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Coffee

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Coffee
A Comprehensive Guide to the Bean,
the Beverage, and the Industry

Edited by
Robert W. Thurston
Jonathan Morris
and
Shawn Steiman

R OW M A N & L I T T L E F I E L D
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2013 by Rowman & Littlefield

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coffee : a comprehensive guide to the bean, the beverage, and the industry / edited by
Robert W. Thurston, Jonathan Morris, and Shawn Steiman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-1440-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-1442-2 (electronic)
1. Coffee industry. 2. Coffee. I. Thurston, Robert W. II. Morris, Jonathan, 1961–
III. Steiman, Shawn.
HD9199.A2C59 2013
338.4'766393—dc23
2013014865
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Preface xi
Introduction 1
Robert W. Thurston

Part I: The Coffee Business

1 Strategies for Improving Coffee Quality 13
Price Peterson
2 The Coffee Plant and How It Is Handled 20
Shawn Steiman
3 Digging Deeper: Cultivation and Yields 22
H. C. “Skip” Bittenbender
4 Coffee as a Global System 26
Peter S. Baker
5 What Does “Organic” Mean? 30
Robert W. Thurston
6 Coffee under Threat: The Growing Problem of the Coffee Berry Borer 35
Juliana Jaramillo
7 Culture, Agriculture, and Nature: Shade Coffee Farms and Biodiversity 41
Robert Rice
8 A Guatemalan Coffee Farmer’s Story: A Challenging Life in a Beautiful,
Harsh Land 52
Carlos Saenz
9 Pickers 56
Robert W. Thurston

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vi Contents

10 Coffee Processing: An Artisan’s Perspective 60

Joan Obra
11 Women in Coffee in Colombia 64
Olga Cuellar
12 How a Country Girl from Arkansas Became an Importer Leading
Other Women in Coffee 77
Phyllis Johnson
13 The Role of Nonprofits in Coffee 82
August Burns
14 Hunger in the Coffee Lands 86
Rick Peyser
15 The “Price” of Coffee: How the Coffee Commodity Market Works 92
Robert W. Thurston
16 Appreciating Quality: The Route to Upward Mobility for Coffee Farmers 99
George Howell
17 What Is Specialty Coffee? 102
Shawn Steiman
18 Where Does the Money Go in the Coffee Supply Chain? 106
Robert W. Thurston

Part II: The State of the Trade

19 The Global Trade in Coffee: An Overview 111
Robert W. Thurston
20 Coffee Certification Programs 116
Robert W. Thurston
21 Direct Trade in Coffee 121
Geoff Watts
22 Fair Trade: Still a Big Plus for Farmers and Workers around the World 128
Paul Rice

Producer Country Profiles

23 Hawaii 133
Shawn Steiman
24 India 137
Sunalini Menon
25 Indonesia 141
Jati Misnawi
26 Colombia 146
Luis Alberto Cuéllar

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Contents vii

27 Ethiopia 153
Willem Boot
28 Vietnam 158
Robert W. Thurston
29 Brazil 162
Carlos H. J. Brando
30 Supporting Coffee Farmers’ Response to Market Changes 167
Jeremy Haggar

Consumer Country Profiles

31 Introduction to Consumer Countries 173
Jonathan Morris
32 Denmark 175
Camilla C. Valeur
33 France 181
Jonathan Wesley Bell
34 Italy 184
Vincenzo Sandalj
35 United Kingdom 188
Clare Benfield
36 Russia 193
Robert W. Thurston
37 Ukraine 195
Sergii Reminny with Jonathan Morris
38 Japan 197
Tatsushi Ueshima
39 Germany 201
Britta Zeitemann
40 United States 206
Robert W. Thurston

Part III: The History of Coffee and Its Social Life

41 Coffee, a Condensed History 215
Jonathan Morris with material from Robert W. Thurston
42 Coffeehouse Formats through the Centuries: Third Places or Public Spaces? 226
Jonathan Morris
43 Why Americans Drink Coffee: The Boston Tea Party or Brazilian Slavery? 234
Steven Topik and Michelle Craig McDonald

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viii Contents

44 The Ecology of Taste: Robusta Coffee and the Limits of the Specialty Revolution 248
Stuart McCook
45 The Espresso Menu: An International History 262
Jonathan Morris
46 The Competing Languages of Coffee: Signs, Narratives, and Symbols
of American Specialty Coffee 279
Kenneth Davids

Part IV: The Qualities of Coffee

47 Coffee Quality 291
Geoff Watts
48 Why Does Coffee Taste That Way? Notes from the Field 295
Shawn Steiman
49 Coffee Quality and Assessment 304
Shawn Steiman
50 Distinctive Drinking: Specialty Coffee and Class in the United States 312
Jonathan D. Baker
51 Brewing: Dissolving the Puzzle 319
Andrew Hetzel
52 Roasting: Developing Flavor in the Bean 324
Colin Smith
53 Roasting Culture 328
Connie Blumhardt and Jim Fadden
54 Barista Culture 332
Sarah Allen
55 Brewing Culture 336
Alf Kramer

Coffee and Health

56 The Long Debate over Coffee and Health 343
Robert W. Thurston
57 Caffeine: How Much Is in Your Cup, and How Much Is Bad for You? 348
Robert W. Thurston
58 Recent Research on Coffee and Health 350
Lawrence W. Jones

Part V: The Future of Coffee

59 Coffee Research in Kenya: Current Status and Future Perspectives 359
Elijah K. Gichuru

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Contents ix

60 Genetically Modified (Transgenic) Coffee 363

Robert W. Thurston
61 Mechanization 366
Robert W. Thurston
62 A Life in Coffee 371
Ted Lingle
63 How to Make a Great Cup of Coffee 377
Robert W. Thurston with Shawn Steiman and Jonathan Morris

Acknowledgments 383
Glossary 385
Index 403
About the Editors and Contributors 411

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Preface

Putting this book together has been a great deal of work, but also a lot of fun, not to men-
tion a terrific learning experience for the three editors. We have certainly learned a lot from
each other. Just when you think you know something about coffee, you become aware of how
much else you might explore. That is partly because the industry is changing so fast, from
the way coffee trees are mulched to how to make a pour-over cup. But even if the industry
stood still today, the amount of information available on any given aspect of coffee would be
huge, and unknowable in its entirety for any one individual. That is why we have called on
so many experts on one area or another of agriculture, processing, retailing, cup preparation,
and consumption, to name a few fields.
We are deeply grateful to our contributors. Their generosity with their time and knowledge
raises a basic question about the coffee industry: Why are coffee people so nice? Why, when
academic historians like Robert Thurston and Jonathan Morris wander in, and at first don’t
know the difference between pulped naturals and pulp fiction, are coffee people so helpful?
(The two of us consider Shawn Steiman a coffee person to the core.)
So while all three editors are proud of this book, we have also been humbled by making it.
We hope that the articles will appeal not only to people in the industry and the millions of
coffee fanatics (geeks, they sometimes style themselves) around the world but also to many
others. This guide presents a wealth of information about a basic agricultural product that
has played a major role in history, affects the economic and social life of many millions today,
and is relentlessly studied and modified by scientists, roasters, baristas, and home consumers.
Although we have tried to produce a non-ideological work, the editors’ and contributors’
preferences—not always in agreement—will become clear. Above all, we’ve aspired to provide
a source of coffee knowledge for all who seek it and all who can benefit from it. We want the
best for those involved with coffee, beginning with the farmers. We are dedicated not to char-
ity or condescension but to the empowerment of industry members.
Finally, we hope this volume will be a pleasure to read.

xi

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Introduction
Robert W. Thurston

In this volume, the editors and the contributors have tried to provide a useful guide to coffee
from the ground up. The articles we have assembled cover a great range of topics, from soil to
roaster, barista, and home use. We are well aware that people’s tastes vary widely. Some prefer
coffee in a grocery store can, already ground, or even instant coffee that requires almost no
effort to prepare. Others pay considerably more money for select whole beans, which they
grind before making each cup. They weigh the coffee and the water, then keep one eye on the
temperature of the water and the other on the clock, as they count the seconds in the various
steps of making the beverage. Still other folks want coffee only at cutting-edge cafés—or, to
use an upscale term, coffee bars—made by an experienced, skilled barista.
Whatever your particular pleasure in a cup, we believe that all aspects of the coffee industry
should interest anyone who cares about the earth, farmers, globalization, or even basic eco-
nomics. In these pages, a wealth of material applies first to coffee but also to wider issues; a
good example is “organic.” Many coffee terms are explained in the glossary in the back of the
book. If a term is in the glossary, it will appear in boldface the first time it is used in a chapter
that discusses the term at length or in a context in which its meaning may not be clear. Since
this is a handbook, readers may want to consult the index to find where the topics that most
interest them are discussed. But of course all are invited to start with the first page and read
straight through.
Everyone connected to the coffee industry has a story about the cup of coffee, the one that
opened eyes, nose, and palate to the realization that coffee could be an excellent beverage.
In the 1950s and 1960s, my mother made coffee in a steel drip pot, using ground, canned
Maxwell House. I remember vividly that the results smelled and tasted like bitter, burnt metal.
But there was that one intriguing puff of marvelous fragrance when she opened a new can.
Years later, I happened upon a special deal for a kit with a carafe, a plastic filter cone, paper
filters, and a can of ground coffee. All of a sudden, I had much better coffee than I had ever
tasted before.
The cup, whatever it was for the initiated, opened the way for a journey deeper and deeper
into the complexities and pleasures, along with disappointments, of coffee. If we can hook
anyone into that journey with this book, we will be happy indeed. But this is not just a volume
for snobs.

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2 Robert W. Thurston

Figure I.1. Where coffee grows. Map by Lara Thurston.

That’s partly because coffee begins with dirt. Agriculture is one of the most fickle busi-
nesses; growing and selling coffee is one of agriculture’s most volatile sectors. From planting
a seedling until a tree bears usable coffee fruit—called berries or cherry, usually in the singu-
lar—can take four years. The weather, war, emergence of a new producer (like Vietnam in the
late 1990s), and changing tastes can wreak havoc on production and the price farmers can get
for their beans, which are in fact the seeds of the coffee fruit.
Boom-and-bust cycles have affected coffee from the 1880s on. In the 1930s, the bottom fell
out of the market; Brazilians, the largest producers for decades, responded by dumping coffee
into the ocean or burning it, producing steady smoke and an acrid odor over Rio. The price of
coffee alternately soared and dove in the following decades, until it hit the miserably low figure
of about 40 cents a pound in New York in the fall of 2004, at a time when it cost farmers at
least 70 cents a pound to produce a crop, or more like $1 in many parts of the world. But
in June of 2011, bad weather in several major producing countries, combined with increased
demand for coffee, pushed the New York C price above $3 before it began to subside a little.
When I visited Kenya in 2004, several people told me “coffee is an old man’s crop.” No one
wanted to enter the business. But at current prices, growing coffee has become attractive again.
Still, farmers, especially ones raising coffee on a small scale, maybe on a hectare (about 2.5
acres) or two of land, capture little of the money that consumers in the Western world spend
on beans or the brew. Among the subjects this book covers is why that difference exists, what
is being done about it, and what the future for coffee producers might look like.
Consumers’ tastes and desires for coffee have followed their own twisted paths. In an il-
lustration entitled “US coffee consumption—a nation goes soft,” the NGO Oxfam finds that
in 1970, Americans drank 36 gallons of coffee per person per year. In 2000 the figure was 17
gallons, while soft drink guzzling went from 23 gallons per capita to 53 gallons.1 These figures
tally, unfortunately, with increased obesity in the U.S.
On the other hand, anyone not living in a cave for the past thirty years knows that coffee
has surged to the forefront of public culture in many parts of the world. New coffee shops have

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Introduction 3

changed the face of not only American cities, but also British, German, Colombian, Kenyan,
and Indonesian towns, to name a few others. The U.S. counted about 2,000 local or small chain
shops in the early 1980s; by the end of 2008, America could boast 27,715 specialty coffee
outlets, of which 11,100 or 47 percent were Starbucks.2 Having opened its 100th outlet in In-
donesia, Starbucks plans to launch another 15 there this year. But the champion of recent expan-
sion is probably Costa Coffee, owned by Britain’s Whitbread Corporation. Two Italian brothers,
immigrants to the UK, founded Costa in 1971. Absorbed by Whitbread in 1995, Costa now
has 1,871 coffee bars and plans to reach 3,500 in the next five years.3 The firm also operates
vending machines, self-service bars, and coffee kiosks. Like Starbucks, Costa Coffee is already an
international presence, with stores in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, China, Russia, and India.
Despite this third wave of coffee conquests, most people around the world drink what
snobs in the business—in fact they happily refer to themselves as coffee geeks—would call
mediocre or outright bad coffee. First of all, about 40 percent of the coffee sold globally, as we
shall see below, is robusta. Properly called Coffea canephora, robusta is a tougher plant than
its relative Coffea arabica. Accordingly, robusta’s taste is rougher, bitter, and lacking in subtlety.
Robusta goes into instant coffee, grocery store cans, and many espresso mixtures, especially in
Europe, where it helps produce the brown foam called crema and to provide an extra kick of
caffeine. Americans still buy most of their coffee in cans, either metal or plastic: 57 percent of
purchases for home brewing were for such containers, a 2011 survey found, while 31 percent
went for bagged coffee (whole bean or ground), and 8 percent for capsule or pod products.4
Like wine, coffee is marked by extremes and everything in between. You can buy a bottom-
less cup fairly cheaply across the United States. In Europe you have to buy mediocre coffee
one cup at a time, although Britain, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries prepare some
excellent drinks. Recently a drugstore near my home ran an ad for Folgers coffee in a plastic
tub, already ground, decaf or regular, for $1.43 a pound. At that price, the results, no matter
how you brew, will disgust any coffee geek. Moreover, the farmers who grow the coffee beans
used for such a grim product earn virtually nothing.
For most Americans, and many people in other lands, everyday coffee remains the stuff of
jokes: “Drink Coffee: Do Stupid Things Faster with More Energy,” reads a popular refrigerator
magnet, the ultimate cultural signpost of our times. If the coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts might
deliver that extra energy, and might also be deemed barely drinkable by people in the high
end or specialty coffee business, Dunkin’ smiles broadly on the way to the bank. It leads the
pack of retailers in America, with about 6,800 stores across the country, and another 3,000
abroad. Dunkin’ sells some 1.5 billion cups of coffee worldwide each year, to help wash down
900 million doughnuts consumed in the U.S. alone.5
Dunkin’ can provide a close encounter with a doughnut, while other coffees have taken
me to a near-spiritual plane, for example Ethiopian Yirgacheffe in certain years, or fabulous
beans from the Kona Coast of Hawaii. Such coffee can cost $35, $40, $60, $100 a pound.
But after an initial investment in equipment for home brewing, anyone can have a cup in
the kitchen for 35 or 40 cents. The most expensive coffee in the world, kopi luwak, at some
$300 a pound, continues to elude me; the people I know who have tasted it say it’s terrible.
Whatever kind you drink, or even if you don’t touch coffee, it calls for attention and re-
spect. Consider the impact of the crop and the beverage over the past four centuries, longer
in the Middle East and parts of Africa:

• Coffee was the first commodity truly traded around the whole world, making globaliza-
tion more than 350 years old.

