#63: Terroir For Busy People

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Lucia 0:22

Hi, friends. Here we are again talking about terroir. And I can't decide if this topic is helpful to you guys or if maybe I'm just beating a dead horse. I didn't set out to pick a fight with terroir. I don't particularly want to keep talking about it, but I do get asked about it a lot because it's quite a sticky topic. Recently I learned that this term is so misunderstood that it's now popping up sometimes as a flavor descriptor. For example, this coffee tastes like milk chocolate, has a sweet orange acidity, and a taste of terroir. Um, what? I mean, this could innocently mean that the coffee tastes like it's expected to taste. As in, this Kenyan tastes like what I expect it to taste like based on my previous experience of coffees from this country. I'm not arguing that this is bad, but when left unexamined, what this could turn into is an expectation of flavor, a requirement of traditional techniques that create those flavors. That means only washed, double fermented coffees are what create a sense of place. The so called true terroir coffees. This is a very romantic idea, but it's not realistic in a world with a rapidly changing climate and even more troublesome a consumer base with an even more rapidly changing attention span and flavor preference. The challenge producers are facing throughout the world is that they are being asked to provide a sense of place, a taste of place, that is accomplished with traditional methods and traditional varieties while at the same time living in a world where we desperately need innovation and cutting edge practices. We need new things in coffee. For example, to get a coffee that would qualify as a terroir coffee, a Colombian producer might be handcuffed to a wash process and maybe very few varieties, maybe a Bourbon or a Catura, varieties that we know are susceptible to the devastating coffee leaf rust, nematodes, and coffee berry disease. So the terroir is problematic because it can turn us into hypocrites. We wield the word thinking we are championing coffee producers. That we are signaling the value of the raw material. That we are thoughtful consumers. But we don't realize that preserving tradition is not what the coffee industry needs. The coffee supply chain is so messed up. I believe it needs radical upheaval. It needs to be burned to the ground and completely rethought. I believe that the last thing we need is to put effort towards further romanticizing and preserving the colonial traditions and way of processing. terroir undermines our goal for change and progress towards a different and more equitable coffee chain. Terroir doesn't liberate coffee producers to step forward and shine in the spotlight of our attention. Instead, it holds them ransom in a broken system to maintain traditional flavor characteristics that no longer work in today's world. So today's episode is taken from a video I did for the High Density Virtual Conference last November. High Density is a completely free virtual conference, and I was asked to contribute a video and I was really happy to do it because I thought the theme was really interesting. It was called Not Just Origin, and I thought this was an appropriate theme to talk about my views on terroir. If you're a longtime follower of this podcast, you will have heard the three episodes on terroir, and you'll already be familiar with my skeptical view of the usefulness of the term for coffee. For high density, I took those three and a half hours of material and condensed it into 20 minutes. It was incredibly difficult. Um, it was so difficult that I couldn't do it myself. I had to recruit a friend, Tom Hopkinson, to edit it down to something manageable. Tom was part of the very first guinea pigs for FTC one, the very first one in July, 2022. And he has contributed much great writing to Barista Hustle. Tom, thank you very much for your help and support. Tom is allergic to podcasts, so he will never listen to this. But if you know him, please do me a favor and get on his case about his irrational aversion to podcasts. Anyway. For long time listeners, you will also have heard much of this information before, but I think we could always use a refresher, and that's why I wanted to call this episode Terroir for Busy People. Maybe most of the people who are using this term and throwing it around thinking it's harmless don't have the time to listen to 3. 5 hours on why that's actually not a good idea. Or maybe they don't listen to podcasts at all, but maybe they do watch YouTube videos. So if you'd like to see the visuals that go along with this audio, you can check out my presentation on YouTube. In fact, you can watch all of the presentations from the High Density Conference on YouTube, which will be linked in the show notes. A very important presentation that I cannot recommend highly enough is by Carl Weinhold. His talk is titled, Power Asymmetry in the Coffee Chain, Sources, Manifestations, and Remedies. He talks about so many of the things that we talk about here, but with a solid economic background. And now we're going to listen to my high density presentation, which frames the conversation of terroir in several myths that I want to dispel or that I want people to reconsider when we just take this. coffee term for granted. All right, here we go. Hi, I'm Lucia Solis, a former winemaker turned coffee processing specialist, and I want to talk to you about terroir. I studied winemaking at UC Davis and worked at some of the most prestigious wineries in the Napa Valley before switching to coffee processing in 2014. In my podcast, Making Coffee, I explore wine related topics in coffee, including a three episode series on the topic of terroir. Throughout those episodes, I have tried to convince a listener that the science is flimsy on