Seasonality-Again
I realize that great coffee can certainly still be good 15 months off harvest assuming it is the right coffee with the right shipping and storage conditions. However, I would like to see a single viable argument that would demonstrate that same coffee wouldn’t be much, much better, 3 -6 months off harvest. The only exception to this might be wonky naturals that get better as they age because their negative characteristics fade. Seasonality, as in other heirloom produce and great vintages of wine or Champagne only serves to add value in terms of how the customer can perceive coffee. I realize it may be confusing for them at first, but shouldn’t we be leading our customers down the right path versus following them down the path of least resistance. The more we de-commoditize coffee and open minds, the better it will be for everyone for the grower, to the roaster, to the coffeebar operator and ultimately to the person that finally drinks a cup that is as delicious as it has been promised to be. As my Auntie once said, discuss.
DZ
How about the work that George Howell is doing over at Terroir? I’m sure that even he wouldn’t say that deep freezing vacuum packed greens taste *better* than coffee 3-6 months after the harvest, but they’re not any worse. At least, that’s the theory he’s operating on, and my taste buds seem to agree.
Of course your grand point is right; coffee as a commodity should not be treated like rubber. It is a fruit and should be handled like it. I guess the only thing I’m trying to say is that once you get past buying beans left out in the elements for years and realize that coffee has seasons, there might be methods to extend that freshness after the coffee has been harvested.
I’m really curious, though, if others have experimented with freezing green coffee like Terroir has and what the results might be.
I love the sentiment of better coffee and faster travel from tree to coffeebar, but I wonder if the market is ready to pay for this extra work. We often compare coffee to other fruits (say, bananas) that have their season, ripen, and must be used when fresh. And these same seasonal fruits are often subjected to the same preservation processes that you’d like to eliminate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana#Modern_cultivation . In this parallel, a tree-ripened banana would taste better, but for the most part the market is unwilling to bear the cost.
Keep pushing the boundaries, man.
You know, Night Train, in a way we’re kinda arguing the same point, just looking through different windows. To me, I feel like using this term is the path of least resistance, a quick fix to a complex topic. I don’t just feel like “it may be confusing for them (customers) at first”, I feel like it will be misleading. I mean, even Daniel here refers to it as a fruit in reaction to your post about seasonality, and green coffee beans simply are not fruit.
Seasonality to me is a rather defined amount of time, and even the 3-6 month window that you note is a pretty wide differential. Green coffee is only at its best for either a quarter of a year or half a year? That’s quite the swing, rather ill defined. I would pose an idea to you, and I’m totally not trying to be a smart-ass, but if you want to really push that a coffee is at its very best in it’s first 3 months off of harvest then create tiered pricing for it where every 3 months you lower the price that your customers pay for said coffee accordingly. You would directly show the value that time adds/subtracts to/from a coffee.
I do appreciate your desire to push a coffee when it is at its most spectacular, and I believe that where you are coming from is really trying create better understanding of what a great coffee is. I just feel like the seasonality terminology misses the mark.
Well Golden Pony,
We do keep arguing the point for good reason. Whether coffee is a fruit or not, I have to ask, is there a time in a particular coffee’s lifespan when it IS quantifiably better than others, by even 1 point on a cupping scale? If so, when is it? Is that a concept that is so hard to grasp? I really don’t think so. So I cannot believe that any reasonable coffee person would say the same carefully handled Kenya is going to be the same 12 months off harvest as it is 3 months. Would you? So if that is too confusing, then I guess I feel like we should risk being confusing. I think your idea of bringing down the price once the coffee is off peak a great one. So why not just try to sell it all when its at its peak, in season, so to speak ;-).?
I can dig what you’re saying. I totally agree that there is a time in a particular coffee’s lifespan when it IS quantifiably better, and that has a lot to do with a number of factors, not just when it was harvested. And I think that we all agree that when a coffee starts showing deadness in the cup that it should not be sold at all. We should be able to tell our customers that the coffee no longer met our standards and not simply label it as out of season. What is confusing is that 2 coffees harvested at the same time from the same growing region could fall out of season at different times because of a number of factors. The problem isn’t when the coffee is awesome and your saying “yeah, this stuff is in top form right now, totally in season, dude.” The problem comes when the customer asks “Sweet, Champ. When does it go out of season?” I don’t know, I gots to cook this pasta for the fam.
are you going to approve my comments? It’s totally cool if you don’t, it’s your blog and all. But, it will make your response to me seem a little weird since the original post isn’t there and is awaiting moderation. Seriously though I think that we’re both trying to say that we want to better inform the consumer, I just want to do it on coffee’s own terms, whatever those are, instead of attaching it to something else that is just kinda related. I mean, it’s not wine, or fresh produce, or modern dance (although it shares some similarities with all of those) it’s coffee. I just feel like using the term makes it seem like it’s harvested and then roasted and then brewed and paints over so many other important steps.
