The Future of Specialty Coffee

Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Making Coffee , Episode 78 . Even though it's March, this is our first episode of 2026, and while many of you are wrapping up the first quarter of the year, I still feel in a lot of ways like my year hasn't actually started . I'm having flashbacks of the weird non-time stretchiness that we all experience during the pandemic. A time when a week felt like a month, and also a year felt like a month? Since we've been in harvest mode, since the end of November, Nick and I have felt that we are in the movie Groundhog Day, trapped in a perpetual motion machine of sameness. Every day exactly the same. Wake up, process coffee, eat, rake the drying patios, eat, sleep, repeat. I haven't assimilated that it's a whole new year and that I have started a new decade of my life, my forties. It's incredible to me that this podcast started in 2019 and that some of you have been with me the whole time. Especially the folks that support us through Patreon. This podcast has no ads or sponsorships. I'm able to keep making new episodes by the grace of coffee nerds like you To audio. But I've had to stop listening to several podcasts because the constant ads were really annoying. I find myself listening to more audiobooks now on my walks. I understand that people should be compensated for their time. I don't begrudge creators making a living. I just feel disappointed that there seems to be a lack of creativity, that everyone follows a single model. A model that asks creators to use their talents to harness people's attention so other companies can crash into the space and hijack that attention. Instead of encouraging me to buy the product or service, I mostly feel resentful of that business for interrupting the thing that I actually choose to listen to. When I have brought this up in conversation before, I've been surprised that I've not been met with the same indignation as I feel. It's not so bad, just skip the ads, they say. Or they say something like, yeah, it's annoying, but it keeps so much content available for free, so whatever, I just put up with it. Must we accept this so easily? Must we keep exchanging our precious time for free content so companies can yell at us to buy more stuff? I know I sound like a curmudge on, and things are turning towards the negative, when what I meant was to reflect on the positive. So sorry, let's get this train of thought back on the rails. I am so grateful to the listeners who donate a few dollars a month to keep this podcast project going. You help me avoid the conventional trap of making things just to fill ad space. And it's especially important for me to pause, feel gratitude, and remind myself of all the things I like about this industry because this harvest has really made me question everything. This is the harvest that made me feel like maybe I shouldn't be in coffee anymore. I spent a decade in the wine industry and I'm coming up on 12 years in the coffee industry. I've been thinking maybe these feelings are a sign of my expiration date. Maybe it's time to find my third act. I usually prefer the idea of speaking from a scar and not a wound, but I am also bursting at the seams to talk with all of you. So fair warning, you're gonna get some gooey parts in today's episode . And today I'm picking up where I left off in episode 77 in December about how harvest was evolved I will finally reveal the destiny of the coffee we produced and I will share reflections on the industry as a whole. So if you only come to making coffee for microbes in science, I get it. Feel free to skip this episode. When I feel more recovered, we will get back to hard science and microbes, I promise. But for today, well, I really just need a place to vent. If you listened to episode 77, you already heard me complain about the challenging beginning of this harvest. Now that it's over, I will share additional details that heightened the emotions of this time for me. The first detail is that we had to triple our production. Growing too quickly is well known to break a lot of businesses. We had to triple production and create four coffees instead of our usual one offering while only having the budget to hire a single additional person. This put a lot of the physical work burden on myself and Nick. Which again we are used to doing. We are used to physically working on the coffee, that's what we do, but at a single size, and now again we had to triple the amount of coffee that we were producing. And the reason we increased this production was because we got an opportunity to sell coffee to James Hoffman as part of an educational campaign about processing. I really enjoyed Hoffman 's Decaf project, which brought awareness to the category by creating a large global tasting of three different processing types. Swiss water, ethyl acetate and CO2, and the regular caffeinated coffee was included . He made a video explaining each method of decaffeination and sold kits so that people could taste all three methods side by side, as well as the non decaffe, the regular caffeinated coffee that was the control. Hoffman reached out to me to do something similar for his audience, to create a kit of