#61: Coffee Fermentation Review with Ashley Rodriguez of Boss Barista

[Music] Welcome to Making Coffee, a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making one of the world's favorite beverages. I'm your host, Lucia Solis, a former wine maker, turned coffee processing specialist. Thanks for joining this week's episode. Hi friends, it's April and Harvest in Guatemala is finally done. I haven't sat down to record for several months because I found I couldn't keep up with processing coffee, running camps, and recording new episodes. And this used to be less of a problem because in Colombia, our harvest stretched out for almost nine months, which meant that we had less coffee coming in and Nick and I were able to balance and work out. We were able to balance these kind of three separate entities over nine months because it meant we could host the three FTCs spread over nine months. And now that we live in Guatemala in our area of Antigua, the harvest is incredibly condensed into three months. So it means that all of the work that used to get done in nine months still has to get done, but we only have three months to do it. And that includes FTCs because we can't host FTCs if there's no coffee cherry to process together. We actually are not able to do three anymore. We were only able to do two fermentation camps this year because of the condensed harvest. And this pace of harvest is something that I am used to from my previous life working in the wine industry because the wine industry is a place where harvest is also condensed and it's very intense. It happens in this very marked period once a year in the fall. But it's been 10 years since I was working at that pace. And well, I found I was a bit out of practice. You might also be able to hear it in my voice. I've been sick. I think that my body was doing me a favor and holding on and keeping me healthy during this very intense period. And then as soon as there was an open window, I think my body's like, okay, now we can let you get sick. So I've also been delaying recording this because my voice has just been disappeared for a little bit. And now it's just a little bit stuffy. So apologies for the sound quality, but I definitely wanted to at least get something out before any more time passed because I don't know how long this cough can persist. And what I wanted to share was that again, we couldn't do three FTCs in the year in the harvest like we were able to do in Colombia. We were only able to do two. But they were really successful. I'm really glad for everybody that came and participated. And it's been a tremendous effort this time of the year to do all of these things in this very short window. And I'm really glad that it's over. And as I was reflecting on that, I realized well, that's not really true because in a sense for many producers, this next part, the part after all the coffee seeds are off the patio and safely in the warehouse is actually more difficult than what came before because now it's time to sell the coffee. And you have client visits, we have cuppings, we have quality control, sample shipping, lots of emails, lots of logistics. And this was also true when I worked in the wine industry. We would say that making wine is easy, but selling wine is actually really hard. So while harvest is over, there is still much to be done. Next month in May, Nick and I will be in London hosting a fundraising event for future FTCs. And the next camp, I'm not sure if I talked about it on the podcast, but I've talked about it a lot on Instagram. And my newsletter is that the next camp is in Kenya in October. And that sold out. So that's really exciting. Then we come back to Guatemala in December that still has some tickets available. And then Indonesia and India are on the list, but no firm dates yet. So if you want to get on the wait list and have the best chance of joining me for a future workshop, I recommend that you get on my newsletter because that's where we announced information first. Those are the first people that are able to request a ticket. And that's really the only outlet I have to sell tickets for the workshops. So you can sign up on my website at lucia.coffee. It's luxxia.coffee. And if you hate receiving lots of emails, don't worry, I am not organized enough to send frequent emails. You might hear from me once a month or every few weeks with podcast updates and new workshop dates. And if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say FTCs, that's kind of why I wanted to post today's episode. I realize that not everyone is a completist like me. When I fall in love with a new podcast, I like to listen to every single episode. But I realize that many people start listening from where they found the podcast. I just sort of kind of move forward in time that way. So in case you've only listened to a few episodes, or maybe this is your first episode ever, and you're wondering whether or not you're going to like this little corner of the internet, I hope that this episode will help you get and oriented to what we do here and what we talk about. And if you've been here from the beginning, gosh darn it, I really appreciate you. Thank you for still being here. And I think that today's episode will still be worth listening to because I hope that today's episode will serve as a nice reminder of the topics that we cover and the philosophies behind those topics. This podcast was meant to be predominantly a science-based podcast, but humans do science. And therefore, we cannot divorce our worldview and culture from the science that we look at. This conversation that you're about to hear was recorded for the Boss Breast of Podcast earlier this month. I met host Ashley Rodriguez several years ago when we recorded our first podcast in person during the SEA Expo in Seattle. In addition to podcasting, Ashley is a freelance writer. She has been the online editor for Breast of Magazine, and you can read her work in several coffee magazines like Standard, as well as her own sub-stack, which is linked in the show notes. And if you like thoughtful conversations about the coffee industry in general, Ashley does a lot more about workplace equity as well. And I really think that you'll enjoy her writing. I think she's an incredibly talented synthesizer of information, and she covers a broad range of topics and a broad range of themes in the coffee industry. If you don't