#71: How to De-Funkify Your Naturals and Get Them to Dry Faster.

#54: Visiting Producers, Advanced Tourism & The Coffee Hunter with Tom of Sweet Maria’s

#57: Will Frith Solves Terroir & Other Lessons From Vietnam

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Transcript

lucia: 0:09

Hello, and welcome to a continuation of the discussion on the natural slash dry process that we started in episode 69. If one has a podcast, the best strategy is to make sure each episode is able to stand alone because you never know how many you're listening for the first time. And as a listener of many podcasts myself, I know it's annoying to feel like you need to listen to previous episodes to understand the current one. So I apologize in advance for not being skilled enough to do this for you. This episode is part two of a discussion about natural processed coffee, and it's what I didn't have time to elaborate on in the previous episode. so it will make the most sense to listen to episode 69 before coming to this one. But if you're a rebel, you do you and freestyle start here. But at least I'm comforting myself with the idea that if you're here listening to a podcast about coffee fermentation, then you already have a level of patience and curiosity. Rare in today's society. I would be worried if I had to make a YouTube video or Instagram reels. This is not the place for short bursts of entertainment or information. This is a place for coffee nerds that want to sit and chew on an idea for a while. In episode 69, I told you how I came to do our first natural trials during the worst possible harvest year. It was a poor match because it was cold and overcast and it rained for the first time in decades during December and January, which are historically dry months. In that episode, I also shared that I do not like the flavor profile of most Latin naturals because instead of tasting exciting, fruity notes, I taste rot and decomposition. Since this note of decomposing fruit has kind of become a hallmark of the process. I haven't been able to taste clean and crisp naturals, and so I wanted to prove that it was possible to control the flavors and that we don't have to default to funk if we want to have specialty coffee. However, I set out to do this during a year of excess moisture. Strike one with a process that is very susceptible to mold strike two. And because of logistics, I started the trial at the very end of the season with a high percentage of overripe fruit that was already on its way to decomposition strike three. If you want to achieve a funky natural, do a dry process in a humid environment and use very ripe or overripe fruit. But my intent was to make a natural that didn't taste like a funky natural. The intent was to blur the lines of processing and make the flavor story about the microbes and not the infrastructure or equipment. I have worked to push wash process closer to the boundaries of dry, processed coffee by filling out the body, making the texture more round and creamy. And so the next challenge on the horizon, what was missing for me was to push the boundaries of dry process closer to the profile of a wash process by pumping up the acidity and making it clear, clean, and bright. But another reason for this was personal because I have never met a Latin natural that I've enjoyed. I wanted to make something Nick and I would enjoy drinking every morning. And while in the last episode we discussed a lot about the landscape of naturals, the thing I ran out of time for, the main thing where I kind of left you hanging was how the coffee tasted. Today we will talk more about how it tasted and the implications of that flavor switch. I mean, I told you I finally had in my hands a dry, processed natural coffee that I looked forward to drinking. But what does that mean, and why would you believe me? I set up experiments with the intention of trying to prove that I could achieve a certain outcome. When a scientist sets up an experiment primarily to confirm what they already believe, this is typically referred to as confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a tendency to design experiments or seek out information in a way that supports one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses rather than objectively testing all possible explanations. This is bad science. The goal for science should be objectivity instead of confirmation bias. A good scientist should be aiming for hypothesis testing. Hypothesis testing is the proper scientific practice and involves testing hypotheses in a way that could disprove them, not just confirm them. And so my experiment would be flawed if I was a scientist or a researcher. So it's a good thing that I'm neither of those things. I don't have time to test for all possible explanations. Furthermore, as a non-scientist, I don't hold myself to those standards. I'm a regular person in the world that needs practical answers for myself. So instead of the scientific approach that is open-ended and usually opens up possibilities for more questions, I needed answers. So I reverse engineered an experiment. I knew exactly where I wanted to end up, what I wanted to achieve, and worked backwards to see how best to get there. And I do want to add that even though the scientific method emphasizes objectivity, science is still done by humans, not robots, and prior beliefs can still affect interpretation and experimental design. Even good science cannot be perfectly objective. In fact, we know that just observing an experiment can influence the outcome. The observer effect refers to the fact that the act of observing or measuring a system can alter its state or behavior, thereby affecting the results of the experiment. This concept is most prominent in physics, especially quantum mechanics, where measuring a particle's position or momentum changes its state, but it also applies in other scientific fields like microbiology. So I set up an experiment to prove something that I wanted to prove, and then I'm telling you that, yep, I did it. I achieved the desired outcome. That's pretty convenient, and it should raise some yellow flags. For some of you, I'm already dealing with a confirmation bias and observer effect, so how do I move forward with the results? My concern wasn't just about convincing you guys to believe me. I also wanted to check myself before I erect myself, since I wanted to believe it. Could this be a type one error, a type one error? In statistical hypothesis testing is where the null hypothesis is incorrectly rejected, suggesting a significant effect or difference exists when it in fact does not. Since I wanted to believe that I could make naturals taste like a wash, could I be finding a significant difference where one does not exist? Could I be giving myself a type one error, false positive forget about getting you guys to trust me first, and most importantly, I needed to know if I was able to trust myself. And what about Nick? Could I trust him? I wasn't so sure about that. Nick and I have similar tastes where we actively avoid Latin Naturals because for us, the funky fruity flavors taste like over rippee, rotting fruit. And when we cup these experiments, we really like the