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Cover Art by: Nick Hafner
Into song: Elijah Bisbee
In this new episode I talk about:
RESOURCES
Inquiries about coffee samples or future Fermentation Training Camps: info.luxiacoffee@gmail.com
Support the show on Patreon to join our live Discord hangouts, and get access to research papers, transcripts and videos.
And if you don't want to commit, show your support here with a one time contribution: PayPal
Sign up for the newsletter for behind the scenes pictures.
Cover Art by: Nick Hafner
Into song: Elijah Bisbee
Hello, dear ones. I sincerely hope you've enjoyed listening to the last handful of episodes where I've been focusing on conversations versus my usual monologues. This has been deliberate because I have wanted to include more voices on the podcast and share different perspectives from my own. However, the original aim of this podcast was to bring you my favorite coffee science. And so today, we are going to kick it old school with a more traditional making coffee episode, where I'm going to walk you through some of my favorite research from one of my favorite researchers, Dr. Roseanne Schwan. She's the co author of the book, Coffee and Cacao Fermentations, which is a thick microbiology textbook. So definitely not for the dabbler, but it is the best resource if you want a deep dive into coffee fermentation. And since we haven't covered microbes in a while, this episode also gives us a good opportunity to review the role of microbes in fermentation and the flavor outcomes in our brewed coffee. So today we are going to review how microbes contribute to defects in our brewed coffee. Before we get started, I want to remind you that FTC December is sold out, but we still have spots for FTC February. or you can email us to be put on the wait list as I announce future dates for... The rest of 2024 and beyond the email and my website will be linked in the show notes, and I hope to see you here in Guatemala for ultimate coffee nerdiness and fun. All right. Today we are going to talk about coffee growing altitude. I feel like there are two different mindsets to coffee growing altitude in our industry. The first is a bit more of a, I call it a beginner mindset, where we repeat this concept that higher altitude is better for quality, and maybe we are impressed when we see coffee growing at higher and higher altitudes. One of the patterns I see in newer coffee companies is flooding the consumer with information. It's like having ten things on the label. This type of flooding is often paired with quality. It's like saying, Look at all the stuff I know about this coffee. You're not buying anonymous commodity coffee. You're paying for the traceability. Altitude can be a signal indicator because coffee is mostly grown in a region that wraps around the equator, cinching the Earth's waste like a belt. This is a tropical belt. It's hot. In hot regions, higher altitude generally signals mountainous and forests, cooler temperatures, and then you can make the leap to slower growing plants, longer maturation season, Perceived for better coffee quality. This is a tropical belt. It's hot. In hot regions, higher altitude generally signals mountains and forests. cooler temperatures, better for perceived coffee quality. But as we move further away from the equator, either up or down, there is more temperature variation, and you can get cooler temperatures at lower altitudes. you can accomplish similar microclimates without the prerequisite height. So when a bag indicates altitude without reference to latitude, I don't think it's particularly useful. I think of it more like a relic. A thing that we think we are supposed to include on the bag. Kind of like padding a resume with extracurricular activities or volunteer opportunities. I find this behavior most often in younger brands. It seems to be something that more mature brands tend to grow out of. This oversharing. When I see a label crammed with as much information as possible, it signals to me that they are still figuring out what is important for quality. They are still trying to figure out what is the signal and what is the noise. So the first mindset is the people who think altitude tells us something important about quality and feel the need to include it in their marketing material. And the second mindset is the people that understand that talking about altitude without the context of latitude is not very useful. And they have removed it from their bags as a virtue indicator. The challenge can be that once roasted coffee labels are paired back to the few essential details, they often resemble the anonymous commodity coffee again. It can be hard to tell who has a streamlined label with only a few thoughtful, carefully selected descriptors. The ones that they think are the most useful for the consumer. And who has a seemingly streamlined label because they don't actually know anything about the coffee. Because they don't have access to the information. So I can see that trying to include as much information as possible on the