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4 Robert W. Thurston

Figure I.2. An Arbuckle’s “trade card” from the late 1880s, one of a series of “countries of the
world.” One of a few illustrations of the day that connected consumption, in this case by elegant
American women, with coffee farming. Slavery had been abolished in Brazil in 1888; perhaps
that’s why the woman picking coffee below the map is smiling. Courtesy of Special Collections,
Miami University

• Coffee and slavery, or some other form of forced, unfree labor, were inseparable for nearly
300 years, into the 1880s.
• Coffee has profoundly affected the environment, particularly in the destruction of forests
in Latin America and the Caribbean. On the other hand, coffee farmers and buyers today
are often leaders in efforts to redeem the land and to practice sustainable agriculture.
“Social responsibility,” to both the land and the people who work it, has become a catch
phrase for everyone working in coffee, from the smallest farmers to the biggest multina-
tional corporations. Sometimes they even follow through on that idea.
• Coffee has been both a mirror of social life in the consuming (as opposed to the produc-
ing) countries and a powerful factor in changing social standards and interaction. To
mention a few examples, coffee helped introduce major changes in the gender roles and
images of women in Britain as coffeehouse culture developed in the 1600s. Coffee pro-
vided the dominant social lubricant in American social life from the late 1800s until the
early 1970s. And just try to think of Italy from 1900 on without coffee.
• More than a few writers depended on coffee or coffeehouses to keep putting words on
paper. Here is a selection of outstanding names: Samuel Richardson, who penned the first
books in English recognized as novels, beginning with Pamela in 1740; the great French
philosophe Voltaire, who wrote a play translated into English in 1760 as The Coffee House,
or Fair Fugitive; the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804); the French real-
ist novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850); T. S. Eliot, American-born but an emigrant
to England, who wrote with longing “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” in
the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915; and the cosmopolitan Ameri-

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Introduction 5

can Ernest Hemingway sitting with a pencil and paper in Paris cafés in the 1920s. Paul
Erdos, 1913–96, a Hungarian scholar, often worked around the clock. He once said, “A
mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”6
• TV shows like Friends and Frasier chose a neighborhood coffeehouse as a meeting point
and social ground. Coffee has had a bit or a major part in countless movies, and it flows
through popular music in a way that no other substance does. “Black Coffee,” “Coffee in
Bed,” “Coffee and Reefer” resonate widely in Western countries; substituting tea, lemon-
ade, or even any alcoholic beverage would produce strange results. Coffee is a perfectly
acceptable, even favorite drink in Muslim countries, while of course alcohol is forbidden.
Only Westerners who avoid coffee for religious reasons do not interact directly with the
brew’s great cultural and social influence. Yet everyone feels the presence of coffee.
• Caffeine, above all in coffee (but also in tea, chocolate, soft drinks, energy drinks, and
as a booster in various headache tablets, among other sources) is the world’s most widely
consumed drug—in the sense of a substance ingested that alters body chemistry or men-
tal state. Is it good or bad for your health? We investigate the latest findings on that issue.
• Coffee grows in some 70 countries around the world. Figures on how many people work
with coffee are not exact, but the International Coffee Organization, based in London,
estimates that 26 million people are occupied with coffee in 52 producing countries.7
Millions more are employed in importing, roasting, investigating, and making coffee in
the developed world.
• According to the United Nations, at the peak of coffee imports in 2009, consuming
countries were spending about $27.1 billion a year to purchase coffee.8 But, considering
the cost of roasting, storage, transportation, labor, and other factors in the actual making
of a cup of coffee, the coffee business may amount now to some $100 billion annually.9
• Alas, contrary to claims made in many books and articles, coffee is not the second most
valuable commodity (after oil) sold internationally. Aluminum and copper fetch more
money, while among agricultural products, wheat, flour, sugar, and soybeans all out-
strip coffee.10 Coffee probably held first place for a time, as the spice trade declined in
the 1500s and 1600s and before sugar became an everyday item, beginning in Britain.
In recent decades, coffee exports have also dropped as a portion of foreign earnings
for most producing countries. Yet in looking for ways to bolster the economy from
Nicaragua to Tanzania, or how to create more secure, decent jobs, coffee continues to
be especially important.

Meanwhile, the global consumption of coffee, especially of high-end or specialty cof-

fee—which we define and discuss in depth—is rising steadily. This progression owes much to
Starbucks and the march of its outlets throughout America since the 1980s. Starbucks had to
close some stores in the Great Recession that began in 2007 but has recently regained ground.
As for the independents, they too declined for a while, but their number has and will certainly
continue to increase. Whether a wonderful or an evil company, Starbucks has been the tide
that since the 1980s has generally lifted all boats. As a coffee shop owner from Long Beach,
California, once told me, “There is a Starbucks going up across the street from my shop. If
they would let me, I’d volunteer to go over and hang drywall, just to get them going sooner.”
He figured that people would come to Starbucks and then get curious about the store across
the street; maybe it had better coffee.
Coffee has a long, highly checkered political history. Coffeehouses did not create English po-
litical parties and thus serve as midwife to democracy, but the atmosphere over a steaming (and

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6 Robert W. Thurston

probably horrible tasting) cup did facilitate trading ideas about politics. English conservatives
feared this “bourgeois public sphere” so much that in 1676, Charles II banned coffeehouses.
His edict was never widely enforced, while his repeated meetings with coffee businessmen in
succeeding years, although marred by occasional arrests for “sedition” and some local closings
of houses, signified a gradual lessening of royal control of business in general.11 Political power
was shifting from scepter to cup. Revolution in France may not really have gestated in the cof-
feehouses of Paris, but again the cafés served as discussion centers and meeting points for people
seeking change. Latin America has been the biggest site of disputes over labor and land—in
short, over the region’s most vital issues—and the scene of repeated revolutionary activity that
grew in key respects from the coffee business.

This book aims to provide, in one usable volume, a guide to all aspects of the coffee business.
The entries and personal stories woven around them start from the ground up; where and
how is coffee grown? Then the narrative moves through the stages of processing, exporting,
importing, roasting, and making the beans into beverages. On paper or your screen is a guide,
a handbook, a reference tool, one intended to inform and to please. But we also ask blunt
questions about what practices improve the land and help coffee people and what techniques
or habits are harmful. A huge issue is where the money goes and why. If—and this is a very
big if—it costs $3 for a cup of coffee in a large American or European city, but a farmer gets
only $3 a day, the contributors discuss why that might be so. Greed alone plays a small part
in this equation, to the extent that it expresses the truth at all.
No product available anywhere in the world is more laden with the baggage of guilt, de-
sire, and promise than coffee. The guilt comes from the $3 cup/$3 a day formula: Western
consumers should do the right thing and fix that situation. But while many coffee farmers, let
alone the day laborers they often hire to pick the ripe coffee fruit, remain poor, it may be that
much of the guilt surrounding the beverage is misplaced. We look carefully at the idea of fair
trade, among other schemes intended to help producers, but equally hard at basic factors that
contribute to the cup/farm difference.
Longing and coffee have mixed for centuries. “Passion” is a word often associated with
coffee. In the past few years, ad campaigns have turned to the bizarre or the extreme.
Lavazza Coffee promotions, for instance, show that sex and coffee are strongly linked,
especially in the Italian mind. But here, too, this book reveals a long tradition of blending
coffee with the pursuit of romance, the exotic, or simply escape from daily life. This was
true by the last decades of the nineteenth century, if not well before. Today relaxation and
“me time,” in which an individual, almost always a woman, achieves isolation from everyone
and everything else, are among coffee’s promiscuous promises. A Taster’s Choice ad of a few
years ago announces, for example, “Serenity. Tranquility. Balance. It’s all right here—made
fresh in your cup.”12
Like wine, coffee offers a path to sophistication. The New York Times Magazine published a
special advertising section in February 1999 that proclaimed, “Coffee requires that we treat it
as a prized commodity, storing and brewing it with loving care. . . . Each coffee bean acquires
a distinctive taste, depending on how it is roasted.”13 Borrowing consciously from the vocabu-
lary of wine, and simultaneously attempting to draw on Americans’ notion (or anxiety) that
sophistication comes only from Europe, terroir has emerged as a fashionable term to suggest
the great care that individual farmers put into growing coffee.14
Such appeals to good taste, offered even by makers of instant coffee, are hardly new in the
history of coffee advertising. Since the 1880s, coffee sellers have tried, and are still trying,

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Introduction 7

everything from teaching easy steps to better housewifery to serving the beverage as a social
lubricant to transporting the consumer through the cup to exotic locales to, inevitably, as-
sociating the drink with sex.
What is new in the atmosphere surrounding the brown liquid is the designation since the
1980s of coffee as an ethical compass. “Can Coffee Drinkers Save the Rainforest?” asks one
journalist, while another wants to know “Can Great Coffee Save the Jungle?”15 Forest or
jungle, the task would be a big responsibility, and quite distant from saving oneself through a
cup of instant tranquility. The Green Mountain Coffee Company proclaims on its bags that,
“Great coffee changes everything.” Of course, these lines imply that drinking bad coffee will
further degrade the environment in producing areas.
The biggest transnational coffee sellers, Kraft (U.S.), Nestle (Swiss), Sara Lee (U.S.), Folgers
(also U.S., recently sold by Procter and Gamble to the Smucker Corporation), and in some
counts Tschibo (German), together continue to sell more than 50 percent of the world’s coffee
annually. Because their presence in coffee is so large, they are under steady assault by green
activists, coffee connoisseurs, and labor advocates. Perhaps everyone who touches or tastes
coffee, from the farmers to the stressed urbanites of the UK and the U.S., is being “mugged in
your cup.”16 Yet there are positive trends as well, even among the coffee giants.
Starbucks prides itself on its initiative “to foster a better future for farmers and a more stable
climate for the planet,” as well as on “economic transparency” through evidence of payments
along the supply chain that demonstrate “how much of the price that we pay for green coffee
gets to the farmer.” The company is “collaborating with innovative nonprofit organizations to
support their neighborhood revitalization efforts and improve community education, employ-
ment, health, housing and safety.”17
That all sounds wonderful. But perhaps even Starbucks—to some, Starbucks above all—is
the devil in the brew? A search on the web for anti-Starbucks images turns up a sea of them.
“Corporate Coffee Sucks” is fairly mild, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drink Starbucks” a bit
harsher. “Starsucks” kicks the language up a notch, while the famous mermaid surrounded by
“StarFuck Off ” challenges conventional good taste.18 Is the company really so bad, or is it just
so well known that it has become a convenient target for consumer discontent? After all, at
least one business group has recently given Starbucks a “corporate responsibility award” for its
practices.19 The controversy over good Bucks, bad Bucks, will certainly continue.
And where might coffee fit into the debate over slow food vs. fast food, artisanal food vs. in-
dustrial food?20 Coffee and indeed the entire food business are experiencing profound changes
everywhere. The drink can be a slow consumable, prepared with care in a nearly ritualistic
fashion; it can be a fast beverage or, of course, an instant one. McDonald’s is now hard at work
trying to square the circle by selling slow coffee inside its fast food restaurants. Customers are
apparently willing to take an extra second or two before they cross from the hamburger side
of a McDonald’s into a plusher McCafé.
Coffee drinkers in most countries cannot be strict locavores, who consume only food prod-
ucts transported to them from less than 150 miles away. No transoceanic trade, no coffee in
the major consuming countries, outside of small amounts produced in the Hawaiian Islands,
Puerto Rico, and Australia. Is the long-distance trade itself a problem? Surely most observers
of the business and most coffee drinkers would say no; the issue is rather how to improve the
global flow of coffee and money. Income needs to rise in the producing countries, making
long-haul trade essential. Already, promising trends in coffee consumption, and with it upscale
cafés and higher-paying jobs, have appeared in some producing countries. When the middle
class, its tastes, and its consumption grow in the developing world, less high-quality coffee

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8 Robert W. Thurston

will go out onto the global market. A smaller supply for export will help to keep prices up. If
this hopeful cycle is not destroyed by global warming, it will improve life for coffee farmers.
Part of the difficulty in talking about coffee in recent years has been that writers and con-
ferences tend to focus on arabica, the good beans that are turned into “specialty,” “differenti-
ated,” or “gourmet coffee.” Robusta, typically the target of sneers from people engaged with
specialty coffee, accounts for a great deal of the world’s production and for much of the money
that coffee fetches. This volume pays attention to robusta and to what the specialty industry
calls “commodity coffee,” essentially anything sold in a grocery store can or plastic tub.
The models of how to grow, select, and sell coffee offered in these pages are partly about
how to extract more money from consumers—because good coffee is on a par with good wine
in many respects and ought to command as high a price as fermented grape juice does—how
to lower costs for the producer, or how to eliminate some of the middlemen who handle cof-
fee on its way (generally) north to the consuming centers, all with the goal of keeping more
money in the pockets of growers and roasters.
The book as a whole endorses no particular formula for growing and marketing coffee; large
farmers may make money and provide excellent facilities for migratory pickers, for example.
Co-ops may work well or may be plagued by internal problems that hamper their effectiveness
and hurt profits. This volume’s motto might be “whatever works.”
The coffee plant itself is the subject of constant efforts to improve yields and hardiness.
Researchers in the producing countries are at work daily grafting, pruning, testing biosprays
made from naturally occurring ingredients, trapping bugs in homemade goo, or adding insects
to control diseases on the plants. Non-organic pesticides and insecticides have never been
cheap, but from 2007 to 2008 they doubled in price in many parts of the world.
Finally, coffee farmers, like their compatriots in any other field of agriculture, are always
looking for more ways to earn money. They grow other crops alongside or between the coffee
trees. Got birds? Bring on the ecotourists. Got beautiful land? That almost goes without saying
where coffee is grown, so build a lodge and invite visitors from the northern hemisphere. All
you need is capital and a low level of violence across your country; yet those are two things not
easy to come by in many parts of the coffee world, as several of our writers show.
Surely the best way to make coffee good for the earth, for the people who grow, pick,
process, and sell it, as well as for consumers, is to educate the last group. Coffee drinkers,
especially in the consuming countries of the north, need to become more aware of what goes
into the dark brew. Several entries emphasize this thread.
If conditions in producing countries are really to improve, more money must make its way
down the commodity chain and into the farmers’ hands. The alternative, especially when the
world price of coffee dips below the cost of local production, as it did in 1999–2004, is dire
poverty, movement from the countryside to the fetid slums of a city like Managua, Nicaragua,
and then north through Mexico to the United States. In some cases people could not move;
they stayed in the villages and starved.21
How to produce good coffee, whether to promote organic agriculture or not, and whether
co-ops are the best organizations for the crop, are among the major issues explored here. How
to get more money to the farmers, through lowering their costs, through fair trade, direct
trade, certification labels, or by honing consumers’ tastes, are other crucial questions. The edi-
tors and contributors hope to educate more people about coffee, making them yearn for good
coffee, as they define it for themselves, in the cup, for the planet, and for farmers.

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Introduction 9

NOTES

1. Charis Gresser and Sophia Tickell, Mugged: Poverty in Your Coffee Cup, Oxfam Research Report,
September 10, 2002, http://www.oxfamamerica.org/publications/mugged-poverty-in-your-coffee-cup,
p. 9. The “source” for the figure is given as “US Department of agriculture/Davenport & Company.”
2. Dan Bolton, “Recession reconfigures coffee retail,” Specialty Coffee Retailer 16, no. 8 (August
2009): 12.
3. Zoe Wood and Simon Bowers, “Costa Coffee chain to double in size,” Guardian.co.uk, April 28,
2011.
4. The National Coffee Association USA (NCA USA), National Coffee Drinking Trends Study (New
York: NCA USA, 2011), 41; a sample across the country of 2,663 people aged 18 years and older.
5. http://news.dunkindonuts.com/press-kit, June 11, 2011.
6. T. R. Reid, “Caffeine,” National Geographic, January 2005, 16.
7. International Coffee Organization, “World Coffee Trade 2012,” http://www.ico.org/trade_e
.asp?section=About_Coffee ICO, accessed April 10, 2012. Slightly different figures are given in Daniele
Giovannucci and Jason Potts with B. Killian, C. Wunderlich, G. Soto, S. Schuller, F. Pinard, K. Schro-
eder, and I. Vagneron, Seeking Sustainability: COSA Preliminary Assessment of Sustainability Initiatives in
the Coffee Sector, Committee on Sustainable Assessment. September 2008, Winnipeg, Canada, 3. COSA
is affiliated with government agencies in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.
8. United Nations International Merchandise Trade Statistics, Yearbook 2009, Commodity Pages,
071, Coffee and Coffee Substitutes, http://comtrade.un.org/pb/CommodityPagesNew.aspx?y=2009,
accessed June 11, 2011.
9. This is the estimate made by Ric Rhinehart, Executive Director of the Specialty Coffee Associa-
tion of America, in October of 2011. Ric Rhinehart, “The new market reality,” Specialty Coffee Chronicle
3 (2011): 6.
10. Mark Pendergrast, “Coffee second only to oil? Is coffee really the second largest commodity?” Tea
& Coffee Trade Journal, April 1, 2009. Thus Pendergrast has revised the conventional claim about coffee’s
second place in world trade made in, for example, his own Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and
How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xv.
11. Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2005). The classic discussion of the bourgeois public sphere is Jürgen Habermas,
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans.
Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). The original, German
version was published in 1962.
12. Smithsonian, May 2002. The picture is of a cup of coffee by itself against the background of a
Japanese sand garden. Or see the ad “Welcome to Starbucks. Seating capacity: one.” The New Yorker,
May 6, 2002. The photo is of a French café chair with a cup of coffee sitting on the seat—no people
in sight—in a charming cottage or apartment courtyard. In fact, ads that tout escape to tranquility are
aimed particularly at women, whose magazines in America today constantly urge females to live at a
frantic pace, then to find “stress-busting tricks,” as “My Health Secret” put it in Health Magazine, De-
cember 2008, 160.
13. “The Art of Coffee” [advertisement], New York Times Magazine, February 7, 1999, 36, 38.
14. George Howell’s Terroir Coffee Company is perhaps the best example of this approach; see http://
www.terroircoffee.com. Howell aims to educate consumers about excellent coffee, with the expectation
that their pleasure and his profits will increase.
15. Jennifer Bingham Hull, “Can Coffee Drinkers Save the Rainforest?” Atlantic Monthly, August
1999; Katherine Ellison, “Can Great Coffee Save the Jungle?” Smithsonian, June 2004.
16. Gresser and Tickell, “Mugged,” 10.
17. http://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/sourcing/coffee; http://www.starbucks.com/responsi
bility/community/community-stores; both accessed June 9, 2013.

