Forty bags on a shelf, a friend on the phone from Bogotá, and a startup with weeks of money left. Five things on a bag predict whether you will like it. One beats the rest.
I am standing in a coffee shop in Homewood, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, in the first warm week of April, holding a bag of beans that costs eighteen dollars, and I am going to buy it.
It is an indefensible purchase for a man with a company of three people and money for a few more months if nothing goes wrong, when something always goes wrong, and a son of two and a half who expresses his opinions about breakfast by throwing it. I am in Birmingham because last year the energy accelerator that Techstars runs in this city took in the three of us and the company we had named Sync Energy, and so my days are borrowed desks and mentor meetings and whiteboards with somebody else's diagrams half rubbed out beneath mine, and a word, runway, that everybody here says the way farmers in Medinipur say rain. And yet I am not worried this spring, and I do not entirely know why, unless it is that the world is reopening and I have come out of that pink house in Jaipur into open air, or that a startup in its first year feels the way those locked-down mornings felt, when everything was still possible and nobody had yet told us otherwise. The dogwoods along the street are out, white as new paper, and the air smells of cut grass and warm asphalt, and the bag in my hand breathes through its little valve a smell of dark chocolate and something floral I cannot name.
Julian is on the phone from Bogotá, a friend from my old life who grew up around coffee, explaining why the bag says Nariño and why that matters, when all I asked him was which of the forty bags on this shelf a sensible man should carry home; what follows is his answer, and then mine.
The one thing that beats everything
Look for the roast date, which is the day the coffee was roasted, printed on the bag, usually by hand in marker or stamped in a corner, and which is a different creature from a best-before date or a packing date, both of which tell you almost nothing. If a bag has no roast date, put it down however beautiful the label, and that single rule clears most of a supermarket aisle and about half of what is sold online, and it is the most reliable rule in this note.
It matters so much because roasted coffee is a fresh food, like bread, with a window that is shorter than anybody selling it would like to admit: for filter coffee the window opens a day or two after roasting and closes after a week or ten days, and for espresso it opens a little later and closes a little later, and once the bag is open you have a few days at the top of its form however carefully you seal it. One day I will give this , because it would change how I buy more than anything else in the series.
Nearly all the coffee in the world comes from two plants, and arabica is most of it and is where the flavour lives, and robusta is the rest, with more caffeine and more resistance to disease and more yield per tree, a smaller bean and a rougher, rubbery taste, prized in Italian espresso blends for its thick crema and its punch the way a pinch of salt is prized in caramel.
Most specialty coffee is arabica and does not bother to say so, and robusta carries a poor reputation that it only partly deserves, which I say as someone who has drunk a lot of bad robusta out of steel tumblers, burnt and boiled and sweetened into submission. Some very good robusta is being grown now, and a surprising amount of it comes from India, which is a story for the last note.
Variety, which you read like a grape
If species is the difference between red wine and white, variety is the grape, and all arabica traces back to two old lines, Typica and Bourbon, with everything else a mutation or a cross or a selection from those, the way every dog is descended from a wolf and none of them look like one.
Julian, with a motorbike going past behind him on some street in Bogotá, ran through the ones worth knowing: Bourbon, the sweet and balanced parent of many others; Caturra, a compact Bourbon found in Brazil, which does well high up and poorly low down; two selections from a Kenyan laboratory in the thirties that are responsible for the blackcurrant taste of Kenyan coffee, that sharp purple flavour like the cordial you drank as a child; and Gesha, a plant from a village in Ethiopia that made its name in Panama, which tastes of tea and citrus and tropical fruit and sells for more than any other, though to me it is thin as a watercolour where I want oil paint. Then there is the whole family of rust-resistant varieties, bred with a little robusta in them, which used to taste compromised and taste a little better with every harvest.
Only about a third of specialty bags name the variety, even in the countries that grow the coffee, so its absence is forgivable, and its presence is a small flag the roaster has raised to say that somebody is paying attention.
Processing, which changes the taste more than origin does
Julian was firm about this, and it surprised me: the way the fruit is taken off the seed changes the cup more than the country the seed grew in.
Washed. The fruit is pulped off and the seed is fermented in tanks to loosen what remains, then washed and dried on raised beds in the sun, and the cup comes out clean and bright and transparent as a window just wiped, so that if you want to taste the place, this is the process that shows it; Kenya ferments twice with a wash in between, which is part of why Kenyan coffee is so vivid.
Natural. The whole fruit is dried intact until it shrivels to a dark raisin, and then the dry husk is knocked off, and what comes out is heavy and fruity and wild, sometimes strange, like the smell of a fruit bowl a day past its best, and less consistent from bag to bag, and wonderful in an espresso blend for body; a dark-roasted natural, with its syrupy weight and its oils, is the cup I reach for most.
Honey. The fruit is pulped but some of the sticky layer is left on the seed while it dries, which puts the cup somewhere between the other two, and the Costa Ricans have made it a national speciality and grade it by how much is left on, in shades that run from yellow to red to black like the jars of jaggery in a village shop.
Anaerobic and experimental. The coffee is fermented in sealed tanks, sometimes with added fruit or yeast, so that it comes out tasting of things coffee does not usually taste of, which makes it the current frontier and the current price premium.
Median prices across a catalogue of Indian specialty roasters, by how the coffee was processed. The experimental lots carry the premium.
Altitude, and what the number means
Arabica likes to grow high, where the nights are cold, and higher means cooler and cooler means the fruit ripens slowly and slow ripening means a denser bean with more acidity and more to say, and in one Central American country a few hundred metres of altitude is worth several degrees of temperature. A bag that names its elevation is a bag whose roaster knows where the coffee came from, and that knowledge is what the number is really telling you.