the concept of terroir and that the seemingly noble concept is little more than a marketing scheme. The podcast episode and this talk is inspired by the book Terroir and Other Myths of Wine Growing by Mark Matthews, who was one of my professors at UC Davis. I wanted to talk about this topic because the specialty coffee industry has a habit of borrowing terms and practices from the wine industry with varying degrees of success. One concept that is being readily adopted in specialty coffee is this concept of terroir. The first thing I want you to know is that terroir is not a scientific term like fermentation or algebra. Terroir is French. It is a French word and a French concept first used to describe French wine. And this is important for two reasons. The word doesn't have a translation. We use the French word, which kind of adds to the mystery. It's a word we cannot translate, and equally cannot define. Many of us believe that there is a definition of terroir, and maybe we just don't know what it is. But that's not true. Ask ten different people, and you will get ten different answers. The first myth I want you to stop believing is that terroir is a scientific term. The second myth is that terroir has an agreed upon definition. The third thing I want you to know is that we cannot take the French out of terroir. You cannot talk about terroir in an educated way if you don't know where the word came from. So while no one agrees exactly on what it means, we can trace where it came from and how it was first used in France. Terroir is often defined as taste of the land. It is a powerful concept that has been widely used in wine and cheese and is increasingly being used in coffee and cacao and other products. This seems like a natural concept to help add value to the coffee industry. Of course we want to value the hard work of coffee producers, and to acknowledge the specialty coffee is not an interchangeable crop like commodity coffee is. Sometimes it's treated as a scientific discussion about climate and soil, but most often terroir is presented as a mystical, romantic notion. Tasting the land, respecting nature, what's not to love? We are so eager to adopt the concept of terroir in coffee, but I believe many overlook or are unaware of its true origins as a marketing term. If we don't examine those origins, I believe the concept could inadvertently hurt coffee producers more than help them. Which, I know, sounds a bit dramatic. Hurt coffee producers? How can respecting the origins of coffee hurt coffee producers? Well, by the end of this video, you will see just how it hurt the French, the very inventors of the concept. As far back as 3000 BCE, the Egyptians understood that some wines were better than others depending on what vineyards they came from. A few thousand years later, in 300 BCE, Aristotle came up with an explanation for this phenomenon. He claimed that the plants use tiny mouths in their roots to eat the particles of soil, and they use that material to produce and grow fruit. So think of the saying, you are what you eat. So if the grapevines were eating the soil, then grapes must be made of soil. So the soil must be the most important element in what the wine tasted like. But this was the beginning of the concept of soil as the reason for why things taste different, because plants were eating it and then growing fruit. And during this time, there's another really fun example that I want to share from This, uh, this period of, of time of thinking, and it's called the vegetable lamb. So, when the Greeks first encountered cotton in India, they didn't know what it was. Cotton is a subtropical plant and didn't grow in Greece. So, the Greeks were only familiar with sheep and using wool to make their clothing. So, because they had never seen a cotton tree, when they first encountered them, they could only imagine that the cotton tree, the little, you know, cotton. balls of the plant were actually tiny lambs and that they, the cotton was a tree that was like a hybrid between an animal and a plant. So they thought that in the wind the branches would sway and they would bend so that the little lambs that were on the tree could sway and reach the grass when they were hungry and kind of come back up. Even if we no longer believe that plants have tiny mouths or that sheep grow on trees, the idea from this time persisted. I think a lot of people still hold this idea of terroir, that it's in as if the plants are somehow eating the soil and therefore expressing the qualities of that place in its fruit. So the birth of this idea of plants expressing the land came from when we thought that lambs grew on trees. So I just want you to keep that in mind of like how ancient these origins are and also how so many things from those times, like we don't believe that anymore. And one of the first significant challenges to this idea came in the 1500s with the observation that manure replaces nutrients in the soil that the plants take out. So as all farmers know, the soil must be amended. You can't harvest and harvest and harvest infinitely. You must replace the nutrients that you take out. This implies that a large element of terroir Like, the soil nutrition, the foundation, right, terroir is soil, is something that the farmer can bring or replace. Because humans who grow things know that we must constantly be changing the soil. We must constantly be changing the composition. Because you can't just fertilize once and be done. It's a constant process of constantly, throughout the year, throughout the decades, changing your soil. So, a word that is often connected with terroir is transparency. The transparency of the product expressing the land. But if we are amending, we humans are amending and changing the soil to grow, and if you believe that the soil is the basis of terroir, then terroir is human made. In fact, farmers