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10 Robert W. Thurston

18. My search for “anti-Starbucks” through Google produced “about 216,000” results, June 11,
2009, while Google Images turned up 4,140 results. However, many may be duplicates.
19. One award is from the Corporate Responsibility Office Association. The judges for the prize are
two professors from business schools, the director of Institutional and SRI Marketing, Calvert Company,
and the chief investment officer, Domini Social Investments. http://www.thecro.com/?q=node/167, June
11, 2009. Starbucks is also, once again, on the list of Forbes Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work
For. An assessment that appears to be more or less balanced can be found in Human Resources, June 3,
2008: surveys of Starbucks’ employees conducted randomly around the globe every two years found, in
the last round, that 86 percent were satisfied or very satisfied with working conditions, pay, and benefits.
On the other hand, Starbucks has recently been involved in a number of unfair labor practice suits in
the U.S. See http://stopstarbucks.com.
20. See, among other recent works, Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann, eds., Food and
Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World (New York: Berg, 2008); Richard
Wilk, ed., Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System (Lanham, MD: AltaMira,
2006); and Kate Soper, Martin Ryle, and Lyn Thomas, eds., The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Dif-
ferently (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
21. Gresser and Tickell, “Mugged,” 10. I traveled in the Matagalpa region of Nicaragua in October
2004. Villagers reported starvation among neighbors who could no longer make money from coffee.

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Part I
THE COFFEE BUSINESS

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1
Strategies for Improving Coffee Quality
Price Peterson

Editor’s note (RT) on the Peterson farm operation: Price Peterson heads a family team, with his wife
Susan, his daughter Rachel, and his son Daniel, that produces some of the world’s finest coffee. Their
farm, La Esmeralda, is high on the side of Mount Baru in western Panama. Early in this century,
Daniel discovered some Gesha (or Geisha) plants growing wild on their land. Gesha would seem to
be an unlikely candidate for the best coffee ever: it is a spindly tree whose branches tend to curl up
instead of the usual down; it isn’t especially productive; and it is more than ordinarily susceptible
to leaf rust, the bane of Latin American growers. Nevertheless, the Petersons felt that the Gesha,
originally brought to the New World from Ethiopia in the 1950s, had extraordinary potential. They
were right. Within a few years the variety was winning Best of Panama competitions; from 2005
through 2007, it was chosen best coffee by the Roasters Guild of America, an unprecedented run.
Price, who holds a PhD in neurochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, is a meticulous
farmer and craftsman. Some thirty years ago, he gave up a tenured position at Penn and moved
with Susan to Panama. Working closely with American importers like George Howell, the Petersons
have developed special practices to make sure that their coffee does not lose quality on its way to the
consumer. For example, they dry pulped beans to 12 percent humidity, then pack the coffee into
plastic bags for weeks, while they monitor it for changes in taste. When the results are satisfactory
by their exacting standards, they repack the coffee in vacuum-sealed bags and ship it immediately.
Now sold directly through an online auction each May, the best of Price’s Gesha has sold for as much
as $130 a pound green. That means importers must bring it to the U.S. and roast it here; the final
price for the best of the La Esmeralda Gesha can then be over $200 a pound. Often rated at 95
points or more, this is coffee to die for.
Finally, the Petersons have done a remarkable job providing facilities for their pickers. They
encourage indigenous families to return each year, and they do. For the Petersons, sustainability
refers to people as well as to the land. Thus the growers have set up a daycare center for harvesters’
children, a nutrition program for them, and weekly visits by a physician and a dentist. Like the
gorgeous farm itself, the degree of trust on all sides is a wonderful thing to see.
A further note on the terms in Price Peterson’s article: We chose to put this piece first, partly be-
cause Price mentions so many important factors, up to the level of export from a producing country,
in achieving good to great coffee. Many specific words he uses, like Q-grader cuppers or mucilage,
are explained in the glossary.

13

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Figure 1.1. Price Peterson on his farm, 2008. Photo courtesy of Hacienda La Esmeralda, Bo-
quete, Panama.

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Strategies for Improving Coffee Quality 15

Thirty years ago, I bought a new Ford pickup truck for twenty-six bags of coffee. Today, a
new Ford pickup costs 151 bags of coffee. To stay in business, the coffee farmer must either
produce more coffee with fewer resources on cheaper land or separate himself from “com-
modity coffee” by producing a high-quality crop. Quality—always determined by buyers’
perceptions—can be either taste or a social, environmental, or health advantage.
If farmers opt for quality, they should choose the tangible or the intangible, either taste or
a perceived benefit to the earth and society. The advantage of producing coffee with excellent
taste is that it can be universally and permanently recognized by the educated consumer who
values his palate. But high-quality coffee, as rated on a scale discussed below, will probably
also be more costly to produce.
Farmers who opt for intangible quality usually do so because they must. Issues of climate,
the varieties available for cultivation in a given area, or culture preclude the achievement of
good taste. In such cases, farmers need to invest in a socially perceived value such as organic,
green, bird-friendly, or certification, for example by Fair Trade USA, that satisfies some
buyers’ need to feel that their coffee delivers moral benefits. These values are neither universal
nor permanent, but they may allow producers to survive for a period.
How can high-quality coffee, marked by exceptionally good taste, be produced? It should
be said at the outset that universally accepted standards for evaluating taste in coffee now exist.
Internationally, there are now certified Q-grader cuppers from fifty-four countries who cup
and evaluate coffee by the same standards. The Q system allows for remarkably objective scor-
ing and evaluation of coffee’s quality. Just as there is a 100-point tasting system for appraising
wine, there is a similar one for evaluating coffee, developed by Ted Lingle and the Specialty
Coffee Association of America (SCAA). In general, coffees scoring over 80 points are said to
qualify as specialty coffee. Beans in this range are considered out of the commodity category
and worthy of serious consideration as fine coffees.
Like fine wines, quality coffees are rarely the product of large corporate efforts. They gener-
ally come from small farms in privileged climes where a compulsive artisan is at work.

THE PLACE

There is an old saying that a good farm is the product of “the man, not the land.” To a degree
that remains true. I have seen good coffee grown on a parched and sun-drenched sandy hillside
in Southern California by a young graduate of the California Polytechnic State University. I
have also seen good coffee grown in a valley in Panama where it rained 360 days of the year,
and people talked not about soil but about the quality of mud. In both cases, the producers
were exceptional farmers.
The perfect coffee farm would lie within 12 degrees of the equator, so that it would have
fairly even sun- and day-length; it would be gently sloped to facilitate drainage and harvesting; it
would receive about 2 meters of rain with a marked, but short, dry season; and the wind would
blow at no more than 7 kilometers per hour year round. For great coffee it would have daytime
temperatures in the low 20s Centigrade with nighttime temperatures around 12 degrees. Finally,
it would be nice if it had no insect or fungal enemies. To my way of thinking, the only thing
on this wish list absolutely necessary to grow specialty coffee, as opposed to commodity, is the
nighttime temperature. Frequently, that cold (but never freezing) night is described in producing
countries as altitude, leading to a general belief that quality coffee requires the highest altitude.

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16 Price Peterson

That too is generally true. Still, above a certain altitude, depending on latitude, coffee trees will
grow, albeit slowly, but the fruit production will drop to unreasonable levels.
Infrastructure is an often underappreciated requirement. Decent roads are required to get
the harvest rapidly and reliably to a processing station. Water must be available for spraying for
pest control. At harvest, communication between processor, transport trucks, and pickers is
essential, not to mention an adequate number of pickers, attracted by desirable and accessible
housing and sanitary facilities for the whole family.

THE COFFEE TREE

In discussing arabica coffee, it should be kept in mind that nearly all the coffee in the New
World is descended from just a few beans and two varieties—‘Typica’ and ‘Bourbon.’ This
extremely narrow genetic base has been hybridized within itself and with a very few other vari-
eties. Almost no additions have come from the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of varieties exist-
ing in coffee’s original home, Ethiopia. Since New World coffee has been more or less the same
for the past 200 years, the only factors affecting quality have been cultural and climatic—not
much else was possible. In turn, this led to very subtle differences in taste and to the appear-
ance of very fine-tuned cuppers. By analogy, any idiot can taste (or see) the difference between
a red and white wine; few can tell the difference between a Jamaican Blue and a Kona coffee.
The discovery of a new taste in coffee—a Pacamara or a Gesha—has been a rare and re-
markable event. We are now finding that there are varietal taste differences in coffee that are
as striking as the difference between a chardonnay and a Burgundy. This awareness of the
great range of coffee tastes marks a whole new epoch. Why didn’t this understanding occur
earlier with Ethiopian coffees, which range so widely in characteristics within one country?
Probably the answer is very poor processing, in turn due to a lack of infrastructure, a lack
of skills essential in preparing the beans for export, a dearth of compulsive artisans, and few
market opportunities.
A giant step toward better quality occurred in the 1950s with the development of dwarf
coffee varieties. These trees facilitate coffee culture greatly, especially for cultivation of com-
modity coffee. To my knowledge, there are no dwarf “land race” varieties that would improve
matters for the quality coffee producer. It would be highly desirable to have coffee trees resis-
tant to insects (especially the coffee berry borer, called broca in Latin America) and fungal
disease. Probably such plants will arrive in the form of genetically altered coffees with highly
desirable taste characteristics. Technically, this sort of tree is within our grasp—we lack only
mature and knowledgeable consumers whose increasing demand would push the process of
developing new varieties forward.

HARVEST

It is commonly and truthfully said that the mature coffee bean is “perfect” at harvest; pro-
cessing cannot improve on that condition— processing can only reveal, damage, or destroy
it. The coffee fruit, or cherry, must be harvested at perfect, all-red maturity. It will tolerate
a few days before or a few days after it peaks, but not more. Harvesting too early makes the
cup grassy and raw; too late and fermentation has begun, resulting in an unstable winey-

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Strategies for Improving Coffee Quality 17

ness. Stripping tree branches of all their fruit at once, ripe and unripe berries together, or
any practice other than a careful ripe-fruit-by-ripe-fruit removal has no place in the eyes of
the compulsive artisan. Unfortunately, stripping by hand or machine is the common prac-
tice in commodity production. Hand picking can only be done properly by workers prideful
of their craft, who are being rewarded at a level commensurate with their dedication. This
is not the place to cut costs.
It is essential that once plucked from the umbilical connection to the tree, the fruit be
depulped, cleaned, and dried rapidly but at low temperature. Harvested fruit left in bags over-
night, or even in the sun for too many hours, leads to unpleasant-tasting coffee. Precisely why
this happens is unknown. Independent of heat from the sun, piles or bags of fruit generate
heat from the activity of microorganisms in the fruit as well as cellular processes of the still-
alive fruits and seeds. It is possible that this heat creates changes within the seed that translate
to tastes we don’t like. Alternatively, the low oxygen levels in those piles and bags may cause
metabolic reactions within the seeds that produce the unwanted results. Potentially, even the
rotting fruit itself may somehow be responsible for the diffusion of undesirable flavors-to-be.
Thus processing must begin within a few hours of harvest and continue uninterrupted.
Again, the need for adequate infrastructure here cannot be overemphasized. Any decoupling
between harvest and processing is probably where most coffee in the world is destroyed—
certainly potentially high-quality coffee often suffers from this problem. In country after
country, one sees great high-grown coffee harvested and then destroyed between various
delays, among them efforts to haul the crop to roads on shoulder or mule back over a period
of days. Coffee handled this way is steadily rotting, until it finally arrives, still damp, in the
warehouse of a “coyote” or middleman and waits until a truckload can be accumulated and
sent to a large central mill for final processing. At best, beans tortured in this fashion now
call for a rescue operation to salvage a portion of the harvest as commodity coffee. I remem-
ber a large processor in La Paz, Bolivia, where a modest amount of space and machinery
was required to finally dry and mill such coffee, but where vast resources were dedicated to
density selection, electronic color selectors, and finally dozens of hand selections in order to
separate out a drinkable beverage.

DEPULPING

There are several types of machines available to remove the skin and pulp from the cherry
and then separate the pit or beans from the rest, a process called depulping. It is not rocket
science and the only requirement is that this equipment not scrape or damage the bean. The
bean comes from this process with a thick covering of a very viscous long-chain sugar that is
essentially an agar. Since this slimy mucus-like sugar coating is separated from the bean by
the parchment (or hull), it has little effect on the cup quality of the coffee. However, it makes
drying, especially on a concrete surface, a hazardous experience. Traditionally mucus was re-
moved (demucilation) by leaving the beans, wet, to sit for up to 36 hours or until the amylase
enzymes in the fruit pulp could break down the slime. The coffee was then washed and dried.
Within the past several years, so-called demucilators (desmucilinigadores) have been developed.
These machines rub the beans against each other as they emerge from depulpers and literally
rub the agar coating off, which oozes away as a thick syrup. The beans can then be dried im-
mediately in a continuous process without suffering the delays of the previous batch process.

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18 Price Peterson

DRYING

Great tomes have been written on the art, perhaps science, of drying coffee. I once met a
young PhD student in physics doing his doctoral thesis on the drying of coffee. All this is
not without justification. By cutting through a moist coffee bean with a sharp knife, one
can begin to appreciate the complex life of a water molecule, subject to the banging around
of Brownian motion, trapped inside and trying to get out by sliding down a moisture
gradient through the barriers of cell walls, increasingly concentrated dissolved solids, and
woody cellulose layers. It is not a simple matter. And, all the while, the cells of the bean are
metabolizing, destroying some molecules and creating others, many of which will ultimately
determine just how your cup will taste.
To complicate the issue, the coffee bean is a mixture of certain proportions of sugars, pro-
teins, nuclei acids, fats, and cellulose, plus a few minerals. We also know that after all this is
semi-incinerated by the roaster, few of these original compounds exist, while a veritable zoo of
new organic molecules has been created. In the raw bean, there is little or no taste. In a water
extract of the burnt and ground bean, there is a world of highly flavored compounds—and we
have no idea how those compounds are related to drying and roasting. Attempting to relate the
outcome to the processes through sophisticated chemical analysis was the life work of Ernesto
Illy, of the Italian Illy coffee family and company. But success was partial and fleeting. Thus
we come back to how best to dry coffee.
The simple prescription would seem to be to dry the coffee as promptly as possible, without
letting the bean temperature rise to the level where chemical reactions, other than normal
metabolic ones, would occur. This approach has the limited virtue of doing minimal damage.
In other words, since you don’t know how to help it, don’t make it worse.
One of the few major achievements of the past century in coffee processing was the intro-
duction of the rotary warm air drier as an alternative to sun drying on an outdoor patio. In
tests that monitor the temperature of well-raked beans drying on a patio, I’ve seen variations
from ambient, around 21°C, to 50°C. This is not a process—this is shooting craps! The
rotary warm air drier (guardiola) allows almost perfect control of both temperature and mois-
ture (humidity). Initially, when beans are at 30 percent humidity (having had surface water
removed in a pre-drying process), evaporative cooling permits the use of very hot air input
(80–90°C) without significantly heating the beans themselves. As humidity drops into the
high teens, air temperature can be reduced to 60–70°, while the bean temperature remains
less than 40°. Finally, as 12 percent humidity is approached, air temperature can be further
lowered, so that bean temperature never gets much higher than body temperature. This level
of control and consistency is unobtainable with patio drying, although approachable with
careful African-style drying on elevated screens.
By the time the coffee, in parchment, is dried to 11 or 12 percent, nearly all of the arti-
san’s efforts at preserving the virtue of the ripe fruit are exhausted. The critical period has
passed and the coffee will be all it can be. From here on out it is carpintería, carpentry, as
the Spanish say.

