#69: Whole Coffee Cherry Fermentations—The Multiple Paradoxes of Naturals

This episode is a final harvest update and the behind the scenes of performing whole cherry fermentation with various microbes in an attempt to create a Dry Process/Natural coffee that I want to drink.

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Transcript

lucia: 0:21

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Making Coffee with Lucia Soli. It's the end of March and it's the tail end of our third harvest in Guatemala. It's been a while since I sat down to record my thoughts, so I was tempted to do a longer intro and catch everyone up on the last few months. But as I've been listening to new podcasts, I find myself getting impatient with long intros. There are exceptions, of course, namely podcasts I have been listening to for years where a long rambling intro feels like catching up with a friend instead of a barrier. But when I find a new podcast, when I'm jumping in cold, anything over two minutes has me impatiently wondering when they are gonna get to the point. If you're new here and clicks because of the naturals title, I don't want you to click away just yet. In essence, this is a rambling podcast. I am a long-winded narrator. There will be tangents, there will be stories, and I do my best to include practical advice in an effort to have a better conversation. I will try to replace the vague term naturals with the term dry process or whole cherry as often as I can remember, but inevitably I will slip back into using the colloquial term naturals. Also, since this is a podcast that often compares and contrasts widen coffee, I do want to start by disambiguating these terms because they refer to very different concepts in their respective beverages. If we are speaking about natural wine. That means non inoculation with a commercial yeast strain and no use of preservatives like sulfur dioxide. The norm in modern day wine making is commercial inoculation, so the term natural wines signals going against the grain, a rejection of the status quo, rebellious wine. If we are speaking about coffee. A natural coffee has nothing to do with microbes or fermentation. Instead, it refers to how the coffee cherries are treated a natural coffee. The coffee cherries remain intact during processing and dry with their skin Still on. This is why it's less confusing to talk about this process as whole cherry because many of the newer methods involve submerging the cherries underwater. So even if water is involved, it's still referred to as dry process. This is in contrast to wet process where the outer exo carp is removed and the sticky sugar and pectin rich mucilage is exposed during processing and drying. Coffee is so unbothered by imprecise terms that it is possible to have a water submerged dry process or a wet processed coffee that never met a drop of water. So if at times during this episode you feel like some concepts are too rudimentary, just remember that coffee is sloppy and we often think we are speaking of the same thing when we are actually miles apart. So in today's episode, I will share with you my very first ever whole cherry fermentations on this farm. And you may be asking yourself why you should listen to someone who is admitting to not having done this style of processing before. In my defense, I have been fermenting fruit for a living since 2008, and I have 10 years of experience fermenting wash coffees. So fermenting whole cherries is not a completely foreign endeavor. Actually, I don't want to gloss over this point just yet. I am seeing a lot of advice and information shared from people who are passionate about a subject, and that's great. They also have insight to share, but I feel there is an imbalance of people sharing advice who make a living from the thing that they are talking about and not just make a living from talking about it. this is not a podcast by someone who really loves coffee or someone who reads a lot of research or textbooks. Science is great, but small scale studies can miss a lot of the practical elements. So I am not sharing today's information from a place of passion or interest at this point in time. Processing coffee is how I keep a roof over my head and food on the table. There was a time when a significant portion of my income came from your support for this podcast. So talking about coffee was important, but in the last few years, that percentage has shifted and Nick and I make more from coffee sales than podcast donations. Part of the reason why is because this podcast exists solely on your support and Patreon. I listen to a lot of podcasts and get annoyed at the interruptions. Thanks to Patreon, you don't have to worry about being in the middle of a coffee story and listen to me, interrupt myself to encourage you to do online therapy or get a new mattress. Now what I share about coffee processing even more directly affects my family's income because I need to sell this coffee, not just the words. As they say, the proof is in the pudding, or the longer expression, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So why should you listen to me about naturals? While I specialize in pulp to wash coffees, not whole cherry slash dry process naturals, I do have some thoughts about their place in specialty. And while I am not an economist and generally stay away from topics like that in this podcast, since my income is directly affected, I have some things to share about the economics of dry and wet process for today's coffee producers. Now, let me tell you how I inadvertently picked the worst possible year to set up my first dry process natural trials. Okay, let's jump back to the very beginning of harvest, December 6th, 2024. For many people. December is a quiet month. Many people take time off for the holidays, and business generally grinds to a halt. However, if you're a coffee farmer or producer in Guatemala, it's the busiest time of the year. The coffee cherries are ripe and need to be harvested and processed. Nick and I could have started our coffee fermentations a little later in December, but we wanted to start as soon as possible so we could have fresh