Fair Trade guarantees to pay a base price that it considers sustainable, or a $0.05/lb premium above the C-price if the market rises above Fair Trade’s base price. Fair Trade’s model is designed only to work with cooperatives of coffee growers, and as such cannot certify single estates that produce coffee. Critics complain about a lack of traceability or true guarantee that the money definitely goes to the producers, and isn’t diverted through corruption. Others criticize the model for providing no incentive to farmers to increase the quality of their coffee. This has encouraged many in the speciality coffee industry to change the way they source their coffee, moving away from the commodity model, where coffee is bought at a price determined by global supply and demand and little regard is given to its provenance or quality.
THE SPECIALITY COFFEE INDUSTRY
A number of different terms are used to describe the various ways in which speciality roasters are buying their coffee and their relationships with the growers.
Relationship Coffee is used to describe an ongoing relationship between producer and roaster. There is usually a dialogue and collaboration to work towards better quality coffee and more sustainable pricing. For this arrangement to have the desired positive impact, the roaster would have to be buying the coffee in sufficient quantity.
Direct Trade is a term that has arisen more recently, where roasters wish to communicate that they bought the coffee directly from the producer, rather than from an importer, an exporter or another third party. The problem with this message is that it plays down the important role of importers and exporters in the coffee industry, potentially unfairly portraying them as middlemen simply taking a slice of the producer’s earnings. To be viable, this model also requires the roaster to buy enough coffee to make an impact.
Fairly Traded may refer to a purchase where there has been good transparency and traceability and high prices have been paid. There is no certification to validate the ethics of the purchase, but those involved are generally trying to do good with their trading. Third parties may be involved but are considered to have added value. This isn’t a very commonly used term, except in situations where a customer asks if a particular coffee is Fair Trade.
The idea behind all these buying models is for roasters to try to buy more traceably, to remove unnecessary middlemen from the supply chain, and to pay prices that incentivize the production of higher quality coffee. However, these terms and ideas are not without their critics. Without third-party certification it can be difficult to ascertain whether or not a roaster is actually buying the way they say they are. Some roasters may buy coffees that have been kept traceable by importers and brokers, and claim this as a direct trade or relationship coffee.
There are no guarantees of a long-term relationship for the producers either, with some coffee buyers simply chasing the best lots of coffee they can each year. However, at least they are paying handsomely for it. This type of approach makes long-term investment in quality difficult and it should also be noted that some middlemen provide a valuable service, especially to those who are working on a smaller scale. The logistics of moving coffee around the world require a level of specialization and skill that many small roasters simply do not have.
ADVICE TO CONSUMERS
When buying coffee, it is difficult for consumers to ascertain how ethically sourced a particular coffee really is. Some speciality roasters have now developed buying programmes certified by third parties, but most have not. It is fairly safe to presume that if the coffee has been kept traceable, has the producer’s name(s) on it, or at least the name of the farm, cooperative or factory, then a better price has been paid. The level of transparency you should expect will vary country by country, and is covered in more detail in each of the sections on the producing countries. If you find a roaster whose coffee you like, you should be able to ask them for more information about how they source it. Most are more than happy to share this information, and are often extremely proud of the work they do.
AUCTION COFFEES
There has been a slow and steady increase in coffees that are sold through internet auction. The typical format for this involves holding a competition in a producing country wherein farmers can submit small lots of their best coffee. These are graded and ranked by juries of coffee tasters, usually a local jury for the first round and then an international cadre of coffee buyers will fly in for the final round of tasting. The very best coffees are sold at auction and generally achieve very high prices, especially the winning lot. Most auctions display the price paid for the coffee online, allowing full traceability behind the whole process.
This idea has also been embraced by a small number of coffee-producing estates that have managed to build up a brand based on the quality of their coffee. Once they have sufficient interest from international buyers they can make an auction work. This idea was pioneered by a farm in Panama called Hacienda La Esmeralda, a farm that had previously set records for the huge prices paid for its competition-winning coffees.
Harvested coffee cherries are sorted and cleaned to remove unripe and overripe fruit as well as leaves, soil and twigs. This is often done by hand, using a sieve to winnow away unwanted materials.
A SHORT HISTORY OF COFFEE DRINKING
This book discusses the history of coffee cultivation in producing countries around the world, but it is also important to consider the growth in demand that went alongside it. Coffee is a truly global beverage, and it is common to hear the claim that it is the second most popular drink in the world after water. While there’s no evidence to support this, the ubiquity of coffee in one form or another makes it plausible.
The origins of coffee drinking are similarly vague, with very little evidence to support it. While there is some evidence of the fruit of the coffee plant being eaten in Ethiopia early on, balled up with animal fat as an invigorating trail snack, we are missing a key piece of the puzzle: we have no idea who decided to take the seed of the fruit, roast it, grind it to a powder, steep that powder in hot water and drink the resulting concoction. It’s an astonishing leap, and a mystery that will probably never be solved.