label is a way to stand apart. I understand how tempting it is to include altitude on the label as a selling point. I also believe what is essential and what is superfluous. I think the conversation about labels is evolving and future Lucia may not agree with present Lucia But as of right now I want to share with you what I like to see on a roasted coffee bag and Hopefully this way you can think about what you look for and what you value when you purchase coffee I think there are four essential elements for a coffee label And these are the things I look for when buying coffee. The first is to include who grew and processed the coffee. If possible, I think it's important to name the farmer or the co op. This gives the coffee provenance. It lets you know the chain of custody. I like this because otherwise it feels like the roaster is taking the lion's share of the credit for bringing this coffee to you. When a label does not include who grew and processed the coffee cherries, it's a lack of acknowledgement that getting coffee from the ground to your cup is a monumental effort that many people are involved in. Next, I think it's important to include the region where the coffee is from. I don't think it's enough to say Colombia or Guatemala. I believe at least you should name the region. For example, Huila or Huehuetenango. And if you can get more specific, even better, because being able to place a coffee and flavor with a specific part of the world, to have that context of coffee, is what most of us are looking for when we reach for the word terroir. However. I believe you can respect the place where coffee comes from without having to invoke the politically charged marketing label. Instead of saying terroir Just tell us where the coffee is coming from. Name the place as specifically as you can. Next, I believe labels should include the cultivar because plant genetics matter to flavor and customers can begin to identify if they prefer caturas, borbones, típicas, margojipe, or pacas. Being able to connect a plant genetics to a flavor profile or a region empowers consumers to better develop their palates and identify their taste preferences in a deeper way. And lastly, I do think labels should mention the processing. For example, how were these cherries treated? What happened to them? If you've been here a while, you've witnessed my evolution from wanting processing to be more descriptive. Because our traditional options were, one word, natural. Traditionally, these two flavor options were very different from each other. A person could very clearly identify one versus the other. It was like saying your options are black or white. Very clear, very opposites. But with the explosion of processing and the rainbow of option post 2014, a label that said natural or washed Just didn't cut it anymore. It didn't give the consumer enough information. To address this, I thought we needed more words to better describe processing, because processing is responsible for a significant part of the flavor profile. A dry fermentation at 28 degrees for 30 hours will have a very different profile than a submerged fermentation at 20 degrees for 72 hours. Time and temperature are significant factors that select the microbes that will dominate your fermentation. Despite being so different in flavor, both can live under the washed umbrella. So, this one word can describe completely different and unique profiles. A fermentation in cherry, or pulped coffee, will be different even if ultimately they are both washed and dried in parchment. So for several years, I was pro labels that described processing in a more descriptive and complete way. That is, until I saw the circus it unleashed. The 100 hour frozen cherry. The 9 step hydrohoneys. The thermoshocks. The lactic acidic process. The triple anaerobic fermentation. And on and on and on. energy around processing and fermentation felt to me to be driven by how cool we could make the label sound, instead of what it was actually doing to the flavor in the cup. If someone did a 100 hour fermentation, then the next person wanted 200 hours. This one upsmanship and exaggerated processing felt very uncomfortable to me. I think it channels a very masculine and competitive energy. For a person who makes a living from coffee fermentation, and makes a living from people giving a crap about coffee fermentation, so much so that you want to listen to a podcast about coffee fermentations, even I think it's going too far. And to be clear, I don't think it's going too far from a coffee purist perspective. I'm not arguing that it's adulterating coffee to include all of these steps. I do not believe hyper processing masks slash hides or dilutes terroir. It's not about purity. It's about sanity, the sanity of the producer who has to execute these elaborate processing routines for the sake of a cool sounding label. Many producers have unleashed their creativity, and I'm excited to see how much fun they are having. I celebrate the Enrique Lopez's from Finca Chilin in Mexico, the Luis Aldana from Fazenda California in