coffee to share for FTCA Fermentation Camp Workshop that I host for producers to teach them how to use microbiology to their advantage. Because of the upcoming workshop, we had several coffees drying on the patio by Christmas time on December 26th at 3:00 AM we were awakened by the sound of rain. I imagine that while most people were fast asleep after a day of family food and drinks and contrast, Nick and I lay awake with our hearts racing and panic in our eyes. If this was any other time of the year, the sound of rain would soothe and coax us to sleep. Rainy nights on the farm are a special kind of peaceful because the falling rain drowns out the coyote howls the dog barking and the sounds of traffic. However, in December, the sound of rain brings nothing but anxiety. Anxiety, because the drying method at this benefic is 100% concrete patios, 100% open and 100% exposed. In an Guatemala, the wet and dry seasons are historically so demarcated that you can almost set your watch to them December through April. The coffee harvest season is also the dry season. Our summer and may to November is the wet season. Our winter, the wet season is very wet. Usually by the end of November, it's like a faucet in the sky gets turned off, and we usually have five to six months of dry, dry, very dry days. The humidity this time of the year is so low during the day that since moving here, I have to carry lubricating eyedrops because for about four months, I feel like my eyeballs are going to shrivel up and fall off of my face. So we went to bed Wednesday, December 25th with coffee at 12% moisture content, planning on giving the coffee one more day of sun and picking it up on Thursday and to put it away in storage. Then a rainstorm on December 26th happened, and it was a huge surprise and completely uncharacteristic of the season. The drying parchment was completely exposed to the rain, and by the time we got to the patios the next morning, you could see where the rain had not just soaked the parchment, but had also created small rivers through the coffee. The patios are arranged in three tiers and in a far section of the second tier, there was enough water that coffee was swept up and carried over the edge to a lower tier, A literal wave of coffee parchment crashing down. Due to the cool weather. Fortunately, this harvest had been slow to start, so the patios were not as full as they had been in other years. However, there was still a significant amount of coffee on the patios that was very nearly dry and ready to be bagged and put in storage, and now we had to start all over again. The morning of December 26th, Nick and I stood above the patios in awe of the situation. The rain had blended lots together, pushed coffees from one side of the patio to the other, and created a soggy mess that we needed to deal with. Unfortunately, that rain event was not the only challenge the next few days. So December 26th, the 27th and the 28th were dry, but still overcast with barely a few hours when the sun broke through the clouds. Not enough heat and warmth to make up for that downpour, so we couldn't back up the lots and get them into storage yet for several days we made no drying progress. And then on Sunday, December 29th, we had a second rain episode that lasted much longer and further pushed back drying progress. This farm has at least two guys that have been working in this patio for the last 30 years, and they told me that they had never experienced a December like this. Nick and I were better prepared for the second rain and managed to pile up the coffee and cover it with plastic tarps to avoid the worst of the downpour. There was so much rain that the water ran along the bottom and we were not able to protect all of the coffee. Usually I can get coffee off the patio in 10 days, but we had five lots that were 21 days in and still not dry. I shared this all in real time during our biweekly discord sessions, and many of you couldn't understand how we had been so caught off guard because rain during the harvest is quite common around the world. When we lived in Columbia, rain during the coffee harvest was normal. In Columbia, coffee is dried with rain in mind. That is why you see greenhouses retractable rooftops, and mechanical drying. but December in Antigua has been historically dry for so long that in this mill there are no mechanical dryers, no coverings, no greenhouses or poly tunnels. No plan B. Even the smallest farmer in Columbia who dries their coffee on the roof of their house because the coffee growing areas are so mountainous that there is precious little flat space. Even they have a second roof on wheels that can roll out to catch the sun and can quickly roll back in when it starts to rain. During our years living and processing coffee in Columbia, it always rained. So there are structures and plans for drying coffee during a rainy period. In Antigua rain in December is so rare. Our only option was to run to the patios at the first sign of gray clouds. Frantically. Push coffee into as small a pile as possible. Cover it with plastic tarps and pray. Throughout the rest of the harvest, there were a few more rain episodes and even more threats, but none that dumped as much water. As a first two in December, it was an ominous start to a wacky year with record low coffee cherry yields, and record high market prices despite the difficult start. Once we were able to get the finished batches, milled, roasted, and ready to taste, we were very pleased with the results. We made a few changes from the previous harvest that improved the quality of the copy. For example, the 20 23 20 24 harvest was a blend of three farms Riata. At the end of last harvest, we identified that we preferred the profile from Lata. And this current 20 24, 20 25 coffee harvest we have processed only from the single farm Lata. This gave us more control over the profile. In total, we have processed approximately 83 bags of green coffee this year. A slight increase from last year's, 70 bags. Once the main production of Wash coffee was safely in the warehouse, I could turn my attention back to naturals. I also felt it would be helpful to