already know who she is, then you're in for a treat, because Ashley is a delight, and her podcast covers a lot of really interesting topics. So if you're not already listening to it, I think you should definitely add Boss Breast to your playlist. Okay, let's listen to the conversation. I was hoping you could just start by introducing yourself. Yeah, sure. My name is Lucia Soeys, and I'm a former wine maker, turned coffee processing specialist. So that means I studied wine making at UC Davis, and went to working in wine in the Napa Valley, and I did that for almost 10 years, it's like nine and a half years, and then I switched over into coffee. So I came in through coffee sort of in the back door from the microbiology fermentation side, and now I live in, currently live in Antioch, Guatemala, where I was born. So I'm kind of back full circle, even though I was, you know, educated and raised in the United States. I was born here, my family's from here, and when I wanted to be closer to coffee, post-pandemic, my husband, Nick, and I decided that we needed to get out of the US and just be much closer to coffee farms. We live on a coffee farm now. We process coffee, and I go back and forth between education processing, eye hold workshops, and just generally, you know, do coffee education for coffee producers, but of course anybody in the coffee industry all along the chain is welcome to enjoy fermentation microbiology, which is pretty niche. So you have to be quite a coffee enthusiast to want to know about coffee microbiology, but that's basically what I do. I try to focus on education. It's so funny that you have to be kind of like really into the nitty-gritty of coffee to be focused on some of the things that you cover in your workshops or on your podcast. You also have a podcast called Making Coffee, but you yourself weren't really a coffee drinker until I don't even think until after you started getting involved in fermentation with coffee, right? I would say I was a coffee professional who didn't drink coffee, meaning that I made my living like I was able to pay my rent and I paid my expenses from working in the coffee industry while not being a coffee consumer. Yeah, I didn't drink coffee until like regularly as a part of like my life and my ritual until like my thirties, because I didn't come through coffee by loving coffee. I came in through loving microbes. My first love is microbiology. Like I was 13, 14 years old in chemistry class, biology class in high school and I was just like this is it. This is the thing. Like I knew very young that this was what I wanted to do with my life and that I would somehow, I don't know, it would be something that my life would be involved in. And then again, it took me to wine and now coffee and who knows we're all end up in another 10 years. But yeah, it took me a long time to like coffee to make it part of my life that wasn't really what drew me to it. Did you grow up with coffee in your life? So being born in a coffee producing country, it's a big part of the culture and Guatemala to grow coffee, not necessarily to drink it. I surprisingly had very little contact with coffee. I would say the way that I grow up with coffee is because my mom is a coffee lover and she's somebody who had a really strong coffee ritual to make her lattes like we had, you know, very nice espresso machines in her home and she makes her daily latte. And I think I also just being like a young jerk teenage daughter like really rebelled against anything that my mom liked and she was so into coffee that I was like, I'm so not into the thing that you're into. And so I was very anti coffee culture like at least that consumer part of the culture for a long time, even even just working in it until I finally fell in love with it. So coffee was always around, you know, I grew up in the Bay Area as well. So I had really wonderful cafes near me. We had rituals and blue bottle. It was just like something really close by that we could always go to. So I love the cafes like I liked that part of it, but I just wasn't into coffee. And I'm now fully converted. How did you make the jump from wine making to coffee? So I wasn't looking to make the jump. I was really happy making wine, living in Appavali and as opportunity came to me, I was recruited by Scott Laboratories who is a supplier of all kinds of wine supplies basically. So you can buy your corks, you can buy yeast, you can buy enzymes, all kinds of filtration media. They sell a lot of different things that you need for wine making. And so I was a customer of theirs for like six or seven years. So I knew that owners really well. We were, you know, we were friends. There's lots of interaction. And this was in like early 2013 that Scott Laboratories was looking to expand their yeast sales from wine and beer into other markets. So they wanted to expand into coffee and into cacao. This was like a pet project of one of the owners because he worked a lot in the wine industry in in Baja California in Mexico. And so he saw that Mexico has both wine and coffee and he just started getting interested in it. And so he's like, I want to do this, but he couldn't do it. So he's like, I need somebody who knows fermentation, who speaks Spanish, who would be willing to open these doors and offered me the position. And for me, I was like, I like what I'm doing. I'm good. So I initially said no to the offer, but he was like, you know, just think about it. I think you'd be really good at it. And I had a really wonderful mentor, Michael Salachi, the windmaker of Opus 1, where I was working, who I approached about this. You know, I said, you know, Alex, Scott asked me if I would be interested in this position. What do you think about it? And he agreed with Alex. He's like, I think you'd be good at it. I think it would be a good opportunity for you. And if you don't like it, you can come back. So he made it really easy for me to take a leap and to accept the offer. And so in the first years in 2014, 2015, I was doing both. I was still working in the wine industry in like Southern California, like San Diego area and Mexico. And then other times I started traveling to coffee mills in Central America. I said go to Guatemala, go to El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica and start doing coffee fermentations with some of these wine yeast from the Scott Laboratories profile. And just