DRY PROCESSING

After drying, quality coffee is stored or aged for four to eight weeks, a step called dry process-
ing. Although no one knows why, during this period the cup changes from a grassy or green

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Strategies for Improving Coffee Quality 19

taste toward its mature optimal cup. The coffee is stored away from the elements with the hull
or pergamino (parchment) intact.
Shortly before shipping, the next step begins. This involves first milling off the hull and, to
a lesser degree, the underlying “onion” or silverskin, a thin translucent layer adhering tightly
to the green bean. The coffee is then selected and sorted for size, density, color, and mechanical
defects. After this it is packaged and shipped to the roaster.
For centuries the package of choice at this stage has been the jute bag. In fact, the standard
international measure of coffee is the bag—a jute sac containing 60 kilograms, or 134 pounds,
of coffee beans.
Throughout the period of “aging,” quality coffee, like wine, is constantly cupped and evalu-
ated. Drying necessitates batch rather than continuous process. Thus, although the coffee
may be coming from the same variety on the same farm, subtle differences creep into batches
(depending on the microclimate, whether the fruit was picked at the beginning, middle, or
end of harvest, etc.) that make one batch cup out slightly differently from another. It is these
differences that may lead cuppers to give one batch a score of 92 and another a 94. Although
seemingly slight, these few points will make coffee cognoscenti value one coffee at $5 a pound
and another at $100. It is that last distinction, between excellent and superb, for which the
third wave coffee buyer lives!

NOW, THE CRYSTAL BALL

A few years ago Bob Fulmer, the coffee guru of Emeryville, California, commented that five
or ten years down the road, the customer would enter the coffee shop and first say that he
would like, for instance, a Pacamara. After a while, he would say, “a Honduran Pacamara.”
And, finally, he would add, make it a triple shot with fat-free milk, cinnamon, and whipped
cream. This is similar to the follower of Bacchus who would first order a bottle of merlot, then
“make it a Chilean merlot.” Either drinker might ultimately prefer a beverage that originated
on a certain farm, from a certain altitude.
That increasing refinement of taste is exactly what we in the specialty coffee sector wish to
promote. We want to provide more opportunity for customers to express their individuality
through their purchases. We await the day when, in addition to the current options of ‘Typica’
or ‘Bourbon’ from a dozen different origins, consumers can have their choice of a dozen va-
rietals from twenty origins.
Following on the improvements mentioned earlier in packaging coffee, efforts are under
way to develop “perfect” storage systems that allow whole or partial coffee harvests to be kept
in inventory for several years while maintaining perfect quality. Like fine wines, this would
enable harvests of exceptional years to be identified and marketed at enhanced prices. Then
the coffee drinker might enter his favorite coffee shop and order a Pacamara, from Honduras,
from the 2004 harvest, triple shot with fat-free milk, cinnamon, and whipped cream. Now
you have a dozen varietals from twenty origins and from seven different harvests. I believe that
leaves the buyer with 1,680 different ways to express himself!

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2
The Coffee Plant and How It Is Handled
Shawn Steiman

Coffee is a handsome tree with dark, shiny leaves that grow in pairs along branches. The white
flowers, when open, offer a heady and refreshing scent. The fruits, usually red when ripe (though
yellow, pink, and orange colors exist on some varieties), are juicy and inviting. Coffee is a tropical
plant, so it survives in a fairly narrow temperature range (not too hot, not too cold).
Aside from the temperature requirements, it isn’t too picky. It grows on a range of soil
types, preferring slightly acidic soils that drain well enough so the plant won’t drown after
heavy rains. It doesn’t much matter what the elevation is, either, so long as the air temperature
is comfortable. Like any other living organism, it needs food and water to survive, but it will
likely live through extreme stress, not including frost, which kills the trees overnight. After
survivable stress, however, a plant won’t produce many, if any, fruits for humans to harvest.
It can take physical abuse, almost relishing in it; regular pruning is well tolerated and even

Figure 2.1. Parts of the coffee fruit.

Drawing by Lara Thurston.

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The Coffee Plant and How It Is Handled 21

Figure 2.2. African drying racks, as they are known throughout the coffee world,
in use in Ethiopia, home of coffee. Photo by Robert Thurston.

necessary to maintain a productive tree. The exception is strong wind. Too much wind and
the leaves are injured or blown off, along with flowers.
Humans love this plant not so much for its ornamental properties, of course, but for the
taste of the beverage it can produce. It is a long journey from the tree to the cup, though.
The part people care about, the seed, is hidden inside the fruits The first step, then, is re-
moving the coffee fruit from the trees. This can be done using human hands or machines that
shake the trees, forcing them to drop the fruit. Before the seed can be roasted and consumed,
it must be extracted from the fruit and dried down to a low level of moisture content. Between
the seed and the outside of the fruit, however, are several layers of plant material that also must
be removed: silverskin, parchment, and mucilage.
If the whole fruit and seed are dried down together, in dry processing, then all the outer
layers can be removed simultaneously, using a machine designed for the purpose. If the seed is
extracted from the fruit first, in wet processing, then the mucilage and parchment still need
removal. Typically, the mucilage is eliminated right away either with a machine or by coaxing
microorganisms into eating it. Then, the seed, still covered by the silverskin and parchment,
is dried in the sun or in a forced-air dryer. Sometimes, though, the mucilage is not removed
and the seeds are dried straight away.
Once dry, the parchment is milled off. Often, some degree of the silverskin remains; it will
separate as flakes during the roasting process. Remaining, now, is a collection of hard greenish-
bluish seeds of varying sizes. As this collection tends to contain some broken pieces, malformed
seeds, or insect- or diseased-damaged seeds, the pile of seeds is sorted by humans or machines.
The odd bits are removed and the seeds sometimes separated by size, density, and color.
From there, they are bagged and transported to a port, where they’ll eventually be shipped
to a warehouse or roaster who will be roasting it before too long. Once roasted, the beans can
be ground, brewed, and drunk!

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3
Digging Deeper: Cultivation and Yields
H. C. “Skip” Bittenbender

Coffee as purchased by the consumer is a two-species crop from the botanical family Rubia-
ceae. Coffea arabica, known as arabica coffee, is considered to have higher cup quality than
Coffea canephora, known as robusta coffee. The majority of coffee produced is arabica whose
origins are in the highlands of Ethiopia. Robusta originated in Côte d’Ivoire and Central
African Republics, for example, which are warmer and wetter.
As with most crop species that people have moved from their origins to other parts of
the world, the genetic variability is quite restricted. At first, Europeans did not realize that
Ethiopia, not Yemen, was the origin. Therefore, movement of arabica out of Yemen in the
seventeenth century was limited to essentially the varieties ‘Typica’ and ‘Bourbon’ that were
growing in Yemen at the time. Old commercial arabica varieties grown today are the results
of hybridizing these two varieties and natural mutations. Today, coffee breeders are just begin-
ning to explore the great genetic diversity of arabica after numerous coffee collecting trips in
Ethiopia that date back to the 1960s. Plant and seed collections exist in Ethiopia, Brazil, Co-
lombia, and Costa Rica, to name only the largest. These collections no doubt hold important
traits like caffeine-free, drought and wind tolerance, unique cup quality features, and pest and
disease resistance that will be incorporated in commercial varieties in the twenty-first century.
Genetic improvement of Coffea canephora (robusta) started much later than arabica. Other
diploid Coffea species can be crossed with canephora,1 but collections of these species are not
as well developed or classified as the arabica or robusta collections.
Most coffee is sold by origin and species, not by variety. This practice resulted from the
traditional disconnect between the regions where coffee was grown and the regions where
coffee is roasted and consumed. The fact that most growing regions typically produced
only a few varieties contributed to the idea that coffees from a specific region had a specific
cup quality profile. However, farmers are now testing varieties recently developed by coffee
breeding programs with cup quality in mind that will likely become commercial varieties.
While it is known that climate, crop management, and processing have a major impact on
taste in the cup, the appearance of these new varieties will surprise coffee roasters in the
future, as these beans will have characteristics that are not traditionally associated with a
particular growing region.

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Digging Deeper: Cultivation and Yields 23

CLIMATE

Coffee, an evergreen tropical crop, evolved under a forest canopy. Traditionally, it is grown
in areas typified by calm breezes, not strong winds. Non-equatorial areas have a single rainy
season while equatorial regions frequently have a bimodal rain pattern. Fifty inches of annual
rainfall is the minimum requirement for coffee cultivation. Irrigation makes it possible to
produce in areas where rainfall is inadequate or the length of the dry season is too long for
adequate yields on a regular basis. In the ideal climate, the dry season stresses dormant flower
buds, so that flowering coincides with the rainy season and the fruit grows and matures into
the cooler, dryer season.2
Arabica grows best with low temperatures of 59°F (15°C) and high temperatures of 77°F
(25°C). Robusta grows better in warmer temperatures, 75 to 86°F (24–30°C). That said, arabica
is grown commercially in some areas where the high day temperatures during fruit growth reach
90°F (32°C). Finding the best temperatures for production on the planet means farming at high
elevations near the equator and near sea level at latitudes nearer to 23° north or south. High
elevation or mountain grown coffee is not about low air pressure, it’s about temperature, par-
ticularly high day temperature. There is a theoretical relationship between elevation and latitude
in determining the suitability of any area for arabica and robusta cultivation. The higher the
latitude—within the tropics, so that trees are not threatened by frost—the lower the elevation
for arabica can be. For example, in Hawaii, at 19–21° north, excellent coffee is grown from sea
level to 2000 feet (about 610 meters) due to the trade winds and mid-ocean environment.

LIGHT

Sunshine is essential for coffee production, even for wild coffee growing in its natural, dry for-
est understory habitat. But unlike many fruit crops—avocado, banana, macadamia, mango,
pineapple—coffee tolerates shade well. Today, coffee is grown in areas that are cloudy, like the
mountains in Kenya, Colombia, and Hawaii. At lower elevations that are warmer and sunnier,
coffee has been frequently grown under shade trees, known as shade-grown coffee. Research
on coffee photosynthesis (the capture of light energy and carbon dioxide for growth) reveals
that coffee leaves need only 20–25 percent of the available tropical sunlight to function at top
performance. The additional light energy is not used by the top leaves but does penetrate to
the lower leaves. This extra light results in the coffee tree producing more flowers per bud, and
thus more coffee fruit growing on the tree. This sounds like a good situation for the farmer,
providing more coffee to harvest per tree per acre, but sometimes it’s not.

NUTRIENTS

In addition to light and carbon dioxide, coffee requires elemental nutrients from the soil,
particularly nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), and at least ten others to grow and
produce a crop. A deficiency in any nutrient can reduce coffee yield and quality. N, P, and K
are the nutrients required in the largest quantities by plants; fertilizers are labeled by numbers
indicating the percentages by weight of these elements. For example, an ordinary synthetic
(non-organic) garden fertilizer bag may read 5-7-4 or 5:7:4. The ratio means that of the total
weight of 100 pounds (45.4 kilograms), 5 pounds are a nitrate containing nitrogen; 7 pounds

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24 H. C. “Skip” Bittenbender

are phosphate, which holds phosphorus; and 5 are potash, which provides potassium. The
remaining weight is filler.
When coffee is harvested, elemental nutrients are removed. Every ton of green bean re-
moves 90 pounds of N, 5 pounds of P, and 80 pounds of K. If pulp and parchment from
harvested cherry is not returned to the orchard, a total of 130 pounds of nitrogen, 8 pounds
of phosphorus, and 130 pounds of potassium are removed from the orchard.
These nutrients must be replaced if the farmer wants to maintain healthy trees and continue
harvesting the same yield year after year. Nutrients can be applied as synthetic or organic fer-
tilizer; the tree does not care as long as the nutrients are in an absorbable form. See organic
below. For example, the nutrients lost in the cherry representing 1 ton of green bean equal
5,000 pounds (2,267 kilograms) of organic fertilizer, such as a thermo-compost from yard
and tree trimmings that contains, under the best conditions, 2.5 percent N, 2.0 percent P,
and 1.5 percent K. The same amount of nutrients for N is found in 650 pounds of 20:5:20
NPK fertilizer. A much larger quantity of organic fertilizer (compost) is necessary to supply
the equivalent nutrients of the synthetic fertilizer. These requirements ONLY address the
nutrients lost in 1,000 pounds of green bean. More nutrients and therefore more fertilizer are
needed to grow leaves, roots, wood, and the cherry pulp.

GROWTH AND YIELD

The arabica coffee tree is generally grown from seed. The seedling initially produces a stem
(vertical) and leaves; as it grows, branches (laterals) emerge from the vertical stem. Flowers
that become the cherries (fruit) are produced on the lateral branches, not the vertical stems.
Flowers are produced once on a section of lateral branches where the leaves are one year old.
Beyond this section of one-year-old leaves is the youngest part of the lateral branch; this is the
section where new leaves are produced in the current year and the flowers and cherry will be
produced the next year.
Coffee yield is normally expressed as mass per area, for example, pounds of green bean per
acre. For farmers who sell their cherry, yield is counted as pounds of cherry per acre. 10,000
pounds of cherry per acre is a good yield; depending on the variety, that’s about 2,000 pounds
(4,400 kilograms) of green bean per acre. What determines yield? The number of trees per
acre, number of verticals per tree, number of laterals with cherry per vertical, number of fruit
clusters per lateral, number of fruits per cluster, number of seeds (green beans) per cherry
(usually two), and the average weight of each bean.
Several conditions reduce yield:

• Peaberries, a condition mostly under genetic control, because only one mature seed ex-
ists within each cherry; this can occur in any varietal
• Internode length, the branch material between leaf nodes, because resources are used to
create more wood between the clusters instead of additional fruits
• Low light level received by new leaves, whether due to a cloudy climate, mountain shade, or
tree shade, because it causes a lower production of flowers and, consequently, of green beans
• Drought and nutrient imbalance

The coffee tree generally does not drop its young cherries when too many are set. Other
trees like apple or mango will set excess fruits but drop them before maturity, somehow

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Digging Deeper: Cultivation and Yields 25

“knowing” they can’t support them with the limited available nutrients and water. In the
northern U.S. this is called June drop. But on coffee trees, the cherry has the highest priority
for nutrients absorbed by the roots. Thus, no matter how much light, water, and nutrients are
available, the tree attempts to grow the cherries. If insufficient nutrients are absorbed to grow
cherries, new leaves, and branches, then only the cherries will grow. If this occurs—that is,
no new lateral branches and leaves grow—then the next year there will be no flowers and no
cherries. This situation is called alternate bearing; one year there will be a big crop but short
growth of the laterals and the next year there will be a small crop but long growth of laterals,
and the cycle will repeat. If the condition of insufficient nutrients occurs early in the season,
then the cherries will demand and receive stored nutrients from leaves, laterals, verticals, and
roots. This will result in the loss of all the leaves on laterals with cherries. Then those laterals
begin dying, starting at the tip and moving towards the vertical stem. In this die-back, not
only is next year’s crop destroyed, but this year’s crop may be lost as well.
Much research on the management of fertilizer, water, pests, pruning, and light has been
done to help farmers have similar cherry (and green bean) yields from year to year. High yield
of green beans every year from trees grown in full sun conditions was not possible until syn-
thetic fertilizer was available to farmers. Traditionally, coffee farmers in sunny and hot areas
grew coffee in the shade. The tree cover held down yields but also nutrient requirements,
which meant that farmers did not have to use as much fertilizer or mulch. Once synthetic
fertilizer became available, many farmers, often at the urging of agronomists and governments,
began cutting down shade trees and using synthetics to get much higher yields. That practice
frequently required less cost and labor compared to using the nutrient-equivalent amounts of
organic fertilizer and leaves of shade trees as the source of nutrients. But synthetic fertilizer
had to be purchased from outside the farm, leaving growers at the mercy of a separate, volatile,
and often fiercely expensive market.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, an activist program favoring shade-grown coffee be-
gan. Initially shade was promoted more to maintain migratory bird populations in the U.S.
than to improve coffee quality or limit synthetic fertilizer and other agrochemical use in the
environment. In the face of lower yields, the farmers hoped to get a price premium through
certification schemes. As we shall see in articles below, that idea has often not worked out well.
Yield is one of the most complex issues in agriculture. Humans invented agriculture for
their own well-being, not the plants’. The yield we seek is sometimes flowers, for example
orchids; bark, such as cinnamon; fruit pulp like banana; roots, like carrot; stems, for instance
pine; and seed, which includes coffee. Yield is determined by genetics, climate, management,
light, nutrients, pests, and disease. In short, a great deal goes into the complexity of yield in
coffee. In thinking about yield, coffee farmers must consider many factors, including the cost
of gathering more cherry from the trees in terms of what must be put back into the soil.

NOTES

1. All species in the genus Coffea have two sets of chromosomes. The only exception is Coffea arabica,
which has four sets of chromosomes. Typically, species must have the same number of chromosomes to
breed successfully.
2. After coffee flower buds develop, they become dormant and require a dry period before opening.
A sufficient water event can break the dormancy.

