Defects and "Defects?" Poor Quality Coffees? - Page 2

Discuss flavors, brew temperatures, blending, and cupping notes.
rmongiovi
Posts: 460
Joined: 17 years ago

#11: Post by rmongiovi »

And if the overall crop quality is such that you'd discard a significant portion of your crop? Do you just write that off? Do you even have the economic flexibility to do that? Or do you lower your standards and make the best of what you've got?

User avatar
luca
Team HB
Posts: 1135
Joined: 19 years ago

#12: Post by luca »

Hiya, some good discussion here that's worth fleshing out. I had it in my mind that I'd probably said some of my usual stuff about coffee processing, but there are enough different threads that I hadn't. Still, it's worthwhile repeating ...

At the outset, we've got to acknowledge that much about coffee production is deeply economically unfair. Coffee roasters and baristas are telling us that they are feeling the cost crunch with inflation now, and that people undervalue their work and expertise ... so you can imagine how the producers are feeling. And not just the farmers; the people actually picking the cherry are a different set of economic interests. And the reality is that it's a surprisingly complex value chain, with differences between different countries, areas within countries and market segments. Even just getting the coffee shipped is complicated. So whilst I'm offering a few thoughts and some info here, I'm keenly aware that for everything I say here, the opposite is probably also true somewhere, and there's a tonne that I don't know ...
drgary wrote:It could be any of these things or all of them and more. I've had rare good luck when my roasting was less capable but the greens were fresh. There's a Christopher Feran blog post that adds some explanation to this. Also, tragedies like the pandemic and war slowed the supply of fresh, premium greens from places like Ethiopia.
Great links. You've already seen this, but others might be interested to read Christopher's post on the decline of Kenyan coffee quality, which gives great insight into the complexity for that country. That post came from Scott Rao and I asking him questions, since he does green buying on the ground and we do not, and we've also been needling him for the Ethiopia version, which he is working on. So look out for that!

Another thing worth considering is the ugly truth that coffee often requires a tonne of fertilizer, which is oil, the market for which has been fundamentally upended.
rockethead26 wrote:Could it be from overuse of the land, depleting the organics and minerals that give the coffee its taste profile?
Mmmm ... I'll pass on that one. Seems unlikely for an area that has been producing great coffee for like 20-30 years and then has a precipitous decline in quality.
drgary wrote:I guess my question is more general. Do strong florals require very fresh greens?
This is another scenario where I'm conscious that I'll say something and probably get it wrong. I'd say it's sort of the reverse; old, baggy coffee develops that awful straw/hay/hollow astringency type thing. It might still have florals, they might fade a bit. I mean I'd say there's a freshness window ... but what is that? Occasionally I've seen green arrive that is too fresh and it has improved with sitting. Conversely, occasionally I've seen past crop that was vac packed outperform current crop. So ... I guess the best I can say is "you'd think so", but I'd always do the work of tasting stuff. But put it this way; if some random roastery I'd never heard of, but that some randoms online raved about, had some like classic washed yirg that was being raved about and the green was over a year old, that fact alone would be enough to put me off from buying a bag of it. But if it was around by the cup at a reasonable price at a cafe I go to, I'd probably get a cup to try it. Was that long non-response more or less helpful than a yes or no?
flyingtoaster wrote:Changing weather patterns? :shock:

Defects are removed manually by cheap labor. Perhaps there are better job opportunities for potential coffee laborers.
Coffee producers have had the sort of classic immigrant type dream (despite not being immigrants) - toil away for little money in the hope that you can send your kids to school. Well coffee producers are an old cohort and, guess what, the kids have been to school and they don't want to be coffee producers. Or if they do, they want to market and sell direct and be paid more. Fair enough. But the real difficulty probably isn't so much the farmers, it's the pickers. That's hard work, pays little and can have a tremendous impact on quality (since they are often the ones judging if each individual cherry is ripe). Tim Wendelboe had a great podcast talking about Tamana, where pickers were in such short supply for the mid season crop that the thing that made economic sense was to do one pass and produce some lots of lower quality for lower price.

Some defects are visible as green, some are not. I'm not sure, but quakers may only be visible after roasting. There are lots of defects that you can see, but some are not visible.

Automation may be somewhat helpful here. Roasters can buy colour sorting machines like sovda and buhler. They're not cheap; like USD$30k and up, so I always have a bit of respect for roasters that actually have them and in a contest between buying from two roasters, one of whom has an optical sorter and one of whom does not, I'll go for the one that does have one, purely because the additional expenditure kind of suggests they are more serious about their work. Optical sorters can easily sort out quakers by colour, though I don't think they'll pick up things like insect damage and the like. I asked one roaster how much their sorters typically screen out and they said 2-5%. However, they may have the sensitivity set high so that the sorters over-screen.

The same optical sorters can also be used to screen green, though apparently it's enough of a chore to reset the machine between green and roasted settings that it's not really practical; you'd have to buy two. So the thing that probably makes the most economic sense is for the dry mills to have these machines and use them after milling the parchment off and before bagging the coffee for export, to avoid double handling. I guess exporters and importers could aggregate together enough demand for a screening service to be able to rationalise the equipment purchase, but it's less efficient because you'd be re-packaging and, in the case of importers, you'd probably be paying far more for land and labour.