Doug, it’s just that you’re not waiting long enough….
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tcvarney/4498755037/
I wonder how much the carbon foot print increases when deep freezing coffee, in our already carbon heavy industry to freeze coffee on a large scale would seem a little taxing on the environment, would it not?
Deaton, probably the same carbon footprint as 8 Roburs in one cafe :)
I also want to mention that the exception that Doug points out here, the wonky naturals exception, isn’t the only one. It is very common to see early central american arrivals that show “green” or “young” characteristics in the cup.
Anyways, I posted this over on the seasonality thread in coffeed.
The people who are for using seasonality as a term for coffee are saying what’s the harm, we want people to think about coffee differently then they do right now and we want them to experience coffees when they are at their best, right?
I do agree, but…
The people who are against it are saying that the harm is that the concept doesn’t really totally apply to coffee and that it’s misleading and could create mistrust with consumers as well as it belittles the importance of proper processing and handling.
The direction that I would like to see this discussion go in is research. There has been a little discussion already about research done on handling and packaging and how that prolongs coffee’s lifespan or protects it from premature aging. I think that we should be looking at a number of different things as well. Besides water activity, moisture content, and packaging and storage, what other variables play into the aging of coffee? Do certain varietals hold up better? Does higher altitude translate to a longer life, or does it create more of a swing and impact of environmental inputs?
It was very interesting to listen to Dr. Tim Schilling at the annual RG membership meeting in Anaheim talk about the Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative and how little research actually existed on coffee quality. I think that perhaps this aging and its impact on quality question is something that I would like to see the GCRI look at closely and that we should all support these efforts in every and all ways that we can. Again, I’m not trying to make a coffee immortal, but I think that we can all agree that more could be done to protect it from premature aging. I think that rather then saying that one coffee is in or out of season and saying that a coffee is better at a particular point in its lifespan, that we really need to be looking at why. This is an opportunity to view coffee on its own terms rather than using comparisons with other products that don’t totally apply.
I’m not sure why there’s a discussion as to whether or not coffee is a fruit. To my mind, it’s more like a grain. A crop that can withstand extended periods of time without the necessity for early harvest and nitrogen storage (as is the case with much of the current commodity fruit crop).
While I can agree that a coffee fresh from the harvest is arguably “better” than the same coffee eight months post harvest, are we even seeing this kind of “freshness”? Many of the coffees coming across our cupping table are still from the 2009 growing season. Logistics of storage, transportation, importation and the like cause coffee to take a long time to reach our shores, perhaps before we can argue whether or not the coffee is “better” two weeks from harvest we should try and see if we can actually land those coffees in the United States in that same time frame.
In Baltimore, I work with several different local farmers and producers. Undoubtedly, the product can be tremendous when harvested at the peak of freshness. However, Earl can pick at 4am this morning, I can have the strawberries by 8am and we can bake or process those strawberries by the early afternoon (at the latest). This kind of accessibility is massive but it’s difficult to correlate this same kind of “freshness” to that of coffee.
To my mind, the freshness debate is relative. Is the coffee produced in a thoughtful manner? Is it sourced thoughtfully? And regardless of the time span since harvest, how does it taste in the cup? If it’s still a tremendous and stellar cup, then I want to buy and serve it. Further, if that coffee is tremendous today and just so happens to be nine months post-harvest, does it really matter? Perhaps that same coffee was even better six months ago, but that’s neither here nor there because that time has passed and there’s no way to go back. The question at hand is: how does that coffee perform today? Does it meet our standards? Is it a coffee we would be excited and proud to serve today to our customers? If the answers are “yes” then I think we’re still doing the good work we need to be doing.
On the other hand, if we’re merely relying on the old descriptions and tasting notes to describe and sell a coffee that is noticeably diminished then we have failed and operate and shysters.
Biz wrote:
“I feel that using the word Seasonal is reductive because it leaves out so many factors as to why a particular coffee is wonderful. It also does not account for the skill of the green buyer and roaster as far as what coffees they purchase, how much of said coffee they purchase, and how they decide to roast/represent them.”
You would have a very good point here if it were true that roasters were out there promoting Seasonality as the sole, or even perhaps primary (or secondary, or tertiary) reason why a coffee tastes the way it tastes. But looking around I just don’t see that—a casual trip through roaster websites will reveal all sorts of different approaches to explaining coffee quality. Usually people will focus most sharply on those things that they believe themselves to be especially good at, or the things that they know best. For many this is roasting. For some it is sourcing. For others it is blending.
