like this and Coffee Producers ask me what the Green Buyers mean when they ask them for an anaerobic process. 

Both parties expect the other one has the answers.

Even if the words are poorly understood they are still copied, pasted and repeated so much that they become familiar through sheer repetition.

We see them so much that we can sometimes convince ourselves that we know what everyone is talking about, or we assume that at least they must know what they are talking about.

But in my observations, it seems like at this point everyone has their individual, personal, un-scientific definition. 

And this is a problem because when everyone defines the words differently, we undermine the point of language to communicate.

To Support this Podcast and become a Patron CLICK HERE

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