to be clear, this Scott Laboratories, who was a yeast supplier is not the same Scott Laboratories that developed the SL varieties in Kenya. So those are coincidentally two Scott Laboratories who were doing coffee things early on, but have nothing to do with each other. It's just a funny coincidence that they have the same name. So that's how I got into coffee. That's why I mentioned sort of coming in the back door. It was about fermentation and microbes and, you know, using my skills in fermentation to just try to do this coffee flavor project for this company. And then I, in 2016, I stopped working for them and I went independent. So now I'm an independent coffee consultant. But that was really, you know, rewarding work and that set the foundation for trying a lot of different commercial yeast in many, many different, you know, it's a 13 different countries, a lot of different mills trying to match certain yeast strains to coffee varieties and different altitudes, different conditions, different varieties. So it got to do some of that work, which was really cool. But it wasn't research. It was more application. That's an interesting distinction. And I think something that you're really good at is using words really intentionally. And I also think that you are a very clever metaphor maker. And one of the metaphors that I heard you use on what the episodes of your podcast is that having fermentation on coffee farms and only really thinking about fermentation as a vessel to remove all of the layers around a coffee seed is like having an F1 racing car and using it only to buy groceries. So with kind of that framework in mind, yeah, let's talk about what fermentation is because I think for a lot of people maybe listening to this show or even myself, I feel kind of inept really understanding like what, what fermentation's possibilities are. And I kind of understand it, I think, from a very rudimentary level in certain aspects. Like I obviously have some some background in coffee so I kind of understand a little bit of the nitty-gritty, but as the word fermentation, I would say becomes, I'm going to use quotes. We can't see each other right now. So know that I'm using air quotes, Vogue, and it's becoming something that roasters put on bags and start using all of these different terminologies for like co-fermenting or anaerobic fermentation, which you've mentioned is a oxymoron, or not an oxymoron. It's redundant. Things like that, like maybe we can kind of start to peel some of the layers back on that and talk about what fermentation is and how we've looked at fermentation historically in coffee. So I know that's a big question, so maybe we can start kind of really, really fundamentally and talk about like what is fermentation in coffee? Sure. So I think that, you know, one kind of warning for your audience is if this topic is interesting to you because you have seen it a lot or you just have like a laden nerd inside of you that enjoys these topics. One of the themes that will always follow us into this topic of fermentation or microbiology is that it is incredibly complex and incredibly nuanced. So if you are a person who really likes certainty and clarity and black and white, then a lot of these conversations, especially around the topic of coffee, are going to feel very uncomfortable because a lot of the answers are it depends and maybe or if this and that, like they're very, very sticky and very messy and that's where, you know, I get a lot of my ideas for the podcast or a lot of my communication comes from like untangling this like giant ball of yarn. So I just wanted to say that that this is very normal to be confused, but your very simple question of what is fermentation. The way that I define fermentation is from the microbiology perspective where it's a metabolism. It's a way that microbes like yeast and bacteria get energy. And in coffee, these microbes are breaking down the glucose that is found in coffee fruit and they're metabolizing it to get their energy and the byproduct. You know, the happy accident is that by doing that, they create these metabolites, these flavor precursors that can get into the seed and that later that we can perceive them in our cup. But it's just the way that these microbes get energy. I think one of the things that happened is we didn't talk about fermentation for a long time because we, you know, really focused on the roasting element giving the flavor of coffee. I think a lot of people were really surprised that coffee was fermented because we were used to thinking of fermentation in our breads, in our beer, in our wine, in our cheese, in our yogurt. So the other clarification that I like is that yes, coffee is fermented, but I do not describe it as a fermented food in the way that those other products that I mentioned are fermented foods. Because if you have grapes, if you don't have a fermentation, you will never have wine. If you have milk and you don't have a fermentation, you will never get cheese or yogurt or kefir or some of the other products. Coffee, if you don't ferment coffee, you will still get coffee at the end of the day. Like the fermentation is completely unnecessary for you to enjoy your final beverage. And yet almost every coffee of all time has some element of fermentation because these microbes are in the air. They are on the skin of the fruit. They're in the soil. They're in our water. They're on the equipment. So you can't really escape that, these microbes are everywhere. So we can't get away from the fermentation. So it's both like, probably every coffee you've ever had has had some some level of fermentation as part of it. You have to like try really hard and use special equipment to not ferment. So the default is fermentation, but also you can completely skip the fermentation and just have coffee. So I think that also helps us keep the fermentation element of coffee in context, meaning it can be really important and it's also completely irrelevant in another sense. Does that make sense? That makes total sense. So let's maybe even try to clarify further what we mean by the idea that coffee doesn't need fermentation. So you you said it really well with the idea that you have grapes, you have grape juice, you're never going to get wine without fermentation. And I think you used one example in one of the episodes of your podcast I was listening to where the only way