talk about this now because I have noticed a resurgence of this method in the specialty sector, especially since the trendier methods like anaerobics and carbonic maceration or thermo shock are usually done on whole cherries. It's the cutting edge of processing, but relies on the traditional foundation of dry process. So let's talk about it. Since these coffees are getting the most attention and winning competitions, a lot of producers of traditional wash coffees are either staring down the barrel of executing their first whole cherry fermentations, or more likely staring down at the disappointing results from their whole cherry trials. If you're a producer who is looking to improve your naturals, I hope to provide some insight into how to make these coffees with less mystery and difficulty. And if you're a consumer, my goal in today's episode is to give you a framework for how to think about naturals that I hope serves you both. If you love drinking this type of coffee or if it's something that you have previously avoided on a menu, if you're a newer consumer of specialty coffee, you'll notice that naturals are popping up in specialty menus all over the place. During our live office hours discussions, I get to hear from producers and roasters on a regular basis. In a previous conversation, a roaster in the UK shared that their specialty shop previously focused exclusively on washed, but in the last few years has really shifted their buying practices and now offers more naturals than wash coffees. So you might not be aware that in previous decades, many specialty roasters have refused to buy naturals at all, focusing their entire offering on wash coffees. But like all fashions, everything old is new again, and the pendulum is swinging towards some specialty roasters, shifting their offerings to include a higher percentage of natural coffees. My feelings on the shift are neutral. The part that concerns me is that to satisfy the shift, instead of buying more from producers who traditionally make dry processed coffees, buyers are looking to producers who traditionally make washed coffees and asking them to make the shift to dry processed coffees. The pressure exerted on producers to switch their processing isn't just a vague zeitgeist. Energy from social media or competition results. The feeling of missing out on sales opportunities if you don't have a natural on your menu, is not easily ignored by avoiding Instagram. No. In many cases, the request is stepping out of the digital world, knocking on the front gate of the farms and demanding attention. It happened in our own cupping lab a few weeks ago. We set out all of the lots from the current harvest. The table had 18 different coffees representing different farms, different varieties and inoculation styles. The cupping went well. There were positive comments about the balance, acidity and sweetness of the coffees. We talked about the different characteristics of the farms, different ages, varieties, and climate conditions, and how each inoculation style provided a different opportunity to highlight a certain aspect of the coffee, like the fruitiness, acidity, or texture of the cup. Overall, I felt like it was a diverse experience and that the 18 coffees showed range and yet. One of the buyers said that he would like to taste the natural and that it would be nice if there was one on the table and that maybe next year there should be. Not everybody noticed the comment, but for me it was like hearing a record scratch the owners took the information in and considered it in case you were new here. I want to remind you that Nick and I do not own anything. We work and live on this farm. We have a small percentage of coffees that we are responsible for, but the mill produces several containers a year, each harvest. The owners were not disturbed by the comet. It's a pretty common refrain from visitors. But to me it felt like the equivalent of going into a Chinese restaurant having a nice meal, and at the end, letting the staff know that perhaps they should consider adding sushi to the menu, that you would be more interested in returning and patronizing them if they offered sushi. Can you imagine telling the chef that they should be making you something else? We know not to go to Italian restaurants and ask for chicken tiki masala, and yet the previous scenario plays out in cupping rooms all over Latin America. And the part that really gets under my skin, it's that it's offered as a helpful comment, something producers should receive openly and gratefully and seriously consider. Listen, I don't wanna be too mean about this, because of course it's said with good intentions, but intentions are not all that matter. Impact matters too, and a well-intentioned comment in the wrong context should be examined. Imagine the burning in my cheeks from forcing a smile through the rest of that cupping. I didn't say anything to the buyer at the time. It was mixed company, and besides, I have this little corner of the internet with you where we can process this together in a less reactive way. I also want to mention this for any other producers who are listening and have had similar experiences and who didn't feel grateful for the comment. Who felt that? Hold on. Maybe that's kind of weird or kind of rude, but, oh well, I'll just drop it. I think it's pretty rude and I don't think we should normalize buyers coming to coffee farms and requesting different processes. There was an extra layer to my irritation with this particular comment During this particular cupping, I was extra annoyed because I was already planning some natural batches the following week. A very petty part of myself didn't want him to take the credit for the suggestion when it was already in the works or that it was a good idea to keep doing this in future cupping rooms. I've personally avoided the task of making naturals The previous two harvests, really the last five because I also didn't make any when we lived in Columbia either. But this year I felt I could no longer put off the inevitable. I decided to do whole cherry trials, not because this one particular buyer asked for it, and so we