Processing is Distracting Us From Quality

Over the last little while, we've found ourselves leaning further and further in one direction.

Washed coffees. Clean coffees. Coffees where the variety, the place they were grown and the work of the producer are really easy to see.

There is an enormous amount happening in coffee processing at the moment. Extended fermentations, anaerobic fermentations, inoculated fermentations, co-ferments, infusions and combinations of all of those things. Some are incredibly interesting. Some are technically impressive. Some taste completely wild.

But we've increasingly found ourselves asking a fairly simple question:

How much of the coffee are we actually tasting?

I can use cars as an analogy, because they are a massive part of my life. I grew up fixing them, building them and racing them.

There was a particular era of modified cars where modification itself almost became the point. Huge body kits, enormous wings, vents everywhere, oversized chrome wheels that barely fitted underneath the guards. One modification followed another until eventually the original car almost disappeared underneath all of it — the "sex spec", Auto salon era.

And weirdly, that is sometimes how heavily processed coffee feels to me.

I guess it was fun at the time and it was about capturing attention immediately. Similar to heavy processing in coffee. There can be strawberry, bubblegum, cinnamon, pineapple, yoghurt, tropical fruit and all sorts of flavours jumping out of the cup.

But sometimes I feel like I'm standing there looking at the enormous wing and flares and forgetting that it was a base model, that could take a corner without scrubbing half the body kit off, let alone go around it fast.

Because modification and improvement aren't necessarily the same thing.

Because I have been fortunate enough to drive some great "driver's" cars. I can compare that with a genuinely beautiful performance car that was built properly from the beginning. The engine, chassis, suspension, steering all working together. You don't really want to add much to it.

The substance is already there.

That is increasingly how I think about coffee.

We want to find coffees that are already built for quality. The right variety, planted in the right place, grown carefully, picked carefully and then processed incredibly meticulously.

Processing still matters enormously. Washed coffee doesn't somehow avoid fermentation, and processing absolutely has an influence on flavour.

But there is a difference between processing being used carefully to reveal what is there and processing becoming the defining characteristic of the coffee.

We want it to get out of the way.

When we drink a beautiful washed Colombian coffee, we want to understand why it tastes different from another Colombian coffee grown nearby or from a different region. We want to understand a variety. A producer's land. We want to buy their coffee again next year and recognise it while still noticing how that harvest has changed.

There should be a thread running through it, a relationship being formed.

Something recognisable.

If processing becomes loud enough, we aren't comparing farms anymore. We're comparing processes.

And there is another part of this that I think we probably haven't spoken about enough.

Who actually gets to participate in that kind of coffee?

The more controlled and complicated some of these processes become, the more they can require infrastructure, equipment, technical knowledge, experimentation and, importantly, money.

Tanks. Temperature control. Measurement. Drying equipment. The ability to separate lots and experiment with them. And the financial ability to have an experiment fail without that failure being catastrophic.

Not every experimental process needs a laboratory, and there are clever ways producers are making these techniques more accessible. But access is clearly not equal.

A producer with capital can invest in processing technology and create coffees with enormously distinctive flavours. Those coffees get attention. Buyers chase them.

And I understand why.

But I keep thinking about the producer five kilometres down the road.

Maybe they have equally good soil. Maybe they are growing an incredible variety. Maybe their picking is meticulous and their coffee is beautifully sweet and clean.

But perhaps they don't have stainless tanks, controlled drying rooms or the money to lose coffee while working out how to do it.

Suddenly those two producers aren't necessarily competing on the quality of the coffee they can grow.

They're competing on what they can afford to do to it afterwards.

That difference really matters to me.

It is very easy to think that spending more money on an expensive coffee automatically means the industry is becoming healthier. I'm not sure it is always that simple.

If the highest premiums continually concentrate around producers who already have access to sophisticated processing infrastructure and direct specialty markets, we have to ask whether we are raising the quality of coffee across a region, or simply widening the distance between the producers who can participate in that market and those who can't.

It doesn't make those successful producers bad people. Many are incredibly knowledgeable, passionate people doing genuinely fascinating work.

The question is about what we, as buyers and drinkers, decide to reward.

Ideally, when exceptional coffee from a region becomes more valuable, that value starts pulling everybody upwards.

A producer sees their neighbour being paid more for picking riper cherry, so they improve their picking. Better drying earns more money, so drying improves. Cleaner processing earns more money, so processing improves. Buyers return, relationships form, knowledge is shared and gradually the baseline quality of coffee in that place rises.

But if what earns the premium becomes a flavour profile that can only realistically be produced with increasingly specialised processing, the lesson to the neighbouring farmer isn't necessarily:

Grow better coffee.

It can become:

Buy better equipment.

And those are very different things.

The danger is that a genuinely beautiful, clean coffee starts to look ordinary simply because it isn't loud.

If buyers and consumers become calibrated to enormous process-driven flavours, a coffee doing almost everything right agriculturally can struggle to get attention. If it doesn't get attention, it doesn't necessarily get the premium. Eventually that coffee can simply disappear back into a larger regional or commercial lot.

Instead of pushing the bar upwards for everybody, we could accidentally just be spreading the bar further apart.

And consumers are part of that loop too.

If we teach people that quality coffee should always be explosively fruity, strangely alcoholic, intensely tropical or taste like something completely unrelated to coffee, then subtlety becomes harder to recognise.

A beautifully clean coffee can almost seem boring.

And I think that's actually moving backwards.

Learning coffee should make you increasingly capable of noticing small differences, not increasingly dependent on enormous ones.

The difference between two varieties. Two elevations. Two sides of the same valley. Two neighbouring farms. The same farm between one harvest and the next.

Those differences can be tiny.

But they are real.

There is absolutely a place for producers experimenting with processing, fermentation and microbiology. There is serious knowledge and skill involved in doing that well.

But novelty alone isn't what we're chasing.

For us, the connection between flavour and origin matters enormously.

We want coffees with beautiful acidity, sweetness and structure. Coffees that are clean enough that small differences become obvious rather than disappearing underneath processing character.

There are extraordinary coffee varieties being grown around the world. There are producers making tiny decisions every day about soil, picking, plant health, fermentation, washing and drying.

All of those things contain information.

We want to taste it.

And we want the economic value of those things to remain visible too.

If a producer grows something extraordinary, picks it beautifully and processes it incredibly cleanly with relatively simple infrastructure, there should still be a pathway for that coffee to be considered exceptional.

That feels much more useful than creating a divide where expensive equipment and increasingly complicated processing and risk become the price of admission to the top end of specialty coffee.

We would rather put our money behind agricultural quality, clean processing, good varieties, transparency and producers we can return to.

Clean coffee. Washed coffee. Coffees that feel articulate.

Not necessarily the coffee that screams the loudest on a cupping table, but the coffee that becomes more interesting the longer you spend with it.

I think we've become less interested in asking:

How unusual can coffee taste?

And much more interested in asking:

How clearly can this coffee taste like itself?

Because, perhaps the most interesting thing we can do to an extraordinary coffee isn't adding something to it.

It is taking away all the obstacles and finally learning how to notice what was already there.