you could really get coffee without fermentation and even so, this is not even totally right because fermentation happens just by like you touching a coffee cherry and there's microbes everywhere. So coffee for most listeners, you know this, but just to give a little bit of an overview, coffee is the seed of a cherry and there's all these layers around the seed that we want to remove essentially from that seed to get to the thing that we want to drink. And to remove all of that stuff, usually farmers use some level of fermentation to get some of that stuff off. If you were to use mechanical processes to remove all of that stuff to get to the seed, then maybe you could say that that coffee was infarmented. And I think that that was the example you used. I think you even tried to think of another way that coffee could not undergo fermentation. And then you were like, nope, that's it actually. Exactly. Like you say, the fermentation's role in coffee is to remove this mucilage layer, this thick gelatinous pectin rich sugar rich layer that is an obstacle for us to get into the seed. Because if you don't deal with that layer, then your seed stick together, they clump, they can get moldy. You can't move on to the next phases of drying and roasting the coffee if that stuff is still there. So fermentation was actually a very sophisticated or is a very sophisticated way to describe something that is not very sophisticated at all. So by saying like producers doing a fermentation or applying a fermentation actually implies a lot more control and a lot more intention than is historically or traditionally found in coffee processing. So what it was is you get these fruits and again you have to get to the seed. So what most producers can do or do even still today is they remove the, it's called pulping the coffee, you remove the outer skin, the cascara, and then you have this mucilage layer. And basically then you do nothing. You just wait. The coffee gets pulped into a tank and then left alone completely. It's not mixed. It's not stirred. It's not touched. You just do nothing and that's the fermentation. And then eventually the coffee is basically rotting. So the microbes are eating all of that mucilage layer and then eventually the seed is clean and then you can go dry the coffee. So I think that's also really funny of this picture of like you know somebody intentionally fermenting but the reality is like, oh you just like let the coffee rot and don't touch it. That gets your seed clean. So I think that being able to use this word, like this very sophisticated word is like we're sort of getting lost from the beginning. And I think to what your explanation sort of implies is that historically fermentation was not a very intentional process. And I think even you've said that fermentation was almost viewed as like a step that you had to get over. Like oh I have to do this like new sense like thing because I need to get all this stuff off the coffee seed. This is actually just taking time. How has the historical understanding of fermentation, how did that affect how we understood where flavor comes from in a coffee bean? So the other thing to mention with this idea of how fermentation was used historically is that the role was to get removed the muselet from the seed and move on. There's consistently historically been a push for coffee producers to ferment as quickly as possible and have that like rapid turnover rate in their production. And then on the other side, on the consumer side, we are used to thinking about fermentation as a place of flavor enhancement from these other beverages, from these other examples and that longer fermentation times are better. So there's this like really big disconnect between how producers have historically used fermentation and thought of it and then what consumers are expecting from their fermentations. So because the push for coffee producers has been fast fermentations, it wasn't just like being able to get paid more quickly, but they also noticed that well if they didn't you know wash the coffee as soon as possible, if they waited with if they left the coffee basically rotting longer, then it would take on the flavor of rot. And for many coffee producers still today that I talked to, the word ferment, like fermented coffee means rotten coffee, it means defective coffee. So they still associate this word with a negative and yet they're talking oftentimes to consumers that are like you know wanting a 500 hour fermentation or asking for these like really novel processes, not realizing they're not really speaking the same language and often have opposite goals. One of my guiding lights and one of my favorite quotes from Danish physicist Miels Bohr is that the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth. So the fermentation could completely damage your coffee and give it a really really nasty flavor. And then that's where most producers stopped and coffee just moved on. So the same tool depending on how you're like pulling the lever can get you different things. Another quote that I like a lot but it's this idea that we often talk about the same things but we have not yet agreed what we're talking about. And so we're all talking about fermentation producers are talking about it consumers are talking about it educators are talking about it, but we all have a different definition. So for some people it's this thing that creates flavor. For other people it's like this thing that ruins my coffee. For other people it's like you know it's basically rot but we're still using the same word. So going back to earlier point about how to me words matter because I just see us kind of going around in these circles and it's really hard to move forward when again we haven't even agreed on on the baseline. I want to ask you more about words because now I can't remember if I said this on record or if I said this to you before we started recording but you were one of the first people who really made me think about terminology really specifically and how important it is to define terms and make sure that we understand what people are talking about when they use certain words. Another thing that I saw on your website when I was doing research for this episode was that fermentation can kind of work in both ways. So you are no this isn't from your website actually this is from an interview I did a view in 2018 that I forgot