#77: The Most Challenging Harvest We've Had

[Music] Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 77. Today I'm going to give you a harvest update and then we're going to get into some audience questions. So if you want to skip the personal stuff and go straight to the information, time stamps are going to be available in the show notes so you can definitely skip around. So I haven't been on the mic in a while and before the harvest update there's a few things I want to share with you. This morning I watched James Hoffman's latest video about healthy coffee on YouTube and I just have to share how excellent I think it is. It's been in the back of my mind to make you guys an episode about my go toxins and it's taken me a while to do it obviously because it hasn't exist yet because I was going to fill it with research and my personal history with bulletproof coffee but it's been a challenging episode for me because I couldn't find an angle that didn't feel like it was 90% negative and that's not the kind of episodes that I want to make and now I'm glad that I didn't end up making that episode because what Hoffman did was much better and what I think is actually needed in our industry. In 20 minutes he made an approachable concise and direct argument. We all know no one will ever accuse me of being concise. So I really want to encourage you to watch that video. It's all the information you need on mycotoxins, heavy metals and phenolic compounds but more than that Hoffman shares the scientific information that only someone like him has the access to acquire but he also shares a point of view. Many of us here love science and I think one thing we love about it is the promise of neutrality cold hard facts the unbiased scientific method but science is done by humans and I often think that cold hard facts are not enough to make a difference. What is needed and what I often feel lacking in our industry is a point of view. I'm not talking about singular opinions on random topics. I'm talking about a larger world view. I like when someone I trust gives me data and their interpretation of the data and of course bonus points if it confirms my existing world view. Because that's the thing we need to watch out for right? Going deeper into our bubble and only finding information that confirms what we already think but I believe in us. I believe we have critical thinking skills and that we can admit that it feels nice to have our biases confirmed but I think that we can also tell when we are swallowing something and unwilling to challenge ourselves. These are the kind of topics and the kind of themes that I want to talk about on discord. Actually, well yes and at this very moment what I really want to talk about on discord is plural of us the new Vince Gilligan show. Not only have I watched all of the available episodes but I have also listened to 16 of the accompanying podcast episodes but the podcast is focused on how the show is made which I think is still worth mentioning because I think many of you will like them because it's a behind the scenes look at making the show it's the nitty-gritty of set design and costumes, editing, sound engineering, what camera lenses they use and how they think about lighting certain scenes. It actually feels like a podcast not for fans of the show but for aspiring television writers and producers which again I love even though I am neither of those things. But what I was hoping for that the podcast doesn't do is it doesn't talk about the philosophy, about the world that they built. If you have seen the show and want to talk with me about grief individuality versus collective consciousness questioning if freedom requires embracing struggle or if perfect harmony comes at the price of self then email me. I am offering free memberships to our discord channel if you want to talk about the cost of forced happiness. I'm serious. I'm very serious about this. Maybe from the centroid you can already tell that this was not a planned episode also because I mentioned that I was putting the podcast on pause while we focused on the harvest and the fermentation trading camps our FDCs. And yet a few unexpected circumstances have come together to create a little bit of space and so this episode was born. The first is that it's been a wild weather year in Antifa. The 2024 2025 harvest was low yielding for this farm and generally across the region. I spoke to several other growers and producers that were also experiencing low yields which was really an annoying time to not be able to take advantage of the elevated coffee prices. So this year as a 2025-2026 growing season was developing there was a lot of excitement. Everyone could see the little green buds developing and the trees were a lot more visually charged than last year. Every morning on my walks through the farm I could see more and more fruit developing. It was the first time in the last four harvest year that I could visibly see the coffee trees leaning over from the weight of all of the fruit that was developing on their branches. The pickers were excited because they could make up their income from last year's low crop and of course we were excited to be able to make more coffee. And as I mentioned in previous episodes Nick and I are undertaking a new project that has us quadrupling our production. And we accepted this project many many months ago when I felt there would be enough coffee to be able to fulfill this request. I also planned FTC to hit at the beginning of harvest so that many producers could come to learn about fermentation and drying and still have enough time to go back to their farms and apply the learnings themselves. But I also know that I can't time it too early because I need to already have enough coffee for several fermentations as examples of our work so that people can cup the coffee that we've processed and then also see coffee drying in various