Comments on: Stumptown Coffee Roasters Guatemala Bella Carmona

By: Barth Anderson

Barth Anderson — Tue, 11 May 2010 20:04:39 +0000

Hiya Nathan! I’m feeling like each of the questions you have posited in that last post deserve a yes answer. That and some serious road time.

Why don’t you come by the Roastery tomorrow and we can talk about some of the complexities of growing, processing, transporting, storing, preserving, roasting, packaging and preparing these seeds we are all so enamored with? Hopefully we can delve a bit deeper by sharing some of our own explorations with you in person. We would be thrilled to have you as our guest!

By: Nathan

Nathan — Fri, 07 May 2010 22:53:44 +0000

Thanks for the comments! No doubt that my thoughts are missing some of pieces of the puzzle, and I look forward to filling in some of the blanks as time passes.

Based on your comments, I’m wondering about the impact of production processes on the perceived quality of coffee. If we’re to say that the differences between one harvest and the next are manifested only in quantity, not quality, than does the difference in quality between one lot of coffee and another largely come down to a combination of growing location (down to a micro-level) and how the coffee is processed?

And what about the notion often expressed in wine-making that to make good wine you have to begin with good grapes? Does this apply to coffee (aside from discussions of Robusta vs. Arabica)?

In the end, is coffee a product largely produced during processing? Or growing? It’s not an either or, but I can’t help but wonder which step plays the greater role.

Sweet Maria’s is great by the way. The info you folks post on your site is stellar, and I’ve had the pleasure of home-roasting several of your green coffees.

By: Thompson Owen

Thompson Owen — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:53:12 +0000

A good post, and your questions at the end do indeed provide great starting points for a discussion, a long long discussion. I can’t possibly address it, but with a general word of caution. Coffee is a dried seed from a flowering fruit-bearing shrub. It’s not a peach, or an avocado, or a grape, or a bottle of wine, or a pinto bean. It’s not indestructible, but it is a dried seed. Seasonality implies many things that are interesting to hold up to coffee but must be discussed with care and particular knowledge, not only about “harvest” in general, but the differences in harvests between on origin and another, between one region or microclimate and another. It is very difficult to speak universally about such things in coffee and end up with a good degree of accuracy. If it is a small crop for Nyeri this year, it neither means the quality is better (the notion that less production = good quality), not does it mean good coffee would be scarce. What does it tell you? Very little because unless there is a huge catastrophe, there is always good lots to be found. It makes sense to speak of harvests in terms of volume, but not really in terms of quality, since quality is found in specific cases, not general ones. Anyway, there are too many tangents here, and too many terms that need * by them, but I enjoyed your post. Keep it coming. -Tom