different coffees for another global tasting, but instead of decaf methods, this project would focus on different fermentations . What was especially attractive to me about this project is that Hoffman was clear that he wasn't looking for coferments, infusions, or anything funky, extreme, or out of the ordinary. You don't need special tanks, valves, freezers, chillers, heaters, sanitization steps, or anything like that to be able to do these fermentations. Just the microbes. We are looking at processing in an accessible and relatable way for most producers in the world. This opportunity was thrilling because education is fundamental to my work. It would be a chance to create a kit of the same coffee fermented in different ways so people could finally taste the impact of a single variable: ferment ation. Even the nerds who taste different kinds of ferment It can be hard to differentiate what flavors you like because of the process that the coffee went through or from the genetic expression of that variety. Do you really like anaerobics or do you just like Pink Bourbon ? We went back and forth over how many coffees would be in the kit. Some versions had three coffees, others had five. Ultimately, we picked four coffees that would tell the story I want to tell about the role of microbes in coffee processing today. The first coffee is mechanically washed. This coffee serves as the control, the blank slate, the baseline onto which the fermentation will be appl ied. So many people see processing as a value add, but very few can look at the naked coffee and determine how much value they are actually adding. For this coffee, the cherries arrived at the mill and instead of being pulled and fermented to remove the musilage, as is common with washed coffees, and because this is our control, the musilage was instead washed off with high pressure water and friction and then taken directly to the patio . That way you can taste the flavors that come from the genetics of the variety without the influence of fermentation. The second coffee was fermented with wild microbes. This is the traditional way wash coffees are made in many parts of the world. This too can serve as a kind of control because it is the regular coffee most people are used to. This is the default processing method in most wet mills across the world. In this coffee, we use the local micro This method relies on unknown, unidentified microbes and leaves the flavors and cup profile up to chance. It's like playing the lottery. Sometimes you win the jackpot, and other times you lose all your savings. It can be thrilling when you win, but it's a tough way to run a business and it's the way most coffee in the world operates. The third coffee I inoculated with a strain of Lactobacillus plantarum. So we know it experienced a lactic fermentation because I introduced those microbes. I'm planning a video soon showing the difference between what most of the specialty coffee industry thinks is a lactic fermentation, when a producer adds yogurt to the coffee tank, and how that process differs from this lactic fermented coffee. My goal with this coffee fermentation was to have a bacteria dominated fermentation and focus on turning up the volume and the acid profile of the coffee. I hope this will show how a producer can play with levels of intensity, turning up the acidity or maybe mellowing it out, making something more bright or a little bit more smooth, a little bit silkier just by choosing different microbes. The fourth coffee was inoculated with yeast, so we know it experienced an alcoholic fermentation, because again I introduced those microbes. This is in contrast to the bacteria dominated fermentation so that you can taste the influence of how bacteria influences acidity versus how yeast do it. The point is not to show how one method is better than the other or even to pick a winning method. All four styles are valid coffee. My goal is to show how much or how little a fermentation can impact the coffee . This set of coffees doesn't ask you if you like the song that is playing, because everyone's preference is different. What this set asks instead is can you tell when the piano comes in? And can you hear the violins? Can you tell the difference between the string instruments and the wind instruments? Can you start to pick out the components that contribute to the symphony? You cannot just try one of the coffees, you need to try all four side by side. I've been watching the internet, and it seems to me that the most common approach as to how processing can add value is by how many extra words a roaster can put on a label. This works for marketing and selling coffee, I guess, but I don't see this approach helping enough producers. It's a lopsided risk-to-benefit equation. For me, this kit, these copies, it's an attempt to show how we can talk about processing being a value add in a different way. Instead of showing off how many words can you use to describe the coffee, can we show that we are listening? Since not everyone can or will want to try the coffee, Hoffman came to the mill to create a YouTube video about processing and fermentation. Nick and I have been filming ourselves for our small Instagram audience, but