Looking just at those who have embraced the idea of seasonality in coffee it seems pretty clear that the messaging is not as simplistic as you make it sound. Most of them talk quite a lot about their sourcing efforts, their roasting approaches, the work of the farmers, the work of the cuppers, the botanic varietals, the micro-climates, and all that stuff that contributes to how a coffee tastes. In this context Seasonality is just one of many indicators that can lead a consumer towards better tasting coffees.
The idea here is a very straightforward one; I think that I understand your arguments about terminology being misleading (“specialty” is one of my favorites ;) but don’t agree that this is the case with Seasonality. What we are talking about here is actually very specific—the idea that there is a “prime” period for a given coffee, wherein it is at or near its most flavorful and complex, wherein its varietal nuance and terroir are most evident, wherein one can expect the most vibrant and expressive cup that coffee will ever be capable of. It is, more simply, the idea that coffees (like all organic consumables) do indeed decompose with time, and tend to be best closest to the date they were produced.
But don’t confuse Seasonality with Quality, or presume that we are using the terms as different ways of saying the same thing. This is, as far as I can tell, the source of your discomfort with the terminology.
I guess the best way to put is like this:
Quality—what is it defined by?
As you point out, there are of course many things that determine how a given coffee tastes, and many process-related actions that can modify the taste along the way. But let’s try to simplify for the purposes of this argument—what are the things that lead to quality in coffee on an agricultural and primary processing level?
–Botanic variety (genetics set the stage for what is likely and what is possible)
–Farm husbandry and climate factors (nutrition, solar radiation, water allow the tree to grow and either survive or thrive)
–Harvesting (is it ripe, is it not ripe, is it sorta ripe, is it intact or is the cherry broken?)
–Processing (fermentation, washing, drying, milling, resting)
Clearly all of these variables conspire to produce some sort of result, good or bad.
That result is the dried green coffee.
Now what comes next? Storage, followed by shipment. Coffee moves to consuming country.
OK, now of course the roaster has an opportunity to exercise some influence and modify the taste of the coffee. And of course this is an amazingly complex and fascinating transformative process. A talented roaster can play with a nice coffee and coax all kinds of different flavors out, quash some and highlight others, even add what some will call ‘extrinsic’ flavor in the form of carbon. Therein lies the beauty of roasting—the chemistry of roasting is exhilarating and profound and sometimes enigmatic.
Then, yeah, the Barista steps in and wields his/her particular brand of chemistry magic, and can also do a lot of things to the coffee that will modify the way it tastes, emphasizing certain characteristics in the coffee over others. Witness the beauty of extraction.
You know all this, I’m not trying to be patronizing. I just wanted to lay the groundwork for what I’m about to say, which is:
Seasonality is not a definition of quality, nor a determinant of quality. It is, however, a powerful indicator, for one important reason—coffee loses organic volatiles with the passing of time. Any green coffee in the world, good or bad, will decompose and decay as it ages. It will lose fragile aromatic compounds. It will become less intense.
As I roaster I care very much about what ‘state’ my coffee is in. The more fresh (read: the closer it is to the actual harvest date) it is, the more I have to work with. As the months pass by, I have less and less to work with, until at some point the coffee is a shadow of what it once was and has very little to offer. What has happened here is just a natural degenerative process. What was complex has become simpler through loss. Again, not a value judgment here—just an observation of what is happening to the green beans as time passes…they are losing things.
So getting back to Quality, for sure it is inaccurate to say that ‘this coffee is surely better than that one, because it was harvested more recently’. That statement would ignore all of the stuff brought up earlier…all the ‘modifiers’ that shape the flavor development of a coffee before it gets consumed. This 3-month old Congolese Robusta doesn’t taste better than that 9-month old Yirg. Nor does this 4-month old 30-Agtron roast of a coffee from Narino taste better than that 9-month old 60 Agtron coffee from Bucaramanga. The modifiers do matter; they matter a lot.
Which is of course why we (the royal we, we as those who care about great coffee) do bear a burden to give consumers the most detailed and clearest roadmap we can deliver that will help show them the way towards better tasting coffee.
That’s where the modifiers come in. Seasonality is one of many modifiers, but it is an important one. Look at it this way—consumers could know the Agtron number of a roast, but does that really tell them how the coffee will taste? They could know the varietal, but that’s not going to give them enough info to know how probable it is they will like the coffee (although it could function more powerfully as a negative indicator—i.e., this coffee is 100% Catimor and thus the probability is low that I will prefer it to those other ones). And of course they can also know when a coffee was harvested but in the absence of other information that doesn’t give them enough to make a good, educated choice.