Brazil, and the Diego Bermudez's of Finca Paraiso in Colombia. But I have also seen that many are not having as much fun and instead feel pressure to change the way they have been making coffee, not because of quality, but because of what can be put on a label. So while in the podcast, I tried to bring you, dear listener, fun science, in my actual day to day work with coffee producers, I have championed simple processing. Minimal processing. Doing the least instead of doing the most. I think it's more interesting to ask, how little can we do to make something taste good? Instead of, how much can we do? How much more can we do? How do we top what we did last time? I don't think coffee needs all of the steps to taste good and to be worthy of a better price. Good coffee can be simple to make, and we shouldn't need a complicated gymnastics routine to justify paying coffee producers livable prices for their work. Talking about how processing differentiates coffee, and getting excited about all of the combinations we can force a coffee through, distracts us from the conversations we should actually be having, about how we haven't been paying enough for the work producers are already doing, the work that they have already been doing. That's not really the future I was hoping for when I started fermenting coffees in 2014. Complicated procedures seem like another way to overtax coffee producers who have limited access to expensive equipment or the latest fermentation information. There is nothing innovative about the power structure where as consumers we extract more from an already delicate and often overtaxed system. Most coffee producers don't get paid enough to cover their cost of production and now we are asking them to invest more in complicated processing before we are willing to raise the prices we have been paying for what they are already doing. And some of you may be like, what is she talking about? It's just words on a sticker or a webpage. But it's not. These words have an outsized influence on the most vulnerable part of the coffee value chain. I have heard from groups of small holder coffee farmers in Colombia who were under the impression that they couldn't possibly participate in specialty coffee culture until they could afford better tanks to have anaerobic fermentations. As if equipment was what made coffee qualify as specialty. So, I used to support more descriptive processing labels. I was glad when we moved from saying washed to describing the process. For example, cherries soaked overnight in cold water, pulped coffee fermented at 24 Celsius for 37 hours, washed and dried in partial sun for 20 days. But now my stance is to go back to simple labels. Because when we ask for this processing information, we just assume we are owed it. But a good processing routine is a coffee producer's intellectual property. It can take a long time to develop something that works. Why did we just assume we are owed this information? Coffee producers who don't immediately share their processing protocol can be seen as cagey. But I think that's really unfortunate. It's perfectly normal to want to protect something you've spent years developing. So I used to support more descriptive processing labels. But now, when I see a long label detailing exactly what the producer did, Sometimes it makes me a little bit sad. It's hard to know if they genuinely wanted to share that, or if they just felt pressure to give up their IP. Maybe it's too defeatist of me, and I'm open to your critiques of this. I want to be convinced that descriptive processing labels are not a failed experiment. that they are not one more way to continue the existing historical power dynamic between producers and buyers. And along with the list of what I think should be, on a coffee bag. I do not believe that altitude is one of those things that should be on there. And I hope today's research will help untangle and give you some perspective as to why altitude is important and also It doesn't give us as much information as we would like to think. So it's not because I don't think altitude matters in quality. Of course it does. There is a reason it was included in the first place. It's just that it's not as straightforward as we think. Today I will share with you a paper that will help us understand what altitude has to do with coffee quality from a fermentation and processing point of view. The paper is titled The Altitude of Coffee Cultivation Causes Shifts in the Microbial Community Assembly and Biological Compounds in Natural Induced Anaerobic Fermentations, published May 2021 in Frontiers in Microbiology. What this very long, overly technical title is basically telling us is coffee ground in different locations changes the microbes in the fermentation. And it's like, duh, of course it does. This is one of those foundational concepts that is part of the reason why we often reach for the word terroir. We're trying to describe this, this feeling, this. concept of something that tastes like it can only come from one place because there is something special