having Hoffman's team in our kitchen filming yeast rehydration protocols was intimidating. The days of filming passed by in a blur, and I honestly can't tell you very much about them because I wasn't in my body most of the time. I was drawn to this project because I would get to show the power and the limitations of microbes. I think social media has really distorted the flavor influence of fermentation. In many ways, the effects of processing are overstated, with coffees being pushed to artificial extremes and those results being blamed unfairly, I think, on the fermentation But among that noise, I feel we are missing some true power in processing. I want people to be able to taste these examples to have a baseline of what the heck everybody is talking about. Most of the fermentation conversation is dominated by funky coffees, and I would like to divert some of that attention back to solid ground. Instead of asking the question, how loud and funky can I make this coffee? Instead asking how subtle and complex can I make this coffee? When you are loud and shouting, you make people back away. I don't like when my coffee shouts at me. But when you are quiet, the instinct is to lean in. I want to make quiet coffee that is complex and makes people want to lean in. All the previous years that Nick and I have been processing coffee, including our years in Colombia before coming to Guatemala, we've had a single buyer. Last year we were able to send some coffee to the United States and include a few more roasters, but overall our coffee is not easily found. This project was a chance to change that . So we attracted the attention of an influential coffee person. Yay. I get to highlight the power of microbes with a fermentation set. Yay ! We finally get an opportunity to get a lot more roasters involved. Yay . More everyday drinkers will have access to our coffee. Yay . And it happens to be the same year, nothing is going according to plan, and it is the most challenging quality year due to climate change, politics Ugh, classic . The excitement of the opportunity, the adrenaline of making it happen, and the finished product were sending my emotions on a roller coaster. It reminds me of how Anne Patchett describes writing her books about how the idea of the thing can never be as beautiful as a thing made concrete. The following quote is from an essay in the book, This is the story of a happy marriage. She writes This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of undescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, it is the single perfect joy in my life. When I can't think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it , I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk. And there, with my own hand, I kill it. It's not that I want to kill it, but it's the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done, I stick it in place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing, all the color, the light, the movement, is gone. What I'm left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembl ed. Dead. That's my book . So the way that Anne Patchett is describing her writing process, that is very similar to how I feel about this coffee. Before it existed, it was a thing of indescribable beauty. And then we had to pluck it from the air and pin it down to make it. The mundane mechanics of floating, pulping, fermenting, washing, drying, b agging, and storage day after day after day, all of that felt so flat. At the end of February, when we picked up our last coffees from the drying patios, bagged them and put them in storage, there were no more butterflies left. Just the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. This experience helped me realize that I cannot see my coffee clearly, and my biggest hope is that I am an unreliable narrator. Because while Anne Pachet's book is a disfigured dead butterfly to her, to me it is still incredibly vivid. Her books bring me a lot of joy. I have read them all, but I especially love State of Wonder and The Dutch House. Do yourself a favor and read more fiction. I feel tension between the original spark of inspiration and the reductive act of turning it into something tangible. It no longer exists only in my head. Now you can hold it. You can taste it . I am sharing this with you so that you can have an idea of my state of mind this harvest. In addition to those anxieties, I am also nervous about stepping into a brighter spotlight of video versus our podcast niche. The podcast listener is considerate. You guys take the time to listen and process information. Whenever I do get to hear from you in Patreon messages or on Discord, I am delighted by the kinds of thoughts and questions you share. But people who watch Reels and YouTube and want to leave a comment are, well, differently motivated . One unexpected consequence of sharing videos was being exposed to comments from people outside our normal community. The attention span is shorter, the comments are often baffling or mean. And a surprising amount of comments were questioning the validity of calling our coffee specialty because it didn't look like what other social media call specialty. I was seeing comments calling patio