Daily Bullet 2
Discover 3 Big Insights Into Speciality Coffee
that will have you amazed
I recently had the good fortune to be part of the entire coffee supply chain from working on the farm in Tolima, Colombia, to transporting the coffee, cleaning it, roasting it and taking part in the final quality controls.
It turned out to be an experience of a lifetime! Here are the three things that will blow your mind about the process:
On The Farm
In the picture above you see African Drying Beds. It’s a method of drying coffee in humid regions. The coffee bean at this stage has endured:
- insect attack on the farm
- storms and dry spells
- machines cleaning the coffee cherry from the bean
- fermentation in wet conditions for days or even weeks (necessary for flavour development)
The farmer then checks multiple times a day that the coffee is drying correctly — protecting it from rain, heat and the cold at night. The process can take up to a month, plenty of room for error — yet how often do you taste errors in your cup? Hopefully never. It’s amazing!
Once dried to 11% moisture the beans need to wait for another month in a cool dry place to stabilise. The moisture needs to redistribute itself before further processing, particularly before roasting.
Then off it goes on to a truck where an unexpected thing becomes important.
Coffee farms in Colombia tend to be high altitude and cool, in transport the coffee descends downs the mountain towards towns at much lower altitudes where the heat can be blistering.
In fact, I almost passed out in the truck when transporting these coffees through a traffic jam in a particularly hot valley. The coffee however remained cool due to proper packing and proven by regular temperature checking.
Ladies At The Milling Station
Now the coffee makes it to the milling station where the seed coat has to be separated from the seed. Imagine a nut, you want what’s inside not the shell and that’s what milling the coffee grains is for.
It’s at this point the coffee finally reveals the first of it’s secrets — the dehydrated beans, the squashed, the insect damaged, the over fermented and so on. Each defect has a giveaway sign and each defective been tastes truly horrible. Thus, every bean has to be checked by hand and cleaned.
This is our first numerical standard for speciality coffee:
- Zero primary defects per 300 gram sample (sour/black beans)
- Up to five secondary defects for the same sample (broken beans)
- If it fails this high standard the coffee is not speciality.
It blew my mind to see literal tonnes of coffee being checked grain by grain by the ladies in the picture above. I had no idea the true level of labour that goes into a cup of speciality coffee — it’s humbling.
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After this stage the coffees have, generally, 9 months before they are move past their peak freshness and how they are stored counts a great deal.
In our case this factor was bypassed by shipping the coffee direct to roasters in the same town. Here, at the roastery, the next phase begins.
Phantom Defects
After a few rounds of sample roasting we go for a big batch. Roasting brings out all of the qualities of the bean and nearly… all it’s secrets.
Whilst these roasted coffees look good, upon closer inspection you can find light coloured beans (comment if you can find it in the image above) that didn’t take up the full nutrition when maturing on the plant. They only reveal themselves after roast and taste terrible, like corn. So again each bean needs to be sorted through three times to pick up any last defects. If we don’t catch them and remove them, they will ruin your final cup of coffee.
There also may be a few scorched beans in the batch which represent good beans that got jammed whilst tumbling around in the roaster for a few seconds too long. We have to find them and remove them too for a super clean and juicy final cup.
Which brings me to the final round in the process, where the true phantom defect appears. The defect that cannot be identified until water is finally added. The phenol!
It is a nerve racking moment when the ground roasted coffee is added to water in a process called cupping — which is the formal method of tasting coffee for it’s qualities in the industry. If a single phenol is detected, which is a bean that’s developed the flavour of aluminium or the like, the whole batch has to be disposed of.
Just to be clear, if single bean has developed a phenolic taste out of thousands the whole batch has to be disposed. The phenol defect is that horrible tasting it effectively means you can’t sell the coffee. Any risk of the customer finding it in their cup and having a ruined experience is too high.
Finally
If it passed the phenol test, to be speciality, it still has to have a score of 80 points plus for final flavour (we can get into the scoring next blog) because it can’t taste boring!
At Chetventure Coffee we only work with coffees 84 points + because that’s where we find the flavours to be consistently be great.
Speciality Coffee
So I hope this article gave you a feeling of why it’s called speciality coffee.
Personally, I find it astounding that each grain matters to the final cup taste and so every grain must be checked at every stage of the process. It’s totally humbling the amount of work people put into speciality coffee to make a juicy clean cup happen.
So now every time I have a wonderful, fragrant and uplifting coffee experience I can’t help but to appreciate all those that didn’t let a single grain slip. One of the greatest pleasures in my life and I hope yours too, is for this reason.
So Tell Me
Did this article succeed in providing a deeper appreciation of coffee? Were you amazed at any point?
Is humbled how you feel too or does it elicit another emotion in you?
Would you like like to know more about the process?
Did I miss anything that seemed important to you?
Let me know in the comments below.
For now, it’s been a pleasure, see you tomorrow to talk about how flavour in coffee is graded.