or unique about that place that cannot exist anywhere else. And we know now that microbes found on coffee cherries are like a fingerprint, a way to identify a coffee from a certain place. This study looks at coffee harvested from the Caparau region located in the mountainous territory between two Brazilian states, Minas Gerais and Espirito Santo. The plants are owned by family farms. And although Brazil is known for robusta production, this area has 90 percent production of arabica, and of that 90%, 75 percent is processed as a natural, aka dry process, aka dried in fruit. This study aimed to characterize the dominant microbial communities of bacteria and fungi present in self induced anaerobic fermentations containing different altitude coffees. They did DNA extraction to identify the type and the abundance of the different bacteria, yeast, and molds. They evaluated the organic acids, malic, citric, lactic, tartaric, succinic, acetic, isobutyric, and butyric. They evaluated caffeine, trigonoline, and chlorogenic acids. Total phenols and antioxidant activity was also measured. Fruits were processed in a natural method, transferred to 20 liter buckets, where they put data loggers inside the bioreactors to register the mass's temperature during fermentation, which lasted 72 hours. And after 48 hours, they took a 100 gram sample to do a lot of their DNA extraction. In this study, they weren't necessarily looking at high versus low altitudes. Instead, they were looking at four different altitudes and the difference between them without a judgment call as to what is considered high versus low. The altitudes are 800 meters, 1, 000 meters, 1, 200 meters, and 1, 400 meters above sea level. So while they don't specifically call 800 meters a low altitude or call 1, 400 meters a high altitude, we can all agree that 1, 400 meters is relatively higher than 800 meters. Trying to define low altitude is kind of like trying to define a micro lot. It depends who you talk to. A micro lot can be 5 kilos or 500 kilos. So the highest altitude in this study, the upper limit, is 1400 meters above sea level. But it could easily be the bottom limit in a different study and considered to be low altitude. So we need the context that this is done in Brazil and not Colombia or Ethiopia. In the beginning of the paper, there's this following paragraph I want to read to you. Regarding altitude and shade effects on biochemical composition of coffee beans, contradictory results have been reported. A study from 2006, 2019, and 2020 observed that green coffee beans from Catura grown at high altitudes and processed via wet method in Costa Rica have high caffeine and fats and low trigonoline. While a study in 2018 observed the exact opposite, that high altitude decreases caffeine and chlorogenic acids in Arabica varieties from Ethiopia. Caffeine, chlorogenic acids, and sucrose are three elements that with higher altitude sometimes increase and other times decrease. These contradictory reports indicate that altitude and shade effects on biochemical composition and quality of coffee beans are highly site specific or dependent upon growing conditions. But I also have a theory about this that none of these papers talked about. In Ethiopia, where coffee is well adapted, I can see how high altitude can have decreased caffeine Because if the plant is well adapted, it might not need to defend itself as much. however, when a coffee plant is taken to Costa Rica and put at high altitudes, in a location where the species didn't develop, it makes sense to me that the plant would respond by producing more caffeine to protect itself. Or rather, the part that makes sense is that some conditions have opposite effects if we are looking at coffee in its native environment versus one where it was introduced. But again, this research does not say this, it's just my personal reflection, my personal musings. during fermentation, microorganisms consume carbohydrates or other organic compounds and proliferate. They dominate. They take over the coffee. Those microorganisms come from the environment, like soil, air, plants. And if you remember from the terroir episodes, talking about Amy Dudley's work. The people. People are also carriers and manipulators of microbes. Coffee is very manual, so over time, humans also influence the microbiome of coffee. But we are not talking about that today. Today we focus on the microbes coming from the environment. I just don't want you to forget that as we constantly touch coffee, we share our own microbes and so naturally shift the coffee's microbiome. I really like this research that I'm telling you about today because it was able to crystallize something I had a hunch about for many years. Something I observed that seemed right, but I had no research to back it up. Until I found this paper. When I first got into the industry, I realized that there were some assumptions I needed to adopt if I was going to be part of the specialty coffee community. One of them was a glorification of altitude. As soon as I started paying attention to roasted