coffee and we're happy to drink it. When it comes to coffee, I often think of Nick and I as a two-headed monster, two different parts of the same organism, and so it was actually kind of fun for us to disagree about flavor descriptors. If you caught that in the last episode, the last q and a episode number 70. it's very rare for us to disagree, so it was kind of funny that we caught it on tape. Anyway, Nick and I agreed on this cupping, but even though Nick and I agreed, he was not enough of a sounding board to give me confidence about achieving the results after our initial cupping, we were both extremely pleased with the results. Suddenly, we found ourselves drinking the naturals. Every morning we had succeeded in converting ourselves to be daily natural coffee drinkers, but could we still be lying to ourselves about what we accomplished, seeing what we wanted to see, or rather tasting what we wanted to taste? And my concern was not just an experimental setup and confirmation bias, observer effect, and false positives. But I also know that I have a bias towards things that I make. I like to make things, and I like the things I make. I remember learning this as a young winemaker. Many of my friends who graduated from the Viticulture and Enology program at uc Davis were obsessed with the work in a way that I think is rare for most professions. Our entire lives were consumed by wine. It became our entire personality. We worked long hours Monday through Friday at our respective wineries. Then as soon as we got off work, we would visit each other's wineries. And this was easy to do because in the Napa Valley, all the wineries are crammed right next to each other. There's hundreds of wineries with tasting rooms. One right after the next lined up like dominoes along Highway 29. And when we weren't at our wineries working or each other's wineries after work, then on the weekends we would go to neighboring towns like Sonoma and visit even more wineries. And when we weren't working on wine or spending our free time in our friends' wineries as part of this wine obsession, many of us made our own wine at home. And when we were not touring tasting rooms in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, we would regularly gather in each other's homes and hold various levels of formal or informal tastings. I was one of these people by day. I was part of the Opus One Wine making team, and then after hours I made wine at my house. One could say garage wine because it was literally in my garage, but that doesn't tell you the full story. Because of my daytime job, I had access to excellent equipment. The winery let me borrow. I had a proper stainless steel, two ton fermentor in my house. I had a basket press. I bought very nice oak barrels for aging. They were used, but they were still very, like once used oak barrels. I had access to the best yeast and enzymes, fining agents and top-notch bottles, corks and labels. Because home wine making is so common, even for non-professionals in Napa. There are several businesses who will rent new professional equipment like bottling and corking equipment to use at home. My uncle Russ was a general manager of a large wine brand in Napa, but he was no winemaker. He studied finance. He was a number cruncher, but had a large property and grew his own grapes, and he ended up harvesting about two tons per year. And from those grapes he made his own version of home garage wine. In fact, in the Napa Valley, an individual can legally produce up to 200 gallons of wine per year for a two person home. This 200 gallon serves for personal or family use without needing a license or a permit. 200 gallons sounds kind of small, but that equals almost a thousand bottles of wine. And you guys, there are only 365 days in a year, so that's like two and a half bottles of wine a day. Every day. Every year. That's actually a lot of wine that you don't have to report and you don't have to, have a permit for. Anyway, my first year making wine, I didn't make that much. I probably made about half that. I think it was somewhere around 40 cases of wine or just under 500 bottles. And yes, most people do use it for personal consumption, and I did drink a lot of my own wine and. don't tell the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. I actually don't know what the statute of limitations is, but I was able to sell a good portion of the cases. And what wasn't consumed or sold was traded. I traded wine for haircuts, yard services dog sitting, but mostly I traded my wine for other wines. During this time, another former Opus employee and close friend of mine from the wine program was also making her own wine, so we traded wine bottles. She had this really great pinot that she made in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, and I was making a Grenache RAB blend. I. After we exchanged our bottles and I tried her wine, I was telling her how much I enjoyed it, and her response was kind of like. Well, the ripeness isn't where I wanted it because the crew had to pick this weekend instead of another weekend because there was a scheduling conflict and the texture's kind of doing this funny thing that I don't like, and the alcohol content was meant to be blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, what are you talking about? Girl, you're crazy. This wine is amazing and. Meredith just kept commenting on the things that she had wanted to improve and do differently for next year. Basically, when she tasted her wine, she tasted what wasn't there because she was so close to it. She saw all of the faults until I had her as a contrast. I didn't realize how differently I saw my wine, specifically because my wine was my wine, because I know the love and effort that went into making it. I loved my wine. I didn't see the faults. Objectively, my wine should have been good. I mean, I had excellent training from my university degree and several years of hands-on experience at a world renowned winery under a legendary winemaker. I used very good raw material, very good ingredients, and top-notch equipment, and proof of all proof. At the end of the day, I was able to sell my wine. I was able to get people to exchange their money for my efforts. But there was a little nagging part of me that wasn't sure if my wine was actually good or if it was good because of the love I had for it. Did my love imbue it with more beauty? I think it's how everyone thinks. Their baby is the most beautiful baby that has ever lived. I remember thinking back then that my wine baby was great and delicious. The most beautiful wine baby to ever have lived. 