can even use hydroponics and grow crops without any soil at all. So farmers can make their soil or they can completely take it away. And at this point, um, we humans are even changing the climate. So not only can we make the soil, we are also altering rain patterns and global temperatures. So myth number four is that terroir is a special property of a location. Something that is very special to that place, like France, and that other places don't have. And it's not. Terroir, if it even exists, can be made. More recently, scientists have shown that if you graft a bunch of muscat grapes onto the branch of a syrah, the grapes still end up tasting like muscat, no matter what soil they grow in. So certain floral aromas are synthesized in the berry itself, so nothing to do with the soil. It's not translating anything, it's not absorbing anything, it's in, it's synthesized in the berry of the fruit. And while it's true that plants do drop minerals from the soil, there's no evidence to connect mineral nutrients into flavor. So, for example, chalky soils don't impart a chalky flavor to wine. So, some of the core principles of terroir, that plants are made of the soil that they grow in, which in turn determines the flavor of the grape, have been largely discredited. But while the term becomes less and less prominent and less relevant in science, It actually became more prominent in marketing. So I want you to think about that. In one sense, science continues to say this thing doesn't really exist. And at the same time, marketing is using it more and more and more. So there's this disconnect there. Farmers must continually replace the nutrients that are lost, meaning they have control over the composition of the soil. So if you believe terroir is a soil, then farmers can change or make their own terroir. But also, plants can grow without soil, so terroir can't exactly be soil. And lastly, some characteristics belong to the plant, and not where it is grown, and not what soil it's grown in. A muscat will taste like a muscat if it's grown in California or South Africa. So the place where it is grown is not strongly influencing the typical flavor. So, Soil, maybe not as important as we think, maybe it's not the foundation that we think, but we're actually going to leave soil aside for a moment and talk again about France. To understand how terroir came to be used as a marketing tool, we first need to examine how France came to be such a superpower in the wine world. Our story begins in 16th century Médoc, a region just north of Bordeaux. The most powerful families in the region were consolidating their estates and rushing to acquire the most desirable land. In 1570, Pierre de Lestonnac began collecting the land that would eventually become Chateau Margaux, while other families established the grand estates of Chateau Latour and Chateau Haut Brion. These estates are major players in the wine world to this day and still produce some of the most expensive wines in the world. The history of the world's best vineyards started with powerful men consolidating their land to become even more powerful and influential. Only later, almost half a century later, did they actually begin to plant vineyards and make wine as ways to show off their wealth. These wine growers had a lot of money to invest in vineyards, and they were constantly changing and shaping the soil, the terroir, to suit their purposes. The tapestates were not farmers who became businessmen thanks to the success of their vineyards. They were powerful businessmen who happened to farm, or more accurately paid other people to farm for them. It was a wealthy person's hobby. Myth five is that the best vineyards in France were discovered by their quality, which is not true. The wealthiest people had land and later they declared That it was the best land. They themselves declared that their land was the best. So this shift from wine as an agricultural product to a status symbol was established very early on. The wine producer set the price of their own product, and the cost bore absolutely no relation to the cost of production. Instead, they set the price high immediately to establish a luxury product. Wine was a status symbol, so it had to be expensive. This is the exact opposite scenario to that of coffee producers who don't set their own price or often don't set their own price and often don't even get paid enough to cover the cost of production. Coffee prices are set by the supply and demand of consumers and traders. So, in France, as well as setting prices high, the big landowners in Bordeaux bought up land to keep out competing winemakers. So, powerful estates restricted competition to create a monopoly. And these estates had the best wine because it was very expensive and it was exclusive and hardly anybody else was making wine. So without knowing this history, you might think that over the centuries, the places that made the best wine rose to the top. You might assume that the grand estates earned their reputation because of their terroir, because of their good wine. Myth number six is that reputation of these grand estates came because they had good terroir. And that's what they want us to think, but no, that's not how it happened. Reputation came from their wealth of the estates, and people that were already wealthy happened to be making wine. So the reputation of the wine was based on the reputation of the wealth of the estates and the family, and not because of the quality of the land or the quality of the winemaking. Now we have to take Next step, because what happened is Bordeaux went from building a good reputation, having this status luxury product to then being supported by the government of France with regulations, you know, protected regulations. So how did this happen? So this is with the help of Emperor Napoleon. Napoleon was hosting an international exhibition on the Champs Élysées in Paris. His opportunity to glorify France and show off its products to the world. At the time of this exhibition, there were 58 châteaux in Bordeaux. 