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4
Coffee as a Global System
Peter S. Baker

Coffee prices have been going up and down a lot recently; this volatility especially worries
coffee companies. When things get extreme (high or low), meetings are convened and reasons
are looked for. A culprit is duly discovered—currently it seems to be “speculators” (banks are
a good target after all)—then a conclusion is reached: “something must be done about it.”
But subsequently nothing much changes because it is very difficult to know what to do and
because the system eventually self-corrects itself anyway.

WHAT IS A SYSTEM?

A system is a collection of components joined up in such a way that it produces its own
pattern of behavior over time. A good and familiar example is ourselves; we are a marvel of
a fully automated, gently oscillating but mostly resilient and self-correcting system. Coffee
production is a system, and fluctuations are a characteristic of a system—in fact within limits,
oscillations are a healthy sign—a very regular human heartbeat, for instance, is less healthy
than one that fluctuates somewhat. Oscillations are therefore an indicator of a system, one of
whose principal properties is self-regulation. But it is surely in everyone’s interests to ensure
that the oscillations are not too extreme, because another feature of a system is that increasing
oscillations can eventually damage the system beyond repair or flip it into a different state,
with its own characteristics.
So we have an oscillating coffee production system. Anything to worry about? Worry itself
is a good thing in moderation: it’s the job of any system to worry. Just as the wonderfully intri-
cate human immune system worries at the slightest sign of an attack from a foreign body, and
occasionally gets it wrong when it attacks itself, so the coffee industry needs its own vigilant
immune response (sub)system looking for signs of trouble. I see this scanning as my job and
believe that it is a key role of academics and support institutes, in general, to do some worry-
ing; negative but constructive feedback, it could be called.

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Coffee as a Global System 27

MISSING CONTROLS AND FEEDBACKS

A principal worry is that recent political and economic history has tended to strip away controls
that safeguard a range of systems, including coffee. Free-market ideology has been all-conquer-
ing, with the single, simple concept that the more things are free and unhindered, the better
they work; that is, the price signal in the free-market system is the one signal that really matters.
From the recent history of our troubled global financial system, however, we can see that
a free-market approach can be dangerously simplistic. After the 2008 crash, Alan Greenspan
professed himself to be in a state of “shocked disbelief,” because “the whole intellectual edifice”
had collapsed. He famously said, “[I] found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the criti-
cal functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.”1 In other words, his
understanding of the global financial system was flawed. Some observers, for example Nouriel
Roubini and Stephen Mihm2 and Nassim Taleb,3 were the worriers who saw exactly what the
problems were, that the financial system was so lacking in controls and feedbacks that it was
a disaster waiting to happen.
Back to coffee: the principal point here is that coffee production is a very complex sys-
tem that works at a range of scales from microscale to global, a system composed of many
subsystems that we don’t really understand well. There are millions of people earning their
living from this system, but they make little attempt to see the whole picture and where it
might be headed. A useful analogy is the old Sufi tale of the three blind men introduced to
an elephant—they all feel a different part, its trunk, legs, and ear, and come to very different
conclusions about the elephant-system.

THE COFFEE-CARBON SYSTEM

How can a systems approach help us? Let’s take a topical example. Currently there are strenu-
ous efforts by some actors to reduce coffee’s carbon footprint. A suggested way to do this is to
store more carbon in the form of trees on the farm. Schemes are afoot to encourage farmers to
do this; with luck and sufficient financial incentives, farmers might be able to store an extra
ton of carbon per hectare per year. With great luck and substantial investment, large numbers
of farmers might be able to do this, just as they have enrolled in sustainable schemes.
But if we start to quantify this picture, some doubts creep in. At a global level, growth
of certified sustainable coffee has been positive: possibly now one million farmers are part
of such programs, though achieving this figure has taken more than a decade. So even if we
are optimistic, it is unlikely that we would be able to boost stored carbon on more than, say,
100,000 hectares of coffee lands per year. That’s a gain of 100,000 tons of carbon, which
seems like a lot; but it is equivalent to no more than 500 hectares of forest. We suspect (but
don’t know because the coffee-system information feedback systems are so poor) that dozens
of times more than this area of forest is destroyed each year to plant new coffee. What we do
know, but still can’t quantify, is that thousands of hectares of coffee are being pulled up each
year and replaced by crops that store less carbon, such as pasture.
If we could study the global coffee-carbon system, therefore, and attempt to quantify the
stocks and flows that are the characteristic of all systems, we might be able to identify the
greatest flows of carbon leaving the system and then decide how to limit them. Available funds
could be spent with optimal efficiency. Thus, it might well be more effective to try to optimize
production on existing farms so that the pressure on virgin land is reduced.

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28 Peter S. Baker

In the end, it comes down to a question of economics, which is the study of the allocation
of scarce resources to competing ends. Therefore a crucial question is, with a limited amount
of funds every year to reduce coffee’s carbon footprint, how should it best be spent? This ques-
tion can only be answered effectively by considering the global coffee-carbon system. Once
we understand it, we can devise a logical way to tackle a global problem through a global
plan. The global coffee mitigation problem cannot be solved by local voluntary schemes—the
reward is not there and even with great good will, time is against us.

THE GLOBAL COFFEE ECONOMIC SYSTEM

It is clear that the coffee economy has been run badly in many countries, with very little in-
vestment in new capital and very little to improve efficiency, as we can see from chronically
low yield figures. Up to now, this has not mattered to the coffee industry as a global system
because there has always been new land to exploit. But today land is in short supply, and with
the problem of carbon mitigation, destroying forest and savannah to grow coffee should no
longer be acceptable. This means that the primary aim of the coffee industry should be to
increase efficiency; currently, it is not doing enough in this respect.
The coffee business is a system just like any other; it has a stock of physical capital (farms,
machines, and factories). The greater the stock of physical capital in the coffee economy and
the greater the efficiency (output per unit of capital), the more output that can be achieved
each year. If the fraction of income reinvested in capital stock and the efficiency of that capital
(its ability to produce output) are not regulated through feedback from a monitoring system,
the capital stock may decline, depending on the lifetime of the capital. Over recent decades,
coffee production, like world capital, has been growing exponentially in some countries.
Whether this keeps going depends on whether growth can continue faster than depreciation,
which in turn depends on several factors:

• The investment fraction—how much income the industry invests rather than takes as
profit (the problem of shareholder value, or greed)
• The efficiency of capital—how much capital it takes to produce a given amount of
output (low efficiency examples include depleted soils in Africa and diseases not being
dealt with)
• The average capital lifetime—how long equipment lasts and what the life of coffee lands is

If the capital stock has a long lifetime, then a smaller fraction of capital must be retired each
year. But here is the rub: with climate change, the basic capital stock of coffee (that is, land) is
wearing out more quickly. How quickly? We don’t know—the feedback about the state of the
industry is weak and subject to long delays—but it is probably accelerating. If we don’t know
what the turnover of land is and how it is changing, then we don’t understand our system,
the one that supports us and pays our wages. The problem will eventually become evident
through the price signal; so long as it is properly interpreted, things may improve. But it is a
pious hope that things will always work out for the best, and that is surely no way to run a
$100 billion a year business.

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Coffee as a Global System 29

A SUSTAINABLE COFFEE SYSTEM?

Despite all the good intentions of the sustainability movement, coffee is not in good shape;
arabica especially is in short supply, as effectively its stock has not grown over recent years. We
are not looking at sustainable coffee sufficiently as a global system and are not confronting
the raft of problems coming our way. Sustainable coffee certifications for example, concentrate
almost exclusively at the farm level, so that broader scale issues are not dealt with.
The case of coffee wilt disease (CWD) is an example of this problem.4 It appeared in just
one small locality in the Congo in the 1970s and subsequently spread through Uganda and
parts of Tanzania. We reckon it has caused losses to African farmers since then of at least $1
billion. But it could have been quite easily contained and eradicated if it had been tackled
early. This did not happen because a very weak and delayed information feedback system
existed, and there was no agency (a subsystem) that had the funds and power to respond
in a timely fashion.
CWD now poses a principal material threat to coffee sustainability in those coffee countries
still free of the disease. But the industry is doing virtually nothing to stop its spread, and sus-
tainable programs do not include advice on what to do nor do they attempt audits to check if
transborder phytosanitary checks are working. This is because no one is looking at the coffee
industry as a global system; everyone is just working on their own piece of the puzzle.
Alan Greenspan was correct: there is a flaw in the model of how our present neoliberal sys-
tem works. Somehow everyone working separately for their own self interests is supposed to
produce a system that works with optimal efficiency. Too much faith is placed in this “invisible
hand,” about which Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz once said: “The reason the invisible hand
was invisible, is that it wasn’t.”5
The reality then is that, just as our financial system was so poorly understood and regulated,
so is our coffee industry. We must do better if we are to protect the long-term interests of the
millions who depend on it for their livelihoods.

NOTES

1. Jon Ward, October 24, 2008, http://www.washingtontimes.com/weblogs/potus-notes/2008/

Oct/24/he-found-flaw.
2. Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
(New York: Penguin, 2010).
3. Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House,
2007).
4. Noah Phiri and Peter S. Baker, Coffee Wilt Disease in Africa (Egham-UK: CAB International, 2009),
http://www.cabi.org/uploads/projectsdb/documents/3387/Coffee%20wilt%20Final%20Technical%20
Report.pdf.
5. Joseph Stiglitz, February 22, 2010, Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco, http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qjvwQrZmpk.

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5
What Does “Organic” Mean?
Robert W. Thurston

Chemicals available in nature, without human manipulation in a lab or factory, are organic;
chemicals produced by laboratory or manufacturing processes are in- or non-organic. The
chemical composition of inorganic and organic compounds may be the same; for instance,
nitrates may be found in nature and mined or can be manufactured. The U.S. Department
of Agriculture defines “organic” and lists government standards for organic farming at http://
www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/ofp/ofp.shtml. “Organic” is often linked to “sustainable,” a
word discussed in various places in this book. Bear in mind that sustainable agriculture can
also involve non-organic methods and chemicals.
“Organic” food is usually contrasted to “conventional,” “commercial,” or even “industrial”
food. All farming used to be organic. Every substance put on crops to enhance their growth
was organic, that is, found in nature, until 1913, when German chemists opened the first
factory to produce ammonia. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed the method—hence the
name Haber-Bosch process.1 The term “organic” was not widely applied to farming until the
American J. I. Rodale popularized it in the 1940s.
The Haber-Bosch process opened the way to industrial production of ammonia and to its
use as fertilizer, which has enabled farmers around the world to greatly increase their yields.
Synthetic ammonia, incidentally, also quickly led to the development of cheaper explosives.
Probably everyone could name some substances not allowed in organic farming, for
example DDT and malathion. Sewage sludge, antibiotics, growth hormones, and “most
conventional pesticides” cannot be used in organic production, says the USDA. Rotenone,
derived from legumes, is okay, even though it kills fish and is somewhat toxic to humans.
Sulfur occurs naturally and hence is allowed for organics, but I wouldn’t put it on cereal.
Copper sulfate, which used to be dumped from airplanes onto banana plants and the work-
ers who picked the crop, tending to turn the humans blue,2 is still permitted—in small
amounts and in certain conditions.
Plants don’t generally differentiate between nitrogen put around them in manure or in
synthetic ammonium products, although the rate of breakdown and usage in the soil can be
different. Organic farmers may also use flaming devices to burn off weeds, which takes a lot of
fossil fuel and adds to our carbon footprint. Consumers especially dedicated to improving the
environment should pay attention to exactly how their organic food is produced. Some coffee

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What Does “Organic” Mean? 31

farms I have visited that were not completely organic were nonetheless teeming with birds
and frogs; judicious use of some synthetic compounds to kill weeds is not always harmful to
the earth, as certain inorganic chemicals break down quickly into their constituent elements.
Going organic may also increase costs considerably; for instance, spraying some Roundup to
deal with weeds may be much less expensive than hiring workers to chop the intruders by
hand. Given a choice between organic and non-organic coffee, it would be useful to know
how the pickers are treated, how much money is getting back to the farmers, and whether the
agriculture is sustainable.
In any event, organic food, with its claim to higher morality and better health, is steadily
winning more hearts and dollars in the U.S. The Organic Trade Association (OTA) reports
that U.S. sales of organic products, both food and non-food, for example cotton cloth,
reached about $28.6 billion in 2010. The organic food market accounted for most of this fig-
ure, at $26.708 billion, up steeply from $6.1 billion in the year 2000. Although the growth of
organic food sales has slipped in the past several years, from 21.1 percent in 2006 to 7 percent
in 2010, the second figure is more than respectable when considered against the paltry general
increase in American spending on food in 2010, at 0.6 percent.3
The value of organic coffee imported into North America also increased rapidly, at the rate
of 29 percent a year between 2000 and 2008, to more than $1.4 billion annually. The North
American Organic Coffee Industry Survey 2010, by Danielle Giovannucci,4 details this trend.
More than 93 million pounds of organic coffee were imported into the United States and
Canada in 2009, a 4.1 percent rise from the previous year. Average annual growth over the
past five years has been 21 percent, a trajectory that dwarfs the 1.5 percent annual growth
calculated for the conventional coffee industry.
With the green revolution, which peaked in the 1970s, scientists unfortunately persuaded
coffee farmers that they would get much better yields if they cut down the shade trees that
traditionally protected the smaller coffee plants from direct sun. Growers were also urged to
dump a lot of manufactured pesticides and fertilizers on the fields. Meanwhile, research stations
developed “technified” or “sun-grown” coffee, which was much more tolerant of direct sunlight.
Yields did increase, but quality suffered, and farmers caught it in the neck when the price of
synthetic chemicals soared—up 100% from 2006 to 2008, on average. All the producers I’ve
spoken to want to use less inorganic fertilizer and pesticide on coffee trees, if only to reduce
their costs. Now, as I have seen recently in several Latin American countries, many coffee
growers are returning to the ways of their grandfathers, by planting more shade trees and other
crops between the rows of coffee trees.
In principle, then, everyone is for organic coffee. We all want a cleaner world, and who
dislikes seeing gorgeous tropical birds or those fantastic bright little frogs? Ecotourism is ex-
panding steadily on coffee farms, especially in Latin America. Success depends on having clean
and beautiful scenery and the wild creatures to go with it.
The labels on bags of organic coffee promise a bright future. As one roaster, Caffe Ibis,
puts it, “Organically grown and processed means that both people and planet are protected
from harmful herbicides, pesticides and artificial fertilizers.” Green Mountain bags claim that
“organic farming produces exceptional coffee without chemicals.” Ah, no, everything and
everybody is made of chemicals—what kind and how the chemicals are produced and used are
the key questions for farmers and consumers.
Certain problems persist in organic agriculture, among them corruption in certification.
I have heard about this issue directly from farmers in Costa Rica and Ohio, and it popped
up again recently in the New York Times.5 Organic does mean, of course, fewer synthetic

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32 Robert W. Thurston

Figure 5.1. Depulping coffee on a mechanized farm, Sertaozinho in Sao Paolo State, Brazil. Few
small coffee farmers possess this type of protective clothing. Photo by Robert Thurston.

chemicals in our food. Various tests, for instance by the Consumers Union in 2002, have
found considerably fewer residues from inorganic compounds in food certified as organi-
cally grown than in conventional produce. Yet, as recent deaths in Germany caused by E.
coli bacteria on organically grown sprouts demonstrated,6 organic may not always be the
safer choice. In any event, all unroasted coffee usually has little inorganic chemical residue.
A major study completed in 1993 tested 60 green coffee samples from 21 countries; only 7
percent of the beans had any detectable pesticide residue.7
All coffee imported into the U.S. has to meet stringent standards. For instance, there is zero
tolerance for DDT residue in beans brought to this country. Although some toxins have been
found even in roasted and instant coffee, they have been introduced into the beans by the
coffee berry borer (broca), an insect whose larvae drill into the seeds, not by the application
of inorganic chemicals. Since coffee roasting usually takes the beans to 400°F or higher, any
non-organic residues in the beans are likely to be burned off.
Given all this testing and processing, the major benefit of organic coffee is not that people
ingest fewer harmful chemicals with it. Nor is better taste necessarily the result of growing
and processing organically, although fine organic coffees are available. Instead, those who pay
a little more to buy certified organic coffee are, above all, helping the farmers and the earth
in the areas where the trees grow. When coffee beans are decaffeinated by the “organic” Swiss
water process, no “chemicals” (wrong again!) are used, according to the website of the Swiss
Water Decaffeinated Coffee Company—only water.
Buying organic is still a useful way of trying to protect farmers and the earth. However,
other certification programs may be every bit as valuable in that respect.