stages and not just for the week that they're on the farm. I scheduled it for December 9th because looking back at our records last year at this time we already had plenty of coffee and this year was supposed to have more coffee than last year and to be higher yielding so we felt confident that we would have a really good workshop. All the tickets were sold, everyone was committed. And then the rain stopped early. We didn't get as wet in October and November as we were expecting and this had some unintended consequences. It was interesting because it made for a much earlier harvest. We started getting fruit at the end of October. October 28th was the first day that we had cherries in the mill and this was almost a full month earlier than last year. So once again we were gearing up for an early harvest and a big one. Things were looking quite promising even though the lack of rain was definitely concerning. And then the effects of the reduced rain started to become more apparent. After the initial week of bringing in fruit it abruptly stopped and we got a very cold front where it seemed like nothing was ripening. There was just so much green fruit on the trees that wasn't changing color. And so this created like a really weird whiplash for us where initially we were panicking that harvest was coming into early, a month early and so a lot of our projects like the shade expansion on the patio weren't ready and we also had not received our yeast and bacteria delivery. So we were panicking that we were going to have so much coffee and not the space to process it or the tools that we needed to process it. And because of the weather we completely changed our concerns from fearing that we would not have any coffee because nothing was ripening. We were worried that we were not going to have any coffee to show for FTCs. Because you guys know that I like to do things at scale and the original plan had us doing several fermentations each at 70 quintales which is 7,000 pounds or 3,175 kilos of cherry. And this is what we were able to do last year. I had this plan last year and we executed it flawlessly. However this year we were struggling to scrape together 15 quintales or just 860 kilos of cherry for the fermentations. Instead of using our regular tanks I was going to have to use our small little cubes, our plastic tanks that some of you may have seen in pictures. It felt really stressful to invite 22 people from all corners of the globe like India and Zambia and Bolivia and Peru and Mexico and Scotland and Guadalupe to come in process and realize that there was going to be almost nothing for them to see when they finally got here. In an attempt to avoid this embarrassment I had to do something I really don't like to do which was keep cherry for multiple days to have enough to process at one time. I don't like to do this because it means that part of the cherry starts to ferment without me right to completely uncontrolled environment and then we add fresh cherry to the old cherry and it really reduces the homogeneity of the batch. It's definitely something that we can work with but it's not ideal in a class about consistency and best practices. Like I was not in a place to be highlighting the best practices we were actually in an emergency triage mode. So we had the rain cut off early in October which gave us a false early start to harvest in November and then a cold front which halted ripening all together so we were in a lull. We were, Nick and I were just kind of sitting around, twiddling our thumbs just watching weather reports and hoping that we would get something to work with. So eventually we did manage to scrape together enough cherry to have a few example coffees to start FTC and then on December 9th the day before FTC we got some of that water that was sorely needed in November but instead it came in December and the frustrating part about this is that for the class I created a couple batches of naturals to show the class and then the naturals my drive process coffee got completely drenched on the patio. This event was coincidentally captured on camera by Cat Melheim. Many of you may know her as Roaster Cat on Instagram. She is an FTC3 alum and we invited her back for FTC10 to help us document the camp and to create some informational videos together. So Cat flew in to Guatemala December 9th in the afternoon. She got to the farm around 3 p.m. and basically got straight to work. She put her bags down and then I started walking her around the farm before we lost some of the light just to show her what we wanted to capture during the following week of FTC. So it was like about 4 p.m. and we were on the patio and it was sunny and bright and the sun was going down so I thought you know maybe we should go up and get a snack so we decided to go back to the house to get a break. She and I were just chatting we stepped into the door we took off our boots and it was maybe like five minutes relaxing in the house when I started to hear rain drops on our roof. When we left for the house I had left Nick on the patio to wrap up so I thought that he would have heard the rain drops that he was still on the patio and he would be able to quickly cover the coffee but the rain started to get a little bit heavier and a little bit stronger and I was like oh gosh he's gonna need help. So really quickly I threw my boots back on we grabbed a rain jacket and I just ran out of the house to go to the go to Nick in the patio and help him. As I was running down the stairs from our house to the drying patio I saw him flying out of the cupping lab at the same time and it turned out that Nick was also not expecting rain so he had gone up to the cupping lab he had left the patio so the coffee was completely alone and then we both looked at each other with panic and across the expanse of the parking lot and then we doubled our speed down to the patio. I didn't realize