thejarren wrote:I'd love to know any additional thoughts from the community here at Home Barista. What did I miss? Are there people already doing something like this
Well this is hardly a new idea, but it's an important one, so it's worth exploring a few ideas.
First up is that what you're writing starts off as though there is some notion of what is "quality". This, in itself is controversial. There are a few well-established coffee scoring systems, most of which are really geared towards identifying coffee that is first and foremost fantastic for filter, maybe a bit less so for espresso. These systems usually fairly mercilessly punish characteristics that they call defects; faults and taints, and historically high acidity and very clean coffees have tended to score highly. So what you'll see now is that there is some backlash to these. The backlash could be for a number of reasons. The more noble is that people say that they prefer the taste of coffee that might traditionally score poorly. A good example is people who like low acid, big bodied espresso, where coffees that might deliver that might not score all that well because they lack acidity, flavour, or persistence of flavour. The example that you see more often is natural processed coffees and anaerobic processed coffees. Natural process coffees often score poorly because they often combine an absolute riot of fruit flavours with defects like earthy and mouldy taints and ferment. The fruit flavours are obvious and easy for people with little experience to appreciate, so they have legions of fans, and people who are new to good coffee usually have a frame of reference of coffee that has a lot of roast bitterness or staleness, so the green coffee defects kind of hide in the general raft of off flavours that people expect anyway. 15 years ago, you might taste something like a low grade natural processed Ethiopian Harrar, which would likely have a lot of defects; it had its fans and the green coffee was fairly cheap. Today, you could still buy that coffee as cheap, sub-specialty grade green. Or you could get an almost identical flavour from an anaerobic natural processed extended fermentation lot, which green coffee suppliers will sell as a premium product at quite literally 8-10 times the price. The more nefarious reason would, of course, be that it's not really in coffee roasters' interests to be held to external quality standards.
Next is the way in which single origin coffees are marketed. Basically, there's a formula of words that almost everyone uses, regardless of if they're selling very cheap or very expensive green. "This is finca such and such from this country. It tastes like this thing, that thing and this other thing. This guy and that guy inherited the farm from their father and have been farming for this long. They are quality focussed and recently bought this piece of equipment or apply this processing step. The environment is very important to them and they have this environmentally friendly initiative. They do this socially responsible thing." The story reads the same, regardless of if the roaster has had a 20 year relationship with the farmer where they've both stuck together through thick and thin, or if it has been copied and pasted from an importer's offer sheet and they have never met the farmer. Whenever these sorts of descriptions are not attributed, I like to copy and paste them into google to see if I can find the original description that the coffee roaster copied and pasted them from. But the point is, these descriptions are a nuclear arms' race of feel good statements, and basically all roasters have ended up at the same point. You're just as likely to read this sort of description for a coffee that's barely specialty grade as you are from a coffee that's the best of the best.
Next point is roast level. Roasters are useless at communicating what their roast level is. Utterly useless. Basically, with most coffees and roasts, you have to choose what you are going to maximise, and you usually can't have it all. If you want to reduce acidity, you will probably reduce aroma, and vice-versa. No roaster will ever describe anything negative. My experience is that the majority of commercial roasts have some fairly obvious roast or green coffee quality problem. But from a quality perspective, I think that it's fair to say that the darker or the longer coffees are roasted, the less distinctive they taste. And this is the way that most espresso is roasted. What really irritates me is buying coffee on the basis of a description that is probably absolutely correct for a light "cupping" roast level, only to discover that the roaster has simply kept the taste descriptions for a roast that has actually developed out those characteristics to reduce acidity.
Finally, there's the question of what consumers seem to actually respond to and be willing to pay for. Around me, it feels like roasters have basically come to the view that in order to charge a premium price, the word that does it is "geisha" (or "gesha"), the coffee variety. I think they can also command a bit of a premium if they ham up some gimmicky processing description. I've got to say that I don't think I've ever heard a consumer in a cafe ever tell a barista that they thought the geisha that they have been served is not good, but I reckon that probably less than 1/3 of what I've tasted has been good. Geisha can be a little tricky to roast, and it's a bit heartbreaking that they often have roast defects.
Personally, I'd love there to be more discussion of, and enthusiasm for, great coffee. There's a whole class of extremely meticulously processed and very expensive central american coffees that basically seem not to have any real market near me, but they are coffees that I really enjoy and would like to see around more. But I don't think that consumers are really interested in paying geisha prices for a washed pacas, even if it has more body and more aroma.
That's sort of just looking at the quality and the marketing aspect of it, but it sort of does boil down to roasters having an argument of "why would I do more than the minimum if I'm not going to be able to command a premium for it"?