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What Does “Organic” Mean? 33

Over the last few years, I have interviewed many people involved in the coffee industry, from
growers to processors to retailers and consumers. In the excerpts below, some of these inter-
viewees discuss the issue of organic coffee.
Interview with Ernie Carman and Linda Moyher, coffee farmers, Paraiso, Costa Rica, May 20,
2008:

LM: To get organic certification for three or four hectares costs $700 a year. Is that sinful or what?
EC: You know how many people she could pay with that $700? We don’t certify ours because our
quota is $3,000. And this is the local certifier, not someone flying in from San Francisco. They
have to certify the farm and they have to certify the mill.
RT: And that takes years, right?
EC: Well, we’ve been certified before, and I think that we could get certified again. We just don’t
do it for philosophical reasons. There are too many people that sell organic coffee that’s not organic
coffee.
LM: Actually if you’re an inspector and you show up at a big farm where they’re paying a lot of
money to get their certification and you go back and tell your boss, “Oh, I can certify that farm”
. . . I mean how do you turn down that kind of money? And that’s not even a bribe, that’s just the
income that they pay.

Interview with Arnoldo Leiva, president of the Asociación de Cafés Finos de Costa Rica [Spe-
cialty Coffee Association of Costa Rica], San Jose, Costa Rica, May 27, 2008:

AL: I don’t think the organic trend is for Costa Rica. I’ve seen very little success, I mean, rare isolated
examples, but when it comes to price, in order to compensate for the lack of yield and problems
that organic agriculture brings, the differentials and premiums that you have to pay . . . it’s too high,
which makes it completely inefficient basically. And from the roaster’s perspective, I’ve found that the
roasters need to carry [only] one or two organic coffees.

Interview with Eugene and Lucy Goodman, farmers, Butler County, Ohio, October 16, 2008:

RT: Now, so, when you came here [from another farm] were you determined to go totally organic
and were you determined to become certified organic farmers here?
LG: No, we are not determined to become certified organic farmers here. We don’t want to deal
with the USDA’s certification program.
RT: So would you call yourselves organic farmers in fact, but not in law?
LG: YES!
EG: YES!
LG: The [USDA] inspector said I’m here one day a year and what you do the rest of the time . . .
because they DO NOT tissue test or soil test to get certification.
EG: Right, there is none of that.
RT: Wow.
LG: Unless there’s been a specific complaint about a farm, then they will come in and start the
chemical testing.

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34 Robert W. Thurston

LG: [We use] neem [an oil pressed from evergreens grown on the Indian subcontinent] . . . a little
bit of neem oil. Cause what we are trying to do is get the beneficial insect population up to where
it’s controlling the bad insect population, and it’s working . . . but it does take, we’ve been here
three years and when we got here there were no bugs.
RT: Really?
LG: It was a cattle farm and I really don’t know what they [did]. I know they used Roundup cause
we found bottles of used Roundup all over the place, but we figured they were just hitting the
fence lines with that.
RT: Right, so the insects have come back. I assume the birds have come back as well?
EG: Unh huh. And other wildlife like snakes. We had an amazing amount of toads in the pond
the first year we were here.
LG: This pond’s five years old; it’s a really new pond. So it’s changed the ecosystem on this land.
LG: It’s true when you go into transition [to organic] and you are gonna go for maybe three to fif-
teen years of low yields and bad disease problems and bad bug pressures when you are taking a farm
that’s been chemically farmed for fifty years. . . . it takes a long time for the soil to recover. Once
the soil recovers, everything falls into place, basically. But it takes a long time for the earthworms
to come back. The various nematodes, funguses, bacteria. In healthy soil, they say there should be
about a billion little critters in about a tablespoon of soil.
EG: And if those are all there, they can do the correct natural interaction. Even if we don’t under-
stand it, I think that’s the sense. I think with organic, you have everything present, which creates
the balance. It does improve the quality of the crop. It does make the plants healthier. A healthier
plant produces healthier fruit, a better quality fruit, that lasts longer, we’ve noticed.

Finally, the organization Organic Monitor sent out an e-mail in March of 2012 that men-
tioned “growing incidents of food fraud involving organic and sustainable products.” This
problem was the central focus of attention at the Sustainable Foods Summit in Amsterdam
in June 2012.8

NOTES

1. David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007).
2. Dan Koeppel, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (New York: Hudson Street
Press, 2008).
3. http://www.ota.com/pics/documents/2011OrganicIndustrySurvey.pdf.
4. The full report may be purchased at https://ota.com/bookstore.html. A summary is at http://www
.organicnewsroom.com/2010/06/_organic_coffee_market_tops_14_1.html.
5. Kim Severson and Andrew Martin, “It’s Organic, but Does That Mean It’s Safer?” New York Times,
March 3, 2009.
6. Europolitics, June 16, 2011, at http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.lib.muohio.edu/hottopics/
lnacademic/?, accessed June 20, 2011.
7. Richard M. Jacobs and Norma J. Yess, “Survey of imported green coffee beans for pesticide resi-
dues,” Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A: Chemistry, Analysis, Control, Exposure & Risk Assessment
X, no. 5 (1993), 575.
8. “Amsterdam Summit Tackles Food Authenticity and Sustainable Commodities,” announcement
from Organic Monitor ([email protected]), e-mail sent March 27, 2012.

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6
Coffee under Threat
The Growing Problem of the Coffee Berry Borer
Juliana Jaramillo

Climate change represents an immediate and unprecedented threat to agriculture: the Inter-
governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts a 10–20 percent decline in overall
global crop yields by 2050.1 The effects of climate change go well beyond the relationship
between temperature and a single species, because alterations in climate influence people’s
most basic decisions, with profound consequences for their social, economic, political, and
personal situations.2 The IPCC has assessed the impact of present and future climate change
and projects an increase in the mean global temperature of 1.4° to 5.8°C (2.5° to 10.4°F) by
the end of the twenty-first century, as well as a higher prevalence of extreme weather events
and changes in precipitation patterns in many areas of the world.3
Investigators generally anticipate that the impact of climate change will be greater in
the tropical regions of the world, and developing countries are predicted to be more at risk
because of their lower capacity to adapt, owing to various socioeconomic, demographic,
and policy trends.4 Thus, since the vast majority of the two most important coffee species,
Coffea arabica and C. canephora, are grown in the tropics, they are especially vulnerable to
global climate change.5
Small-scale farmers produce about 70 percent of the world’s coffee, and more than 100 mil-
lion people depend on its production for their subsistence. Studies from Brazil, Mexico, and
Uganda show that even minimal increases in the mean temperature due to climate change will
have disastrous consequences for coffee production, in some cases reducing the area presently
suitable for coffee production by up to 95 percent.6
Furthermore, the International Coffee Organization (ICO) predicts that under various
climate change scenarios, coffee production will decrease by up to 10 percent compared with
the reference case without climate change.7
According to the ICO, the highest yield reductions are expected in Africa and South Amer-
ica, which will result in pushing up coffee prices worldwide. Yet ICO’s forecasts consider only
abiotic stress (for example, rising temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns) and do not
take into consideration that climate-induced stress may also render plants more vulnerable to
biotic stresses such as opportunistic herbivores,8 in particular Hypothenemus hampei, the coffee
berry borer (broca in Spanish), the key pest of coffee around the globe.9

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36 Juliana Jaramillo

In natural ecosystems, the dynamic interaction between plants, pests, and their natural
enemies is influenced by the biological characteristics of trophic levels (the various positions
in the food chain), the nature of the surrounding ecosystem, and climatic factors. Global
climate change is likely to directly influence the population dynamics of all trophic levels
and further disrupt the multitrophic interactions among different biotic communities,10
modifying the limits of where a species can live and leading to an expansion or contrac-
tion of their typical habitat.11 Until very recently, studies on the effects of climate change
on ecosystems focused only on one trophic level (for example, on plants). But, in reality,
climate change has significant effects on a multitude of interactions between species, and
seemingly minor changes to individual interactions can combine to exert important effects
on the structure of entire communities.12
Climate change may influence the interactions between species more than it impacts a
single species because those interactions are regulated by phenology (the cyclical events of
an organism’s life that are influenced by climate), behavior, physiology, and relative abun-
dance of multiple species. Thus climate change will not just influence a plant species but
disrupt the population dynamics and the status of, for instance, its insect pests or pathogens
(diseases).13 This is true because temperature has a strong and direct influence on the pests’
and pathogens’ ecology, reproduction, and survival,14 on the number of pest generations
per year,15 on their phenology,16 and on their distribution range.17 Indirect effects may in-
clude changing host-parasite interactions or alterations in the ways that insects respond to
climate-induced changes on the host plant.18
Over the past thirty or so years, changing climate, in particular global warming, has already
produced numerous shifts in the distribution and abundance of species.19 As a result, climate
change and the spread of invasive species are two of the most important ecological issues fac-
ing the world today.20 These developments are particularly important for coffee, which serves
as the economic foundation for many countries in the tropics, and on which so many people
depend for their subsistence.
The coffee berry borer attacks fruit on the trees, causing losses exceeding $500 million
annually and, worldwide, affects many of the millions of rural households involved in coffee
production. Under low pest pressure, the conversion factor (the ratio of freshly picked coffee
berries to the amount of processed, parchment coffee) is 5:1; however, a serious coffee berry
borer infestation can push this ratio up to more than 17:1, with devastating economic conse-
quences for farmers.21
Currently, H. hampei is present in all coffee producing areas of the world, except China
and Nepal, with the most recent introductions in Puerto Rico in 2007 and Hawaii in 2010.
Predictions of the effects of climate change on coffee and the coffee berry borer indicate that
even a small increase in temperature (1–2ºC or 1.8–3.6ºF) would have serious consequences
for coffee production. Particularly dire outcomes are predicted for areas where high-quality
arabica is presently produced.22 These authors suggest that a 1ºC (1.8ºF) increase would lead
to a considerably higher number of coffee berry borer generations per coffee fruiting season.
The model further predicts that higher temperature increases (more than 2ºC [3.6ºF]) would
result in shifts in the range of latitude and altitude affected by the coffee berry borer. It seems
that this worst case scenario is already happening, as changes in the altitudinal range of the
coffee berry borer have recently been observed in Indonesia and Uganda; moreover, on the
slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the pest is now found at elevations 300 meters higher
than its upper range only ten years ago.23

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Coffee under Threat 37

A major but largely unexplored impact of climate change is how it will affect the interspe-
cific interactions between parasitoids (parasitic organisms that live and feed on their host, ul-
timately killing it), other natural enemies, and their hosts.24 It is predicted that higher trophic
levels are often disproportionately affected by drivers like climate change and habitat modi-
fication, with specialist natural enemies (parasitoids) more impacted than generalists (preda-
tors).25 Differential influence of climate change on crops, crop pests, and their natural enemies
is likely to result in asynchrony (absence of alignment in time of life cycles and processes) and
ultimately will have a profound influence on any ecosystem.26 Native and introduced exotic
natural enemies of insect pests appear unable to track climate-driven geographic expansion of
their hosts.27 The natural balance created by both indigenous natural enemies and their hosts
and the introduced exotic natural enemies of key insect pests in coffee growing regions like
Central and South America and Asia will likely be disrupted. For example, the decoupling of
the coffee berry borer and its natural enemies could result in higher pest numbers or more
serious outbreaks. Presently, virtually nothing is known about the effects of a warming climate
on the natural enemies of H. hampei and other coffee pests. Yet it is crucial to also figure esti-
mates of future distributions of natural enemies/competitors of coffee pests and diseases into
existing and future models of climate change, which would enable better planning by growers
and the coffee industry.
Climate change and its forecasted impact on coffee production will ultimately have huge
implications for livelihoods and poverty levels throughout the tropics. To mention a few prob-
able outcomes, the complex agro-ecosystem of coffee production will be disrupted, as climate
change directly disturbs the coffee plant and its potential production or by reducing or shifting
the land suitable for coffee production. At the second trophic level, alterations in climate will
possibly disturb the dynamics of coffee’s pests and diseases causing more serious and frequent
outbreaks, as climate change will not only have an effect on the life history parameters of the
pest itself but also disturb its trophic relationship with natural enemies or antagonists. Finally,
climate change will most likely affect the quantity and quality of the coffee produced. Poor,
small-scale farmers will not be able to afford expensive adaptation strategies and will therefore
often end coffee production altogether. Large-scale farmers will most probably have to rely
heavily on applications of synthetic pesticides to cope with the problem, which will reduce the
safety of the product. Hence, as climate changes, there is an urgent need to develop efficient
and affordable adaptation strategies for coffee cultivation that include management of insect
pests like the coffee berry borer and other pests and diseases.
Possibly the best way to counter a rise of temperatures in coffee plantations is the introduc-
tion of shade trees, which create a diversified and more resilient coffee agro-ecosystem that will
perform better under climate change.28 Positive effects of shade trees in coffee systems have been
extensively demonstrated during the last years.29 Shade trees mitigate microclimatic extremes and
can buffer coffee plants from microclimatic variability,30 leading to a decrease in the temperature
around the coffee berries by up to 4°C (7.2°F).31 A reduction of this magnitude would imply a
drop of 34 percent in the intrinsic rate of increase of the coffee berry borer,32 therefore allowing
coffee to grow in areas that will most likely experience increases in temperature, making them
otherwise unsuitable for coffee production due to increased pest pressure. For example, a study
from Costa Rica indicated that shade levels of 40–60 percent, provided by trees, helped to main-
tain air and leaf temperatures below or close to 25°C (77°F).33
Shade trees also play a role in soil and water conservation and management,34 which will
be critical issues, particularly in Central America and East Africa. Furthermore, Teodoro

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38 Juliana Jaramillo

and his colleagues have demonstrated that coffee berry borer densities were significantly
lower in shaded versus unshaded coffee plantations,35 possibly because shade coffee agro-
ecosystems can serve as a refuge for beneficial arthropods (native and introduced), leading
to higher levels of biological control.36 Moreover, in a two-year study in shade-grown and
sun-grown coffee in the Kiambu area of central Kenya, borer infestation levels in the shaded
plantation were always lower than in sun-grown coffee and remained below the 5 percent
economically tolerable threshold level, an effect most likely due to the lower temperatures
in the shaded coffee. Lower pest numbers were accompanied by considerably higher yields
in shade compared to sun-grown coffee, possibly because of improved soil, nutrition, and
water conditions in the former.37
Little research has been done in coffee production areas regarding the impact of climate
change on functional agro-biodiversity (including work on insect pests) and their interac-
tion/impact on crop production. The problem of inadequate capacity for adaptation to
climate change in these areas is critical and in need of immediate attention. More research
and action in this regard will begin to fill some of the climate change knowledge gaps in the
coffee-production sector and to assist in the development of adaptation strategy packages for
climate change on coffee production. Small-scale coffee farmers have little capital to invest in
potentially costly adaptation strategies, thus lowering their resilience to changing conditions.
Yet the use of shade trees in the framework of more diversified coffee plantations (for instance,
by introducing food crops to the system) to suppress coffee pests like the coffee berry borer is
rational, affordable, and relatively easy for coffee farmers and other stakeholders to implement.
This approach is an important strategy to improve the resilience of agricultural systems, espe-
cially in the tropics, in a changing climate. While the introduction of shade trees seems to be
the best currently available strategy to combat the coffee berry borer, new tools and solutions
need to be discovered to best cope with the inevitable change in climate.

NOTES

1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “Summary for Policymakers,” in Climate

Change 2007 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2–18.
2. United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC), “Climate change: impacts, vulner-
abilities and adaptation,” Manual, 2007.
3. IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers”; J. T. Houghton, Y. Ding, D. J. Griggs, M. Noguer, et al.,
Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
4. K. R. Hope, “Climate change and poverty in Africa,” International Journal of Sustainable Develop-
ment and World Ecology 16 (2009): 451–61.
5. A. Addo-Bediako, S. L. Chown, and K. J. Gaston, “Thermal tolerance, climatic variability and
latitude,” Proceedings of the Royal Society London Series B Biology 267 (2000): 735–45.
6. E. D. Assad, H. S. Pinto, J. Zullo, and A. M. Helminsk, “Climatic changes impact in agroclimatic
zoning of coffee in Brazil,” Pesquiza Agropecuaria Brasileira 39 (2004): 1057–64. C. Gay, F. Estrada,
C. Conde, H. Eakin, and L. Villers, “Potential impacts of climate change on agriculture: A case of study
of coffee production in Veracruz, Mexico,” Climatic Change 79 (2006): 259–88; Global Resource In-
formation Database (GRID), “Vital Climate Graphics Africa: Global Resource Information Database,
Arendal,” 2002, http://www.grida.no/climate/vitalafrica/english/23.htm, accessed March 20, 2012.
7. International Coffee Organization (ICO), “Climate change and coffee,” report presented to the
International Coffee Council, 103rd Session, September 23–25, 2009. London.
8. R. J. C. Cannon, “The implications of predicted climate change for insect pests in the UK, with
emphasis on non-indigenous species,” Global Change Biology 4 (1998): 785–96.

