Reflections on coffee innovation: Papua New Guinea and Aged Sumatra

I’m still a relative newcomer to Nespresso, so I’m learning not only how Nespresso does coffee, but also about coffee in general. Our launch of two Q Coffees this past month - Papua New Guinea and Aged Sumatra - has taught me quite a bit about unique origins, plant varieties and processes. It has also taught me about rarity and its inverse relationship to desirability: it seems that like with exotic teas, the harder they are to get ahold of, the more people seem to want them.

Five years ago, Nespresso made a decision to offer an aged Sumatra. We did this by choosing delicious, fresh green coffee from an Aceh cooperative we’d just begun working with, carefully storing it, then creating a handling procedure to qualitatively age it for the next five years. I learned that “Qualitative ageing” means – among other things - aerating and rotating the equivalent of one container of coffee every day. This allows the coffee to evolve, rather than just get old. It’s a lot of work. But astonishingly to me, the effort pays off. The coffee flavour actually transforms dramatically in the ageing, becoming much mellower, with exotic tropical wood notes and a muted acidity.

It strikes me that this is a big commitment, that Nespresso really went out on a limb with the idea. What if the flavour hadn’t evolved in a positive way, if the ageing process had not gone to plan? If the coffee had just gotten old, instead of transforming into a complex new profile? As I am learning, a commitment to coffee also means a measure of daring, of risk-taking. ?

From Papua New Guinea we sourced a coffee that you don’t see very often, mainly because it isn’t easy to get flawless examples of it, let alone any sort of quantity. I learned that New Guinea is the coffee lover’s coffee: beloved because there is a preponderance of old tree varieties there, which have a truly refined, gentle fruit note that glides smoothly on the palate. The country’s infrastructure means it’s difficult to move coffee from the very remote, hidden valleys it grows in, and logistical delays can ruin the inherent quality. But in the care of our supplier, the coffee was fermented for just the right – long! – amount of time to highlight its sweet fruitiness.

Having chosen these two coffees, we now went out on an even longer limb and decided to Q grade them. What does that mean?

In short form, it means that the coffees were independently evaluated by sensory experts to specialty coffee standards. These experts – of which there are only around 7000 around the globe – are qualified through a highly demanding program to assess coffee quality. The Coffee Quality Institute that owns the program is a non-profit dedicated to improving the quality of coffee and the lives of those who produce it. They created the standard for quality verification and certification in specialty coffee.

Once again, there was a lesson in all this for me. Everything about these coffees took time, money, coordination…effort that went above and beyond the usual. We didn’t have to do this. The coffees would have sold without this commitment to quality. But both the choice of coffees and the decision to have them certified as Q Coffees showed me how very committed we are to the bean. Coffee rules at Nespresso, it is heart and center.

Recently I read a quote saying Nespresso is like a bourgeoise old lady who doesn’t change with the times. But this decision to Q-grade the coffees and seek non-biased external evaluation of them strikes me as the very opposite. There is an honesty and vulnerability about welcoming objective grading and the more I learn about the coffee world, the more I understand how cutting-edge this actually is. It was a risk: like the choice to age a fresh green Sumatra coffee 5 years ago, there was no guarantee of the outcome. We did it because we believe in coffee. It strikes me that these choices are not easy ones to make, but ones that illustrate a deep commitment to coffee and to quality. Something I am very proud of.

#CQI #Qcoffee #CoffeeQuality #CoffeeCertification?