coffee bags, One constant identifier of quality was a coffee growing altitude written very prominently, very proudly, on the bag. You can find roasted coffee bags that won't tell you the producer, won't tell you the processing, but they will brag about the altitude. This never made sense to me as a bragging point, and I've never felt like it gave much information. It was like, okay. So what? To review, the conventional thinking goes, the higher the altitude, the higher the quality. Some of the reasons I have heard are that higher altitude equals cooler climate, equals longer growing season, equals more time for coffee to ripen slowly, equals higher accumulation of sugar, equals higher quality. Okay, sounds reasonable. I see why so many of us buy this narrative. But as listeners of the podcast will know, every subject invites its opposite. If the narrative we have adopted is that high altitude equals good, then it inadvertently implies that low altitude equals less good. We can't have one without the other. I had no problem with high altitude equals good, but I had a problem with the second part. The low altitude equals less good, that I didn't think was accurate. Another thing to clarify is that today I am not talking about the agricultural conditions and how cool climate ripening compares to warm climate ripening. Instead, we are focusing on microbes and processing and altitude. The cultivation of coffee and the processing of coffee go hand in hand when we talk about final cup quality. I'm not discounting the effects of altitude on growing conditions. Instead, I want to highlight what little credit slash role we have given microbes in the whole altitude quality narrative. I believe high altitude, high quality connection has been dominated by agriculture, and we have not given enough consideration to how different microbes are in those different altitudes. But first, let's review how wet and dry processed coffees are different. Yeast from the genera Saccharomyces, Pichia, Candida, Cloveromyces, Hansenia spora, and bacteria belonging to Leuconostoc, Lactobacillus, Bacillus, Flavobacterium, Serratia, Pseudomonas, and Bicella are often found while coffee is fermenting. And based on the process, wet or dry, you will find different concentrations of those microorganisms. Bacteria thrive in wetter environments. those species will generally dominate the wet process like honeys and washed coffees. While yeast. are more tolerant of low moisture environments and they tend to dominate the dry process. aka natural, aka dried in fruit. So moisture will shift the balance of the microbes in your fermentations. Temperature also shifts the balance of microbes. These microbes have different temperature tolerance. So if we take the same wet process, meaning we pulp the cherries and have wet parchment in a fermentation tank that is warmed by the sun, and another that is in complete shade, the the different temperatures of those fermentations will influence the microbes that are in the tank, the ones that are working and producing flavors. Even if those tanks are in the same country, even if they're in the same mill, even if it's the same harvest, even if those tanks on the same day are tanks that are side by side, the fermentation will still be different based on a dramatic temperature change. And the same dry process in the same location done during a cold season will taste different to one done during a heat wave because the temperature changes the microbes in the fermentation. but furthermore, bigger reason, more than temperature, that the dry process tastes different from washed, is because of the amount of moisture available to the microbes in the fermentation in a wet coffee. Washed process versus a dry. So yes, temperature matters, but that moisture is a much bigger Influence on the overall result and this is the biggest frustration I hear from producers They'll tell me I picked coffee from the same farm use the same tanks fermented for the same time as always I did everything the same and my coffee tastes different and maybe they did do everything the same But the microbes are not the same. Maybe it was a cold day versus a sunny day. Some days it rains some days It doesn't even if They are doing everything to the best of their ability, the same. In the world of microbes, subtle changes can lead to dramatic differences. Perhaps if coffee growers and producers could control the weather, they could get more consistent fermentations. But that's impossible, and also unnecessary for consistency, as we will see shortly. And now we come back to altitude. Dr. Schwan's work shows that altitude is another factor that changes the microbial population and therefore the results and flavors in fermentation. Temperature matters, moisture matters, and altitude matters. Among the altitudes, 800 meters had the highest bacterial richness, with 18 genera assigned, and 1, 000 meters had the highest fungal richness, with 166 species found. The researchers observed a tendency to decrease the bacterial diversity indices with the altitude increase. the 