could have something interesting for him next year, but because I know that the same scenario is playing out in cupping rooms far and wide For the past 10 years of processing, when clients ask me to Ferme Naturals, I've tried to steer them away because in my experience, we can achieve a lot of the same goals of differentiated coffee in much easier ways by tweaking their current wash process. If you're familiar with even a handful of the previous 68 episodes of this podcast, you will notice the conspicuous absence of naturals. For the last 10 years, I have been a washed coffee advocate through and through. The research I talk about, the advice I give, the type of coffee I make and consume is overwhelmingly unapologetically wet, processed, washed coffee. Up until this point, I'm embarrassed to admit my professional processing strategy for dry processed naturals has been abstinence. If I ignore something, can I will it to stop existing? If I don't do the dry process and I don't help anyone else do dry process, can it just go away? Per usual, abstinence only is a terrible strategy and dry process has some excellent qualities, so it was time to dip my toes. All this negativity around dry process makes it sound like I do not like to drink dry process, natural coffee. You might think I hate naturals, and you'd be partially right. If I'm at a cafe, I'm not allowed to know anything about the coffee except for the processing style. When given a choice of what to drink, I will always, always pick to wash coffee over a dry process natural. However, if the choice is between an Ethiopian natural or any Central American wash coffee, then the choice flips. It's not that I don't like the processing method, it's that I usually don't like them from Latin countries. Also, liking to drink something is different from wanting to make that thing. For example, honeys. I have liked many honeys in the past, but from a processing point of view, they're annoying and difficult and I don't wanna spend my time that way. From a production point of view, honey process is painful to scale and reproduce. You can stain and rust equipment. The extra mucilage attracts way more flies, making it less hygienic. They take longer to dry than wash coffees and are more susceptible to mold and off flavors. And the payoff in the cup can be really similar to a washed coffee, so the extra effort and headache often feels wasted. I may lose some of you with the statement, but I have yet to find a Central American dry process, natural that I look forward to drinking. I've tried some that I think are okay, many that are fine. Several that don't offend me, but to date, not a single one has thrilled me. This is uncomfortable for me to admit to you as a processing consultant. I have tried to keep my personal feelings out of it and remain neutral to the method and focus on best practices, but today I'm feeling emboldened, perhaps by planetary alignments to finally publicly share that I do not like Latin natural coffees. What is always missing for me in the Latin dry process is a certain finesse and elegance that is so easily achieved with a wash process. Most people who love dry process love the fruity component. However, living near coffee farms, I am constantly smelling the aroma of decomposing coffee cherries, and that is what most Latin naturals smell and taste like to me, like the cherry skin decomposing on the farm. And there is no morality here. There is no right or wrong. Most, if not all of our preferences are learned or taught or absorbed through our culture. Several years ago, before we lived here, I was tagging along with some coffee buyers from New York to a large coffee farm near Antigua. The buyers usually spend January and February fighting the oppressive cold of North American winters their only respite against this attack is the annual trip to this particular coffee farm. I found myself in the same car with these buyers windows rolled down enjoying the warm Antigua air. We were a few kilometers away from the farm, but as we got closer, the warm breeze suddenly brought the aroma of coffee cherry pulp. To me, the aroma was decomposition, sharp acidity, and something very foul. If you know about compost, you know that if it's balanced, it shouldn't be disgusting, and it should especially not smell disgusting from several kilometers away. The fact that we could smell it from so far away to me signaled an unhealthy decomposition and the rotting aroma was really unpleasant. While I was busy rolling my window and taking shallow breaths to avoid gagging, this buyer from New York stuck his head out the window like a dog in breathed in deep yogic diaphragmatic breaths. While my nervous system tensed up with the anxiety of imagining improper balance of nitrogen and carbon rich materials leading to insufficient airflow and anaerobic conditions, which produce foul smelling gases that resemble sewage systems. His nervous system relaxed into the piece one feels on vacation, swinging on a hammock, sipping an icy cocktail, and listening to the soft sounds of crashing waves. Give me a coffee that tastes like decomposing cherry and I will politely sip it and use all of my energy to avoid throwing up in my mouth and relax my facial features into something that will not be too offensive. Give this dude a coffee that tastes like decomposing cherry he is transported to a beach vacation. This experience also reminded me of one of my professors at uc, Davis. Dr. Hildegard Haman taught sensory science and when we were learning to identify defects in wine, she confessed that she had a positive memory of skunks from her childhood. In South Africa, the primary aroma compounds in skunk spray are sulfur containing chemicals called thiols, specifically butyl more capin, along with other related compounds such as methyl mar captains. Wines made from Sauvignon Blanc. Grapes have a high percentage of both thiols and mercaptans, and so while most who find a skunky aroma in their wine would reject it. My sensory professor feels a surge of pleasure and nostalgia when she smells almost any Marlboro Sauvignon Blanc. The same mercaptans can be interpreted in