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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 -
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 -
When most people hear that I’m going to Central America for work, they often say some variation of “how cool! you’re going to have such great coffee” which is true, but only because I haul most of if myself from The United States back to Central America in my suitcase.
Consuming countries pay a higher price for good coffee - so by design the best coffee leaves the countries where it was produced. The coffee that remains is the stuff that wasn’t good enough to export and sell, so by design the locals drink the lower quality coffee.
In this episode I share a story about drinking coffee with small-holder farmer that illuminated another part of the coffee quality problem. -
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. -
Hello friends,
Today I want to share an interview with Sofia Handtke from Mapache Coffee in El Salvador. I recorded this last November at the end of my time with them. That was my second season working with them and designing fermentation lots at their mill. Over the last 2 harvest seasons we've done about 40 different batches combining 4 strains of yeast, 3 cultivars and various lengths (# of hours in the tank) in an effort to create additional flavor options.
I wanted to interview Sofia and Jan Carlo together but they have a small mill team and a lot of responsibilities so I caught them when I could. In the interview with Jan Carlo we spoke about how Mapache is embracing vertical integration, how he believes this current generation is more open to sharing information, and some of his struggles like disease pressures and how climate change has impacted his farming philosophy. You can catch my conversation with him HERE.
In this conversation I ask Sofia to share her Q Grader experience and talk about her background in coffee. She believes that getting coffee producers and buyers using the same standard language is very important but unfortunately it’s still out of reach for many producers in Central and South America—this is a topic that deserves it’s own episode and it's in the works.
She shares what it was like growing up in a coffee farm and how she and Jan Carlo are engaging their two teenage children to inspire them to see the coffee industry as a career option, unlike her parent’s generation, many of which had to abandon the industry because it was no longer a viable way to make a living.She shares some fantastic insights about coffee branding and marketing and the coffee gear she takes when she travels.
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