that I did but you talked about how for one farmer really manipulating the fermentation process can be really beneficial if they're in a cooler climate and their fermentation is taking way too long. On the converse if someone's living in a very hot climate fermentation can also help them slow down that process or do whatever they need to do to kind of circumvent what could happen if it's too hot and their coffee goes bad too quickly. So it's really interesting to hear you reflect the idea that fermentation lives in both of those dualities if that makes sense. Well not just both of those dualities but many many more and so it's like using we're using the same tool of you know fermenting the coffee liberating the musulage and in those two scenarios they're opposite climates and potentially opposite goals but we're still using the same tool. We can use a fermentation to buy us more time in the hot scenario and maybe elongate the fermentation so that you can get more impact of flavor so that you can kind of think about it like a soup like you want those flavors to marinate and if you can you know simmer it for longer you can get more flavor development. That I think that's a helpful analogy but in the cold sense there's diminishing return you will plateau and more time doesn't always mean more and more and more and more and more flavor and so in those situations where I've had clients coffee producers that have coffee mills or farms and incredibly cold climates really cold nights and they really struggle to get their fermentation. This is frustrating for them because space is limited and so if they're not able to turn over their tanks they could maybe not have enough space for their incoming coffee cherry meaning that it's either going to you know rot on the vine or or rot on the on the tree and not be able to have space and then that also impacts their economic viability because they're not taking advantage of all of their resources so there's a lot of reasons why you would want to cut down your fermentation. The other reason for this particular producer that I use in the example his fermentations were taking so long and the musselage was so stubborn they would wash the coffee and then it would kind of stick back to the coffee seed so they'd have to use even more water so by doing a fermentation in a different way using a particular yeast strain that was able to dissolve the musselage much more efficiently like he was able to reduce his water usage by half just by changing the type of yeast that was in his fermentation tank so this tool can be used in very different climates for different varieties for different goals and I think too often we think of fermentation in a very narrow way and so I just love to bring these examples to say like no this opens up like the multiverse of all of these different things that we can do with these the least interesting of which to me happens to be flavor. One of the ways that I was able to experience some of your work is I went to a workshop that you did called worms and germs and it think it speaks to that idea of flavor kind of being like the last thing on the list in a way so one of the coffees that you had us taste was I think it was the same coffee it was grown at a very low elevation and elevations one of those things that we prize in coffee we talk about it constantly this is grown at 200 meters above sea level or what have you and that's a marker of quality generally but elevations kind of a finite resource and then there's also kind of the nexus of climate change which I'm sure fermentation could really be a useful tool in but the coffees that you had us taste were so markedly different and it was really interesting to have you talk about how fermentation can be an enhancer for like these finite variables essentially it's almost like looking at it as a science experiment you have your like independent and your dependent variables and there are certain variables that are fixed so you can't change and I wonder how you approach your work when you're working with a farmer how do you kind of take in everything that you're experiencing on a farm to come up with a solution that makes sense for them. I like I love that question but first I want to kind of address this idea of flavor diversity because I think it speaks to one of my personal pet peeves which is this idea of a coffee hunter this idea of like going and finding these gems out in out in the wild and I think that the old school mentality was the only way to get flavor diversity to have like a broad range of offerings for our coffee consumers is to go to all of these different places and to make sure that your menu has a coffee from Kenya and a coffee from Sumatra and a coffee from Guatemala and a coffee from Columbia because that was diversity of flavor it had to be that different and I think that now what we've opened up with processing and with the world of microbes is that you can get a microcosm of flavors from the same place you can take one coffee and treat it differently process it differently and then also using different microbes in your fermentation or the way that you dry it and you can get this rainbow of flavor in one place and so I think that's a really important tool for a lot of producers to be able to use you have the power in the way that you treat your coffee to get all of this different flavor that kind of dovetails into the second part of your question is how I approach designing fermentations for my clients well first usually I spend a good amount of time you know at their facility I try not to do as much of virtual consulting I really like to be on the ground and understand their limitations whether it's access to water whether it's access to labor whether how much climate change how much pests and diseases are pressuring the area then I like to reverse engineer the simplest possible protocol that I can and my designing strategy is very minimal because for me it's like the goal is reproducibility and scalability one of the biggest complaints I get from coffee producers is you know I do the same thing every time and I get a different result I'm picking from the same farm I'm fermenting for the same number of hours in my same tanks and then when I go to taste the coffee they taste differently that makes a lot of sense when you understand microbiology and where some of these contaminations could be coming in and