13 years after that experience, I find myself once again, this time with my co-parent Nick beholding our coffee baby, and proclaiming it is the most beautiful. So before I brought you guys the results, I needed someone who was not me and not Nick to take the coffee and provide feedback. However, I wasn't sure how to do this because there's very little coffee to go around. Due to the cooler late harvest season and lower yields, I was only able to process 700 pounds of sherry. By the time you remove the lower quality floats and any broken bits, what we've ended up with is around one exportable bag of green coffee, which is about 69 kilos or 150 pounds of green coffee, and those 150 pounds are split into seven experiments. So I only have about 20 pounds of each experiment, an amount you can't do very much with. All this to say, Nick and I are not sure what we are going to do with it. We have been focusing on sending out samples of our main wash harvest and felt uncomfortable sending samples of the natural because this experiment is not enough to sell and we didn't want to waste buyers' time with coffee that is unavailable to buy, but I still needed to have others taste it. Fortunately, on a day we were going to be doing some regular qc, I got an unexpected message from Dan and Tom of Sweet Maria's in California they were ina visiting their suppliers and had some unexpected free time. This was perfect. So I invited them to our QC cupping so that they could taste the coffees. It's a really fun part of living where we live. Frequent, unexpected visits from coffee friends. As green buyers with decades in the industry, this pair have tried a lot of coffees from diverse locations in many preparations. Tom is a thoughtful person who has been on this podcast before episode 54 and has his own podcast with, I will link in the show notes. I thought he and Dan would be able to give me honest feedback on the coffees. We had several washed coffees on the table, and then our seven natural experiments. I didn't tell them what each experiment was or the purpose, but I did point out that some were washed and some were natural because I wanted them to taste the coffees in a specific order. Same as in wine tasting where you start with the white wines and then move to the red wines. You don't bounce all over the place or go back and forth between red and white wine. Anyway, after the cupping, when we were casually chatting about the coffees, Tom said that if I hadn't told him that there were naturals and washed on the table, he would've thought they were all washed. It was a casual observation. He couldn't have known this is what I wanted to hear, what I needed to hear. I didn't realize how much tension I had been holding in my body until I heard his words and felt my shoulders drop. He said that they all tasted like a set, like the coffees were a family. Clearly they were different, but like they belonged together. This was a relief to hear and interesting because of the different processing strategies and the resources that were used. The table spanned the whole harvest, early peak, and late harvest with various levels of ripeness. And like I said, with the naturals, some late harvest, very late harvest, with a lot of overwrite fruit. And yet all roads lead to Rome. They all belonged. This is another point that I'm trying to achieve, which is expanding the window of coffees that get to be included, that get to participate in specialty. So much of the early specialty coffee philosophy has been about coffee hunting and finding the jewel, the singular exceptional daylot. Among the rubble. Most of the story has been about micro lotts and keeping things separate. I'm not talking about traceability because that's definitely helpful, but I do mean separating out the best lots and extracting them for the specialty market. For many, perhaps without even realizing it, without wanting to specialty. Coffee has a foundation of exclusion, extraction, and exceptions. Even though specialty coffee pretends to be a new wave of coffee, unlike commodity coffee, to me, it still has a flavor, a whisper, a root of the old school colonial mentality of extraction. The colonial mentality behind coffee cultivation in Latin America was characterized by a focus on profit, exploitation of land and labor, and the establishment of social and economic systems that prioritize the interest of the colonial powers at the expense of indigenous and enslaved peoples. For me, the specialty focus on micro lotts is related to the point of prioritizing interest of colonial powers, buyers at the expense of the local people. The producer. And many would argue, no, no, no, you're totally wrong. Micro lots are the way that we actually value and can pay local people more. But this is a fantasy very few producers ever realize when you learn about commodity coffee and see that the price of commodity hovers between$2 and 50 cents and maybe$3 and 50 cents per pound, and then you see that micro lotts can get prices of seven to$10 per pound. It does seem like it's a positive trend in the industry. However, the part of the conversation that is often left out is volume. A producer can maybe sell one to 10% of the production as a special micro lott that receives those prices, and the rest is likely still sold at commodity prices or prices based on the New York Stock Exchange. And those prices rarely. Barely cover the cost of production. In my experience with my exposure to coffee producers all over the world, higher prices on micro lotts is not what will save them, because that premium on a small percentage often does not compensate for the rest of the coffee. I wanna illustrate this with a really quick example of a producer who makes, let's say, 300 bags a year and gets the commodity price of$3 per pound. If they do a different experiment, something extended or extreme or weird, maybe they can find a buyer who loves it and buys 10 bags and will pay$9 per pound. The benefits to the buyer are pretty clear. They have a unique offering of coffee for their customers as well as if they choose. They're able to use this marketing claim and say that they pay 200% above commodity prices. This could make their customers feel really good about buying this coffee, increasing the likelihood of brand loyalty. You feel like an ethical buyer because you as a consumer are buying coffee that you know was triple the commodity price. Then your mind kind of fills in the blank that if this producer is getting triple the standard rate, she must be making a good living. It seems like a win-win. While the benefits for the green buyer and the final consumer are obvious, the benefits for the producer are less so. For example, what is often overlooked is any investments that were made to produce that$9 per pound coffee. Perhaps they spent a few thousand on a bioreactor. Perhaps the process takes them three times as long taking up space in their facility, and therefore they produce only a third of the coffee that they could be producing. Or perhaps they didn't really know what they were doing and they did a bunch of other experiments that turned out crap and had to be sold at a loss so that this one micro lock could shine. It's likely that even at three times the price, it could still not cover the cost of production when time, opportunity, cost investments and lost coffee are taken into account. And then what about the other 290 bags of coffee? Getting a new customer, setting up a new logistics supply chain, managing that relationship for 10 or five or even one bag is a significant time investment. This is why I am allergic to micro lots. I work with producers to make small tweaks to improve the 290 bags instead of making big changes that focus on the 10 bags. In that same example, a producer could make twice as much if the