However, if a coffee consumer is presented with several modifiers she could probably zero in on coffees she will like with a relatively good success rate. Say the package tells you:
The botanic varietal (cultivar)
The place it was grown (country, region, farm, altitude)
The processing method (wet, dry, semi-washed)
The harvest date(s)
The roast date (perhaps with an indication of relative degree of roast)
Now you are getting somewhere! Now the picture begins to emerge. Finally some choices can be made based on meaningful background data rather than abstract marketing. Sure, there will still be misses, as there are other variables to consider….but there will probably be far fewer of them, given that one can eliminate a lot of potential risks (that the coffee is too dark, that it is a poorly regarded varietal, that it is grown in a country with a low success rate with quality, that it is old).
So you know, I think we probably agree about all this. I think I may have just helped make your point for you, at least one of them—that we cannot just pick one of the many modifiers and pitch that to consumers as the critical arbiter of quality in coffee. That doesn’t help at all.
Where I do not agree is that there is anything vague or misleading or abstract about Seasonality as we have presented it. It really is simple—we know when each of the coffees we purchase was harvested, and we stick that information on the bag. That way a consumer will know if it is 3 months, 4 months, or 8 months removed from harvest, and that time span is one particular indicator about what one can likely expect from the coffee. It should not be taken in isolation, and isn’t presented that way.
The window we apply to determine whether a coffee should be considered “in-season” is not an arbitrary one. It is the result of 15 years of buying and selling coffees and observing their behaviors over time. The 9-month window (from date of harvest to out-of-season) is based on probability—9 months is about the time where most coffees (say 75% of them if you want a figure) begin to ‘lose it’ in a very observable way. Certainly we’ve seen some juggernaut coffees that still taste good after 12 months, and some others that have gone limp after just a 3 month run. But this is the other important point I wanted to make:
When we look for indicators that will help guide consumers towards quality, we ought to look at what is the most common experience rather than build the guidelines around the outliers or exceptions. So here it is—most coffees will slowly lose quality as they age. After about 9 months is when the age will become apparent to average tasters, most of the time. So if we want to design parameters around the window during which we can best expect a coffee to be near or at its peak flavor, doesn’t it make sense to use these sorts of statistics to determine what those parameters should be?
But wait, you argue, that’s the freaking point. Why put parameters at all, when we know them to be rough estimations that in some cases will not jive with the actuality? I would answer that most of what we do in coffee, especially where sensory evaluation is concerned, is estimation…and must be, given the nature and number of the variables that influence taste. It has been said that every single cup of coffee is a snapshot in time, never to be repeated.
The answer is all about intention. The intention is to provide as many meaningful, quantifiable indicators as we can to help consumers navigate the labyrinth that is ‘specialty coffee’. Harvest time is one such indicator, along with roast date and varietal. But a point in time only has meaning if there is context…and here the context is the Seasonality window. Perhaps you might disagree with the 9 month post-harvest window we’ve chosen….but is it better to have no window at all? To have no indicator to help introduce consumers to the fact that coffee seeds are organic agricultural products with a limited shelf life? Seasonality works because it is intuitive and familiar. Agricultural products have seasons. Fruits, corn, flowers, whatever…they all have seasons. Coffee has seasons too. So do sesame seeds. And rice. I’ve heard the argument that coffee is a grain/seed, not a fruit. I understand that, and agree with it. But seeds and grains age too! Although they are not bought and sold according to their harvest dates, it is still true that fresher sesame seeds taste better than older ones. Fresh rice has more flavor than older rice. And coffee is a seed with much more chemical complexity than either, which does mean that there is more to lose through decomposition. Probably you are right that it is trickier to define seasons with coffee than with Michigan blueberries. I accept that. But that doesn’t mean much…just means that we need to be careful when laying out the definition.
It doesn’t matter that some coffees will defy the odds and be great 10 months out. If that ever happens (it did happen to us two years ago, with this gorgeous coffee from Yirgacheffe we called Kurimi—that crazy stuff seemed nearly ageless) then count oneself lucky and keep on keeping on. We didn’t stop selling it because it was over 9 months out, we just wouldn’t label it as in-season. Would our customers stop buying it because there is no in-season sticker? No way—as long as it tasted great, it sold well. No problem. But again, that is an exception. Most coffees do not age as gracefully as that one.