There is evidence of coffee drinking in the late 15th century, but little to back up the anecdote that the first coffee house was Kiva Han, opened in 1475 in Constantinople. If it’s true, the coffee would have been grown in Yemen, and we know that consumption did spread into the region. Coffee quickly become entwined with political and religious thought, and coffee houses were banned in Mecca in 1511 and in Cairo in 1532. In both cases, popular demand won and these bans were soon lifted.
Cafés serving Italian-style coffee were a novelty in 1950s London. With coffee enjoying a resurgence of popularity in recent years, interest in coffee shops and how to make the perfect brew has increased again.
The first coffee houses opened in Europe in the mid 1600s, and coffee soon replaced beer and wine as the breakfast drink of choice. In the New World, the popularity of coffee surged after the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when drinking coffee became a patriotic act.
COFFEE REACHES EUROPE AND BEYOND
Coffee drinking wouldn’t spread to Europe until the 1600s and coffee consumption, for medicinal purposes rather than for pleasure, predates coffee houses in Europe. Coffee would have been traded through Venice in the early 1600s, but a coffee house didn’t open there until 1645. The first coffee house in London opened in 1652 and began a hundred-year love affair between the drink and the city. Coffee unquestionably inspired culture, art, trade and politics and left a lasting impact on the city itself.
In France, it was the influence of fashion that spread coffee drinking. Coffee had been gifted to the court of Louis XIV, and its growing popularity there spread the habit of coffee drinking into Paris.
Vienna was another city that would develop a rich café culture in the late 1600s. The story of the first café in Vienna, the Blue Bottle, using coffee beans left behind by the Ottomans fleeing after the failed siege of Vienna in 1683, is charming but probably no
t true; recent evidence suggests the first café there opened in 1685.
One key moment in the spread of coffee drinking and coffee culture actually revolved around tea. The Boston Tea Party in 1773, when American colonists protested against British oppression by attacking merchant ships in Boston Harbour and throwing chests of tea overboard, was not just an important rejection of the British Empire, but also marked the moment that coffee became a patriotic drink in the United States. A rapidly growing population meant a rapidly growing market and made the US increasingly influential in the coffee industry in the years to come.
CHANGE THROUGH INNOVATION
The US was also where key innovations came from, that allowed coffee to be an affordable staple in every home around the world. In 1900 a company called Hill Bros. began packing coffee into vacuum-sealed cans. Extending the shelf life this way meant fewer households would have to roast their own coffee, but made business more difficult for small local roasting companies.
A year later a Japanese chemist named Satori Kato patented his process for producing instant, or soluble, coffee. Until very recently he was thought to have been the first to produce it, but recent discoveries now credit the invention to David Strang in New Zealand in 1890. The process elevated convenience above quality, but it made coffee drinking easier for many, if not necessarily cheaper. Today instant coffee is still incredibly popular around the world.
In Europe, key innovations focused more on the café than coffee at home. There are various claimants to the first espresso machine, but patents using these principles began to be filed from 1884 onwards. Luigi Bezzera would patent his machine in 1901, and he is often credited as having invented the espresso machine.
These machines allowed café operators to make lots of cups of coffee, of a similar size and strength to filter coffee, very quickly. The great leap forward in espresso technology would come with the use of a large spring to produce very high pressures. The claim to this innovation belongs to Achille Gaggia in 1945, though how he acquired the patent remains a little murky. This high-pressure brewing produced espresso as we know it today: a small, concentrated cup of coffee topped with a deep brown foam, called crema.
The espresso bar boom that happened in many cities in the 1950s and 1960s was as much cultural as it was about the consumption of coffee. However, from a technical perspective, espresso brewing was perfect for cafés because one machine could now rapidly produce a whole range of drinks.
COFFEE TODAY
It would be impossible to write about modern coffee drinking without discussing Starbucks. The company’s roots were in roasting and selling coffee beans from a shop in Seattle, but it was transformed by Howard Schultz into the global phenomenon that we know today. Schultz claimed to be inspired by his travels to Italy, though the modern Starbucks experience would be unrecognizable to a native Italian. Starbucks, and businesses like it, undoubtedly paved the way for the growth in speciality coffee that we see around the world today. Starbucks made coffee an even more popular out-of-home drink and raised expectations for what a cup of coffee could cost. The company remains hugely influential, and is pioneering coffee drinking in new markets like China.
What defines modern speciality coffee is the focus on where coffee comes from, and how that impacts its taste. This focus has influenced how cafés brew, sell and serve cups of coffee. Coffee drinking has evolved from simple morning stimulation into an expression of self, an expression of values or of conscious consumption. Coffee drinking is now woven into a myriad of different cultures around the world.