quality of the copy could go up by one to two points, and they could get, let's say 50 cents more. so$3 and 50 cents instead of$3 per pound, a 50 cent increase, just 17% improvement on those 290 bags is over$22,000 compared to a 200% price increase on 10 bags, which is$13,000. The fastest way to get me to delete your email is to ask for my consulting services to help you make a micro lot, and especially if you mention that it's for a competition instead of micro lotts exclusivity and coffee hunting. I think specialty coffee can be about craft intention and inclusion. Instead of finding the lightning in a bottle and seeing how small and exclusive something can be, I often return to something Will Frith the founder of Building Coffee in Vietnam. A roaster and a consultant wrote, will Wrote Better Coffee for More People. Thank you Will for saying in five words what takes me a rambling 25 minutes. but we went on this tangent because of Tom's comment that all the coffee he tasted on the table belonged to the same flavor family, which is why I make a single 85 bag blend, not 18 different day lots, micro lotts and processing combinations. I don't have a headache from sending out 18 different samples to 20 different people. I make my life easier by needing to keep track of and sell only a single coffee. I. Without this controlled approach to processing each day, lot would be allowed to be wild, and therefore you would need the coffee hunter to cup through 40 different coffees to find the needle in the haystack, but with a controlled approach. Many of the coffees that wouldn't make it into specialty get to be included. Better coffee for more people. But, okay. That was Tom and Dan's feedback. Two dudes from the United States. I needed more diversity. I wanted to find out what the locals thought. Next. We kept the experimental coffees with two Guatemalan friends who are not in the business, but they are enthusiastic, special, specialty coffee consumers. Our friend JJ loves natural wine and recently helped organize Anika's first wine festival featuring natural wines. If you're planning a visit to Guatemala, I recommend coming next February and trying to catch the wine festival, or I definitely recommend coming in November for the annual Flower Festival. But really, there are very few bad times to visit Guatemala. Anyway. JJ is an artist and travels a lot for his exhibitions in every new country and city he goes to. He always picks up specialty coffee he finds for the last eight months of our friendship, he had been focusing on dry processed naturals. Every funky natural he could find, he would buy and share it with us. For months, Nick and I had a steady stream of Columbia Naturals parading through our kitchen. The friendship with JJ was fresh and budding, so just like hoarding a new romance for the first few months, Nick and I tried to be the most attractive version of ourselves, showing we were open-minded and trying all of these funky coffees that JJ brought back Months of feigning enthusiasm for yet another moto and aerobic, natural or hops fermented lygon or thermo shock. Something, something, something. When we invited JJ to taste our version of naturals, it felt like we could finally reveal our true selves. And what we revealed is that we are in fact, cynical curmudgeons who don't actually like loud and funky naturals. We prefer the quiet, bright clarity of a classic washed coffee. We did not expect to convert JJ to our side. That was not the point. He genuinely loves the funky coffees. He loves Latin Naturals, and I don't wanna take that away from him. However, the win that day, the success during the cupping was in being able to differentiate hours from what he seeks because he likes what he likes. Ours was not his cup of tea. The success wasn't him telling us that he can taste a difference. And that our natural did not taste like a natural to him in scientific terms. I was not seeking a hedonic preference. I was not asking if one coffee was preferred over the other, if it was better. I wasn't trying to make the best coffee ever. Remember, we used overwrite fruit. We were not able to sort to uniformity. We did not use the iconic raised African beds. This coffee was dried on a concrete patio floor. It has so many strikes against it. I had no expectations that I would blow anybody's mind with this coffee. But what I was expecting, what I did want, the point was to blur the lines of processing. Could we achieve something clean like a wash with none of the traditional equipment? And in challenging circumstances, the initial cuppings were about discrimination, also known as a difference test. When given two samples, can you tell that they are different? I asked someone who prefers washed coffees and someone who prefers natural coffees, and they both told me that this dry processed natural coffee tastes like a washed, so clearly they are different coffees, not different enough to put them into separate groups, or better said they are similar enough to consider them in the same group. My natural experiment is a cat in Lion's clothing. While it doesn't look exactly like them, it resembles them enough that the rest of the lions have accepted it into the den. I was trying to show that natural is not a flavor profile, but a processing method and we can use multiple methods to get similar flavor profiles. I think I need to say this because I still think many people do think natural is a flavor profile and it's getting closely associated with funky and with intensity so I definitely want to caution us against collapsing these two things, collapsing, funky and natural together. And natural is a specific way of making coffee that highlights certain characteristics of fruitiness and complexity. But producers have a lot more control if they want it. I think the issue is really not with consumers. It's much more with the producers. I think the issue is that many Latin producers associate natural dry process with neglect because it is so often used for the lowest quality because low quality doesn't deserve the extra attention. So many Latin producers are very used to using a dry process for all of the fruit that is sorted out. That is floated at the mill because wash process requires a lot of water and tank space. All of the stuff that you're sorting out, the stuff that you know is of lower quality, it doesn't go through the wet mill process that the best coffee goes through. It doesn't deserve that attention, so it usually goes directly to the patio. So in a traditional wet mill, you will see a lot of. Dry, processed coffee, a lot of naturals, but that process is reserved for the lowest qualities that are just, spread on patios and largely ignored because it's the lowest quality you're attending to your highest quality wash coffees, and then only when time permits. Okay. Some of the, the dry processed coffees are raked and Paid attention to, but it's essentially an afterthought. So naturals are associated with the process that you do on the coffee that you don't care about, and therefore you're not paying attention to it. So there's some producers who hear about Specialty Naturals they initially think, why would anybody want that? That's our