Mechanical harvesting could also help, and has been deployed for ages in Brazil, leading to lower green costs there. But mechanical harvesters are expensive, so the farm has to operate at scale, and they only work where the trees are planted in rows, on flat terrain where you can drive a tractor, and kept pruned dimensioned to the size of the harvester. Given that some of the best coffee in the world grows on steep hillsides on mountains, irregularly interspersed in forest shade trees, it's not a solution to everything. Mechanical harvesting also means that you pick ripes, over ripes and under ripes all together, then sort them after the fact (eg. optical sorter, but don't forget there's also floating and screening). So it results in a lower yield of ripe cherry overall, but the labour savings are supposed to offset that.
rmongiovi wrote:And if the overall crop quality is such that you'd discard a significant portion of your crop? Do you just write that off? Do you even have the economic flexibility to do that? Or do you lower your standards and make the best of what you've got?
I'd say there are multiple dimensions to this question. And I'm still not going to pretend to understand all of the dimensions.

One point is that this is sort of a binary decision that's almost a commodity coffee mindset. It's better to think of it as there being multiple markets. If you take a look at the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, you will see that with the group of "specialty" buyers that contributes data to the guide, in the specialty market, there is room for producers to get increasing prices for increasing points scores, with something like 88+ scores commanding much, much higher prices than like a bare 80. So the answer is probably that producers will make the most profitable coffee with the fruit they have available. Note that the most profitable coffee might not be the best, and it might not be the highest priced. As above, it might cost too much to do selective picking, so that the price increase might be offset by cost increases. And then let's not forget that there may be other reasons. Why do producers have both heirlooms and hybrids, if the hybrids make for a lower pointed cup? Well, one of my friends told me a harrowing story about visiting one of the producers he has been buying from for years and walking through a block of heirlooms that looked like sticks, devoid of leaves, whilst the hybrids on the block right next to them were doing an admirable job of pressing on through the leaf rust.

Another point is this whole question of "who is the producer?" In our minds, it's a single farmer, and the farmer has a chat with their roaster buyer and strikes a deal. Even when that's true ... it's usually not true ... if nothing else, there's usually an exporter involved to consolidate freight into a shipping container and deal with all of the various regulations. But this sort of relationship might be true of any of the more prestigious, well-established farms, and a bunch of the up-and-comers out of somewhere like Colombia, where the producer speaks flawless English and has an instagram account. So those guys might have flexibility to do individual lots and negotiate things with roaster buyers. What could they do with this flexibility? I don't know. Maybe if the cherry looks bad, you turn it into an anaerobic natural instead of a clean washed coffee. But in Africa, things look a little different (and also in other places, like in Colombia this will happen too). I gather many of the farmers don't 100% rely on coffee; they may have mixed farms, or, in any event, only a few hundred trees. This might not be enough for it to make economic sense for them to sell their own batch. Or the law and regulations that producing countries have to assure their governments of export tax revenue on coffee may make exporting small lots difficult. So they are delivering cherry to a factory/mill/co-op/whatever you want to call it. So this has its own quality challenges. What price do the farmers get? Are they offered a price at the factory if they meet a certain quality standard (eg. ripe cherry, based on colour)? Well, if that's the case, then what is the incentive for them to be more diligent than their neighbour, if their lot will be blended with their neighbour's lot and they are going to be paid the same? Or do the farmers retain ownership of the coffee right until the point of export, such that they benefit from a quality uplift that gets them higher prices, eg. if the coffee is sold at auction?

As a retail consumer, about all I can really say and reasonably hope for, is that I hope for there to be mechanisms where I can vote with my dollar, and that can be passed all the way back to the farmers and workers producing the coffee, to incentivise the production of the types of coffee that I want to drink.
LMWDP #034 | 2011: Q Exam, WBrC #3, Aus Cup Tasting #1 | Insta: @lucacoffeenotes

User avatar
drgary
Team HB
Posts: 14347
Joined: 14 years ago

#13: Post by drgary »

luca wrote: This is another scenario where I'm conscious that I'll say something and probably get it wrong. I'd say it's sort of the reverse; old, baggy coffee develops that awful straw/hay/hollow astringency type thing. It might still have florals, they might fade a bit. I mean I'd say there's a freshness window ... but what is that? Occasionally I've seen green arrive that is too fresh and it has improved with sitting. Conversely, occasionally I've seen past crop that was vac packed outperform current crop. So ... I guess the best I can say is "you'd think so", but I'd always do the work of tasting stuff. But put it this way; if some random roastery I'd never heard of, but that some randoms online raved about, had some like classic washed yirg that was being raved about and the green was over a year old, that fact alone would be enough to put me off from buying a bag of it. But if it was around by the cup at a reasonable price at a cafe I go to, I'd probably get a cup to try it. Was that long non-response more or less helpful than a yes or no?
Thanks, Luca. In answer to my question about florals being more preserved in fresh greens? I'm interested to read that florals may not be the first thing to go. In my home roasting, getting florals to prominently show up as they have in some coffees I've tasted is like trying to photograph a rare bird. It may appear if I look long enough. Meanwhile, I guess my best choice is to pick greens that a reputable seller describes as floral and try to roast it as well as I can. If I'm still not getting that floral, I might send a sample to the roaster and ask if this is anything like the way they roasted the coffee. I don't currently have a color meter and may spend for one in the future. In a recent TW video, he says that the color meter is as essential as the roaster. Okay ...
Gary
LMWDP#308

What I WOULD do for a good cup of coffee!

Post Reply