58 different wine brands. You can kind of think of it that way. And Napoleon knew that he couldn't just present the public with 58 different wines of equal stature because that's bad marketing for the fair. The wines of Bordeaux needed to be classified into the top ranking. He needed to be able to clearly signal to the public which wines were the most worthy. So Napoleon asked the wine merchants to hurry up and come up with some kind of ranking. So how did the wine merchants decide who got to be first and who was in last place? Was there some epic blind tasting with all of the wines where they competed for the top spot? No, there was no time for that. The fair was about to start. And remember, he asked the wine merchants, the sellers of wine to give him a top ranking list. He didn't ask the winemakers or the wine drinkers, which wines they preferred. Instead of tasting the wines, the wine sellers looked at the price list of their, you know, on their menu and decided that the most expensive ones must be the best ones. And therefore the cheaper ones must be less good. So, in 1855, Napoleon formalized the Grand Cru system in Bordeaux, which ranked 58 châteaux into five levels, in order of status. And only four estates were ranked in the top tier. The Premier Cru, the first grotes, and, can you guess who they are? The top three are old friends, Château Latour, Château Haut Brion, and Château Margaux. So the three Chateaus were the first ones to consolidate their land. They were the wealthiest estates. They were the ones who set their own prices as super, super high, and they set their status themselves. The fourth premier crew was the Rothschild family, which was one of the co founders of the California winery that I worked at, Opus One, and that completes the first growths. And this system is still in place today. Completely unchanged today. The 1855 ranking became synonymous with quality. The estates used the justification that some land was better than other land, meaning that it had better terroir, because the wines from those lands were more expensive. But the wine buying public didn't set those prices. The chateaux set their own price, and the prices reflected how powerful they were, and the power of their reputation. So at the time Napoleon was establishing the Grand Cru system, terroir was actually not even considered to be a positive attribute. In fact, it was very literally a dirty word. In a French dictionary from 1650, terroir is defined as manure. The term was used as a pejorative in wine, as an undesirable, earthy flavor derived from soil. In 1650, if you said a wine had terroir, you meant that it had a defect because it tasted like you were putting dirt and manure in your mouth. The change in definition for terroir was not something that happened gradually over time, nor was it due to any scientific advance. It happened when a group of powerful people were afraid of losing their power and realized that they could profit from changing its meaning. French wine growers were threatened when an insect called Phylloxera made its way from the United States to France in the 1860s. The pest decimated the French vineyards and the wine production in France fell from 84 million hectoliters in 1875 to only 23 million hectoliters in 1889, a 60 percent drop over 14 years. This is similar to the drop in production that El Salvador saw when leaf rust attacked coffee trees between 2010 and 2014. Bordeaux had spent all of these centuries building its reputation, and then Phylloxera wiped out their vineyards in the blink of an eye. When Phylloxera hit, there was a severe wine shortage. This setback for Bordeaux allowed other wine producing countries and regions to step up and fill the need. And America was the source of the problem, and eventually provided the solution. Phylloxera was stopped by grafting the French varieties onto American rootstocks that were resistant to the pest. But by the time the French viticulturists got back on their feet, it was too late. The market was already filled with foreign wine producers. Suddenly, there were a lot of other options available, and the prices were more affordable. Suddenly, more French people could afford good wine. Bordeaux survived a Phylloxera attack, but had lost their stronghold. They had to do something to reestablish their status as an industry leader and to justify their high prices. So imagine, they were Setting their own prices as high as possible to create a luxury product, they lost their vineyards, other more economical, more affordable wine came in and now French people had a choice. I can buy the super luxury product or I can buy this less expensive wine that tastes just as good. You know, that's a pretty obvious choice. So with Bordeaux winemakers were very desperate to say, how do we stop these foreign invaders? So, they came up with a strategy to present foreign wine as inferior, to present French wine with its history and tradition as the true wine, the authentic wine. Wine growers persuaded the French government to create certifications for wine based on its place of origin, their terroir. This allowed them to distinguish the authentic wines from the foreign, inauthentic wines. Terroir suddenly began to be used as a positive term, implying that the French land is inherently better for making wine, and, again, overlooking the fact that it had been, the people had been changing that land for 300 years by doing all of the soil amendments and all of the manures and all of their activity on the farm. So, early French dictionaries only had the negative definition of terroir as manure. In 1962, French wine dictionaries had both definitions, the old, the