worst process. but if a buyer requests it, then you know, you think, okay, I guess if someone's willing to pay for it, I'll do it for them. But usually what happens is that they just swap out the best fruit for their worst fruit, and then they don't really update any of the other protocols. It's still not cared for in the way that fruit is in African countries that have a history with this method, and I think because of this quickly, the funky, fruity flavor standard spontaneously emerges from farms all throughout Latin America. But in Ethiopia and other African countries where the process originates and is much more common. It's not a process of neglect. It's a very active process. Hundreds of people are actively sorting and selecting a homogenous color. Lots of effort goes into mixing and maintaining airflow to keep temperatures down and have uniform drying. Good naturals take a lot of work. And I think Latin American producers are either unaware or unable to put in this work. And the result is Funky Naturals. Because these are extreme processes and you're getting this extreme, reaction. So this funkiness has come to characterize the genre. So what happened when the Latin producers tasted our naturals, it was time for a third round of feedback. Our producer friends, one of whom is a Q grader and cup of excellence judge, so excellent palate. We're finally given a chance to taste these naturals when they gave us their feedback. It was almost apologetic, like, ooh. Um, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but these naturals taste like washed. They said it as if we had failed and they were pained to have to be the ones to give us the bad news because in their mind, a natural must be funky. Otherwise, it's not a natural. Otherwise, what is the point? In their mind, if you wanted something to taste like a wash, just make it washed, which, yes, obviously that would be the easiest thing. And we will get back to this point in a moment. But first, I want to dissect this expectation that naturals must be funky, otherwise they are a failure. I was like, wait, since when? And it's obvious now, but I hadn't put it together until that moment, until I could sense their embarrassment for me. If we go back to the idea that when Latin producers started doing Specialty Naturals, it was as a way to differentiate and access a different market. It makes sense that these coffees needed to taste really, really different. But also I think a very important component of this is that no one showed them how to do it right. No one was teaching a good version of this process. I think most just read Instagram posts to get an idea, saw a picture of something, maybe read a couple sentence description, and then they tried it. So I think a lot of people were approaching this method visually seeing pictures, but never tasting what the end game was. I would say an enormous percentage of producers who make naturals have never tasted the thing that they were trying to emulate, the thing that they were trying to replicate. And like I said, with the Latin humid climates, the lack of labor and history of neglect for coffees that are dry processed, the funkiness naturally emerged. It couldn't not be funky. There was no way you were going to do this with those methods and not have a funky decomposing coffee. I think also since almost everyone was getting this result, since it was a a consistent result that if you do these steps or lack of steps, then you're going to get a very extreme, intense, funky flavor. I think that's where it started to become associated as a feature of the process. So funkiness was not a sign that you were doing something wrong because it can't be wrong if you don't know what right is. So that funkiness became a hallmark of naturals instead of a signal that something has gone off the rails. cause there is no coffee police to say, hold on. Funkiness is not a feature of naturals. It only tastes like that because you didn't follow the African recipe. You guys are over here doing a different thing, and so you can imagine a few cycles of copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, and suddenly we forget what the original image was and now the original. The standard is Funky naturals, and if you're not doing that, then you are the one who's failing. When I realized that, when the moment of getting this feedback, I, I felt like up is down, down is up. I felt completely disoriented to this information that was coming in. And it kind of reminded me of the way that makeup has changed in our culture. I'm not a historian, so I'm not talking about makeup from 6,000 years ago in ancient Egypt where you know, all genders use cosmetics to enhance their features. I'm talking more about the recent history where makeup is mostly the domain of women, one use of makeup is for women to enhance their beauty with color. Cosmetics in general, not really the realm of the average man, but makeup is fun and many men do use makeup as well to various degrees, various intensities, The spectrum includes using things like concealer to eliminate blemishes or bruises to celebrities and fashion models, films, and ultra high definition. And then on the more extreme end of the spectrum is drag culture. Drag culture is fundamentally about transformation, about using bold colors and theatrical techniques to create a persona that is often larger than life and distinct from everyday appearances. Exaggeration is central to drag features such as eyes, lips, cheekbones, and eyebrows are dramatically accentuated to stand out on stage and be seen from a distance. Heavy contouring is used to sculpt the face feminize or exaggerate features. And this includes using makeup to reshape your nose, your jawline, your cheekbones and forehead. In drag culture, men exaggerate the feminine look. And they have developed many techniques for using light and shadow to play with dimension and many makeup application techniques to make the makeup long lasting and basically bulletproof. Because imagine the kind of staying power needed for makeup to cover a five o'clock shadow and last through singing and dancing performances to stand up to bright hot lights and sweat. These makeup application techniques and products, these are valuable skills that are in turn being borrowed by women. But what's interesting is that along with the application skills came, the aesthetics Open up any YouTube makeup tutorial, and there are women with a full beat of glam makeup that either mimics the drag look or uses several techniques like conting, the nose and jaw, dry new eyebrows, and baking with powder. There's an entire generation of young women learning how to do their makeup from drag queens, making that their standard of glamorous beauty, wearing a full face of performance worthy drag makeup has become normalized, and not just for the stage or the red carpet, but for grocery trips and errands. Full glam is so normalized that it has already spawned its alternative. Because a universe requires balance. A reaction to this full glam phase in beauty is the no makeup. Makeup. You'd think no makeup. Makeup would mean not wearing any makeup, but no, it means still wearing makeup. But the goal is to look