dried coffee unhygienic and really pushing raised beds for drying as the only worthy method for specialty coffee. I found out that there are coffee consumers who really believe that unless it was dried on a raised bed, it's not allowed to be called specialty. Many believe that unless there is a bioreactor involved, then nothing truly special is happening. This isn't just factually incorrect, but if left unexamined, I think it's actively harmful for the industry as a wh ole . Reading the criticisms about drying patios or the size of our fermentations made me realize how out of touch so many coffee enthusiasts are to the realities of coffee. I felt like the conversation about what gets to call itself specialty was getting hijacked by social media and the voyeurs standing on the sidelines instead of being defined by the actors in the play. The industry trends are being defined and led by a very loud minority. That's the first problem. But a second bigger problem is that it's being defined by outsid ers. I was being critiqued because I call our coffee specialty, but I wasn't showing co-ferments with fruits. I don't use stainless steel bioreactors or glass jars with an airlock. I avoid the 200-hour fermentations in favor of 36 to 48 hours. I'm not using exotic coffee varieties. I show large 5 to 10 ton fermentations, not micro lots with five or ten kilos. I am walking on coffee to rake it and I am drying it on the floor. The feedback I was receiving was that if I wasn't going to show the traditional signaling of specialty coffee, how could people know that it was specialty? As if I am not allowed to call my own coffee specialty, as if I have to be interviewed, submit my application, and then a committee of outsiders would review it, stamp it, and eventually maybe bestow upon me the right to use the title of specialty. I've seen an interesting pattern as the industry, or the category of specialty coffee, grows. As a category of specialty gains visibility, the more narrowly it is defined. It is both growing and collapsing at the same time. This reminds me of a cinematic effect called a dolly zoom. The camera physically moves toward the subject, the dolly is going in, while the lens of the camera zooms out simultaneously. This keeps the subject size constant in the frame, but it distorts the background, making it stretch or recede Directors use this trick to simulate things like vertigo, anything that involves a deep disorientation . That is how I feel as I watch this happen in coffee. This effect is used to convey overwhelm or show isolation because the subject keeps trying to approach while the world keeps pulling back . The specialty coffee category is growing, more people are interested in specialty co ffee, more people want to drink this coffee, but for producers, the definition of what consumers consider specialty keeps morphing. Many producers feel like the camera of specialty is moving towards them, but the lens keeps zooming out. No matter how quickly you walk forward, the specialty club keeps receding away from you. Instead of inviting more producers to participate, the goalposts keep moving as to what one has to do to be granted access into the specialty coffee club. It is profoundly disorienting. So I found myself at the end of February, after a long hot day raking coffee and foolishly nourishing myself with a few snarky comments from the armchair experts devaluing our work, I found myself complaining to Nick about the whole situation and how frustrated I was with it. He suggested that instead of ranting into the wind, like I usually do, we should turn it into a video. He propped his phone up and hit record. I normally like to take some time to gather my thoughts, as evidenced by the podcast style, but I was so irritated that I just started talking to the camera. It's a new style for me, but I'm glad that we made it so that we could have a bigger conversation . If you wanna see that video, it is linked in the show notes. But you guys know me, ten minutes is not enough time to discuss anything profoundly, so that is why we have gathered here today. There is a lot I didn't get to say in the video. Now I want to examine each of the critic isms one by one . The first criticism is that I'm not using exotic coffee varieties or heirlooms. You will not find a borbon rosado or a sidra or a geisha here. I have access to cat ra, a little bourbon, and mostly hybrids because disease resistance and yield still matter more than cup score to a farmer's bottom line. Specialty can't be defined by using exotic varieties because consumer trends and preferences move at the speed of light and agriculture moves at the speed of agriculture, that is to say, at the speed of trees, at the speed of years and decades. Producers are getting the signals that they need to plant geisha for borrosado, euhanoides, whooshwoosh to get into the specialty club . However, many of the same people who fly the flag of processing purity, of not adding foreign microbes to the tank have no cognitive dissonance introducing completely new foreign varieties of coffee to regions that have no historical context for these varieties. Farmers need to plant what works in their climate and conditioning , not what sounds cool on a menu. I believe a quote boring variety that is well suited to its climate and soil and that is grown well will taste better than a trendy one that has all of these claims of amazing flavor profiles, but if a farmer doesn't know how to grow it, it's not going to perform well. It can't taste very good. I would rather have a quote boring kat ura that a farmer knows how to grow that, they feel comfortable growing, than a first-year geisha that a farmer hasn't figured out yet. I think we need to value all coffee genetics that are grown well. We are focusing too much on the exotic genetics and not enough on the skill and craft of growing something well. Another criticism I received I called category of the vessel. I don't show stainless steel bioreactors or glass jars with valves or even plastic barrels with an airlock. All my fermentations are done in traditional tanks called pilas that look like rectangular swimming pools. I make no effort to cover or exclude air from the fermentation. I have other videos where I show with an oxygen meter that you don't need to physically exclude oxygen from the tank to have an anaerobic environment. So I don't make the effort to seal it up because the microbes produce carbon dioxide that displaces the oxygen and without any human effort, the microbes will create a protected anaerobic environment. So most of those tank interventions are just redundant . And I do this because new tanks can be expensive, and in my twelve years of processing coffee in fifteen different countries with different clients, the tank has never, not once, been a barrier to high scoring and quality coffees. Requiring a specific vessel to say that that's what qualifies specialty coffee, it's like saying you can only cook a good meal if you used a $1,000 hand forged high carbon steel Japanese knife. Sure, the tools are nice to have , but craftsmanship is about the skill of the human, not the flashiness of their tools. I don't think it's skillful to show how much money you have to waste. I want to ask that we don't judge the coffee because of the vessel. Specialty coffee can be fermented in a swimming pool, a bathtub, a plastic bucket, or even an old shoe. Another criticism is that I show bags of commercial microbes instead of coferments with fruit. When we're adding fruit, we're adding more microbes and more sugar. You're often accelerating the fermentation, like a car with no brakes. Regular fermentations are usually without control, but fermentations with fruit are like turbocharge, no control. You might think I get hired for my consulting services when producers are inspired to try new things. But the reality is that I get hired most often when producers I get called and I come in like a detective trying to figure out where the murder happened. So even though I don't do the fancy weird processing myself, I do get to see and taste a lot of this firsthand and from clients . From this, I have concluded that those processes are in disservice to coffee producers. They're more effort to make, introduce more risk to an already risky endeavor, and usually a producer ends up with more unstable coffee, which is not good for your finances. It's a b ad business move. So no, you will not see any other fruits in my fermentations. And yes, I buy microbes instead of swabbing the native trees and flowers and collecting the local microbes and growing them up in a laboratory because ain't nobody got time for that. This needs to be a business, not a hobby. To be clear, I'm not disparaging people who keep their own cultures of microbes. If you can do it , amazing. I salute you, I envy you, you are doing something really cool. But for those of us who can't, it shouldn't keep us out of the specialty club. I don't grow my own microbes for several reasons. The biggest among them is time and money. So let's talk about price quickly. A very clear signifier of specialty for consumers can be a high price tag. They see a high price tag and think it's what separates the normal coffee from the special coffee. But I don't want to make expensive coffee because I don't buy expensive coffee. And I want to make coffee for myself and people like me. I want to keep this coffee accessible, priced at $6 a pound, not $20 a pound. The lower price point shouldn't signal that it's not specialty. Specialty needs to exist in many price points, not only at the very high end. And so, even though microbes are an additional cost, buying microbes allows me to keep costs, the volume, and the quality predictable . The next criticism. I do short fermentations . People are looking for impact and don't think 36 hours can have an impact when they are used to seeing 200 or 400 hour fermentations . Yes, long fermentations can have an impact, but in my experience it's diminishing returns. In thirty-six to forty-eight hours, I can turn over tanks and make more money by processing a whole second batch of coffee, having twice as much coffee to sell, then if I kept it longer, if I had half as much coffee to sell, with maybe a half-point difference in intensity, it just doesn't make any sense. Also, in my experience, the long fermentation impacts the long term storage of the coffee. Most