800 meter bacteria profile was very distant and different from the other altitudes. so this is not surprising, right? They're saying higher altitudes that likely have less humidity and cooler temperatures also had lower bacterial populations and higher yeast and mold populations. And you might expect that all microbes are present at different altitudes, but in different concentrations, that is to say, in different amounts. For example, Sphingomonas, Methylbacterium, Leuconostoc, and Bicella were found in all altitudes but at different concentrations. But there were some genera that were only found at 800 meters and nowhere else. And some were only found at 1000 meters and nowhere else. For example, Gluconobacter was found in three of the four locations. It was only found at 800, 1, 200, and 1, 400 meters. It skipped 1, 000 meters. And that was found at about 20%, 12%, and 9 percent concentrations. So at 800 meters, the concentration was about 20%. And when you go up to 1, 400 meters, the concentration of this bacteria dropped by half. It was down to 9%. Gluconobacter is a genus of bacteria in the acetic acid bacteria family. They prefer sugar rich environments, so are sometimes found as a spoilage organism in beer. They are not known to be pathogenic, but they can cause rot in apples and pears. They are used alone or with acetobacter for microbial degradation of ethanol. They are aerobes. They oxidize. And, along with Gluconobacter, another member of the acetic acid bacteria family, is acetobacter. In this study, acetobacter was at 9 percent at 800 meters, 7 percent at 1, 000 meters, and up at 1, 200 meters only at 5%, and there was none at all found at 1, 400 meters. So as we go higher in altitude, the spoilage bacteria reduce in population. So in this study, at 1400 meters, gluconobacter was half of the lower altitude, and acetobacter was not found at all. What this means is that the chance to have an over fermentation defect are very low when the bacteria responsible for the vinegar aroma is not found at that altitude. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast I work with most, was only found in a Goldilocks window. It was only identified at 1, 000 meters and 1, 200 meters, so they did not find it at the lower end or the upper end. And in addition to looking at the DNA of the microbes present, they also mapped the fermentation byproducts, the organic acids produced by yeast and bacterial fermentation. The higher altitudes of 1, 400 and 1, 200 meters had higher concentrations of acetic, malic, and citric acid. But the 1, 400 meter also had a high correlation with lactic acid, while the 1, 200 meters had a higher correlation to tartaric. And please do not seek coffee grown at 1, 200 meters because you love the tartaric acid profile. This result is very specific to this location. The point is that the different microbe identities matter because it leads to different acid profiles. Something I found surprising in this study were the acetic acid results. Even though 800 meters had the highest population of gluconobacter and acetobacter, meaning that they had the highest potential to produce acetic acid, that's not what actually happened. The altitude 1, 200 meters had a higher concentration of acetic acid than the lower 800 meter coffee. Remember, acetic acid is associated with rot and a coffee that tastes like vinegar. You would expect that the altitude with the highest concentration of acetic acid producing bacteria would also produce the highest concentration of acetic acid. But instead, a higher altitude with less spoilage bacteria ended up producing more acetic acid. I have two ideas about this. One is that even though the 800 meter coffee had less acetic acid than higher elevations, it perhaps doesn't have a lot of other things going on, so the lower concentration will stand out more. Even if a higher elevation has more acetic acid, Perhaps it doesn't come across as a defect because it is in balance with all of the other acids. An acetic acid in low concentrations is fruity and pleasant. It's only when it's out of balance that it makes the coffee taste of vinegar and become a defect. The other idea of why the result is not as expected is because microbiology is complicated and just because you have higher levels of spoilage bacteria doesn't guarantee that you will have Remember, the issue with lower elevations is lack of consistency. And sometimes you do hit a unicorn, a high scoring coffee, but it is hard to replicate. I think of it kind of like driving without a seatbelt. If you drive without a seatbelt, it doesn't guarantee you will get into an accident. But if you do get into an accident, not wearing a seatbelt makes the accident much worse. For the experiments, the conditions during the 72 hours changed from 8 Celsius to 23 Celsius. The humidity went from 56 percent to 85%. Perhaps on this day, it just did not flavor the bloom of Acetobacter. Maybe if it had been two degrees hotter or had a slightly higher humidity for a little bit longer, we would have seen different outcomes. Other