like you are not wearing any makeup. So let's just take a moment. Young women are wearing so much makeup. They are so used to seeing themselves with makeup. The baseline has been raised so high. It's been raised to the level that the reaction against all of this makeup is to keep wearing makeup, but just to make it look undetectable. That is how much we have distorted our baseline of what the human face looks like, what skin looks like, and what we collectively find beautiful. And yes, I'm talking about YouTube makeup tutorials of 2024 and 2025. But there's also a funny scene from the American Show, the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, where she has a separate alarm to wake her up before her husband so she can get up before he does. go to the bathroom, put on makeup, fix her hair, and then get back into bed so she can pretend that she woke up like this to be this perfect beauty for her husband. And this was tied to the social expectations that, women should always appear well groomed and attractive, especially during the 1940s and the 1950s when beauty standards were heavily influenced by Hollywood. Like Audrey Lorde said, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. No makeup. Makeup is not liberation from full glam performance makeup. But in this sense, perhaps liberation is not desired. Now while I'm not personally inclined to attempt a full glam look, I am not immune to the siren song of makeup. I am not sharing this observation as a person who abstains. I am in the lobster pot boiling away with all of the other lobsters. I participate, I buy makeup, and I wear it sometimes to hide an insecurity, but also because I find it fun to paint on my face. I think self-expression in this way is valuable, but what does this have to do with coffee? Well, just like in the example, the exaggerated feminized version of drag makeup is becoming the standard for women who already have feminine features. What was developed as exaggerated characters of feminized versions for the stage and performance has trickled down to the bathrooms and vanities of women who are not performers, but regular people with regular jobs. In Latin dry processed naturals, I see the exaggerated version of funky becoming the standard. What began as extreme processing has trickled down to be the expectation for a traditional coffee producer trying to make a traditional coffee. When I got condolences from my natural, that wasn't funky. When the producer said that it tasted like a washed, I felt like they were looking through the lens of drag to determine beauty. And in that sense, I guess I'm doing my version of no makeup, makeup naturals. So where does that leave us? I finally had some feedback from specialty consumers, from Guatemalan producers and US buyers. It's a small sample size to be sure, but I felt comfortable knowing that I got the same feedback from a diverse palette and diverse parts of the supply chain. All of these different groups agreed that this natural was a cat in Lion's clothing. A harmless pretender, but more importantly, a powerful tool. This is not about deception for the consumer. We are not trying to trick people, but it is a tool for producers. For example, I would never label this as a wash coffee, even if that's what I think it tastes like because it was treated differently the way that it was dried in the fruit has implications for roasting a roaster benefits from knowing the process to help guide their roasting decisions. And even if this tastes like a washed and a similar profile to my wash coffees, another thing I would never do is blend them together, blend my wash coffees with this natural again, for that same reason that it would create uneven roasting and uneven results. Because remember, the seed is experiencing a different metabolism during the drying phase when it's dried with its skin off compared with the skin on. Let me go back to another good point made by the producers on why they saw this coffee as a failure, or at least why they didn't understand it. This was because it was made in a place optimized for wash coffees. Making a natural is a pain in the ass. It takes more effort, takes up more space on the patios, takes longer to dry, so the yields are lower and the cost of production naturally goes up. It makes sense that if you're going to go through all that trouble, you better end up with something very funky to show for it. The extreme protocol must come with an extreme flavor to justify it. Wash coffee lets you process a lot more volume because by removing the cascada, you reduce the physical sides of the seeds so that no matter what you're doing, you can fit more of them into a tank or a raised bed, or a patio or a mechanical dryer. Basically, anything that you want to do, you can process more coffee parchment over cherry in a given amount of space. And the second major efficiency of washed coffee comes from time due to the additional tissue layers. A dry, processed natural coffee can take three to four weeks or longer, you know, longer than a month to dry, but a washed coffee can be dried in a week or less. We also talked in episode 68, the germination episode, that dry process naturals are more heat sensitive and generally less resilient to long storage periods because they don't have that germination signal that keeps the wash coffees protected. I. Naturals also require more labor to sort the cherries before starting the drying process and labor to constantly mix during the long month of drying. So in a given facility, a producer can process significantly less coffee as dry process natural than they can washed. So I was compromising efficiency and increasing costs. Just end up with something that tasted like it was washed anyway, what a waste. And we can agree a pretty dumb move. But like I told you guys, the point was not to make a commercial version of this. It was proof of a concept. The important part for me was proving that we could blur the processing lines to give other producers, my future clients, and maybe listeners of this podcast, more options. It's a tool for producers to have flexibility in a changing climate, to participate in specialty and move up to new markets and to do more with less. Hold on. I just said it takes more effort and more time and is less efficient than washed. So why would anyone need to know how to do this? Well, it requires that we accept a different version of efficiency. Imagine a coffee grower who currently only sells fresh coffee cherry. The more you process a product, the more money that you can make. if that grower who currently only sells cherry, can begin to process their coffee and sell dried parchment instead, they can make more money. But the investment to set up a wet mill is huge. It requires a lot of capital. It requires access to water, it requires access to electricity. And since the clean, bright flavor profile of a washed coffee is valued, what if instead of installing a wet mill, they can begin to process naturals that only taste like they went through a wet mill. We can call these naturals. No, wet mill. Wet mill. No, please don't, don't do that. I'm kidding. but the point is that for some growers, it can be the first step to moving