people don't notice because a coffee with thirty six hours and a coffee with two hundred hours can cup the same right after drying. But if you taste them again in four months or six months or one year, which I do as part of my QC, my coffee will remain unchanged while the longer fermentation will have significantly changed and most likely faded. Too many producers are being led down the wrong path of making more unstable, unpredictable coffee for the sake of putting a three digit number on the label. Another criticism. I show five to 10 ton ferment ations, not micro lots with 5 or 10 kilos. I like to process at a large scale. However, I have found out through comments that many people think if it doesn't look like a Barbie's dreamhouse amount of coffee, then it's not special. If it's big, it can't be special. If it's scalable, it can't be special. I don't like this. This is similar to the coffee hunter ethos that specialty needs to be a diamond in the rough, that an outsider needs to come in to new lands and find the treasure. If coffee batches are repeatable, predictable, and scale well, then what is there left for them to do? Coffee hunters need a lot of bad coffee to exist to be able to justify their role in finding a treasure. Too many coffee lovers and coffee enthusiasts are unfamiliar with what it takes to process coffee. What kind of volumes are needed to keep up with the world appetite? Specialty cannot exist, it cannot rely on this idea of the small, the micro, or the nano. Because it's really hard for a producer to make a living that way. Historically, the way that coffee producers have made money is volume. That's been the only lever that has been available to so many. You need to have a lot of coffee because coffee is not paid And the lie that has been told to so many coffee producers is that it's okay to produce less coffee because you'll get a higher price for the less coffee that you make, for the smaller amount of coffee that you make. And it's just a formula that has been really hard for most producers to realize. I don't know any that have really managed to make that work for them. Okay, next criticism is that there was not a single raised bed in sight. I am showing coffee drying on the floor, and not only is it on the floor, but I also show myself walking on the coffee with a rake to mix it and dry it. This is unhygienic, they cry. This is not specialty coffee. Listen. Drying coffee on the floor is incredibly Because it's on the floor, the way that we mix it is by walking on top of it. What I show in the videos is how much less labor is needed to move coffee when you mix it by walking versus when you mix it by using your arms on raised beds. And again, let me clarify: raised beds are great. By getting the coffee off of the floor, they can really help with better airflow and lower peak temperatures. It can be definitely a gentler approach. But the flip side of that is that raised beds require a lot more labor and you need a lot more human bodies to make it happen. And asking a producer to move from one system to another would mean a significant price increase that few people want to pay. And even if you could get people to pay extra, in many places, you might not even be able to find enough people to compensate for this new system . The amount of coffee that one person can mix and manage by having it on the floor and walking to mix it, it would take maybe six to eight people to do that same amount of work, that same amount of attention on a raised bed. So for producers who already have raised beds and already have a hundred extra bodies to move the coffee, I salute you. That's great. But when a place doesn't historically have that structure, when a place doesn't have that system, we can't use that image as the only acceptable method of drying coffee. We can't take standards from one part of the world and apply it globally because that's just not the way it There's many different iterations because depending on what country you're in, there's a very different context of what the climate is like, what material is available, how much labor is available, how much that labor costs, and then it also matters culturally how coffee has been processed in that region historically . I just want us to have a bit more nuance and care when people start to leave comments about what specialty is and isn't and what it looks like or what it should look like. It was disappointing to get those kinds of comments, those kinds of criticism on this coffee, but in addition to the disappointment and seeing those types of comments, something that was really interesting was that a lot of these definitions were coming from outsiders, from people who are loving coffee, but whose livelihoods, the roof over their heads doesn't depend on that coffee existing. I think that we need to be a little bit more aware of how often this is happening. How often the conversation is shaped by people who have a casual interest in coffee, and not from the people whose sweat and toil is actually , you know, producing the coffee itself. When the vision of specialty is distorted, when consumers think that specialty coffee is only micro lots of exotic varieties fermented in bioreactors with