the role that temperature and pH play and so for me you know that's kind of what I help them unpack but I think that's been part of why we've needed the coffee hunter is because we haven't given producers the tools to know how to consistently reproduce their good results does that make sense that totally makes sense it makes me think of the idea of how does one determine the value of what they have and if they can't reliably and predictably understand what a coffee is going to taste like from one tank to another from one harvest to another than that severely limits the power of producer to create value for the value to start there and you've talked about this on your podcast too that the coffee supply chain works in reverse in a very bizarre way that a lot of the way that we value coffee or the way that we dictate I don't want to say trends but just the way that things happen come from consumers and roasters versus coming from the farmers themselves and I have to imagine unreliability is one of the key reasons I mean colonialism is too but the unpredictability of a harvest is probably one of the one of the big reasons why that process happens in reverse no absolutely and even yes unreliability but unreliability because of colonialism meaning that these were new novel crops that were introduced into unfamiliar environments to unfamiliar people who don't have the decades or centuries of history to know how to treat disease to know how to actually process this it's one of my like pet peeves of comparing coffee and wine is that we don't often acknowledge that with wine growers there's a lot of cultural and historic knowledge because of how long this you know the grapes have been growing in that certain area there's a lot of power that the growers have because they know their product really well and wine definitely works from producer out like however like the price of the wine bottle depends on how much you paid for the grapes but the the same is not true for coffee like the price of the coffee bag of roasted coffee that you buy is rarely proportional to what the initial coffee cherries cost or what the producer was paid for that so I think that when we try to compare coffee to wine often we don't realize like this complete power disparity that grape growers have that coffee producers don't have and when we use that analogy we kind of like provide cover and then we can like kind of overlay this like very romantic idea of the coffee grower because maybe we know some wine makers or we see like that wine style and it's just not true in coffee and I think that it lets us talk about like the lovely and kind of like romantic and fun things about wine without addressing this like systemic like power imbalance that came from you know this crop being forced on a lot of people and on oftentimes like pushing out their native crops and pushing out their subsistence crops just to grow coffee for other people so like it's kind of wiki yeah it's definitely it key I want to talk a little bit about the power of fermentation when it comes to climate change because one of the things that it feels like we talk a lot about in coffee but maybe necessarily haven't faced in a really tangible way is that coffee is going to change drastically coffee has already changed drastically so have you seen fermentation playing a role a bigger role as climate change continues to affect farmers yes and I think actually I just lived this with a new variety that is a hybrid it's an H1 variety here in the farm in Guatemala and my usual microbes are having a really hard time fermenting this you know rust resistant variety I'm not itch notices so I'm not sure about this it's just my observation but these hybrid varieties tend to have thicker musilage at least the one that I'm working with and it's taking much longer for that musilage dissolve so it kind of screwed up my I had a chart for I ferment for 36 hours and then I go to the patio and then I know how much cherry I can receive I know how many people I need to be on the patio to be raking this coffee and moving it and because this musilage was just behaving in a way that I had never encountered in 10 years it was taking twice as long and it just kind of like this like chain reaction of like screwing up when I could receive cherry and how much base we had on the patio and it we figured it out but I was really surprised that that change was so significant that I saw it in my fermentation tank so I think that the microbes that have been traditionally fermenting coffee that are just spontaneous in wild maybe not able to keep up with the new varieties that we need because of the more disease pressure and climate change pressure for coffee producers so I think that's something that maybe people haven't thought about and I hadn't seen it until this this very year working in the mill but you know before we wrap up I definitely want to say that there's a way that we're talking about this that I get really excited about in terms of the identities of certain yeast strains and what flavors they can produce and how we can marry the yeast strain and the coffee variety into creating some flavor I could see how some people could be kind of uncomfortable about that in thinking that are we just doctoring coffee and creating flavor that's like dishonest because a lot of the conversation that I do see is this idea that we value transparency and really wanting to exemplify you know the taste of the place and I have many episodes about terroir that's definitely like a topic that I really like to talk about but in a nutshell I understand how it makes people uncomfortable but that's it's I'd like to make a little bit more effort to talk about how yeast works and that it's not creating a flavor that isn't there it is part of its metabolism to consume the sugars as well as other like minerals and nutrients that are in the you know coffee medium and then its byproducts just happen to be these aromatic flavor precursors and because yeast and bacteria are completely part of the you know the skins and the identity of these coffee cherries I don't think that they're two separate things the same way that we humans can't really separate our bacteria DNA from our human DNA like we just are our microbiome I do still think that you can have transparent coffee that is honest coffee that is fermented in this way and that we're not like faking flavor or