traditional negative one, and suddenly the positive one showed up too. And a few short years later, by 1970, the negative aspect no longer appeared. The culture had changed so much that terroir was only seen as a positive thing. The history of what terroir originally meant was erased, even for the French. So myth seven is that terroir has always been a positive term. which is not true. It used to be a defect that got turned into a positive term when people realized that they could make more money that way. The eventual result of the winemaker's appeal for government protection was the Appellation d'Origine Controllée, the AOC, the Controlled Designation of Origin. This certification is used to protect wines, cheeses, butters, and other agricultural products in France and has spread to other industries, including coffee. The AOC system sounds great in principle. It elevates terroir and protects traditional methods. All things we can feel good about. On the other hand, it protects and keeps power in the hands of the already powerful and ignores the downside of that protection. I'm not suggesting that traditional products and regions shouldn't be protected. I'm just sharing some of the limitations of the AOC system so that we can make a better plan for coffee. I want us to learn from what wine did and make coffee better, instead of just copying and pasting what happened in wine. The other side of the protection coin is control, and that control comes at a high price. AOCs preserve traditional winemaking techniques and protect traditional varieties, but they also regulate how much wine is allowed to be made in order to maintain prices. Even if a producer could make more wine, they are only allowed to produce a certain amount under the protected guidelines. We could have so much more good wine, but then good wine wouldn't be exclusive, and there is so much more money to be made if products are scarce and controlled by a small, powerful group. One area that is very active in coffee right now is the development of new varieties. Coffee is an important global crop with shockingly little genetic diversity, which makes it very susceptible to disease and climate change. Under the AOC system, to protect traditional products, you must keep planting the same varieties. Imagine locking a coffee producer into the, into the varieties that are traditional for their area and not allowing experimentation with new and better suited varieties for the sake of preserving tradition. This would handicap producers greatly. In Bordeaux, you can only get five varieties, Merlot, Petit Bordeaux, Malbec, Cabernet Franc, and Cabernet Sauvignon. That's it. No upgrades. They are locked in to those five varieties. Discussions about terroir came to a head in 1976 when a small but powerful group wanted to set the record straight and prove once and for all that France was better at making wine than America. The Judgment of Paris was a wine competition organized in Paris in 1976 by Stephen Spurrier, a British wine merchant, pitting French wines against California wines. Spurrier, who sold only French wines, wanted to confirm terroir as the reason other wines could never be as good as French wines. The French had the advantage of terroir because they had better soil and history and tradition on their side. And California was new. They couldn't possibly have terroir, therefore they couldn't possibly make good wine. Out of eleven judges, nine were French and one was British, and just one was from the US. The French also had the home advantage because the event was held in France, so the bottles didn't have to travel far compared to the American bottles that had to cross an ocean to get to the competition. Everything was set to make France the winner. 90 percent French judges in France with the stated intention that they wanted to prove that French wines were better because they had terroir. So they weren't trying to, you know, be unbiased. They were very specifically biased. They said, our goal is to prove that French wine is better than American wine. And they stacked the decks in their favor. And yet, and yet, with everything set against them, A California wine rated best in each category. California Chardonnay beat a White Burgundy. A California Cabernet beat Bordeaux. The very place with the highest claim to terroir. The intention of the competition was to prove that France remained the foremost producer of the world's best wines. And yet, California wine kicked France's butt. This was devastating for the concept of terroir. Because the judges either had to admit that they preferred American style wine to the traditional French, meaning they were traitors, or that they simply couldn't tell the difference, meaning they were idiots. So this meant that terroir could be copied, could be replicated, and could even be improved and bettered elsewhere. There was nothing intrinsic about the soil that made Bordeaux wines so great. The results should not be a surprise to us knowing that the French wines stayed the same century after century because they were not allowed to change while California wines can do whatever they want. Innovation. There were so many opportunities for French wines to improve. And if you were a fifth growth in 1855, You are still a fifth growth today in 2023. No one gets to rise through the ranks by improving their wine because it was never actually reflective of the quality of the wine. You can't plant new varieties. You can't update your wine making methods. You can't make more than your limited quota, so of course, French winemakers were falling behind the winemakers in new regions of the world. Look at what coffee can learn from this. The goal should not be to adopt the terroir myth like wine has as a way to value the origin, but to take a different lesson, which is that place can often hold quality back. The real