it at the time but Kat was running behind me and capturing the whole thing so she created an Instagram reel documenting like our panic to run to the coffee covering it with plastic as quickly as we could and then kind of just standing there in disbelief of this downpour that completely came out of nowhere. So I will also link that in the show notes for your viewing pleasure anyway back to coffee so we thought it was going to be a big yielding year so I made a commitment to significantly increase our production and pre-sold the coffee. We got a false start that made me think that I could finish harvest early so I have some travel commitments in February which now I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep so this whole season has just I just felt like it's really gone off the rails and and in a way we haven't really started it's nearing the end of December and my projections based on the last three years of processing here had us expected to be about a third of the way through the production a third of the way of the coffee that we promised and at last count we're only a tenth of the way to our goal. So that's the challenging bit of the unexpected weather and the unexpected consequences that allowed us to have way more downtime way more twiddling our thumbs than we had originally planned so that in combination with the presence of cat we were able to make some you know more educational videos and be able to film a lot of the process so we're thinking about ways to share coffee processing and fermentation information in new ways kind of going beyond the podcast and doing more visual things. So over the last few months Nick and I have been making more kind of short short-form videos short reels on Instagram to share coffee processing stuff and we'd like to do more longer format YouTube videos where I get to share a lot of visual information. We've also been making short reels on Instagram because even though I like to paint a word picture often a picture picture is the best example so I really like to be able to share images from different mills images of different coffee defects images of yeast activity all of these things that I think a lot of people don't get to see on a regular basis. So that's why I think the video format is really complimentary to kind of information that I share on the podcast. So what you're about to hear is a Q&A from Instagram which is asked kind of an open-ended like what do you want to know about fermentation and then Nick collected them and put them in front of me and just hit record on our camera. So you'll hear the answers are much looser kind of top-of-brain reactions on my part. So if you want to see me answer these questions with visuals then you can click on the link in the show notes that'll take you to the YouTube video or you can just stay here and listen kicking it old school. Okay and now that you've listened to an introduction that's half the episode let's get into the questions. So a lot of times because of what I know about fermentation and microbiology it's hard for me to put myself in the shoes of people that are less familiar to know what is still confusing or how I can best explain things. So we asked you what is still confusing and now I'm going to respond to your questions. Is it all coffee that is anaerobic aerobic coffee? You have to have like a little bit of a foundation so when we're talking about processing there is the term anaerobic that's kind of come up in conjunction with fermentation. It's like an adjective to describe the fermentation and anaerobic fermentation which is really scientifically incorrect because all fermentation by definition is anaerobic. So we don't need to qualify it the way that I talk about it is like saying you know wet water. Water by its nature is wet. Wetness is already a property of water. We don't need to then tack on and say wet water. So saying an anaerobic fermentation is about as dumb as saying wet water. Now I think what most people mean colloquially is that the environment in which the fermentation is taking place is in a sealed container and that would give the coffee different flavor properties but the fermentation itself is unchanged. The fermentation happens with yeast and bacteria breaking down glucose creating flavor precursors and that happens with or without oxygen participating in that. Clarifying whether the fermentation itself is anaerobic or aerobic is neither here nor there. I think it's a way to sound more technical where if you are talking to somebody who understands microbiology you actually sound less intelligent because you're describing a process that doesn't meet description. So the utility of the word anaerobic to describe the fermentation is pretty weak but we still can't deny that sealing the fermentation, sealing the coffee can have a different impact than when the fermentation is in the open environment. So I think that part of the confusion is trying to define something that really doesn't need a definition. It's much more about the environment and not the style or the type of fermentation. Another thing to keep in mind is what this question is presupposing is that it's always a binary. It's either anaerobic or aerobic. It's either on or off and microbiology mostly works on a spectrum. It's mostly a sliding scale of different levels of oxygen. So you can have something that has very low levels of oxygen that you could call an anaerobic environment or you can have low levels, medium levels, high levels of oxygen which would select for different microbes. So it starts to get really complicated and again it's like unnecessary to really talk about flavors and talk about what's happening in our cup at the end of the day. So I don't love to like clarify some of these examples because I think then people like hold on to them more tightly and try to connect a description of a process to a flavor in a cup. And I don't