It also doesn’t matter that some coffees will fall off the edge of the earth after 3 months and boast flavor notes of cardboard, starch, and cellulose. Sucks when it happens, but at that point we are screwed with or without a seasonality program. We wouldn’t sell a coffee that tasted like that, even if it was picked right of the drying patio and roasted.
Those are the outliers, the ones that don’t follow the statistical norm.
What happens when the statistical norm changes? That’s when we would need to adjust our parameters. If the worlds farmers wake up tomorrow and pick nothing but ripe coffees, dry everything to 10.5% on raised beds under shade, mill with minimal friction in cool conditions, store coffee in hermetic conditions, ship in reefer containers….yeah, then the 9 month window thing would likely become less meaningful. But today, tomorrow, next year, the year after that…I stand by it as a meaningful indicator.
Chris Schooley wrote:
“I just feel like seasonal is too much of a blanket term to use when we are trying to get the consumer to CELEBRATE the wonder of each coffee in its own unique way”
I’m not sure that’s the goal. This isn’t ‘We are the World’. Most coffees don’t deserve to be celebrated because they are unexceptional. And those that are exceptionally good do deserve celebration, but in decreasing measure as they move inexorably closer and closer to mediocrity with the passage of time. That’s the main purpose behind the seasonality push—it is a siren call to coffee drinkers that says “if you really want to see what I am capable of, please, please, please drink me now while I am still in my prime!” It isn’t to say the coffee cannot be enjoyed past peak.
Speaking of peak, the last thing I really wanted to comment on here was this idea that some coffees NEED to rest in order to be at their peak. That they need to ‘calm down’ or ‘settle in’ or something like that. There is no doubt that some coffees arrive in the US, several months post harvest, and then actually begin to taste better after sitting around for a while. That’s a real phenomenon. But I would suggest that there is a reason for this, and that it has to do very much with cherry ripeness at the time of harvest and with the quality of the drying. As you know, most coffees are picked well before they reach full ripeness. The hallmarks of under ripe coffees are things like astringency and sourness, which are negative traits in coffee. With time, some of those traits diminish (along with positive ones). There surely comes at some point a moment when the negative traits have sufficiently diminished to a level where they are barely perceptible, and when there are still enough positive traits left to be tasted. That moment might be the real ‘peak’ for that coffee. Fine. But it is defined as much by the absence of negative traits as it is by the presence of positive ones. And of course that is not what we are after—we want coffees that are harvested at peak ripeness and that taste great even two weeks after harvest. And that has been my experience, for sure….I taste a lot of coffee that are just weeks off the tree that are sweet, juicy, balanced, without even a hint of astringency, sourness, or ‘greenness’.
I do believe that saying ‘this coffee really needs rest’ is a euphemism for ‘this coffee was a bit under ripe’.
The moisture thing is similar. Most coffee isn’t dried very uniformly. Too slow, too fast, not enough circulation…all of these things lead to green coffee that isn’t homogeneous in moisture content or water activity. To compensate, farmers or millers will hold coffee in parchment to give it time to find some kind of equilibrium. Many farmers intentionally dry their coffees to 12.5% for economic reasons—more weight=more loot. But 12.5% is probably too moist…creating the necessity for further drying followed by further resting to get homogeneity. But what happens if the coffee is dried well from the start? 8-12 days on raised beds under shade, turned frequently, covered at times, taken down to 10.5%? I submit that this coffee does not have the same need for ‘rest’ to become more stable. It is already as stable as it needs to be.
Anyway, the point here is just that some of the conventional wisdom in the coffee world may have been derived from bad practices at the farm level. In the past there have been fewer options to dry right, fewer incentives to pick well, etc. The protocols that emerged, like reposo, may well be unnecessary when those conditions are eliminated and coffee is picked well + dried carefully. Just a theory, but at the very least the anecdotal evidence is piling up. It does seem to make sense though, right?
Thanks Geoff. I see all of your points and like you said, we really do agree on most everything here and I think that you raise a valid inquiry with your thoughts on ripeness of harvest and proper drying affecting the approach to reposo. My point this whole time has not been the concept, but the term, and you kinda solved that problem. I actually could get behind using “Prime” instead of “Seasonal”. It’s really kinda perfect and I can’t believe it didn’t come to mind earlier. It tells us just as much and more than what “seasonal” tells us. It says that this coffee is at its best and it also encourages the consumer to then inquire what makes this coffee “prime”, opening the door to better understanding. I’m personally going to use “prime” from now on. And, obviously I didn’t mean that we need to celebrate inferior coffees, but I would like to think that this is “We Are the World” and I would like to think of myself as Cyndi Lauper and you could be Huey Lewis and we could really change the world with a song and make people believe again in the power of pop music.