up the value chain. Another use case that comes to mind is for producers who maybe already have a version of a wet mill, but will need some flexibility in the aforementioned water war apocalyptic future. Many producers of washed coffees that I talk to have an unquestioned assumption that the water will never run out, that we can pull and pull and pull from the earth and the water table will just keep resetting Coffee processing and water conservation are two strangers yet to meet. In a typical Latin American wet mill, it requires 41 liters of water to process one kilo of dry parchment coffee, so 40 to one of water. This is a significant amount and it doesn't reflect any water needed to grow the plant. This is just water needed to get the cherry, the already ripe cherry to become a clean seed ready for roasting. Most people who visit a wet mill for the first time are. Surprised by the staggering amount of water needed to process coffee. Imagine being able to reduce water usage by 95% as a climate is changing and becoming harsher and unpredictable. It would be good to have an ace in your back pocket if and when water availability becomes an issue. I predict a time in the future when we may have to shift what we drink, not because of flavor preferences, but due to climate conditions, we may have to learn to like drinking more Li Baras and boost us instead of arabicas and learn to like dry processed coffees. Or maybe we can even learn to get our caffeine fix somewhere else. We often group coffee and cacao together. Yet this issue of processing is one where they differ dramatically. While coffee requires biblical amounts of water to make cacao requires almost none. In cacao, there is no float step. No water is required to pulp. The cacao fermentations have enough liquid from the fruit that water is not needed to submerge and have, a wet fermentation. And after the fermentation, the seeds are not washed like they are in coffee. To get the cacao seed from the cacao fruit requires no water, except maybe for a little bit to really clean equipment, but it's really not essential to the process. Speaking of alternative morning habits, I already mentioned in part one how drinking coffee is not part of traditional Latin culture. And of course now, yes, people do drink coffee, but that wasn't always the case and in many places it's still not the case from living and working on farms in Columbia and Guatemala and all of my consulting visits throughout Latin America. At the farm level. Still today, the workers are more likely to be drinking chocolate every morning than coffee. Growing up in the United States, I got used to seeing hot chocolate as an evening thing around a campfire, but at least in Columbia and Guatemala, and I'm sure many more Latin countries, hot chocolate is the early morning beverage, not coffee. Before we move on, let me tell you a bit more about the experimental trial and the setup that I had and what was different about the coffee in case you wanna try an experiment like this yourself. As I already mentioned before, I started with mixed fruit and no sorting whatsoever. That was.'cause I had something in mind. But if you are going to do this trial, I really recommend that you sort your cherry to the maximum level of uniformity that you can, where you are with your resources. I prove to myself that this can work under the worst of circumstances, but you will absolutely get better results if you sort your fruit first and you separate out the over ripe fruit. That's, that's step one. I did not sort, but you should definitely sort. On the day of the trial, we took fruit directly to the patio to be dried as our control. And the rest of the cherries spent 72 hours submerged in a barrel with different combinations of yeast and bacteria and this. Was an effort to, bring out more of the acidity, but the strongest effect is a biocontrol. So the yeast and bacteria that I was adding would outcompete any of the spoilage molds coming in from the overripe fruit. So if you are doing a really good job sorting, you may not need these microbes to. Battle against your, incoming spoilage organisms because you're sorting those out. So that's just something to keep in mind. I think this could still have very good results without, having to invest in any, designer yeast or designer bacteria. I. The important component is that that sorting that I mentioned, so for those 72 hours, for those three days, the cherries were fermenting in open top barrels and two to three times a day I was checking the pH to make sure that it was dropping. I was mixing the cherries to get even coverage and temperature distribution and I was smelling the fermentation. One of the issues with dry process coffees is that it's really hard to get consistency and uniformity. So by having them in the barrel and the mixing and the submerged is a workaround for that. It's a way to get a process that doesn't want to cooperate to kind of fit the mold a little bit better. So those were the first three days, and on the morning of the fourth day, we drained all of the barrels and set the cherries to dry alongside the control that. We put out, the very first day. So those first four days went completely as planned. And what was most interesting was what happened on the fifth day. On the fifth day, after 24 hours of being in drying mode, the experimental batches seemed drier than the control that was actually on its fifth day of drying. So this was pretty odd. The control had had a headstart. it had already been drying for an extra four days, and yet. By the fifth day, it seemed to be lagging behind the new lots, and since the fermented batches had been submerged some of the color, you'll notice this on, some of the anaerobics too, the color from the gusta will leach out. So a lot of times when they're drying those, those coffees look visually lighter. They're, lighter in color than the control batch. The control batch was like very black, and the submerged lots were like this light, kind of brown, orangy red. So because of that color difference, at first I thought that, it seemed drier because it was, I don't know, a trick of the light. There was something, different about these coffees. But as we kept drying, as we got into days eight and nine and 10, it just kept getting more and more clear that these other coffees were drying. More quickly. The ones that had spent an extra three days in water were drying faster than the control that got started drying four days earlier. And again, this was very confusing initially because not only had the fermented lots caught up to the control, they were leaving it in their dust. What I thought would be a handicap. Turned out to be an advantage in drying. Now, one thing we really want to caution against with, naturals and dry process is drying too quickly. so as a reminder, naturals are more heat sensitive than washed coffees and are more likely to be damaged by high heat. So even though they were drying quickly, these coffees were drying under a shade cloth the whole time. So they were drying quickly, but we were constantly monitoring their temperature and making sure that they were not going above 35 Celsius. So I had, a probe thermometer and