we're not creating something that's not there it's still a very natural process which is different from perhaps an infused term where you are maybe in the coffee you know drying with citrus rinds to try and get the aroma of citrus into the coffee seat I'm not saying that infusion doesn't happen but fermentation is not that infusion fermentation is flavors that are generated from a metabolism and not like essential oil drops that you're you know putting into the tank something like that I think that's clear no that is clear I'm trying to even go backwards a little bit on parsing out that tension because I think that that's like a neat like a super niche tension but it's one that I see all the time and but it's not necessarily something that like as a consumer I think you would see so I'm trying to unpack it a little bit but I would say if I'm trying to explain it and maybe you can correct me on this I would say in like the last five years there has been concerns again in air quotes about wait things that we add to coffee and it seems like in the muck of all of that fermentation's kind of been thrown in there and there has been questions about like are we manipulating the flavor of a coffee by adding certain things like like you were saying like citrus rinds to like the drying beds and fermentation is is not that but I think it gets confusing for people when they see like pineapple processed or something like that which is if I'm if I'm right about this I think I'm right is a process called co fermentation where fruit is thrown into like a fermentation tank to like eight along in the process because pineapples have their own microbiomes but that's not there to necessarily like infuse this thing with pineapple it's there to be part of the fermentation process does that does that make sense exactly and I think that that is a really really good kind of point to remember is if you add fruit at the fermentation stage if you add mangoes if you add strawberries if you add pineapple to your fermentation at the stage where the coffee is still has all of its musilage on there all of those fruits are just providing like more fuel it's more like you know gasoline for the fire of fermentation but you're not going to get a one-to-one like flavor introduction your coffee will not taste like pineapple it will not taste like mango if you put mango at that phase and so yeah I do think that a pineapple fermentation is more confusing than it is helpful because then it gives that impression and then you have consumer you're kind of priming them to like do I taste the pineapple do I taste the tropical flavor which you know is not directly translatable but yeah co ferment is a lot less this is a problem that we have in science is like our words and our terminology is like pretty bland so people don't want to use some of these words but I think that you know what you're right I think for consumers maybe this is not a concern it's more for coffee industry kind of people in the middle that I see a lot of this resistance to the purity like pure coffee transparent coffee and to be clear resistance yeah like to be clear this is a hot topic in like the niche niche parts of coffee like people get very upset about this yes it's true and I'm really glad that it is such a niche part of the market and that most consumers don't care and are just interested in good tasting coffee because I really think that's you know at the end of the day that's what's important like does your coffee taste good I don't know that we need to like moralize or demonize you know some of these processes like which it's just coffee guys like I feel like there it doesn't need to be as intense I do think you made a good point though when you talked about like the words like pineapple co fermentation or something like that as as fermentation again I'm going to use air quotes becomes more vogue even though fermentation's been around forever and a lot of these processes like co fermentation have been around forever even though I've seen on websites being like this is a new process and it's like okay well it's maybe new to you but it's it's been done for quite some time there is still a lot of confusion about like what's actually happening with my coffee like because these words don't really have any sort of scientific definition within our industry specifically that we all agree on and again going back to this idea that like you were one of the first people I've really heard talk about the use of words and how words matter and how our inability to land on like one definition for a thing means that we're all probably talking about either the same thing with different words or talking about different things with the same word so for consumers when they look at a bag of coffee and they're like what does anaerobic fermentation mean or what does carbonic maceration mean like how is a consumer supposed to interpret like what's on a bag of coffee essentially applying some sort of fermentation process has happened but like I don't know like how do you pick up a bag of coffee and even decipher what's going on here now and it's funny too because I mostly work with coffee producers but because of the podcast and because some of the presentations and work that I do I also get to talk to a lot of roasters so like I will like look at my inbox and I'll have you know messages from coffee producers saying oh roaster asked me to do this carbonic maceration or this anaerobic process what does that mean and then I have in that same space you know roaster saying I received this carbonic maceration anaerobic coffee from a producer what does that mean and I'm just like they're both sides are not talking to each other and I think that both we don't have enough words for coffee because it's a young industry so we haven't developed that vocabulary and then also we are being very loose and very sloppy with how we're naming things and I think there could be like there needs to be a balance and I think right now we had you know few way too few words and now we have a lot of words and I think we just need to we're just in this messy middle and we need a little bit more time for things to like calm down and then coalesce into vocabulary and I know that there are people that are attempting to have you know dictionaries and lexicon and and people really want this my concern is that most of these efforts have been from the