different ways too. For example, in the case of three Mer Capto Heyl acetate, some describe the aroma as passion fruit and others as boxwood, which is a really nice way to say animal urine. It's a matter of degrees and thresholds. If you smell tropical passion fruit, and someone else smells putrid, animal urine, you are likely smelling the same thing and you are both correct. In the case of the naturals, I smelled sewage and he smelled happiness. Before we keep going, I wanna take a moment to say that if you are a Latin producer who makes top dollar for your naturals. I salute you. If you are making these naturals and they are selling well, keep on keeping on. Every coffee is beautiful to someone. Every coffee has a home. My motto with my clients has always been, if it's not broken, don't fix it. I'm not advocating that you should not make these coffees, but I am advocating for intention. I think if you are going to make these coffees, you should do it on purpose. And if you don't want to make a natural that tastes like decomposing cherry and reminds some people of sewage, you don't have to. If your naturals are inconsistent, hard to scale or just underwhelming, there might be something in the rest of this episode to help you. There are three main pillars that I think can significantly improve the quality of Latin Naturals. They are sorting selection of microbes and shade. Sorting and microbes are the two levers that you can push and pull to clean up and improve. The consistency and quality and shade is key to lowering the drying temperature. Since naturals are more susceptible to heat damage, which can shorten their shelf life. You may be wondering why you waited 30 minutes to hear the most basic of advice. Well, it's because I get to taste a lot of Latin naturals and I get to visit so many mills across Latin America where these basic steps are not consistently being applied. Before we talk about how I push and pull these three levers and give you a protocol, I want to dig in a little bit more into why the dry process is so hard to achieve in certain parts of the world. Why it's not something that you can copy from Ethiopia and paste in Columbia or Guatemala. As I've already said, the majority of my consulting work is in Central and South America, where wash coffees are the dominant process. In contrast to the Americas in Ethiopia, the original home of coffee, the dominant process was dry process. It's genius in its simplicity. You don't need electricity, you don't need water, you don't need a pulper or fermentation tanks or washing channels, essentially, no equipment required except perhaps raised beds. It is the ultimate and low intervention processing, but usually has the most impact on flavor. This is the first paradox, the first paradox of naturals, less human intervention, but higher flavor payoff. The second paradox of naturals is that it's a simpler process that is actually harder to achieve. Just because something is simple doesn't mean it's easy. Wash coffee evolved after naturals because it took time to develop the equipment, the engineering and workflow that allows a wash process to occur. In that way, a wash process can be viewed as an improvement over dry process because it's the next evolution of processing. The thing that came after the solve for a lot of the issues posed by the inconsistencies of dry process. The wet method revolutionized coffee processing. The way the Ford Model T car revolutionized transportation compared to the horse and buggy. There are a lot of parallels between Ford's assembly line and the washing channels that revolutionized coffee processing. The wet process focused on uniformity, efficiency, and scalability. It also improved quality because by pulping the coffee, there are more opportunities to sort out defects by exposing the parchment and also to prevent future defects by reducing total processing time. So where does that leave the dry process? Dry process is still a good fit when you have a deep knowledge of the coffee varieties and how they ripen. It's also a good fit when the climate is stable and when there's a long history of both growing a crop and consuming the beverage. Like in Ethiopia, where the population that processes the coffee is also drinking it, incorporating it into their culture with rituals. I think this is another thing that we take for granted when we try to compare coffee and wine. Most of the wine grapes are still grown close to where they originated in Europe. And the people have had thousands of years of experience with both how to grow the vines and how to process them and know their best expressions. Coffee in contrast, is both a colonial tool and a pioneer crop. It was taken to places where there was no history or culture of growing processing or drinking this beverage because it didn't originate In most places, it grows Today, there is a very limited cultural context outside of colonial structures. Living in a tourist destination like Antigua, I get exposed to a lot of tourists. There's a weird connection that many tourists make when they visit Antia. Many love drinking Guatemalan coffee, and they feel like they're getting an authentic experience by drinking Guatemalan coffee in a Guatemalan coffee shop, like they're somehow getting closer to the product. Except that Antigua coffee shops are not authentic to Guatemalan culture. They're copies of American culture for tourists. When I walk into several of the coffee shops in Antia, I feel like I could be in San Diego or Oakland, California, which is to say they're very nice and have very few local Guatemalan patrons. This is in contrast to cacao. Cacao is both grown in Guatemala and drunk by the indigenous mind populations. You can come to Guatemala today and still experience a cacao ceremony with Mayan communities. This is an example of traveling to the source and having a deeper experience with a product. Like going to France to drink wine or Japan to drink green tea, but coffee doesn't have the same connection here. There is nothing historically authentic about the coffee shops here. It's the foreigner's culture package back to foreigners as a

31:17

Facsimile.