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Coffee under Threat 39

9. A. Damon, “A review of the biology and control of the coffee berry borer Hypothenemus hampei
(Coleoptera: Scolytidae),” Bulletin of Entomological Research 90 (2000): 453-65; J. Jaramillo, C. Borge-
meister, and P. S. Baker, “Coffee berry borer Hypothenemus hampei (Coleoptera: Curculionidae): Search-
ing for sustainable control strategies,” Bulletin of Entomological Research 96 (2006): 223–33.
10. C. Parmesan and G. Yohe, “A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across
natural systems,” Nature 421 (2003): 37–42; W. H. van der Putten, P. C. de Ruiterb, T. M. Bezemera,
J. A. Harvey, M. Wassen, and V. Wolters, “Trophic interactions in a changing world,” Basic and Applied
Ecology 5 (2004): 487–94; and M. Tuda, T. Matsumoto, T. Itioka, N. Ishida, M. W. Takanashi-Ashihara,
M. Kohyama, and M. Takagi, “Climate and intertrophic effects detected in ten-year population dynam-
ics of biological control of the arrowhead scale by two parasitoids in southwestern Japan,” Population
Ecology 48 (2006): 59–70.
11. J. M. Tylianakis, R. K. Didham, J. Bascompte, and D. A. Wardle, “Global change and species
interactions in terrestrial ecosystems,” Ecology Letters 11 (2008): 1351–63.
12. Tylianakis et al., “Global change”; W. van der Putten, M. Macel, and M. E. Visser, “Predicting
species distribution and abundance responses to climate change: Why it is essential to include biotic
interactions across trophic levels,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 365 (2010): 2025–34.
13. J. H. Porter, M. L. Parry, and T. R. Carter, “The potential effects of climate change on agricul-
tural insect pests,” Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 57 (1991): 221–40. M. Cammell and J. Knight,
“Effects of climate change on the population dynamics of crop pests,” Advanced Ecological Research 22
(1997): 117–60; J. Bale, G. J. Masters, I. D. Hodkinson, C. Awmack, et al., “Herbivory in global cli-
mate change research: Direct effects of rising temperature on insect herbivores,” Global Change Biology
8 (2002): 1–16.
14. Bale et al., “Herbivory in global climate change research”; P. J. Gregory, S. N. Johnson, A. C.
Newton, and J. S. I. Ingram, “Integrating pests and pathogens into the climate change/food security
debate,” Journal of Experimental Botany 60 (2009): 2827–38.
15. T. Gomi, M. Nagasaka, T. Fukuda, and H. Higahara, “Shifting of the life cycle and life history
traits of the fall webworm in relation to climate change,” Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 125
(2007): 179–84.
16. N. J. Dingemanse and V. J. Kalkman, “Changing temperature regimes have advanced the phenol-
ogy of Odonata in the Netherlands,” Ecological Entomology 33 (2008): 394–402.
17. R. Karban and S. Y. Strauss, “Physiological tolerance, climate change and a northward range shift
in the spittlebug Philaenus spuramis,” Ecological Entomology 29 (2004): 251–54.
18. R. Menendez, A. Gonzalez-Megias, O. T. Lewis, M. R. Shaw, and C. D. Thomas, “Escape from
natural enemies during climate-driven range expansion: A case study,” Ecological Entomology 33 (2008):
413–21; R. E. Forkner, R. J. Marquis, J. T. Lill, and J. Corff, “Timing is everything? Phenological
synchrony and population variability in leaf-chewing herbivores of Quercus,” Ecological Entomology 33
(2008): 276–85.
19. Parmesan and Yohe, “A globally coherent fingerprint”; T. L. Root, et al., “Fingerprints of global
warming on wild animals and plants,” Nature 412 (2003): 57– 60.
20. N. L. Ward and G. J. Masters, “Linking climate change and species invasion: An illustration us-
ing insect herbivores,” Global Change Biology 13 (2007): 1605–15; S. A. Mainka and G. W. Howard,
“Climate change and invasive species: Double jeopardy,” Integrative Zoology 5 (2010): 102–11.
21. P. S. Baker, J. A. F. Jackson, and S. T. Murphy, “Natural Enemies, Natural Allies.” Project
Completion Report of the Integrated Management of Coffee Berry Borer Project, CFC/ICO/02
(1998–2002), 2002.
22. J. Jaramillo, A. Chabi-Olaye, C. Kamonjo, A. Jaramillo, et al., “Thermal tolerance of the coffee
berry borer Hypothenemus hampei: Predictions of climate change impact on a tropical insect pest,” PLoS
ONE 4(8) (2009): e6487.
23. F. L. Mangina, R. H. Makundi, A. P. Maerere, G. P. Maro, and J. M. Teri, “Temporal variations
in the abundance of three important insect pests of coffee in Kilimanjaro region, Tanzania,” in 23rd
International Conference on Coffee Science, Bali, Indonesia, October 3–8, 2010 (Paris: ASIC, 2010).

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40 Juliana Jaramillo

24. L. J. Beaumont, A. J. Pitman, M. Poulsen, and L. Hughes, “Where will species go? Incorporating
new advances in climate modeling into projections of species distributions,” Global Change Biology 13
(2007): 1368–85.
25. Tylianakis et al., “Global change and species interactions.”
26. Bale et al., “Herbivory in global climate change research.”
27. J. K. Hoover and J. A. Newman, “Tritrophic interactions in the context of climate change: A
model of grasses, cereal aphids and their parasitoids,” Global Change Biology 10 (2004): 1197–1208; and
Menendez et al., “Escape from natural enemies.”
28. P. A. Matson, W. J. Parton, A. G. Power, and M. J. Swift, “Agricultural intensification and
ecosystem properties,” Science 277 (1997): 504–9. M. A. Altieri, “The ecological role of biodiversity in
agroecosystems,” Agriculture Ecosystems and Environment 74 (1999): 19–31; and B. B. Lin, “Resilience
in agriculture through crop diversification: Adaptive management for environmental change,” Bioscience
61 (2011): 183–93.
29. For example, in coffee and cacao plantations, Agroforestry Systems 38 (1998): 139–64; R. G.
Muschler, “Shade improves coffee quality in a suboptimal coffee zone of Costa Rica,”Agroforestry
Systems 85 (2001): 131–39; C. Gordon, R. Manson, J. Sundberg, and A. Cruz-Angon, “Biodiversity,
profitability and vegetation structure in a Mexican coffee agroecosystem,” Agriculture Ecosystems and
Environment 118 (2007): 256–66. See also Rice in this volume.
30. Beer et al., “Shade management.”
31. A. Jaramillo, “Solar radiation and rainfall distribution within coffee plantations (Coffea arabica
L.), Revista Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales (Colombia) 29 (2005): 371–38.
32. Jaramillo et al., “Thermal tolerance of the coffee berry borer.”
33. Muschler, “Shade improves coffee quality.”
34. Beer et al., “Shade management.”
35. A. Teodoro, A. M. Klein, P. R. Reis, and T. Tscharntke, “Agroforestry management affects cof-
fee pests contingent on season and developmental stage,” Agricultural and Forest Entomology 11 (2009):
295–300.
36. I. Perfecto, R. A. Rice, R. Greenberg, and M. E. van der Voort, “Shade coffee: A disappearing
refuge for biodiversity,” BioScience 46 (1996): 598–608; J. M. Tylianakis, A. M. Klein, and T. Tscharn-
tke, “Spatio-temporal variation in the effects of a tropical habitat gradient on Hymenoptera diversity,”
Ecology 86 (2005): 3296–3302.
37. J. Jaramillo et al., unpublished data.

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7
Culture, Agriculture, and Nature
Shade Coffee Farms and Biodiversity
Robert Rice

For more than a decade, ecologists, ornithologists, geographers, and others have cast the cof-
fee agroforestry system—an agricultural system involving the production of coffee beneath
a species-diverse canopy of shade trees—as a land use with great conservation potential.
Whether a large estate farm or a small peasant-operated tract, a shade coffee farm can possess
different characteristics that place it beyond a mere site of commodity production. Perhaps
the most well known of these dimensions rests with these systems’ attraction of and ability to
support a highly diverse bird community, an agriculture known as bird-friendly.1 Yet several
other ecological benefits have recently been added to shade coffee’s ledger,2 while its socioeco-
nomic rewards are becoming better known.3
This chapter focuses on recent findings that support the notion of shade coffee’s ecological
and agronomic benefits. A central axis of the chapter concerns the role of birds within the
coffee agroforestry system. But it will also become clear that regional vegetation biodiversity,
establishment of native species, pollination from bees and subsequent fruit set, as well as the
role of bats as insectivores within the system, can also be linked to shade coffee sites. Prior
to examining the differences between an intensely managed, high-input system and a more
traditional low-input, diversely shaded one that satisfies the “coffee-as-habitat,” it is worth ad-
dressing some basic concepts and terms associated with shade coffee, as well as the recent land
management history of some coffee regions.

THE ISSUE OF SHADE

The coffee plant we know and love (Coffea arabica) developed as an understory shrub in
what now is the mid-elevational belt of Ethiopia and the Sudan.4 As a forest species, it does
well in shade and has undoubtedly evolved a short-term tolerance for open sun—a situation
the native plant has to confront when treefalls or landslides create light gaps in the natural
forest. Within this natural setting, we can imagine millennia in which coffee plants existed in
a spectrum of shade conditions, ranging from the densely closed forest cover to the open-sun
light gap setting. Arabica’s most common natural conditions, however, would tend to be a
relatively undisturbed forest setting with a fairly heavily shaded understory.

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42 Robert Rice

Parallel examples of this shade gradient exist throughout the coffee landscapes of the world.
Peasant producers, normally with a relatively small holding or two as their only real estate as-
sets, opt for a more diversely managed “coffee” farm compared with large (or even medium)
producers. Because peasant farmers must “thread the needle” each year, as J. Berger puts it,5
striving to do as well as they can with the little they have, they face a daunting array of chal-
lenges. Few such farmers are inclined to devote the entire area of arable land to a single cash
crop like coffee. Price fluctuations, diseases, natural disasters, and the general need for other
items preclude that strategy. As a result, the “coffee” farm ends up being a farm from which
the bean is harvested each year, accompanied by a constellation of other foodstuffs and useful
materials like fruits, firewood, lumber, and, sometimes, traditional medicines derived from
plants.6 This diverse agroforestry system supplies the land manager with an array of products
that can be consumed by the household, given to workers who help with harvesting or other
cultural practices associated with the coffee, or sold on local/regional markets for cash.
Medium and (especially) large farmers are not nearly so dependent upon coffee. Either they
have other agricultural lands and crops (catch crops) or they have other interests that can
protect them against the vagaries of nature that could devastate a single-crop small producer.
Moreover, a larger coffee farm demands a larger workforce. Where little to no shade is used,
less tending of the shade trees means that more time can be spent directly on the coffee bushes’
production—pruning, fertilizing, and general cultivation. Where shade trees are involved, a
one- or two-species shade cover allows for easier maintenance of the canopy, as workers learn
the specifics of how the trees grow and respond to pruning. A uniformity of shade mainte-
nance is more easily attained and maintained.
The result of these two approaches to coffee management creates not only the two extremes
on the shade continuum—that is, a very diverse, forest-like setting and a less diverse open-sun
or nearly shadeless condition—but also the muddied middle ground of slightly shaded, semi-
diverse systems found between these endpoints. It is this managed shade cover, essentially a
biodiversity managed by the farmer, that in turn allows promotion and presence of an associ-
ated biodiversity.
Coffee areas in various countries display landscapes attesting to the broad array of man-
agement styles in production. In general, where government ministries or research institutes
have advocated more modern practices in order to increase yields, for instance in Costa Rica,
Colombia, or Kenya, management practices tend toward the less shaded or open-sun end of
the continuum. In the 1970s, Central American countries saw a tremendous push to intensify
coffee production, a process that included the reduction or elimination of shade trees and
the introduction of agrochemical inputs. The campaign hinged on the control of coffee leaf
rust (Hemileia vastatrix), a fungal disease considered coffee’s worst pest.7 Countries such as
Costa Rica, Colombia, and Kenya had earlier transformed their coffee areas, greatly reducing
the complexity of the traditionally managed systems. Such transformations to the agricultural
landscape jibe with the general tendency of agricultural intensification, where a more simpli-
fied, less diverse system—ideally, a monoculture—can be used, whose main purpose is to
increase yields.8 By contrast, where less technical assistance has prevailed, either due to a lack
of national efforts or because the coffee lies in remote regions where producers have escaped
the “benefits” of official development efforts, growers seem more inclined to retain and make
use of a shade cover. Rice and Ward present data on the extent of traditional versus techni-
fied coffee area in northern Latin America, estimating that the region’s coffee area had been
41 percent modernized or technified, usually involving the reduction or removal of shade
trees—in turn usually an integral part of the intensification of production in coffee.9 The

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Culture, Agriculture, and Nature 43

Figure 7.1. Coffee management systems. Source: adapted from Patricia Moguel and Victor M.
Toledo, “Biodiversity Conservation in Traditional Coffee Systems of Mexico,” Conservation Biol-
ogy, 13, no. 1 (February 1999). Reprinted with permission from Wiley/Blackwell.

coffee landscape of the region, however, presents a mosaic of shade conditions, shaped by the
institutional forces mentioned above and the personal choices of the growers themselves. Less
is known about other coffee regions, although anecdotal evidence points to similarly varied
management styles throughout the coffee-producing world, with intensification of production
being promoted or adopted to varying degrees. A consequence of the intensification process
is that total biodiversity tends to decline.10
What results do these different management styles generate upon the landscape, and how
might they affect the farmers involved and the ecology of the systems? Esthetically, a moun-
tainside planted in the curvilinear contours of evenly spaced coffee bushes with no shade trees
evokes a certain orderliness. Like hedgerow upon hedgerow, the coffee’s regular pattern upon
the landscape speaks of constant care and devotion by the grower. But such systems often rank
as biological deserts.
Alternatively, a coffee landscape managed with a diverse shade cover presents a hillside
nearly indistinguishable from a forested slope. It may be more likely to have early morning
mists caressing its flanks and will certainly be home and refuge to an array of bird life (and
other wildlife) that its open-sun sibling will never see.
Shaded coffee agroforestry systems contain a species diversity supported by the trees, and
the structural diversity, the “architecture” of these systems, mimics that of natural forest. As
an agricultural land, however, it cannot and should not be equated to natural forest in its
offerings to wildlife and the resultant refuge to biodiversity. Shade coffee cannot be a substi-
tute for natural habitat. But it can be a refuge for biodiversity, providing fairly good quality,
supplemental habitat for a number of species.