fruit additions for hundreds of hours and dried on raised beds, what messages are we sending? All those checkboxes are really in the service of marketing and having cool images to share, and usually that comes at the disservice to coffee producers because all of those things, not only are they more of an investment, more time and more risk because you're adding extra steps, but you're adding a lot of unknowns to the coffee When you're processing with more risk, more input, less consistency, at a smaller volume, very few producers are winning. Up until this point, I've mostly been picking on marketing and consuming culture for perpetuating these tropes, but a few coffee producers do it too. This fums me out so much . We're getting this very loud message about processing and fermentation , and it's from half of the 1% of coffee producers who claim to have magically made it work for themselves. But I believe that most of these unicorns are perhaps not being truthful about all the good coffee they have ruined on the road to success. And in addition to that, they likely have other businesses or other family money that allows them to experiment and not rely on coffee exclusively as a means to support themselves and their families. And it's these handful of producers that are showing us these incredibly complex , ridiculous protocols. And that model is getting repeated and copy-pasted for other producers to replicate as an example of the way to escape the commodity commercial market . As if the only way to reach that next level is to do these crazy acrobatics with your coffee and create weird one-of-off exclusive micro lots. But that model has worked for like six producers in the world, and yet that's what we see over and over again. But that's not the only way. This is why I get so passionate about this subject, and why I find it important to show the other message, the other side, that specialty doesn't have to mean small and exclusive and weird. Special can just mean different from the usual. I don't think that we need to bring size into the conversation at all. I want to show that we can do specialty at scale, because when specialty is about exclusivity and small amounts of coffee, that means there's less people in the world who get to taste that coffee. There's less people in the world who get to participate. And a big part of my philosophy is inclusivity. How can we get better coffee to more people . So with all of this, I just wanted to start to chip away at this idea that specialty coffee has to be limited edition, exclusive, small volumes. I don't think that serves the industry. I don't think that serves coffee lovers. I feel like so many people end up losing out . So despite the criticisms and the mean-spirited comments, I just want to keep showing bigger coffee, scalable coffee, and the unglamorous things that it takes to get to that point. We have spent all this time talking about what specialty is not. And something kind of funny that I saw in the YouTube video recently is a uh comment that I didn't cover in the video but that I think it's worth talking about . So this comment is interesting because I think the person was actually trying to agree with me. I think that they were trying to say that the bar was maybe set too high and that more coffee should qualify as specialty. So here's our comment. This is what they said. Specialty coffee has two capsules two characteristics harvested by hand and cup scores exceeding eighty points. People criticizing the processing method, the way that it's dried, know fuck all about specialty coffee . Oh sweetheart, so close. It's so close . It's possible the comment was meant ironically because it's so funny, but I don't know. Unfortunately, maybe I'm too dense to tell, and I'm going to move forward as if it's meant sincerely , because even if this person is joking, even if it was meant to be uh an ironic comment, someone else who reads it might read it sincerely. So here's a problem with this comment. Let's all agree on the above 80 points being specialty. This is a heuristic that was established in the 1980s by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. That's fine. That is some ground that we can all stand on . But his first point about the hand harvested part, that part not so much. Our coffee is hand harvested, but not because it's superior, not because it produces the best quality, not because it's a pillar of specialty coffee, but mostly because of geography and politics. Much of the world's coffee is hand harvested, because you can't put machines into the farms. Usually the farms are too steep, too remote, or too small to afford the investment of machines. In general, I think we should stop bragging about coffee being hand-harvested. I don't think it's a badge of quality. It's a remnant of the colonial systems that took land and exploited the people living there for cheap labor. Instead, I would love to see us bragging that coffee businesses are successful enough to afford to purchase new technologies like mechanical harvesters that release people from the bondage of picking coffee. In my book, that is a much more solid brag. So not only do I disagree that specialty coffee should be defined by