Why and How, Pt. 2: Sustainable Economics

The supply chain for roasted coffee is long.

Coffee has sensitive cultivation needs; in most of the countries coffee is grown a fair amount of work is still done by hand. When coffee is harvested, much of it ends up on the C-market (the ‘C’ stands for ‘coffee’) which is the global commodities exchange of coffee based on supply and demand. The C-market price per pound is currently well below the cost to produce a pound of coffee, meaning that many farms are spending more to produce than they make back.  

This price per pound is tied almost exclusively to a single, very sensitive process of roasting coffee.  For a specialty roaster, the clock is always ticking on your coffee to showcase the quality and character you search high and low for.  There is a noticeable difference in roasted coffee that has been cared for along the supply chain than with coffees that have not. However, the journey to arrive at the kind of coffee you expect in Specialty is extensive and the folks who consistently lose out on the profits, again, are often the farmers.

When fermenting raw green single-origin coffee I am not concerned by the things I am usually concerned with in roasting.  The details of varietal, washed or natural, etc.. are typically burdens on the farmer translated into added expenses.  In fermentation, I am not concerned if it is Arabica, Liberica, or if the water activity is .40 versus .70, because fermentation is far more stable than roasting for flavor in this case.  When coffee is roasted, compounds are altered and exposed, many of which are volatile. Once the roasted coffee has degassed (about 2 weeks) those volatile, beautiful aromatics which contribute to flavor are lost.  When fermenting, there are no transient gasses or volatile compounds which dissipate and take away from flavor. 

Doing away with concerns of quality linked to roasting, we are free to consistently buy directly from a farmer even if they produce a coffee that doesn’t ‘roast well’.  This allows a greater potential for the farmer to act as their own representative and take a larger share of the profit. In thinking about coffee differently it may afford us an opportunity to provide a more stable, cost-effective buying relationship for the people producing our coffee.  There are numerous forces at play and certainly a need to come up with more solutions, but in the current market of low global prices for coffee, fermentation in this way is a useful tool responsible buyers can begin implementing today.