Real Coffee
A little extract from our book Real Coffee. Seems a fitting way to start a coffee blog.
Coffee is a precious, exotic and beautiful product. It’s really really hard to grow, to process and prepare for market. Yet we expect it to be on tap, at all times, effortlessly. Coffee has many many flavours but to most of us it’s just a commodity. We have lost touch with coffee and need to reconnect.
In recent coffee history people talk about the “Three Waves of coffee”. The first is the invention of instant coffee in the early 20th century, making coffee a household drink the world over. The second wave began with Starbucks in Seattle in the 80’s making coffee a ‘shared social experience’ and the explosive growth of coffee shops. Both these movements transformed our relationship with coffee. But taste and quality were inevitably sacrificed to convenience and mass production. Specialty coffee, we call it “Real Coffee”, is the third wave. It’s a reaction to the other two. With Real Coffee, the product and its quality take centre stage.
Real Coffee is the best of the coffee crop in every coffee growing region. The most flavoursome. It’s typically grown at the highest altitudes and where the atmospheric conditions converge to create the perfect farming environment. Real Coffee is inherently ethical. The growing conditions are invariably organic by default, and the premium the farmer obtains typically exceeds the wages offered by some NGO certification brands. Farmers recognise the value of these beans and process them with enormous care. They are hand sorted, washed and dried. Machine use is kept to a minimum.
With commodity coffee the opposite is the case. Machines are widely used as quality is not a factor – it’s just weight. The term ‘Specialty’ was first coined in 1974 by a gutsy american coffee trader, Erna Knutsen. She’d been offered one bag of “special green beans”. Her boss said she could buy it if she could sell it. She did. Everyone loved it. She went back and bought 300. Specialty coffee quickly took root on America’s west coast and the focus on quality and flavour inspired early adopters, all of whom continue to lead the coffee revolution in the states.
The movement spread to New Zealand and to Australia and on to London. Now it reverberates around the world. With specialty coffee festivals hosted in a rapidly growing coalition of cities, including: London, Shanghai, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin, Stockholm, Beijing, Seoul, New York, Athens, Budapest, Ho Chi Minh, Auckland, Nashville, Helsinki, Brazil, Sao Paulo, Toronto, Addis Ababa, Istanbul, Mumbai, Tokyo, and Bogota. In our country, the UK, after a slow start, Specialty Coffee is picking up the pace. It’s now over 10% of the total coffee market, and experiencing double digit growth every year.
That’s faster than the coffee market as a whole, driven by consumers desire for quality, product honesty – and flavour. Specialty coffee is defined by the global governing body, the Specialty Coffee Association, who also set the standard. They rate all coffees from 0 to 100. 80 and above is Specialty. 85 and above is amazing. The best coffees in the world. Under 80 is commodity – more ordinary, necessarily dark roasted and bitter coffee, that needs milk and sugar to make it drinkable.
The scoring is all about flavour using terms such as acidity, body, sweetness, clean cup, fragrance/aroma and aftertaste to describe that desired sensory experience. Just a reminder, commodity coffee (high street coffee) is sold by weight. Real Coffee brings out the unique flavour of each type of bean. It’s smooth and not bitter. It’s best taken black, although milk is fine.
Commodity coffee is bitter. It’s roasted far darker than Real Coffee. This is done to achieve consistency. When you have thousands of coffee shops and supermarket aisles to fill you need it to taste the same in every one. “Burnt always tastes burnt.” This dark roasting also hides defects. Defective beans affect flavour. The Real Coffee standard allows no major defects. With commodity coffee there is no limit to the defects allowed.
Real Coffee is now mainstream. Like good wine, artisan cheese, real bread, and real meat. It’s on the radar for people who want a great taste experience and truly care about the food they eat.