People of the Internet: We like you. And we like talking with you. Somtimes on this blog we get to dialogue back and forth with our readers. Sometimes, as with the Class on Fire, we decide the conversation is so good we want to move it to the public arena and make it a post of its very own.
Below is a comment from Person of the Internet: Jason. His comment hit on one of the major topics of debate in the coffee world. Does “aware” coffee taste as good as other coffees? Below is Jason’s question as well as a response from both Sara and Melanie – so three voices in all. While the questions are posed in response to Jason – we really are asking you, the consumers and blog readers for your thoughts.
Jason – Thanks for your poignent question and for sparking this discussion.
Jason Says:
”Just wondering….. I’ve read about your adventures and the seemingly endless search for “eco-friendly” coffees and proprietors of such beverages, but…I was just wondering if anywhere in your journey you were actually going to do your tastebuds a favor and seek out some gooooood coffee and actually share that information with the world. This information would be just as valuable as know the recycling practices of said places. I myself am not interested in spending my hard earned dollars on an inferior product simply because the seller pushes hype and marketing over quality. I’m certain that there are plenty of places that place value on providing a great product along with being socially responsible. Maybe in the future you could also provide an evaluation of beverages consumed… I think you could.”
Sara Says:
“Hi Jay
Thanks for reading our blog! We have been searching for eco-friendly coffees and businesses that think about the environment and the people impacted along the way, and we have had an amazing trip.
Some of the coffee we have had has been amazingly delicious, while some of the coffee has been sub-par. I feel the exact same way you do about quality coffee…that is partially why we have dedicated all this time to seeking out coffee. As well as tasting better, higher quality coffee can help people become more aware of what they are drinking.
I would love to know more about your thoughts on marketing and hype in the eco-friendly coffee world. We have seen a lot of instances where a business said one thing but did another, etc…
As for our blog, we decided to keep a positive spin in our writing. We are not out there to criticize people or tell them how to run their own business. The knowledge we want to share is about responsible consumerism. We have also found that what tastes good to one might not taste good to another. What do you think?”
Melanie Says:
“Hey Jason. You can see by the fact that we both are compelled to respond that you are asking an essential question.
My thought is to challenge a different assumption (not saying that you have this belief, just that we encountered it a lot):
If coffee is eco/people friendly, does it necessarily mean that its not high quality? In my opinion the two are not mutually exclusive. On our trip we had some amazing coffees and some pretty not-so-amazing coffees in both the “aware” and “conventional” categories.Three people we met on the trip offered what I find to be great perspectives on this matter: (who all supply delicious coffee)
1) From Global Village coffee (Chapel Hill, NC) - You have two tomatoes: one grown on a large farm using pesticides, chemical fertilizers and mechanical planting process. The other from a local farm, organically produced, sun ripened, hand picked – which do you choose?
Many people would choose the one from the organic farm – the assumption being that its redder in color, smaller in size and will probably be juicer and taste better. Why do we not use the same thought process when it comes to coffee?
From what I understand of the coffee farming process (which is still small), it takes more effort and attention to grow the coffee plants organically or in an environmentally friendly way. Wouldn’t that extra love enhance the taste of the coffee? Or to put it another way – how would producin organic or “aware” coffee hurt the coffee?
2) From Higher Grounds (Leeds, AL) and echoed by Cuvee Coffee (Spring, TX) – These folks said their ideal would be to have all coffee produced with social and environmental awareness and then let the quality of coffee be the factor that determines which companies succeed.
I also want to second Sara’s question – is fairly traded, enviro/people friendly coffee hype, marketing, a personal purchasing philosophy, a trend, a way of life, or all of the above and more? Why do you choose, or choose not, to buy products that have a certification or that you know were sourced responsibly?
Lastly, in any community you have a choice about how to contribute; we choose to contribute to the coffee community by highlighting the positive and good people and coffees that we come across. Bad press is just not our style. If we have a cup that’s bad, we simply don’t mention it. If the cup is amazing, we usually say so. (But, just because we don’t say something about the coffee at a particular place, it does not mean the coffee is bad.) In our lives and on this blog we try to keep our attention on the good, the beautiful, and the hopeful.
Thanks for reading – comment at will.
-Melanie and Sara Rose
I love this question from Jason! (Maybe that’s because I know Jason well.)
I believe with all the non-taste certifications floating around out there, there’s too much hype people are trying to cash in on. I absolutely abhor certifications that have nothing to do with taste (read: What does so-called “Fair Trade” taste like??)