lucia: 31:18

of local culture like an or Boris eating its tail. But let's get back to the idea that coffee has been taken to places where there is no history or culture of growing processing or drinking this beverage. This is pretty straightforward and perhaps benign, but I feel like there's been a second purpose to further separate the coffee plant from the people who have the longest history and knowledge of growing it. It's not a coincidence that 70% of the world's cacao is grown in Africa, but originates in Columbia, and that coffee has flip flopped originally in Ethiopia, but mostly grown in Brazil. I don't believe it's a climate thing. Most of our coffee could still come from where it originated, and cacao could still come from where it originates. But then the people who have a history with it would be in charge instead of the colonial powers, and it wouldn't be compatible with modern capitalist structures. When looking to expand an empire by taking coffee to a new land, there are many advantages in relying on the wash process. It makes sense that as coffee spread to new countries where coffee is not traditionally grown, the tradition of how to process it was also left behind, as well as the original microbes, which we talked about in the terroir episodes of this podcast. As a result, coffee has a very transactional relationship in many Latin countries. When we romanticize coffee growers like our wine growers, we pass over the fact that they are not standing on the shoulders of giants of thousands of years of information and experience. We pass over the fact that the driving force and coffee production has been cheap labor, exploitation of land, and producing volume, not quality. We must not superimpose the romantic image of a grape grower in the French countryside, pressing grapes in his cellar, bottling his wine, and placing it on the table for his family to drink with the small coffee grower in El Salvador, who most likely has never tasted the coffee she grows. Dear patient, listener, these are, but some of my reservations about naturals in Latin countries, some, but not all. This is not even an exhaustive list of my concerns. There may have to be a second episode to further dissect everything that I can't fit into this one. But for your sake, let's see if I can land this plane. So with all those reservations about naturals and Latin countries. On Saturday, March 1st, I found myself having a bit of an existential crisis as Nick and I were floating cherries and filling barrels to start our first natural trials. This harvest, I felt a little like I had caved to the market pressures of buyers asking for naturals, and I needed to keep reminding myself that I was doing this not for myself, but to be able to provide support for the producers who do feel pressure, who do think that this is the only way to stand out, even though I don't want to make naturals for myself. I do think it would be helpful to have some firsthand experience so that I can advise my clients when they're in a similar situation. I also want to have this tool in my toolbox for the situations where water availability is limited and to generally prepare myself for coffee production in a post-apocalyptic water war future. Also, another topic that could be in the second naturals episode. Anyway. The entire harvest. I knew this future was coming, but due to the cool season that pushed back the start of harvest and the rains that made drying extra slow, there was not enough room on the patio to start the trials for months. The season was quickly coming to a close. The patios were still full, and the yeast and bacteria were languishing in my fridge. Also, the cool, humid and overcast weather did not inspire the desire to process naturals, which can so easily develop mold. The delay was so significant. I thought maybe the season would end without getting to do these trials at all. I was both worried I wouldn't get around to it and hopeful that I could procrastinate another year, no such luck. Finally at the end of February, an extended dry period came allowing us to get our main production in the warehouse, which cleared enough space in the patio to be ready to process naturals. So back to Saturday morning, March 1st, we received 700 pounds of coffee cherries. I wanted to try a few different combinations of sacro, myis yeast, nons, sacro, myis yeast like pichia and lactobacillus bacteria. However, the first hurdle was floating the cherries in our regular wet process, the cherries are directly dumped into a hopper that carries them to a siphon that removes a less dense, lower quality floaters from the denser higher quality fruit, and takes them directly to the pulper. All of this works by gravity. To be able to float our cherry and avoid the pulper, we would have to go against gravity and use double the labor and take twice as long to use the floating step, and then to dig out and catch the cherries before they went to the pulper. This was gonna be really difficult, so we ended up filling an old water tank with water and manually floating the cherries and scooping them out. Again. It still took twice as many people, but we avoided the step of having to carry the 700 pounds twice up and down a few flights of stairs. Let's go back to the first and most important lever for improving Latin Naturals. This selection is key and is usually missing. In parts of Africa where I have worked, including Kenya, Burundi, and Rwanda, there have been so many people picking, sorting, moving, and raking coffee. It was astonishing to me when I first visited those wet mills. African mills make Latin mills