think that's particularly useful and I don't think that's particularly interesting. So in my world, if I could have a wish, it would be that this stops being this anaerobic or aerobic adjective description or even conversation is really toned down. I don't think it's very helpful. I think it's much more confusing. I don't think it's really adding to the conversation of coffee quality or coffee flavors or even processing. So I would love to see this really be let go. Next question is, am I aware of any efforts to design yeast specifically for robusta? So the short answer is no. I am not aware of any efforts to design yeast specifically for robusta. And then additionally, I don't think it's necessary. I'm going to go on an olymp and say all of the yeast that is commercially available for a rabica that I'm aware of and have used is perfectly suited to also work with robusta. And I don't think that there needs to be anything specific developed for robusta. I think it's enough of a challenge. It has been in my 10 years of experience working with producers and fermenting coffee. It's been enough of a struggle to get a rabica adoption for, you know, just widespread information and adoption of one type of yeast for the companies to then invest very specifically on a different tier or a different level of products when their main product that works for both is already struggling for adoption. So I don't see that to be something in the near future. And I also believe that anything that would be designed specifically for robusta would be, you know, more expensive because then you'd have to pay for the research and development to select that yeast and for the information from that. And you might get, I don't know, 5% better performance than a thing that already exists. So not only am I not aware of a product that any development, I don't think it's particularly necessary. And then once it came out, I would be really hesitant to recommend it because I wouldn't see the need, you know, it's solving a problem that nobody is asking about. The next question is, do I think producers should create terms that further describe processing? This one's a little bit tricky because I, I do not. Sorry, simple answer. I do not. No, I don't think that the problem or the barrier to people paying fair prices for coffee and to recognize coffee quality is that we've had a lack of words to describe the processing. Like that hasn't been the bottleneck. There's way bigger social structures, there's way bigger cultural issues, there's way bigger political issues that are preventing that from happening. So I don't think that coffee hasn't been valued because we don't, producers don't have enough words to describe processing. Along that vein, when I sell coffee that I've processed and when I consult with producers, my advice is to make your processing simpler. I'm a big fan of going back to simpler terms and just describing coffees as wash coffees. So even if they are fermented with certain sacramiases yeast that are inoculated, even if the container is, you know, a sealed container, it, it's still for me a wash coffee if we remove the cascada and are processing it that way. So I really like the kind of two channels of naturals are processed whole fruit and wash coffees are processed pulped without that outer tissue. So I believe that keeping it really simple and focusing on other things, focusing on the genetics, focusing on less tangible things about the, the producers in terms of farming practices or the values. That is much more of a selling point because again we're talking about marketing. So using words to describe processing for me is a very weak way to market your coffee. When there are other levers that producers can pull that are already available to them without making any investments. So like highlighting things that make your coffee special that don't have to do with processing. As an addendum to those that might not be that intuitive. So while I don't think that producers should create more terms to describe processing like the along the veins of the triple anaerobic hydro honey style, I actually do really like fantasy names. I like when a coffee process is called like galaxy process, you know, something that is completely divorced from science. Like we can't pretend that it's scientific. And I think it's a way for producers to have fun, to signal that they're doing something out of the ordinary and that it invites more questions. So I think that in a way it could be perceived as, oh, you're obscuring, you're, you know, not sharing the information. But I also don't think that we should, as buyers, think that we are entitled to a producer's, you know, recipe. That's their intellectual property. So I think it's very valid for a producer to say this is my unicorn process. And then they are allowed to share what that means if they want to or not. I think that's that's their information to share or not. So those are like my two areas. Like I want really simple like this is just a washed or this is a natural or this is Milky Way fantasy coffee processing. The next question is how to more precisely measure fermentation process with whole cherries. This is a great question because it highlights the challenges that whole cherry processing gives us when we are trying to understand the fermentation when we're trying to understand the activity of yeast and bacteria. And whole cherry is a big challenge. It's really difficult to know what's happening inside the tank because each cherry is its own bioreactor. It's a self-contained unit of metabolic activity. So when you are doing a fermentation like that, each individual cherry is experiencing its own fermentation, its own different fermentation rate because each cherry is starting with a different moisture content depending on how ripe it is, a different sugar content depending on how ripe it is, and different microbes kind