hand harvesting. But I've also had really amazingly delicious machine-harvested specialty coffee. I think the technology that allows a mechanical harvester to take the fruit off the tree is really impressive. And in addition to harvesting coffee, machines are also much better than humans at sorting out the less dense defective fruit using vibration instead of, you know, our precious sc,arce resource that is water . And while we're at it, machines can do an excellent job of drying coffee too. If I had a magic wand, I would be here arguing not for coffee patios over raised beds, but for mechanical drying over patios . More technology, more machines do not negate the specialness of coffee. They are a necessary part if we're trying to move the industry forward. I feel a bit like I've backed myself into a corner. I have said many things that specialty is not, and I'm sure I've forgotten some things and I'm sure you guys will all let me know. But all this definition of what specialty coffee is not probably has you wanting to know what specialty coffee is . This is a hard one. In trying to define it, I think about my coffee. I consider my coffee to be specialty because it's made with intention, because it's reprodu cible. I think of its specialty because of how I balance acidity and body and flavor, um, how I choose to create that complexity, and also because that complexity is stable over many months . However, none of that criteria feels satisfying enough. I don't think that definition moves the industry forward. Maybe it helps me, but how does it help others ? Instead of telling you why I make specialty coffee and defining the term, I would rather say that my coffee is not specialty . Now that I see more of what the club is like, instead of advocating for membership, I retreat. I no longer want to be part of the specialty club. Because more than anything, I feel like specialty has been a lie for producers. A carrot dangling at the end of a stick. I believe it started out well meaning, an acknowledgement that commodity prices rarely cover the cost of production, that farmers and producers don't have access to loans and capital to make improvements, that they are operating on a shoestring budget and relying on unpaid, undocumented labor from family members. Specialty coffee was a promise of better prices and recognition if producers only did more. I don't like what this implies. To me, this caveat implies that coffee has been poorly compensated not because of geopolitics and systemic inequality, but because a coffee wasn't good enough to be well compens ated . It feels too close to placing the blame on producers for their own poverty. It's like saying we couldn't pay you more because your coffee wasn't very good, and if you had made better coffee, well then we would have paid you more. So now that you know that, just make better coffee and we will pay you better for it. I think this is insane . Farmers and producers need to be better compensated for their work just as it is without first jumping through hoops and being granted membership to the specialty coffee club. I believe that even the farmers whose coffee you think tastes bad should still be better compensated. Your preference of liking it or not should not determine what someone is allowed to earn. I don't want to spend time defining what specialty is or should be. I wish specialty didn't have to exist. If buyers could just pay what farmers ask for, we wouldn't need the category as an aspirational goal to make a living . The specialty category is not an example of our finest triumphs of coffee excellence, but of our greatest failure, the legacy of cheap coffee . Now I'm sorry this episode is a bummer, and this is where we're ending. I told you, I have not been in a great place. I cannot lift your spirits on coffee because my spirits currently are not lifted in coffee. But I do recommend lifting your spirits with art. I recommend reading anything by Anne Patchet. I highly recommend watching the movie Listers. I have offered free Discord memberships in the past if you want to talk about the TV show Pluribus. And now I'm extending it to people that have watched Listers, which is a bird watching movie that you can find on YouTube. It is delightful. It will just restore your faith in art. I love it so much. And yeah, I hope I hope more people watch it. Our next office hours are Friday, March 27th, which I'm really looking forward too because chatting with you guysys alwa cheers me up. I really love these conversations because you guys bring really thoughtful insights or really interesting questions into the mix. So yeah, office hours are great. To get reminders, sign up for the newsletter, which there will be a link in the show notes. And the newsletter is the first place you'll be getting information about the fermentation tasting kits with Hoffman. So as a roaster, you will be able to buy the raw coffee. And then eventually as a consumer you can support your local roaster and try these kits. Alright everybody, thanks for hanging out. Thanks for making it to the end of another episode. Another year. I love you guys. I'll catch you next time. And remember, life's too short to drink bad coffee. Under the room