Where to buy, in order
From a roaster who prints a roast date and can tell you the farm, ideally one who roasts after you order, which is how I would come to do it myself, years later, in a kitchen in Bengaluru.
By subscription, if you drink coffee steadily: a subscription solves the freshness problem structurally, which careful shopping never can.
Directly, if you ever get the chance: direct trade at its best means transparency about who was paid what, with the miller and the exporter and the importer each named, which is better than the alternative and still short of a guarantee.
As for the certificates, Fair Trade and organic and the rainforest labels each guarantee something real about how the coffee was farmed or traded and stay silent about how it tastes, which is the single most useful correction I can make in this note: a certificate on a bag speaks for the farm's paperwork, and a roast date speaks for the cup.
What the price means
Every bag of coffee in the world is priced against one number, the price of arabica on the exchange in New York, which I wrote about in the history note, and when that number collapsed at the end of the eighties farmers lost money on every pound they grew. Specialty coffee is negotiated at some amount above that number, farm by farm and sack by sack, so what you buy when you pay what I am paying today is a way out of that index, and that is what the money is for. I find it a defensible reason to spend eighteen dollars even this spring, with a runway I can count in weeks on my fingers. Does everyone who buys a bag like this think about it? I doubt it, though I suspect that knowing it is what turns a treat into a decision.
Bogotá from the air, with the mountains behind the city. Photo by Victor Rosario on Unsplash.
Colombia, since Julian is on the phone
Colombia's growers have belonged to one federation for nearly a century, and the man with the moustache and the mule on the old advertisements was played by the same actor for almost forty years, longer than most marriages, and between the federation and the mule the country taught the world to say its name whenever it asked for a cup. The regions Julian rates for specialty lie in the south, in the folds of the mountains, and the famous coffee axis in the middle of the country, a landscape of small farms on hills the green of a billiard table, is on the world heritage list and grows the volume.
I kept thinking, as he talked, about my own country, which grows good arabica and very good robusta in the hills of the south and sends most of it abroad in plain sacks, a great share of it to Italy, where it disappears into espresso blends and is drunk every morning in Milan and Naples under an Italian name on the tin, so that a man can spend his whole life tasting Karnataka and never once hear the word. Standing here with a bag that says Nariño in letters an inch high, I cannot shake the feeling that a country ought to send its name out into the world along with its beans, and I wonder what it would take for a shelf in Alabama to say Chikmagalur as proudly.
One correction, since a great deal of writing gets it wrong: Brazil is the largest arabica producer in the world, and Colombia holds the more specific honour of being the largest producer of mild washed arabica, which is the title the country actually holds.
The strangest Colombian coffee Julian knows of is grown from one of arabica's rare wild parent species, and before the year was out a Colombian barista would carry it onto the stage of the world championship and win with it; by the accounts I have read, it tastes of sweetness and very little else, like sugar water with a memory, and Julian has not tried it, and neither have I.
Where the label lies
The best cautionary tale in coffee is about a label, and it begins in Hawaii, the only American state that grows coffee at any scale, where it is picked by hand on black lava slopes at an American minimum wage, on farms that average a few acres, by people whose fingers are stained purple by the end of the day, and where the green coffee sells at the farm for roughly eight times the world benchmark before anyone roasts it.
Kona green coffee sells at the farm for about eight times the world benchmark, before anyone roasts it. That gap is what the fake labels were chasing.
So people faked it, and a couple of years ago the Kona farmers sued the retailers and roasters who had been selling coffee labelled Kona with almost none in it. The settlements are coming in by the million, though when the last of them is paid a farmer with two acres will have a few thousand dollars to show for years of waiting, and for now the law still lets a blend carry the name with a tenth of Kona in it; it will take the state several more years to require that a bag labelled Kona actually be mostly Kona.
I have colleagues who came from that part of Hawaii, and one of them told me, years ago, over lunch, about picking coffee as a child on a family plot and about the exact shade of red that means a cherry is ready, the deep soft red of a ripe tomato, a long way from the red of a fire engine, and I think about him every time I see a shelf of bags with a Hawaiian name and a price too low to be true. The place is in trouble anyway, with a beetle and a leaf disease and a falling crop, and the fake labels are the least of it.
Five questions
At any counter, in this order:
When was this roasted?
Which farm, or which cooperative?
What variety?
How was it processed?
What did you pay for it?
A good roaster answers all five without a flicker of annoyance, and one who cannot answer the last is probably still fine, and one who bristles at the first has told you everything you need, so walk out with your money still warm in your pocket.
If you do one thing this morning:
Find the roast date on the bag in your cupboard.
If there is none, you have already learned the most useful thing in this note.
The next question is what the water does, which I would not believe until I moved somewhere it went wrong, and after that comes the grinder, which is where the eighteen dollars should really have gone first.
I bought the bag, and it was very good, dark and heavy and a little smoky, the way I like it, and the company did not last the year, though we did not know that yet, and I am glad we did not.
Questions this note answers
What is the most important thing on a coffee bag?
The roast date. Not a best-before date, the day it was roasted. Filter coffee is at its best from about one to ten days after roasting, espresso from about seven to fourteen. A bag with no roast date is a bag you cannot judge.
What do washed, natural and honey mean on a coffee bag?
They describe how the fruit was removed from the seed. Washed coffee is pulped, fermented and rinsed, and tastes clean and bright. Natural coffee is dried inside the whole fruit and tastes heavier and fruitier. Honey sits in between, with some of the fruit left on while it dries.
Does Fair Trade or organic mean the coffee tastes good?
No. Those labels certify farming and trading practices, which matter. None of them says anything about the cup. A roast date and a named farm tell you more about taste than any certificate.