Today, there is a coffee shop for every taste, from the mass-market purveyors of sweet, creamy coffee-flavoured drinks to the craft coffee shops serving single-estate pour-overs.
COFFEE ROASTING
Roasting is one of the most fascinating aspects of the coffee industry. It takes the green coffee seed, which has almost no flavour beyond a quite unpleasant vegetal taste, and transforms it into an incredibly aromatic, astonishingly complex coffee bean. The smell of freshly roasted coffee is evocative, intoxicating and all-round delicious. This section deals with roasting on a commercial scale. See Home Roasting for information about home roasting.
A huge amount of research has gone into the commercial roasting of relatively low-quality coffee, most of it to do with the efficiency of the process and the methods used in producing instant soluble coffee. As these coffees aren’t particularly interesting or flavoursome, very little work has been done on the development of sweetness, or the retention of flavours unique to a particular coffee’s terroir or variety.
Speciality roasters around the world are, by and large, self trained and many have learned their trade through careful trial and error. Each roasting company has its own style and aesthetic, or roast philosophy. They may well understand how to replicate what they enjoy drinking, but they do not sufficiently understand the whole process to manipulate it to produce a variety of different roast styles. That is not to say that delicious and well-roasted coffee is rare: it can be found in almost every country in the world. If anything, it suggests that the future is bright for quality coffee roasting, as there is still a lot to explore and develop that can only lead to better roasting techniques.
FAST OR SLOW, LIGHT OR DARK?
To simplify matters, it can be said that the roast of a coffee is a product of the final colour of the coffee bean (light or dark), and the time it took to get to that colour (fast or slow). To simply describe a coffee as a light roast is not enough, as the roast could have been relatively fast or it could have been quite slow. The flavour will be quite different between the fast and the slow, even though the bean may look the same.
A whole host of different chemical reactions occur during roasting, and several of them reduce the weight of the coffee, not least of course the evaporation of moisture. Slow roasting (14–20 minutes) will result in a greater loss of weight (about 16–18 per cent) than faster roasting, which can be achieved in as little as ninety seconds. Slow roasting will also achieve a better, if more expensive cup of coffee.
The roasting process can be controlled to determine three key aspects of how the coffee will taste: acidity, sweetness and bitterness. It is generally agreed that the longer a coffee is roasted, the less acidity it will have in the end. Conversely, bitterness will slowly increase the longer a coffee is roasted, and will definitely increase the darker a coffee is roasted.
Sweetness is presented as a bell curve, peaking in between the highs of acidity and bitterness. A good roaster can manipulate where a coffee may be sweetest in relation to its roast degree, producing either a very sweet, yet also quite acidic coffee, or a very sweet, but more muted cup by using a different roast profile. However, adjusting a roast profile can never improve a poor-quality coffee.
The roasting process affects acidity, sweetness and bitterness of bean flavours. Roasters seek to balance these three aspects through carefully controlled use of heat and timing.
THE STAGES OF ROASTING
There are a number of key stages during roasting, and the speed at which a particular coffee passes through each of these stages is described as its roast profile. Many coffee roasters track their roast profiles carefully so they can replicate them to within very tight boundaries of temperature and time.
STAGE 1:
DRYING
Raw coffee contains 7–11 per cent water by weight, spread evenly through the dense structure of the bean. Coffee won’t turn brown in the presence of water, and in fact this is true of browning reactions when cooking anything.
After the coffee is loaded into a roaster, it takes some time for the beans to absorb sufficient heat to start evaporating the water and the drying process therefore requires a large amount of heat and energy. The coffee barely changes in look or smell for these first few minutes of roasting.
STAGE 2:
YELLOWING
Once the water has been driven out of the beans, the first browning reactions can begin. At this stage, the coffee beans a
re still very dense and have an aroma of basmati rice, and a little breadiness. Soon the beans start to expand and their thin papery skins, the chaff, flakes off. The chaff is separated from the roasting beans by the air flowing through the roaster and is collected and safely removed to prevent the risk of fire.
These first two roasting stages are very important: if the coffee is not properly dried then it will not roast evenly during the next stages and while the outside of each bean is well roasted the inside will essentially be undercooked. This coffee will taste unpleasant, with a combination of bitterness from the outside, and a sour and grassy flavour coming from the underdeveloped inside. Slowing the roasting process after this will not fix the problem as different parts of the coffee will always be progressing at different rates.
STAGE 3:
FIRST CRACK
Once the browning reactions begin to gather speed there is a build-up of gases (mostly carbon dioxide) and water vapour inside the bean. Once the pressure gets too great, the bean will break open, making a popping noise and nearly doubling in volume. From this point onwards, the familiar coffee flavours develop, and the roaster can choose to end the roast at any point.
The World Atlas of Coffee: From beans to brewing - coffees explored, explained and enjoyed Page 4