look like abandoned ghost towns. There is such a stark difference in labor. It feels like a different industry altogether. Dry process naturals are notoriously difficult because they're not uniform. This lack of uniformity makes them difficult to roast, creating cup to cup variability, and generally shorter shelf life when compared to the same coffee process in a wet method. The way to counteract this is to pick only red cherries. The solve is to expend a lot of effort and labor upfront to homogenize the cherries. This is rarely done in Latin countries. The lack of labor makes it impossible, but also the lack of knowledge. In my workshops, there are many producers who process naturals but may have never tasted a delicious Ethiopian natural themselves. Not only are they unfamiliar with the traditional flavor profile, so the target of where they're trying to go, but usually they are also unaware of the protocols in Ethiopia that make these coffees such a success. It is like expecting someone to be able to recreate a croissant just by looking at a picture of it. The flavor and texture is not something that you can see a picture of and replicate All over Guatemala, there are bakers making crescent shaped gummy bricks of dough that couldn't be further from the flaky, airy, buttery essence of a croissant if they tried. Once again, my pedantic approach to language is on full display. I wouldn't be upset if they called these abominations half moon bread or crescent pastries, but they call them croissants. And because I love this pastry so much, I keep falling for it and thinking despite all previous disappointments, maybe this time will be different. And it's never different. It has not been different to this point. But I will probably still keep drawing. Anyway, during class time, I share pictures from my consulting trips to Africa. Most producers are surprised to see the amount of people working in a traditional wet mill and sorting cherry. They can't believe how red and uniform the cherries are before they even get to the wet mill, before they are floated and further separated. In contrast, most Latin naturals start their journey more closely resembling Skittles candy, taste the rainbow, various colors of yellow, green, red, and purple. So my best advice is to sort, sort, sort. But I know most people can't, even if they wanted to. And so for this trial, I could have made the extra effort to sort to the level of Ethiopia or Kenya, but since it wasn't realistic or practical, I decided not to. In fact, we didn't sort the cherry at all. And remember, this is the end of the season. The percentage of very ripe and overripe cherry was at its peak, more ripeness, brings more spoilage organisms, higher risk of over fermentation defects. The only selection I did was to remove the floaters. So we received the cherries exactly as they came in from the field and only did this. Float step because I wanted to see how much my microbes could compensate for this lack of sorting labor and against the extra challenge of spoilage with late harvest fruit. Remember, I'm not trying to make the best naturals ever. I'm not trying to create a competition winning batch of coffee. I'm trying to make the best natural I can with the least amount of effort. It's only very recently that I was made aware of the Duchess Sixes culture. Essentially, it's a cultural philosophy that gets its name from the fact that tests and school are graded out of 10 and that a six is all you need to pass. So you know, why bother putting in any more effort? If you only need a six, why do more so instead of being a top student, striving for a nine outta 10 or a 10 outta 10 better to get a six. And you know, have friends enjoy your life. Be interesting anyway, I've only recently been made aware of this cultural quirk, and I am definitely obsessed. But back to Saturday, after floating the next step was to ferment with selected microbes. Normally, the fermentation happens in ceramic tanks in the mill. But to get those coffees out there, use a washing channel. And because we were doing whole cherries, it wouldn't work because the fruit would be smashed and ruined. So we would need to use plastic barrels. And instead of fermenting in the mill, I decided to ferment down in the patio to avoid moving the whole cherries again.'cause each time we needed to move and manipulate the cherries from, let's say, the truck to the weighing scale, from the scale to the floating tank, from the floating tank to the fermentation tank, and then the fermentation tank to the patio. Each step each. Movement was an opportunity to tear the delicate skin and expose a misage, increasing the chance of contamination and risk, kind of ruining my whole experiment. So after floating the lighter cherries. All the fruit went down to the patio and we separated into batches. So 100 pounds of cherry went directly onto the patio to begin drying immediately. So that's our control. The next a hundred pounds was put in a barrel with water only. So that was a fermentation with the wild microbes that are coming in from the farm. And the next five barrels each had 100 pounds of cherries with different combinations of yeast and bacteria. So. All six barrels. The five with Sacro, myis, sacro, Myis plus lactobacillus, a Pichia plus lactobacillus, uh, Pia by itself. All of these different combinations plus the wild, coffee with water. All of those were left for 72 hours to ferment. And then we, after 72 hours, we drained the water off and place them on the patio to dry. So notice I am also not using raised beds and raised beds are great if you already have them, but