I’m writing this from a hotel in the small town of Ataco, El Salvador. I’ve been away from home for 21 days out what will eventually be 120.

It’s currently coffee harvest time in Central America this is the time of the year when I am traveling the most seeing clients at their mills and designing fermentation lots. 

This is an interesting industry because of the amount of travel required by many parties along the chain (farmers, producers, exporter, importers, roasters and cafes). All of these entities are usually located in different countries with different languages, time zones, cultures and customs. These far apart business need to work together and the best way to have a smooth business is to have strong relationships. The best way I can think of to have strong relationships is to travel and sit with each other face to face and get to know the other's culture.

Unfortunately flying is a huge contributor of carbon emissions.

I’ve struggled with the paradox since I started traveling heavily in 2014.

At home, I am committed to reducing my environmental impact, I don’t have a car, I buy bulk foods in my own reusable containers, I compost all my food waste, Ive reduced my meat consumptions and I’ve stopped purchasing new clothes. Yet the amount of flying I do every year eclipses all the other efforts.

Previous years I spent November to March alternating one week in Central America and one week at home. Sometimes even seeing 3 clients in 1 month and only being home for a handful of days.

In addition to the environmental strain, there was a personal strain as well. That pace was difficult because It kept me constantly on the move and in airports, I was never home long enough to feel refreshed. 

There was a moment I felt like I might need to quit working in coffee because the travel was too demanding.

To reduce my travel, this year I’m trying something different. Instead of going back and forth between Central America and the United States, I will stay in Central America all 4 months. My flying is dramatically reduced but not eliminated. Having such a dramatic carbon footprint is not in alignment with how I live the rest of my life, so I’m still working on how to reconcile that.

Join me for today’s episode for more on this paradox and a harvest update.

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You heard my experience getting my Q grader license on last weeks episode. Today’s podcast is a continuation of the Q grader discussion but focusing on its role with coffee producers.

I mentioned that it’s tempting to use the wine Sommelier certification as a shorthand to describe the Q grader license because the Sommelier’s has been around much longer and its a more familiar term than Q grader. 

I’ve been guilty of using this shorthand in the past but its both lazy and inaccurate. I feel it's important to untangle these two tests because if we keep repeating it, eventually we will start to believe it. However tempting it is, these two certifications are different in a fundamental way. The sommelier certification is predominantly used by the service industry (restaurants, etc) and the Q grader license is used as a means of quality control for exporters, importers and roasters.

The sommelier certification is consumer facing, it is not a means to improve wine production quality. There is very little overlap between a winemaker's world and a sommelier's world.

In contrast the Q grader license has a significant overlap in the production and consumer worlds. I value the Q grader license and I'm glad to have a standardized method of coffee evaluation but there is one often overlooked detail that has nagged at me.

Coffee producers are rarely Q graders, they are not the tasting experts, the buyers are. This means that everyone else in the value chain is more of an expert in tasting coffee than the people responsible for producing coffee.

Most of us haven’t considered what it means when the consumer is more sophisticated than the producer. What kind of power dynamic is created when a specialty coffee buyer is more sophisticated than the person who is deciding the flavor profile of the coffee?

I'm also curious about the system of cupping scores perpetuated with the Q grader system.

Join me in today's episode as I imagine a world without coffee scores.

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What is a Q Grader?

In the coffee industry the Q Grader license is often compared to the sommelier exam in wine—this is a shorthand that can be useful to provide some vague ballpark approximation, but over the next 2 podcast episodes we will see how different these tests are.

When I started to get serious about working in the coffee industry I was looking for ways to deepen my knowledge and the Q Grader license seemed like a good place to start. If I wanted to use fermentation techniques to improve coffee quality I would need to learn what the industry considered to be high quality.

Because how can we agree on what is coffee quality, without speaking the same sensory language?
To move the conversation of quality forward, I needed to differentiate between preference (coffees people like) and quality (agreed upon criteria that are independent of preference).

I have definitely scored high quality coffees that were not in my preferred flavor profile—conversely just liking a coffee is not enough to qualify it as a good coffee. It needs to meet quality standards of acidity, structure, body, sweetness and balance. I believe it is important to be able to put our personal preferences in context when evaluating a coffee.

Join me on today's episode as I share my experience with the Q Grader license.

To take a sensory class from Alexandre Schmitt: https://www.wineandflavors.com/en/

Maybe we can revive the hashtag: #letcoffeebecoffee

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I find the term "over fermentation" to be especially annoying. From a biology point of view this term is nonsense.

When coffee professionals use this term it's understood to mean a defect, usually vinegar, "boozy" or like rotting fruit. Everyone agrees that it's a negative trait for a coffee to have. I think it's important to be able to identify this trait but I think this label has held fermentation back and made many (producers and roasters alike) shy away from a process that when controlled can enhance coffee quality.

In this week's episode I answer a listener question about double fermentation and Brettanomyces that gives me an opportunity to untangle the concept from the name we've given it.

"Double fermentation" is another common colloquial phrase mistaken for a scientific label.

It gives the impression that there are two fermentations, but this is not what's happening biologically.

I also talk about the Russian River Brewing Company in Windsor California. I visited earlier this year in July and got to see how they use Brettanomyces and try their Brett Beer. The coffee industry is borrowing from the Beer industry as well as the wine industry and beer yeasts are becoming more popular in mills across Central America. This is an exciting time for coffee microbiology but there are a few cautions I want to give about this particular yeast.

For the visually inclined: I have 3 videos that will breakdown the coffee fermentation process:

https://www.luxia.coffee/instructional-videos

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If you made it through last week's deep dive about how we talk about and label specialty coffee - you've earned your coffee-nerd badge!

This week I want to pull back the lens and talk more broadly about quality and value. Instead of examining the rigidity of microbiology, this week's episode explores the subjective side of preference and what makes something "good".

I tell you a little about my coffee tasting history and share the story of the best (and worst) cup of coffee I've ever had.

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The first step in expanding the role of processing in the coffee quality conversation is how we label these coffees. I have noticed a lot of redundancy and confusion in how we describe the coffees.
I've heard various forms of; fermented coffees, yeasted coffees, anaerobic fermentation, lactic process, acetic process.

The labels we use set up the foundation, and I argue that when the labels are inaccurate the whole foundation is compromised. This area of fermentation in specialty coffee is just beginning and I think it's important to be as precise as possible as we move forward.

In this episode I talk about why these names are incomplete at best and inaccurate at worst.

I also answer the first listener question:
"Is it possible to "capture" yeasts from our environment in our own farms and apply these to the fermentation to create our own profiles?"

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In this very first episode, I wanted to give you a little background on how I approach coffee processing as a former winemaker and microbiologist. I discuss the similarities and differences in the processing methods of wine and coffee, and how they can impact perception and education within coffee processing.

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A behind the scenes look at one of the world's favorite beverages. Lucia is a former winemaker turned coffee processing consultant. This podcast will talk about the steps in getting a coffee cherry ready for roasting, share current coffee research in microbiology and have interviews with coffee producers in different parts of the world.

Photo by @a.w.klass
Design by @hafner.nick
Music by @elijahbisbeemusic

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