Discover The Secrets Of The Speciality Coffee Supply Chain

Out of interest, I recently worked throughout the speciality coffee supply chain from a week labouring on an award-winning farm (a total privilege), Finca San Luis, Tolima, Colombia, to transporting the coffee, cleaning it, roasting it and taking part in the final quality controls.

It was an enlightening experience that will forever enrich the coffees I drink and I hope enrich the coffees you drink too. Here are the three highlights that were the most significant discoveries about the process:

On The Farm

Tolima, in Colombia, is tropical, which means abundant humidity and coffee seeds are like sponges so yes, agreed, this doesn't bode well for drying. The critical moment is at night as the air cools and moisture is reabsorbed by the drying beans (below). More than once I had to jump out of bed in my pyjamas to check the drying beds for their temperature and wetness. In reality, there's not much you can do once the beans are re-wetted, apart from estimate how long they may take to dry and react by managing the flow of hundreds of kilos of new coffee arriving daily to be dried.

You don't want to see me in PJ's so here's a pic of the main man, the farmer, Don Omar Arango, doing quality control in the day. He will check each bean, as a defect caused by the issues outlined below, could ruin your cup (at least these are the standards of Finca San Luis).

So, the issues mentioned above are:

• insect attack on the farm (damaged beans roast unevenly, taste bad)
• storms and dry spells (dehydrated beans will taste like cereal)
• machines cleaning the coffee cherry from the bean (plain and simple smashed bean is no good)
• over fermentation of particular beans (resulting in vinegary notes) caused during the necessary fermentation required for flavour development

Considering the above, it's now astounding to me when I taste a clean cup of coffee. Yet, the story doesn't end here, there's much more. But first, a glorious moment below where the coffee bean, after fermentation, is separated from its cherry - I kid you not it smells like pear champagne if there were ever such a thing!

Once the beans are dried to 11% moisture they need to wait for another month in a cool dry place to stabilise. The moisture needs to redistribute itself before further processing, particularly before roasting.

Then off it goes on to a truck where an unexpected thing becomes important.

Coffee farms in Colombia tend to be high altitude and cool, in transport, the coffee descends down the mountains and towards towns at much lower altitudes where the heat can be blistering.

In fact, I almost passed out in the truck when transporting these coffees through a traffic jam in a particularly hot valley (above). The coffee however remained cool due to proper packing which was assured by regular temperature checking.

Ladies At The Milling Station

Now, the coffee makes it to the milling station where the seed coat has to be separated from the seed. Imagine a nut, you want what’s inside the shell and that’s what milling the coffee grains is all about.

These cleaned coffee grains now have to be checked individually again! Below is an image of the ladies at the milling station hand sorting our floral and lemony washed processed coffee from Finca San Luis. I of course 'helped' (slowed them down) and learnt how to identify further bean defects that were previously not visible, as they were hiding under the seed coat.

It blew my mind how much labour and care was involved here with each bean, I repeat, being hand-sorted. The standard the coffee has to be cleaned to is as described below:

• Zero primary defects per 300 gram sample (sour/black beans)
• Up to five secondary defects for the same sample (broken beans)
• If it fails this high standard the coffee is not speciality (https://sca.coffee/research/coffee-standards).

If you're curious, the image below shows some beans with defects you may be grateful we're sorted out of your cup after seeing.

After this stage, the coffees have, generally, 12 months before they move past their peak freshness and how they are shipped and stored counts a great deal (https://cutt.ly/SvQJO5S).

In our case, as we were roasting in Colombia (then shipping internationally ;), shipping to the roaster was only a day so we could work with super fresh green coffee. It's here, at the roastery, the next phase begins.

Phantom Defects

It is as scary as it sounds.

Within the green beans still lurk many secrets of good and bad flavour only revealed after roasting. It's a nerve-racking moment the first time you sample roast a small amount of coffee to see its potential. The trouble is that even after a few rounds of sample roasting it remains nerve-racking as a one-in-a-thousand bean phantom defect could have evaded detection and enter a customers bag of coffee. Below are three pretty looking boxes of coffee we roasted and now -

We Enter The Dark Side

If you look at the boxes carefully there are yellow coloured beans called quakers, these are beans that looked all good green but reveal themselves to be odd after roasting. Usually, they are beans that didn't absorb the proper nutrition on the farm and taste intensely like corn. During your inspection of the boxes, you may also have spotted darker beans, scorched during roasting, these taste...you guessed it, burnt. So once again we hand sort each bean before packing to remove the final visible defects.

But wait, what about the phantom defect? This one, unfortunately, can only be detected after brewing! It's a defect thought to be caused by phenolic compounds that taste like metal and can ruin an entire cup/bag of coffee for someone (https://cutt.ly/qvQBz8M). They are hard to catch as your sample of test brews may or may not contain a phenolic bean. If you do detect this defect, however, even after all this work, it's questionable whether you should sell this batch of coffee as the experience for the customer is likely to be compromised.

The Good News

After your coffee has passed all these tests it has to be scored on flavour (https://sca.coffee/research/protocols-best-practices) and to be speciality has to breach 80 points of 100.

At ChetventureCoffee we only work with excellent 85+ point coffees graded by professional tasters and competition judges.

So, that's why is called Speciality Coffee and that's why it tastes so good (and costs a bit more too).

It has become one of the great pleasures of my life and I share the best discoveries on chetventurecoffee.com so we can all drink better caffeine, and be part of a grand experience together.

Now tell me

Did this article succeed in providing a deeper appreciation of coffee?

Would you like to know more about the process?

Did I miss anything that seemed important to you?

Let me know in the comments below.

For now, thank you for reading, Chetan