of on the outside that are able to interact with said sugar and said moisture. So it's incredibly difficult to predict or to control those fermentations. So no, I don't know any way to do it. That's why I don't do those fermentations. That's not my preference. I will do them if I have to, if forced, we will do whole cherry fermentations. And there are ways that we can make that process a little bit more stable, but it's still a guess because measuring is really challenging because each individual cherry is a unit. Now when I pull up the coffee and I can have much more of a uniform mass because I'm taking off those tissue layers, I have more access to what's on the inside. I can have a submerged fermentation. So each of my coffee seeds has a much more similar moisture content and I'm also spreading out that sugar availability. So wash process, pulled coffees, have much more consistency within the batch because they're not individual bioreactor units, and it's easier for me to read the pH of that mass and get some information about what's happening in my fermentation, whereas if you're getting the pH of a whole cherry fermentation, usually you don't have liquid. So you need some liquid to be able to measure pH. So it's really impossible. So my push isn't, hey, let's have more toys and more technology to better measure this. We can just process in an easier way with the caveat of having water and having the structures available to do that. So while there, I'm not aware of the tools and instruments to better measure what's going on in a whole cherry fermentation. What I do to work around that lack is I ferment whole cherries the way that I do my wash coffees, meaning that it's submerged. So I'm trying to even out the moisture content more and I'm also inoculating. I'm controlling the microbes that are present in the fermentation. So it's a two pronged approach to be able to reduce the differences so that my lack of measurements is less important. I don't need to be hyper aware of what's happening in my fermentation from a measurements point of you following my pH and my temperatures because I'm compensating by submerged inoculated fermentation. So one thing allows me to relax on the other thing. And that's why when you're not inoculating and you're not submerging, yeah, measurements become much more important, but we don't have those tools yet. So until we do, I use those methods that are available right now. Okay, so the next question is what's the most eco-friendly way to treat wastewater and effluent? This is not my area of expertise in terms of wastewater and managing ecological systems, but I will tell you about my experience. And this question is hard to answer because it has within it the word the most ecological. And out of all of the methods, I don't know which one is the most efficient, but I will tell you that any farm that's doing anything at all is helpful because I've been to so many places where there's no government oversight. There are no external pressures to treat your wastewater. And so most of the wastewater from the fermentation or processing goes into rivers or into the groundwater. There's like no filter. There's no layer of protection between the water that we're producing in the mill and the outside environment. So that's throughout the world in many countries that I visited. That's just the reality. I don't think that the systems need to be so expensive or involved. It's just, I think, an educational problem of having different, you know, settling pools, different settling ponds, including some aquatic life so that you can re-oxygenate the water. Because that's the biggest challenge. If you know you've been aware of the conversations with fermentation, it's that all fermentations are anaerobic, meaning that oxygen is not part of it. And as the fermentation is happening, there's more CO2 that's being carbon dioxide that's being released. And so there's dissolved oxygen in water. So you already have some amount of oxygen there, but when you ferment that water, you are reducing the oxygen content in that water. And so when you're done with the fermentation, you have a substance that is really, really low oxygen availability and high acid, right? Really low pH because the fermentation produces organic acids. So you have something that's pretty toxic and this is just any fermentation ever. This isn't specific to inoculated fermentation. So this is just the way the coffee's processed. So this water is very charged with organic matter, very little oxygen. And so most of that time that water goes from the fermentation tank into the environment, into rivers and drinking water. And the problem there is that because of that low oxygen, it deprives the oxygen for fish and plant life. So it's something that we don't talk about enough that I would love to see more attention, but I'm just not the person to recommend a system. I'm just letting you know that that water should be paid attention to much more than we do now. So thanks for the questions. This was really helpful for me to kind of wrap my head around what is still confusing. And I think it's possible that these answers may have sparked even more questions. So not a problem. Keep them coming. I love talking about this stuff. All right. Thanks, everyone, for making it to the end of another episode of making coffee and the end of another year. I feel so grateful that you all spend time and hang out with me in this way and even more grateful for those of you who take the leap and hang out with me and discord and have fun discussions. So I hope to see more of you there in the future. I hope you all have a great end of year, great holidays, time to spend with friends and family and eat delicious food. And I'm sure I'll be back here in January with another fresh harvest update. And let's see what this new year brings. And remember, life's too short to drink bad coffee. [Music]