insight from the Judgment of Paris is not that California wines were better, it's that professional tasters couldn't tell where the wines came from. Terroir doesn't exist. Similar wines can come from various places, and I don't think this is a bad thing. It doesn't mean that all wines taste the same or that we have to lose diversity. It's a positive thing if more places have access to economic opportunities. We know that coffee is native to Ethiopia, and yet today it's grown in over 70 countries. How can we even regulate or talk about the terroir of coffee when if it weren't for people, it wouldn't even be growing in 67 of those 70 countries? The dangerous part of the terroir myth is that you are powerless if you are not blessed with the good soil. The ones who benefit from this thinking are the ones who are already privileged. Talking about the transparency of terroir in both coffee and wine erases the painstaking labor of those people who transform and elevate simple agricultural products into something more. We think it's a story of land and climate and soil, but it's really about power, prestige, and politics. Thanks for spending this time with me. I know it's a densely packed you. Um, video. But remember, this is condensed from audio. three plus hours of podcast, which is already a condensation of many books and research. So it's a vast and interesting topic. And I just hope that some of these, um, this bit of information helped you get more curious and more interested in other aspects of the topic of terroir, including its history and where it came from and why we use it and how it can be useful instead of just taking for granted that it's a positive thing that can help everybody. for having me. And that it's something that coffee should immediately adopt without a little bit more reflection. So thanks again for joining me and see you next time. Well, I hope you found that review helpful if it was your, not your first time, you know, listening to the podcast and listening to these ideas. And something that kind of struck me thinking about it again, is that in the intro to this episode, I started by criticizing the use of terroir as a flavor descriptor, as in what is a flavor of something as esoteric as terroir? It's like asking what is a flavor of love? But as you've just heard, ironically, this is actually the most historically accurate use of the term. Historically, terroir was used as a flavor descriptor. When wine was more prone to spoilage before microbiology played a larger role, wine could and did taste like earth, like dirt, like manure, which is obviously not a compliment. So if you're in a cupping, and you have a coffee that tastes like a mouthful of dirt, or smells like manure, Congratulations! You are actually tasting terroir. You are perfectly correct in using that as a flavor descriptor. But also, like, don't do that, because it would be incredibly rude to describe somebody's hard work as tasting like, cow poop. so Okay, you might be accurate in doing it, but probably don't do it. But what I really hope that you understand now is that it's not helpful to use the word terroir as a shorthand for growing environment because it has way too much baggage. The historical and economic context of wine is vastly different than the historical and economic context of coffee. Terroir is a French word that was turned into marketing propaganda by elite aristocrats afraid of losing power who used religion and God to promote nationalism. The attitude was that God has blessed this French land to be superior. It discounted human farming practices, interventions, or cleverness. Terroir, as deemed by the French, was about God favoring French and forsaking non French winemakers. We should not forget this heritage and casually apply this term to all agricultural products. We should not separate the concept from its French culture of origin and the original intentions. Coffee needs progress. Not romantic regression. And anyway, we already have better words available to us. For example, we can talk about an ecological niche, as we have with pernoy, to describe the unique flora, fauna, and microbes located in a particular place. Yes, the place where a coffee comes from can be expressed in the flavors of the cup, but we don't need to invoke terroir in order to be able to make that point, we can talk about the provenance of a coffee, the chain of custody that gives us traceability as we have with Wilfrith, because how a coffee moves through different hands and through the world, for that matter, also makes it unique and adds to its specialness. So, what do we think? Are we done? Can we put this to rest, or do you still have more questions? If you do have more questions, a really great place to go is to our Office Hours Live. That's where you can debate this topic with me or with other fellow coffee enthusiasts, coffee producers, and roasters who are very interested in this topic and have, different points of view. So, if this conversation is something that you'd like to continue, we'd That is a good place to do it. Um, you can go to the show notes to patreon. com slash making coffee, join our community, come hang out with really cool people. And it also helps me a lot to know that you guys are interested in listening to more episodes, you know, along. It's the style that we do here at making coffee and it helps me take time out of my schedule to actually dedicate to creating new episodes for you guys versus doing my regular consulting or coffee processing work. So by joining you're voting for more of stuff like this in the world and I really appreciate it. I appreciate you guys for listening and I appreciate when you join our conversations because it's way more fun when I'm talking to you guys and not just talking to a void. So yeah, thanks for listening and remember life's too short to drink bad coffee.