consuming and roasting side and I don't know that there's enough balance within like the whole chain that everybody's voice is being heard so I've been really resistant to make a glossary lexicon I don't think it's my place and I am really surprised that a lot of people do think it's their place to do that or the people that decide I'm gonna be the one who's going to be to put this stake in the ground so it's both sort of saying we have this problem and I'm not quite sure what the solution is yet and I think it's you know it's it's gonna take us more time to develop this but what I love to bring awareness to is that we don't have enough words we're not in agreement with most of the words that we do have and we're still working on it so for people to just be much more cautious when they're throwing these terms around instead of you know repeating what they've seen and maybe just ask hey what do you mean by this because I think there's also a cultural context where different cultures also have different meanings that's not necessarily you know something that we need to untangle and demystify is just saying oh what does this mean for you a producer in India and what does this mean for you a producer in Guatemala how are you using these terms because they could be you know very different one example I'll give you really quickly is double fermentation so in Kenya double fermentation usually refers to the first phase the coffee cherries are pulped so the skin is removed it there's a dry fermentation meaning there's no it's just in its own moisture there's no additional water for maybe first 24 ish hours and then there's a second phase where the tank is completely submerged in water and then that's the second fermentation so that's a double fermentation and that has a very specific flavor profile and in Colombia a lot of producers are using the term double fermentation when they keep the coffee cherries whole intact for one to three days maybe a week and then they pulp the cherries and then they do a second separate fermentation in parchment in just the the musulage and that has a completely different flavor result and yet a consumer on a bag will just see double fermentation so I don't think that there needs to be one universal fermentation and Kenya needs to either adopt columbias or columbia should adopt Kenya's but that you know each country can have their own definition and yet you know maybe it's just asking more questions if you care right if you just find a flavor that you like like go for it but if you do care I think there's a lot more questions that could be asked I would also I mean I guess I would put it on roasters to be clear about what they mean by those things too but maybe that's implied in that before we go is there anything that you want people to know about the work that you do that maybe we haven't covered in this conversation um I guess yeah if this is you know your audience's first introduction to my work of microbiology and coffee fermentation and you find this interesting I have a lot of episodes one that I'm really excited about that I did recently is about altitude so this connection of altitude and quality and flavor from a microbiology point of view so there's a lot of resources for you if you're you know like I mentioned I have three episodes on terroir and that connection to quality and coffee producers um and I also do fermentation workshops I'm hosting them in Guatemala the next one is sold out it's coming up in February but I'm doing more in the future and it's called fermentation training camp FTC and it is open to anybody we I have a 50% set aside for coffee producers and then the rest of the tickets are anybody else and you know who's interested so we always usually have uh exporters and porters we have roasters we have baristas and we have just coffee enthusiasts just people who are just really into coffee and when it comes spend a week processing coffee with us we do three different types of fermentations and just like meeting other people in the coffee industry so those are really fun events where for a week you come to Guatemala and we just nerd out about coffee processing um and let's see if there's anything else podcast camps um and I will I am processing coffee right now I don't have a lot for sale but I'm working to have some small quantities available in the US so that people can try you know you don't have to be you don't have to buy a whole bag or 10 bags of coffee to be able to try some of these fermentation so that I'm working on and I think that's it thank you so much for joining me my pleasure always I feel like this was incredibly rambly on an already like difficult topic but I hope the point is just like sparking interest to look more at these topics and figure find out that there's there's a lot of resources out there too well thanks for another day of hanging out with me on the podcast special thanks to the patrons who make it possible for me to make new episodes and if you want to join our coffee community and join the office hours live and ask me a question or connect with other awesome listeners go to patreon.com/makingcoffee that's where we hang out like I mentioned I haven't been making new episodes but I have been at least maybe twice a month hopping on discord and just having open conversations with you guys having some guest speakers so that's always a lot of fun the podcast after the podcast if you see coffee in a different way after listening today consider joining patreon and help me make more episodes and Ashley also has a patreon and I think substack is her preferred method for support so you can check out Ashley's substack in the show notes and I think there's a lot for you to explore there because she's a very prolific writer well it's good to be back in front of the microphone good to be with you again and I will be back soon hopefully with a more recovered voice and a favorite podcast guest Pernoy from Ketihaklu joining us this is Pernoy's third appearance on the podcast I know that you guys really enjoy what he has to share and this next episode will be really focused on processing and specifically how Pernoy has decided to process his coffee this harvest and we do a little bit of comparing contrast to what I did in Guatemala and what he's doing in India so that's going to be super fun all right thanks for listening and remember life's too short to drink bad coffee