I hate to admit it, but if a tomato that were grown on a huge corporate farm actually tasted better, I’d buy it over the organic one almost any day. Thankfully, that is rarely the case; but it highlights, in my opinion, the crux of the coffee situation perfectly. TASTE has to be the final arbiter, not ancillary considerations that add nothing to the cup. The sad news: the awful super majority of coffee consumers don’t know what clean fruit, high-grown, low/no defect, naturally sweet, well-roasted coffee actually tastes like (they lazily rely on buzz words such as “Fair Trade,” “organic,” “shade-grown,” “bird-friendly” and the like to signal to their lazy brains that this coffee is somehow good tasting when in reality it may…or it may not be good tasting. The good news: people who grow really great tasting coffee much more often than not are taking care of their environment and the people who harvest the coffee. Growing good-tasting coffee very often goes hand in hand with doing it sustainably…and you don’t need to pay some Western NGO to certify to guilt-ridden rich white folks in rich countries what these farmers already know in their heart to be true.
Obviously, I have lots of energy on this issue; but as a coffee buyer and roaster I’m not afraid to admit the un-PC truth: if a conventionally-grown, non-FT coffee tastes better on the cupping table versus its FTO counterparts, I’m going to go with the former 9 out of 9 times. Why? Because TASTE is what matters most. And growing coffee well (i.e., sustainably, with judicial use of pesticides as topography and soil conditions dictate) actually makes it taste better. Simple truth.
One more simple truth: so-called social and environmental awareness sometimes looks a whole lot different to a producer or a coffee picker than it does to a person who lives in a highly industrialized Western nation. We often put our solutions onto their problems to assuage our own guilt, never realizing that our solution not only doesn’t solve their problem…but that their “problem” isn’t really even considered a problem to them in their context. This is especially true the higher up the quality coffee growing spectrum you go. NGO protection programs that have nothing to do with the actual taste quality of the product only perpetuate this scenario because those programs often disincentivize farmers from producing a quality product that WILL earn a genuine profit from buyers willing to pay for it by paying them a guaranteed minimum anyway for whatever product they show up to market with, regardless of actual quality…taste quality. In effect, the farmers “study to the exam” instead of studying to learn and affect real change in the world.
In other words, I’ve tasted more than my fair share of nasty-tasting “FTO” coffees.
Sorry for the long sermon! AND THANK YOU FOR POSTING JASON’S COMMENT AND FOR YOUR THOUGHTFUL RESPONSES.
Hello ladies and commentors,
After years of drinking whatever Columbian coffee was cheapest at the local supermarket, Melanie introduced me to a new way of consuming coffee. First she introduced me to GOOD TASTING coffee, first from Moca Joe’s in Brattleboro, VT, and then from Coffee Lab in Tarrytown, NY. At first I was a bit taken aback by paying 3x what I had been paying for coffee but it makes sense to me that if I am paying that little for coffee, there is now way that the grower can pay a decent wage to his employees. I earn enough to afford to pay a bit more (I mean how much do I spend a month on coffee anyway) and feeling a little better about myself is worth it. Can I guarantee that the extra gets to the grower and picker? No!. But at least I have done my bit and if I don’t there is no chance at all.
The second thing that has happened is that I have found that I am much more discriminating about the taste of coffee. (confession, I usually put milk and sugar in my coffee). Even among “good” coffee that people I respect and who know more about coffee than I do, there are some coffees I like and others I don’t. I tend to prefer a medium roast and a mellow taste. I do not like “bitter” coffee. Among the coffees at Coffee Lab, my favorite is a Columbian Mesa de los Santos. but I am also fond of Decaf Sidamo which I make for my wife and guests and sometimes mix in for myself when I do not want to much caff. I admit that I have not verified the details of whether these are fair trade or shade grown, etc. but I know Coffee Lab tries to be responsible about their choices of coffee sources.
So, briefly. I pay more because I think it is the ethical thing to do and because I get better tasting coffee.
Happy drinking. If anyone finds a good tasting low alcohol beer please let me know.
Ed
Great topic girls!
My two cents:
I base much of what I have come to believe about the coffee market and Fair Trade coffees in particular on what I feel is a fairly accurate fact:
The global coffee market is at best inherently flawed, inequitable and imperfect.
Coffee is the second largest traded commodity in the world behind crude oil. It is the second largest imorted good into the US behind crude oil. The majority of coffee producing countries are developing and third world. It is a global market with millions of lives directly or inderictly effected by its pricing and production trends.
Global markets are inherently inequitable due to a lack of market information and trade infrastructures in the developing world… Growers in Ethiopia can’t google the current commodities price of coffee. Often growers don’t have the capacity or the infrastructure (roads) to bring their coffee to processing factories. We know the majority of the coffee grown in the world is grown by very small farmers without processing capabilities on hand.
Global markets are also inherently flawed and suseptable to corruption. A farmer with no market information or ability to access prospective buyers is forced to sell to local brokers. It is not a profitable business for the majority of coffee growers.
Global markets, in particular coffee, are inherently inequitable. At the turn of the century when commodity coffee prices around the world hit their lowest point in a century growers at origin abandoned their crops and were sometimes forced of their land for lack of sustainable income. In the US the coffee market, led by Starbucks was booming with record profits. Inequitable.