a surface thermometer. And as soon as the temperature started to come up, we would. Do extra mixing so we could bring that temperature back down and in the end, it only took us 15 days to dry, which is well under the three to four week or longer. I've heard of many that take five weeks or 40 days to dry. That's pretty common with Latin Naturals. So even without the flavor results, just being able to dry naturals cut that drying time in half, this acceleration in drying alone could be valuable to producers looking to increase their production, meaning that they can, turn over their patios more frequently and process more coffee over, a particular season. the other thing that I wanna mention is that we dried faster with less sun exposure, which means that the speed was not contributing to damage and reducing shelf life. So. The more common method to speed up your drying. Most people speed up by applying more sun and more heat, but not less. We were applying less. So what was happening? Why? Why was this coffee drying more quickly? Like I said in the beginning, I'm not a researcher. I don't have all of the tools to analyze the internal structure of the seed and report back, but I do have experience and intuition and I'm not afraid to guess. And this is my podcast, so I'm just gonna give you my best guess at what I think is going on. So remember we've talked on this podcast several times about what a nightmare the honey process is. All of that mucilage contains sugar, and that sugar is hydroscopic, meaning that the sugar attracts water. So when the coffee is drying, our goal is to draw water out of the seed into the environment, to diffuse it from the inner core out to the surface and out to the environment. But this mucilage provides a layer of sugar that is. Kind of counteracting, it's drying moisture from the environment to the surface of the seed. And in high humidity, a honey coffee likely gets wetter, not drier. So this sugar layer is counterproductive to drying. It's like, you take two steps forward and one step back. So in our natural control batch, the one that just went, directly to the patio, spent no time In the barrels, it submerged under water. In that situation, all the mucilage is still there, like a honey, but it's under another layer of the exo carp. It's underneath the gusta. So I think that there's still an effect of this sugar layer, this mucilage layer, preventing efficient water transport from the inside of the seed out to the environment. And so of course, cherries lose water very slowly. They dry very slowly. in the versions that spent those 72 hours fermenting with microbes in those situations, we had very vigorous fermentations. They were incredibly active and I think a significant portion of the available sugars was able to be depleted. Even though the fruit was still intact, I think somehow enough sugar from the surface of the peel and maybe from the inner mucilage flowing through those tissue layers, was able to leak out, was able to leach out just the way we can leach out the color. And when we put the cherries out to dry, they just had less sugar to attract the ambient humidity. They had less. Effect of that layer to, prevent this efficient loss of, of water from the inner core out. So in our other one, every two steps forward no longer had this one step back due to the sage layer, or due to, a, a thicker mage layer. So that's my best guess. It could have absolutely nothing to do with this, but I'm just reporting what we found when we fermented our coffee dried much more quickly. And I also wanted to mention that even if you're not going to use microbes, and you're doing naturals. At the very least, we wanna sort to the most uniform color that we can and sort out all of those over ripe ones that are bringing in these spoilage organisms. And I really, really recommend that you use shade to dry your naturals. I think a lot of producers are hesitant to use shade because they think that it will make an already slow, long, drawn out process even longer, but. I haven't seen that to be the case because as long as you maintain airflow by mixing frequently, the shade again is not making our coffees dry slower. I think it's actually, contributing to accelerating our drying. Again, this is also just my theory, but I'm sharing it here. I think that what's going on is that. Uh, with naturals because they take so long to dry a lot of producers really abuse these naturals. They are in the sun, very hot, hot heat, and because of the dark surface they heat up even more. So they're attracting more of that heat. And I think sometimes this can create something like a crust. So you have this crusty physical bear, the outside gets incredibly dry and it's just retaining all of that moisture on the inside of the seed. And so I think that when we dry with shade and we don't let the outer layer, the outermost surface get so dry and get so hot, the, the temperature gradient from the surface of the seed to the inner core of the seed is not so dramatic. It's not so different. And having. Less of that dramatic barrier, I think allows the water to, find its way out more easily to diffuse out more easily than when you have that, outer crust. So that's my guess and that's why I think, counterintuitively drying with shade is unlikely to slow it even more, but can help you potentially speed up drying. dry processed coffees. if you're gonna try this, I just want to. Mentioned to pay attention to the thickness of the shade. I think you, want just enough shade, maybe a 30 or 40% to reduce that surface temperature. You don't need to go so extreme to have, I think, an 80% shade where you're just really dropping the temperature for no reason. I think yes, there is a way where you can have. Way too much shade and it could potentially slow it down. But I think if you stick to that 30 or 40%, light coming through, then you'll be able to achieve the faster rates with shade. And the other thing is that it's way more pleasant to work on those coffees. Like if you want people to. Be constantly raking and paying attention to this coffee. If they're under shade, it's more likely that they're going to pay attention to these coffees and they themselves are not going to pass out in fate from heat stroke. So Nick and I also find that we are much more comfortable drying these coffees so it's good for the people and it's good for the coffee. Alright, can you believe it? I think there is more to say, but this episode is long enough, so I will leave it here. you know the drill, if you wanna chat about this in real time, join Patreon because this naturals conversation is not over in the lease. There is still some really fun conversations happening in. Patreon and on our Discord channel. Patreon is important because this podcast is a community supported effort. If not, for the handful of you who join this podcast would not exist. So thank you guys for, for joining. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. And please share this with a friend to be notified when the next one is coming out. Consider subscribing to my free newsletter at Lucia Coffee. Lucia is L-U-X-I-A. Great to be with you again. And remember, life's too short to drink bad coffee.