I don't think that they should be a barrier to making good naturals. The advantage of raised beds is that they can help prevent mold, which is a big problem in our humid countries, by getting the cherries off of the ground and as well as providing greater airflow.'cause you have airflow on top and airflow on the bottom versus the patio where you just are kind of, you know, drying from one direction. the second benefit of raised beds is that by getting them off of the ground, you're also lowering the drying temperature because you're not getting that radiant heat from the patio. So it's by default, a more gentle way to dry. Coffee beds are also more gentle because they need to be raked by hand versus a patio where most of the movement is accomplished by stepping on or through the coffee or in very large places, uh, basically driving a truck or a tractor or a motorcycle to mix and move the coffee. So again, by default, Ray's, beds don't allow the coffee to get beaten up so much. There's nothing magical about raised beds. It's just you can't drive on them, step on them if you have. This type of structure. But I believe that you can do all of this gentleness. I believe you can accomplish that on a patio as well. I believe that it's possible to be gentle and not step on the coffee. It's possible to reduce temperature with overhead shade, and the last burden of contamination can be taken care of by the. Previous fermentation in the barrel because the yeast and the bacteria that I use to inoculate those barrels acts as a biocontrol against the ambient mold that could be found on the patio or brought in by the overripe cherries. So. Another key to this method is that the cherries are submerged. In many iterations, the cherries are placed in dry plastic bags to ferment. This is a fine method and again, if it works for you, keep doing it. This dryness usually leads to higher temperatures, which can lead to more intense aromas, so I completely understand why it's a popular choice. The reason I don't do it, and the reason I don't recommend it is because it's difficult to control and reproduce, and because you can't monitor it since the bag is sealed the whole time, you're essentially blind until the end when you open the bag and you know, maybe get a surprise with my method of inoculation. Plus submerged fruit, uh, in a completely open and exposed tank. I'm able to follow the pH, I can mix the cherries to make sure that the fermentation is homogenous. And the most important part is that I'm smelling it and making sure that the microbes are still healthy and my coffee is not at risk for any defects. So there, there will be no surprises. I am, eyes open the whole time monitoring my coffee fermentations. Okay, so what were the results? Well, the results were that we were able to dry the coffee in 15 days, Hull it, which was a whole other challenge because we didn't have the proper wholer and we had to like MacGyver a setup with a pulper, a pasta colander, and a shop vac set to reverse to be able to get the green seeds out so that we could roast them and cup them. At this point, only a handful of people have tried them, but my intent was to make a natural that didn't taste. Like a natural to blur the lines of processing and make the flavor story about the microbes and not the equipment, not the infrastructure. I have worked to push wash process closer to the boundaries of a dry, processed coffee by filling out the body, by making it, you know, heavy, a heavier texture, more round and creamy. And what I hadn't done before, the experience that was missing for me was pushing the boundaries of a dry process closer to the profile of a washed by making it clear and bright. So in the end, I can tell you I have finally made some Latin dry processed coffee that I am looking forward to drinking. There's more to share and digest, but I think I will leave it here for today. I've been sharing pictures and videos of this process, both on Instagram, on my newsletter, as well as during live office hours. So if this topic really interests you, come join us there and be part of the conversation. And I'm curious, are you gonna rush out and try to find a natural process in your local coffee shop? Will you think of dry processed coffees differently now? I wanna thank you for hanging out with this episode because it's been a while since I sat down to record my thoughts for this podcast. but even though we haven't been publishing new episodes during the last several months, we have been regularly gathering for the aforementioned discord office hours and. I just can't tell you how much I enjoy them. What a great part of my week they are. They're just these casual chats in case you're new here. The office hours are casual chats where I get to share, you know what Nick and I are up to do harvest updates and then mostly hear from you all over the world to what you're doing, what you're interested in. We kind of, you know, workshop some protocols. It's just a really fun, casual space. So if you've been looking for a way to get more involved into specialty coffee or you just have all of these questions or a place you wanna meet, some coffee nerds, um, feel free to join us on Patreon. It's$3 per month to connect with other awesome listeners. And like I mentioned earlier, your support will help me make new episodes and keep them free from sponsors and distractions. Thank you for listening, and if you get value out of our time together, please share with a friend 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. Great to be with you today. And remember, life's too short to drink bad coffee.