The Benefits of Direct Sourcing

When I first started to roast coffee, I was blissfully unaware of the many variables that influence the outcome of a roast. With hindsight,that was a good thing because my ignorancemade me focus on my roasting skills and onkeeping a meticulous record of the few variables Icould control during a roast. As time went on, myexperience grew, but still my confidence as a roastergot shaken every now and then by an inexplicableoutcome of a roast.

Fortunately, with every batch I roasted my hostof data had grown as well. So I went looking forunintended alterations to roast conditions: achange in moisture content, a wrong roast profile,a discrepancy in charge temperature, a change inairflow, an inconsistent drum speed. Admittedly, Ifound a lot of these and they explained most of theroasts that had puzzled me at first. But not all ofthem.

Crafting the perfect cup begins with perfect cherries.

As specialty roasters, we are in passionate pursuit of roasting excellence. Hence, we spend considerable amounts of time and money on getting the right equipment, on tweaking our roast profiles, on gadgets that help us improve roast consistency. We glean knowledge and experiences on YouTube and attending roasters’ retreats, we look over the shoulders of champions whenever we get the chance.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. It all brings us closer to the desired outcome. Yet, if we focus our attention entirely on the roast process, we miss a simple truth that is of paramount importance: crafting the perfect cup begins with perfect cherries. Simple, yes, but not easy. The sense of transparency and control that we derive from standardized terms for coffee grading, cupping protocols, sampling techniques and procedures, while comforting, is an illusion.

I am not suggesting that cupping, grading and sampling are useless. Quite the contrary: without these tools, roasting would be like driving down a winding road in the fog. The consistent and considerable rise in quality of specialty coffee since the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA, www.scaa.org) first introduced a standard with metrics for grading specialty coffee, and the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI, www.coffeeinstitute. org) developed the curriculum and examination standards to equip and certify individuals that grade coffee according to these standards, the Q-Arabica and Q-Robusta Graders, speaks for itself.

However, despite the existence of a mature and continuously calibrated quality system, it is still difficult to ensure that any given lot of green purchased yields the roast results the samples that were physically inspected and cupped suggested. This is due to an intrinsic problem with testing coffee quality: unlike a mobile phone or a computer, coffee beans do not survive a quality examination. Hence, only small samples are tested, which leaves test results with a significant margin for error. We cannot be sure that a whole lot of coffee is homogeneous or whether it is actually one lot from one farm at all. To be continued....

About the author

Eric Baden is a German citizen who has lived in China continuously for the past 20 years. Starting out as a roaster, he became a Q-Arabica Grader and over the past 6 years built Coffee Commune into a full value chain business that is all about great coffee and the credentials to craft it from crop to cup.