highlights they found with altitude and organic acids are... At 1, 200 meters, malic and succinic acid were significantly higher. At 1, 400 meters, citric and lactic were significantly higher. And tartaric acid was only detected at 1, 000 meters and 1, 200 meters but at less than half the amount at 1, 000 meters than 1, 200 meters. And 800 meters was not highly correlated to any acid at all. Organic acids mainly affect, obviously, the acidity, but they can also affect the sweet flavor, the sweetness that you can perceive in the cup. Bioreactive compounds, trigonoline, and chlorogenic acids are precursors of volatile compounds that contribute to roasted coffee taste and aroma. And volatile alcohol precursors produce rose like and fruit like flavors. So these are all of the things that they were measuring from these different microbes found at these different altitudes. From a microbial point of view, one of the most fundamental understandings is that the environment influences the microbial population. That is to say the physical conditions of temperature and humidity, influence, and select for certain microbes. I often ask you to imagine microbial populations like human populations, so imagine Mexico and Greenland. They are roughly the same land mass. Greenland is the 12th largest country, and Mexico is the 13th largest. So Greenland is slightly larger than Mexico, but its population, according to Google, is just 56, 000 people, scattered in a few coastal towns, making it the least populated country on Earth. Mexico, on the other hand, has 130 million people. There have to be many reasons for this discrepancy, but I think a significant one is temperature. Greenland has recorded lows of negative 70 Celsius, and the summer high is just 10 Celsius. Mexico is a big country, so the climate varies, but there are usually just two seasons, wet and dry. The coastal areas are hot and dry from November to April, with temperatures around 28 Celsius. All other things being equal, I bet most of you would rather live in Mexico than Greenland. I know I would. So we can say that a warm climate is selective for more people. And we can also say that a warm and humid climate is selective for many more microbes than very cold and dry locations. We also know that more microbes That is to say a higher density and higher diversity of microbes means more chaos. Chaos, like higher risk of mold and spoilage. More chaos means more opportunities for defects. Coffee's grown and process at high altitudes with cooler temperatures and less humidity had less chance to spoil and have defects from processing. Higher quality is almost assured when you eliminate defects. You don't have to be particularly exceptional. As long as you are a coffee that is consistent and free of defects, then you're miles ahead of most other coffee. Growing and processing coffee at high altitude is like being born tall. You don't have to be a particularly skilled basketball player, but just being 6'3 gives you an advantage over your shorter teammates. When we glorify altitude, I think people were pointing to the fact that higher altitude coffees were often less likely to have defects, and higher altitude coffee also tend to be more consistent. They have more batch to batch consistency, day to day consistency, and consistency is key to quality. It's easier to be consistent when you have fewer options, fewer chances to get derailed. The higher the altitude, the cooler the climate, the lower the microbe diversity, the fewer options for defects and voila, naturally more consistent fermentations. You could have bad practices, but still not get many defects because of microbes that create those defects. Just. So I had a hunch that a big part of the narrative that higher altitude coffee was higher quality was a shorthand for coffee that was more consistent and less defective. And since we know defects in the mill are often due to microbial contaminations, I felt like this was an easier problem to stabilize. If the lower altitude grown coffee could better control their microbes, it could stand proudly on a cupping table next to its higher altitude friends. I think this is where a lot of my work gets misunderstood. It's not about making lower altitude coffees taste like higher altitude. I'm not over here trying to erase your terroir, or origin, or what makes a coffee unique. But there is low hanging fruit, like being able to have fewer defects and more consistency by inoculating the fermentations, that would reduce the quality gap between higher and lower altitude, and perhaps, my hope, is render it mostly irrelevant. Because the unintended consequences are significant to farmers. I wanted to share an example from a conversation with a producer I talked to recently for our Spanish language podcast, Cabal Café. I invited Julia on the podcast to share her 10 year journey of becoming a carbon neutral producer in Mexico. In the conversation, she tells us the long journey to get to that place, and as she is introducing her farm, she begins to tell us about the variety she is