I admit the coffee that Jason and Aron are talking about are not considered “commodity”coffees. They are specialty coffee brokered by coffee roasters and importers in the western world. Not coffee traded on the commodity exchanges in NY and Germany where price is dictated by commodity traders and not the cost of production or the value of quality. Across the board high end Arabica coffees deemed “specialty” by third party evaluators are socially and environmentally sustainable.
However, the majority of consumers don’t know this. And, unfortunetly, the majority of coffee grown is not sustainable either for the grower or the environment.
My point, I guess, is that Fair Trade and Organic Certifications are not perfect market structures but they are a damn good start. I would argue that the most improtant value of a product is the human value. No coffee is good enough to justify near slave labor.
I would add that the quality of FTO coffees has improved dramatically over the last decade. In fact the Oromia Co-Op in Ethiopia has won multiple awards for the quality of their FTO Harrar and they are far from alone.
One of the important things to remember is that both Fair Trade and Organic Certifiers mandate constant quality oversight on certified farms.
Also, an FTO farmer will receive more than the standard $1.36 a pound (actually the farmers themselves receive nothing near that price point) if their coffee is graded higher. It’s in their best interest not to “study the exam” but to focus on quality.
Wow this is getting way to long…
I’ll finish with this. My shop specializes in Fair Trade and Organic coffees. We also purchase non certified coffees. In fact we just sold a bunch of Lot #5 in the Costa Rican Cup of Excellence.
I cupped that Costa Rican and it’s very good. But I also cupped our FTO Ethiopian Yergacheffe and I am hard pressed to say the Cup of Excellence is that much better.
My goal is to sell as much coffee as possible and to do it with a conscience. I can do that by tapping into the marketability of FTO coffees and I can do that by buying non-cert coffees. But above all they must be good and they must be ethically sourced.
I think to downplay the importance of sourcing ethical coffees is to turn a blind eye to the reality of our industry. But I’ll admit that if an FTO coffee isn’t good it won’t do either the roaster retailer any good or the grower. I believe the TransFair and Co-Op’s around the world know this.
Quality and ethics are not mutually exclusive.
Thanks if actually made it through all this… Sorry for ranting girls.
Mike
Mike:
You’re right: FT is a start. I would not go so far as to say it’s a good one, though. I have yet to find any clear information (if it in fact exists) as to whether the FT system even actually pays quality premiums. And that says nothing of the fact that “the little guy” truly isn’t represented in a FT system that requires membership in a co-op.
To my mind, this conversation makes little sense including “C” in it because, ostensibly, these lovely ladies have not embarked on a cross-country tour to taste all the interesting 24 hour diner coffee they can find. In theory they want to highlight sustainable coffees that also actually taste good (implying high green quality); and that is very, very difficult to do with “C” coffees.
Folks like Mr Bagersh and Oromia are producing fine coffees in Ethiopia and they seem to have the right i dea–getting quality coffees into the hands of quality-conscious buyers–but they have largely migrated toward a stale, static system (FT) that has no apparatus for quality or sustainability multipliers such as some of the more well-rounded cert systems out there encompass. The knife edge of quality-seekers in the market are miles ahead by now with their own sustainability systems. And that brings us back to the original comment by Jason. I would add to that the question of which takes preeminence: tasting truly fine coffees that happen to be sustainable, or seeking out sustainable coffees that happen to be extraordinarily good. Of course they are not mutually exclusive, but I would say again that to a quality coffee purveyor the former premise needs to be the focus and not the latter.
My opinion.
My mind is spinning with all the information from these blogs. I have to say I agree with much of the ideas here, even the ones that are conflicting. I want to pose a question:
A quality coffee purveyor can very much focus on quality coffee and quality of life, in all aspects of the business, from buying beans, to how they roast their coffee, to how they treat their local environment. A culture can be formed where buying quality coffee is just as important as buying ethical coffee. How can we, as coffee enthusiasts and consumers, focus on both and support these business in what they are doing to make a difference?
-Sara Rose
Here’s an relatively ignorant layman’s opinion… Nothing is more bitter than the taste of slave labor in any market. Taste is subjective just like these coffee competitions. People have been “voting” on the pedigree of everything from wines to figure skaters for ages. The backstory is usually accounted for subliminally.
I love bringing home my coffee and discussing with my child how “Bird Friendly symbiotically affects the present and future lives of farmers and the environment.
We love ignorance…it takes us off the hook. It kills our buzz. First efforts to increase social awareness are often criticized, but the debating process usually creates a better model for all concerned.
I think that we are a parched society when it comes to global connectiveness and responsibility. Drink the “good” stuff, and thanks to those that not only do things right, but the right things as well.
Peace and gratitude to you Sara, Melanie and contributers for the forum and information.