growing. And I noticed she did so with a little bit of shyness, which was odd because otherwise, Julia was speaking strongly and powerfully. She became timid because she knows she is not growing the trendy varieties. Instead, she is growing what's available to her in her conditions where she has a high risk for Roya. She is doing the important and difficult task of becoming carbon neutral and our specialty culture is overlooking her because she is not growing the hot new varieties. When we glorify geishas or are impressed by high altitude numbers on a coffee bag, when we talk about altitude in this judgmental way, either positively or negatively, we inadvertently make some farmers feel like they can't participate in specialty coffee because they can't grow certain varieties, or up and move their farm to higher elevations. But the point is, they don't even have to do that to have high quality coffee. We can get consistency and interesting flavors with any variety at any altitude by working with the microbes of fermentation. Oh, and drying. Don't forget drying. Drying is very, very important, but to participate in specialty coffee, we should not require a certain variety, a certain process, or a certain altitude limits. I'm not saying that there is like an official rule written somewhere that specialty is these things, but we make the culture when we talk about these things. You and I are slowly building the culture around what is specialty in our labels and websites and Instagram accounts and producers see and hear us. They are paying attention to what we say is important to us and it affects them. I know many of us know that specialty coffee is not a narrow definition, but I talk to and hear from a lot of small holder producers in Colombia and Guatemala and all over who are getting a different, less nuanced message. They want to move from commodity coffee to specialty coffee, but believe me, many of them think that the only path is anaerobic fermentation or carbonic maceration, or they think they can't have specialty coffee because they can't grow geisha or sudan rume. They are getting the message that specialty is about what you can put on the roasted coffee label and not a philosophy of growing coffee and a way of doing business differently. What I'm trying to say is that as producers, you have a lot more control than you think and you are not doomed if you don't have high altitude. You don't need to plant trendy cultivars, and you don't need to do crazy processing to participate in specialty coffee. Well, thanks for hanging out with me for this science y and somewhat rant y episode, But I hope it helped you to appreciate the coffee you're drinking, and also to reconsider the role coffee labels play, and what information we think should be included on them. I Also hope that if you're a coffee consumer, you'll consider ignoring the altitude numbers on a coffee bag, or at the very least, to not use that number to make a purchasing decision. I love podcasts. I have been an avid podcast listener since 2010, but I've noticed recently how many of my favorite podcasts, even the ones I have listened to for a long, long time, are now including a lot more ads, like very long ads. There is hardly a podcast I can enjoy that doesn't have frequent interruptions trying to sell me online therapy, mattresses, or electrolyte drinks. I appreciate that people need to be compensated, because making a podcast takes effort. So I put up with the ads in exchange for the thing I want to listen to. But there is one podcast I listen to that doesn't have ads, and when I listen to it, I feel the breath of fresh air that is uninterrupted listening. That is what I want for Making Coffee. So the only ad on this podcast, I guess, is me. It's my own. I never do sponsorships or ads on Making Coffee. This is a completely community driven effort. I keep making new episodes because of the listeners who join Patreon and make it possible for me to take time away from my consulting to dedicate to podcasting. And when there is a long break between episodes, it's because I had to go do my real job. Nick and I have nine dogs and a cat. That is a lot of mouths to feed. So if you like having a space like this on the internet, consider joining Patreon. Go to patreon. com slash making coffee. That's how you can join our live office hours chats and speak with me directly and ask me your questions and also connect with our awesome coffee community and speak to more producers or for producers to get connected with roasters and have those direct relationships in a really casual and comfortable place. So if you see coffee in a different way after listening today, consider joining on Patreon and help me make more episodes. If you enjoy listening and get value out of our time together, please share with a friend who loves coffee or wine. And if you want to be notified when the next episode is coming out, consider subscribing to my free and infrequent newsletter at lucia. coffee. Lucia is L U X I A. Thanks for listening, and remember, life's too short to drink bad coffee.