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44 Robert Rice

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT SHADED SYSTEMS

Certain biological dynamics within agricultural systems are well understood. Entomologists
and plant pathologists have studied the life cycle of many insects and pests for decades. But
researchers have barely begun to investigate the role that agricultural lands play in providing
habitat for organisms that are not pests, thereby enhancing biodiversity protection. How to
treat managed lands as potential reservoirs of biodiversity, research on ecological connections,
conservation biology, and the potential environmental value of managed lands are all new
territory for agroscience.
Shaded agricultural systems like coffee or cacao in an agroforestry setting have been evalu-
ated from the standpoint of agronomic and general ecological aspects provided by shade.11
Coffee and cacao systems currently attract researchers focusing on the habitat dimensions of
the crop management characteristics (there are others, such as rice fields’ value for water birds),
and although much remains unknown about the ecological potential of such lands, some
basic knowledge has emerged. For instance, in a shade coffee farm, the greater the managed
biodiversity—the tree species used by the farmer—the greater the diversity of birds found
within that system. Local or native tree species tend to harbor greater diversity of birds (and
probably insects), most likely due to the co-evolutionary history of these associated creatures.
The structural diversity of the shade (its “architecture”) also adds to the diversity of bird spe-
cies found there and can be more critical than the actual number of plant species present.12
Shade coffee provides a range of ecological services as well. These are the natural and dy-
namic processes in natural habitats that “keep the systems going,” so to speak. Pollination and
subsequent fruit set of the coffee is enhanced in shaded systems, especially where natural forest
is nearby. Moreover, there is a degree of biological control within shaded coffee farms compared
with less shaded ones.13 And in terms of native forest tree species recruitment and establishment
across the local landscape, shade coffee systems can act as reservoirs for genetic material.14
Given the forest-like conditions of these agroforestry systems, it is easy to imagine an array
of other ecological services associated with shade coffee. Soil enrichment from continued leaf
litter deposits, as well as soil protection from the natural mulch and root networks formed
by the trees, provide but two benefits in these forest-like settings. The canopy created by the
shade trees obviously acts to intercept the impact of heavy rains upon the soil and channels
nutrients via stem and trunk flow into the surrounding soil. As shade tends to suppress weeds
that would otherwise flourish in more open-sun conditions, the need for labor or chemical
means to control weeds decreases. Not only does the shaded system allow fewer weeds to ex-
ist, but more sunlit systems tend to engender a more aggressive weed community.15 Less well
understood, but intriguing from numerous sources anecdotally, is the degree to which shade
coffee conditions help mitigate the effects of regional long-term drying trends and landslide
hazard related to increased hurricane intensity, itself a product of climate change. Some recent
research efforts, as well as personal observations from growers and this author, point to the
benefits of shaded systems with respect to such concerns.16

SHADE, QUALITY, AND YIELD:

BALANCING ENVIRONMENT AND ENTERPRISE

While shaded agroforestry systems may provide a host of benefits, we should not lose sight of
the fact that these holdings are managed for the livelihood and/or subsistence of the local land

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Culture, Agriculture, and Nature 45

managers. The crescendo in some marketing tactics and trade journals that sometimes equates
shaded coffee systems with rainforest or unquestioningly embraces the notion that more shade
is better must be placed in context: these holdings are farms on which people must produce a
crop to make a living. To avoid the possibility that farmers’ survival strategies get sidelined, a
cautionary note should be sounded when touting shade’s environmental benefits.
Coffee lands, even when ideally managed in terms of mimicking a forest setting and provid-
ing the maximum benefits of a habitat, are agricultural lands. They are not natural forest, and
we should not portray them as such. They can be managed in such a way so as to enhance
their role as a refuge for biodiversity, but the regular disturbance that goes on from the vari-
ous cultural practices associated with cultivation, as well as their less-than-natural makeup in
terms of plant species diversity, precludes their achieving the habitat quality of natural systems.
For that reason, natural forested areas need to be protected for the numerous ecological and
esthetic benefits they offer. Shade coffee holdings provide supplemental habitat and ecologi-
cal services that complement those of natural forests, and, in certain cases, take the pressure
off natural resource use within natural areas.17 The fetching aspects of these shaded systems
derive precisely from this dualism. Scant research has been done to determine how each role
can best be harnessed.18 Within the shade coffee systems, there exists a theoretically optimal
balance point in shade cover that allows for maximum habitat qualities, while simultaneously
not depressing yields.
Some studies reveal the relationship between coffee yields and shade levels. In Chiapas,
Mexico, Soto-Pinto and colleagues measured yield in terms of dry weight of coffee fruits per
plant.19 They found that with increased shade levels, yields tend to decline, with the decrease
beginning around 50 percent shade cover. Another Mexico-based study in the eastern state of
Veracruz found that farms with more diverse shade (n = 2) averaged 5,322 kg of fresh coffee
cherries per hectare, compared to 3,958 kg/ha for farms where a single species of shade tree
dominated (n = 8).20 Another study from that region found no yield differences between rus-
tic and single-species shade coffee systems, even though the two showed significantly distinct
foliage cover, shade tree density, shade tree diversity and number of strata within the shade
component. Taken together, these studies suggest that there exists an optimal shade cover that
simultaneously allows for adequate production and biodiversity protection.21

THE SHADED SYSTEM AS HABITAT

Recent investigations have added to our knowledge of shade’s role in providing viable habitat,
enhancing biodiversity, harboring biological control agents like birds and bats, and creating
conditions for pollination of the coffee itself. This growing body of research points to agro-
forestry system management as an intriguing and potentially important tool for conservation.
Structurally, coffee plantations mimic natural systems quite well. From work conducted in
Chiapas, Mexico’s coffee sector, coffee plantations (both rustic and planted shimbillo, Inga
spp.) were compared with a number of different habitat types. In general, both are more simi-
lar to natural forest habitats than to secondary (naturally recovering) habitats. Moreover, con-
sidering foliage frequency per stratum of plant life, these shade coffee plantations’ vegetational
structure was most similar to forest categories such as lower montane forest, low-elevation
pine-oak woodland, and gallery forest habitats.22
For birds, the canopy cover of shade trees can serve as habitat seasonally or throughout the
year, depending upon local climate conditions. Where a marked dry season figures into the

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46 Robert Rice

equation, the shade cover can be crucial. Researchers have found that in Ecuador, the per-
centage of cover in the upper canopy seems to affect not only occupancy in general but also
the tendency of birds to emigrate (leave the system) during the dry season. This “threshold
response,” as they called it, occurred in the 21–40 percent shade cover range. Upon approach-
ing 40 percent shade cover, not only does the probability that forest birds species (at least the
eighteen they evaluated) will make use of the system increase to 1.0 but that, as the dry season
progresses, the probability that these species will leave dives to zero. In other words, at around
40 percent shade cover, birds will definitely use an agroforestry system; the same type of cover
allows them to remain in place during difficult months characterized by marked dryness.23
The take-home message from this study confirms that not all shade is equal and that at least
40 percent cover is needed for a number of avian species.
The role of epiphytes within the shade coffee setting has also been examined. Epiphytes are
plants living on other plants, such as certain orchid species and most bromeliads. Depending
upon the region, the presence of epiphytic bromeliads within the shade tree stratum leads some
coffee farmers to remove them from the tree limbs on a regular basis. In the state of Veracruz,
Mexico, where growers perceive the bromeliads to be detrimental to the shade trees, epiphyte
removal is a common practice. Given that a number of bird species make use of epiphytes in
several ways—nesting material, foraging substrates, next sites—bird communities might be
expected to change with whatever cultural practices and attitudes related to epiphytes exist on
a farm. Epiphyte removal might also be expected to change the microclimate of the setting.
Researchers arranged with a grower in Veracruz to remove epiphytes from some plots as
usual but leave them intact in others, in order to compare bird communities.24 As expected,
plots without epiphytes tended to harbor a less diverse bird community, and plots with epi-
phytes showed a significant difference in average bird abundance throughout the year. Not
surprisingly, resident bird species known to use epiphytes as nesting substrates were signifi-
cantly more abundant in plots where the epiphytic plants were left on the trees.
By capturing, marking, and recapturing birds within the coffee setting, this first-ever experi-
mental design showed that habitat selection by certain bird species can be linked to a single
variable—the presence or absence of epiphytic vegetation. The common bush-tanager, a bird
that nests and forages in epiphytes in the Veracruz region, moved from plots without epiphytes
to those where epiphytes were present. Another bird species that does not make obvious use
of the epiphytic component, the golden-crowned warbler, displayed no difference in the prob-
ability of movement between the two treatments.25 Thus, while shade trees can act to provide
habitat for birds in general, the nuances associated with certain management practices by
growers can lead to a greater understanding of the conservation value of shade coffee systems
overall and how best to manage them.

INDIRECT BENEFITS OF SHADE COFFEE AS HABITAT

What emerges from the habitat characteristics of the shaded system reveals some intriguing
ecological connections. The presence of birds and other organisms in the shade coffee setting
establishes the types of linkages and services not normally associated or recognized with ag-
ricultural lands. These connections range from the socioeconomic to more strictly ecological
phenomena like the spread and recruitment of tree species within the surrounding landscape.
In Chiapas, a recent study examining the gene flow of a native understory tree (Miconia
affinis) of the family Melastomataceae revealed strong connections between shade coffee

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Culture, Agriculture, and Nature 47

farms and nearby forest fragments. Not only can the farms help cement genetic connectivity
with contiguous habitats, but they can actually serve as sources for forest regeneration. Given
that both resident and migratory birds disperse the seed of M. affinis and that native bees are
necessary for pollination, the maintenance of intact, traditionally managed coffee farms (i.e.,
shaded coffee farms) that can serve as viable habitat for these organisms becomes even more
important. The authors concluded that “it is imperative to highlight the ecological function
of shade coffee farms, not only in providing refuge for native fauna, but also in preserving
habitat connectivity and gene-flow processes essential for reforestation by native tree species.”26
The value of bees to coffee productivity came into sharp focus when a researcher at the
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama examined global statistics and the ar-
rival time of the (accidentally) imported African honeybee, which has hybridized with long-
established European honeybee populations in the Americas. He concluded that the bees
were partly responsible for the increased yields (more than 50 percent) seen during the last
two decades of last century in the Americas’ coffee regions.27 The lesson here, too, is that
management of coffee that creates or maintains viable habitat for a number of organisms, in
this case pollinators, can have positive economic results. These findings coincide with research
on coffee and pollinators in other studies and coffee regions,28 where native bee populations
were found also to contribute to pollination services for coffee, and forest remnants as well as
shade-diverse farms were seen as quality habitat for bees.
It is worth pointing out that not all bee species that pollinate coffee flowers react similarly to
the conditions of the coffee habitat or to the surrounding landscape. In Indonesia, Klein et al.
examined fruit set in coffee by looking at the types of bees responsible for pollination.29 Rare
solitary bees showed greater success in inducing fruit set compared with more common social
bees and were also more prevalent where light intensity was greater. Social bees, however, showed
greater species diversity nearer forests. With the forest-like setting of shade coffee systems, greater
social bee diversity would be expected. Given bees’ positive role in overall fruit set,30 shade trees
in the coffee agroforestry system may well tend to enhance overall bearing of fruit.

BIRDS, BATS, AND BIOLOGICAL CONTROL

Assuming that the coffee agroforestry system may serve as bona fide habitat, this agricultural
setting obviously displays some of the same dynamics found within natural habitats. Organ-
isms interact in innumerable ways, the most basic of which is that of food web relations. From
studies of birds as predators within the shade coffee system, we know that traditionally shaded
coffee farms indeed provide evidence of such interactions.31
A group of researchers familiar with shade coffee and shade cacao from a variety of perspec-
tives and settings conducted a meta-analysis of data found in forty-eight studies. All studies
used netted exclosures to exclude birds from the crop itself or from the canopy, and such
treatments were paired with open (non-netted) treatments. This meta-analysis sought to ad-
dress whether the magnitude of bird predation on arthropods (insects, spiders, etc.) (1) differs
between the shrub layer and the canopy layer, (2) can be related to the presence of migratory
birds, and (3) is associated with bird diversity and abundance.32
Combining data from Guatemala and Mexico conducted in coffee agroforestry systems, the
authors found that arthropod abundance fell by 46 percent and 4.5 percent in the canopy and
coffee layers, respectively. Though scant in terms of number of studies, these subsets of data
show a consistent pattern in which birds produce greater impact on arthropods in the canopy.

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48 Robert Rice

When seasonality was addressed by examining the contribution to arthropod reduction by

migratory birds, the results showed no significant difference for total arthropod reduction.
However, for large arthropods (more than 5 mm in length), migrant bird presence did lead to
a significant difference in arthropod reduction. Decreases averaged 36 percent when migrants
were present versus 24 percent when absent.33 As for resident birds, a field experiment in
Chiapas showed that a diverse shade component associated with coffee creates conditions in
which bird predation ranks higher than in less shaded, more vegetationally simple systems.34
Finally, the data from the meta-analysis study support the notion that bird diversity trumps
abundance and density of birds in reduction of arthropods.35
An intriguing dimension to the role of birds as consumers of arthropods (i.e., predators and
therefore potential biological control agents) emerges from a study in Jamaica’s Blue Mountain
and Kew Park areas. Researchers excluded birds from coffee plants to examine the degree to
which they might be predators of the coffee berry borer (Hypothenemus hampeii), the broca
of Latin America, one of coffee’s most worrisome insect pests. Birds did have access to another
set of coffee plants, the “control” portion of the field experiment. The plants from which
birds were excluded had significantly higher levels of borer infestation, more borer broods,
and greater damage to the coffee berries. The conclusion was that birds were controlling the
insects. Some seventeen species of birds were identified in the study as predators of the borer,
with nearly three-quarters being neotropical migrants overwintering on the island. Of these,
three warbler species in particular emerged as the primary predators: black-throated blue
warbler (Dendroica caerulescens), American redstart (Setophaga ruticilla), and prairie warbler
(D. discolor). Average abundance and diversity of birds showed a positive relationship with the
amount of shade tree cover as well, and the pest control benefit was determined to average
$75/hectare. This is the first study to examine the extent to which birds provide an ecological
service by acting as biological control agents against an economically important insect pest.
It links the ecological and economic services to conservation via the shade component of the
coffee agroforestry system.36
Bats also consume insects. Most studies of changes in insect numbers due to natural
predators have assumed that, where netting is used to exclude birds from coffee or shade
trees, only birds’ presence or absence matters. But a clever experiment in Mexico sought
to tease out the role of bats as insect predators by placing exclosure netting on individual
coffee plants only in the day to exclude birds, only at night to exclude bats, and day and
night to exclude both birds and bats, while leaving a control set without exclosures. While
both birds and bats play important roles in controlling insects in the coffee system—this
was a shaded organic farm with more than 120 species of birds and more than 45 species
of bats—the bats figured into the overall insect control throughout the year, adding to the
birds’ role. Arthropod densities on plants where both birds and bats were kept away aver-
aged 46 percent higher than on the control plants. Most interesting, however, is that bats
had a greater impact on insects in the wet season, when their absence from the exclosures
allowed for an 84 percent increase in arthropod densities.37
Differentiating between diurnal and nocturnal predators with such studies reveals the com-
plexities related to the ecological services of these agricultural systems. With bats’ well-known
role as insect predators, coupled with the fact that their numbers are dwindling globally, the
crucial need to maintain viable habitat for them becomes evident.
Another meta-analysis, conducted using twenty-seven data sets that addressed shade coffee’s
role as a refuge for biodiversity, assessed the system’s ability to harbor species richness of birds,
ants, and trees.38 The focus of the study was land management intensification and its effects

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Culture, Agriculture, and Nature 49

upon the diversity of these three taxa. The data allowed the authors to establish a management
index based on the degree to which coffee sites in all the studies had been intensified. The in-
tensification gradient follows the shade gradient in figure 7.1 for the most part, with a number
of vegetation characteristics used to define the levels of intensification, and the management
index being proportional to management intensity.
Not unexpectedly, tree diversity declines as the management index increases. Birds and ants
also show species loss with intensification, with ants being more sensitive to management
practices. All coffee management categories showed a loss of ant richness, which was mirrored
by losses in bird richness—except for rustic and shade monoculture systems.39 Dwindling for-
est bird species correlate significantly with the management index, indicating that losses are
greater as the management practices become more intense.
One insight gleaned from this study relates to resident birds versus migrants. As manage-
ment intensifies, resident bird richness tends to fall off. In contrast, migrant birds showed no
discernible loss in richness as the management index increased. However, their species richness
did decline in most of the coffee systems when compared to forest.40

CONCLUSIONS FOR POLICY MAKERS AND CONSUMERS

Many of the studies of shade coffee and its ability to provide a viable habitat for a range of
animals support the notion that there can be a positive correlation between conservation
and the marketplace. That is, certain management practices can result in varying degrees of
habitat protection and provision. For agricultural planners and policy makers in producing
countries, the shade coffee option offers a double benefit. It can serve as a land manage-
ment strategy to provide supplemental habitat to natural landscapes (protected forests, forest
remnants, riverine or gallery forests, etc.), as well as provide a livelihood to the thousands of
families that depend upon coffee directly or indirectly. For countries concerned about preser-
vation of biodiversity and rural poverty, shade coffee provides a nexus for the attention that
governments need to give to both. For consumers, the shade coffee issue—in particular those
coffees that have a shade certification like Bird Friendly® or Rainforest Alliance Certified®—of-
fers a chance to make purchases that support growers involved in good land stewardship. For
both policy makers and coffee consumers, these management strategies allow for the linkage
of conservation to the market place.

NOTES

1. R. Greenberg, P. Bichier, and J. Sterling, “Bird populations in rustic and planted shade coffee
plantations of eastern Chiapas, Mexico,” Biotropica, 29, no. 4 (1997): 501–14; J. Wunderle and S. Latta,
“Avian resource use in Dominican shade coffee plantations,” The Wilson Bulletin 110, no. 2 (1998):
271–81; C. Tejeda-Cruz and W. Sutherland, “Bird responses to shade coffee production,” Animal Con-
servation 7 (2004): 169–79.
2. T. Ricketts, “Tropical forest fragments enhance pollinator activity in nearby coffee crops,” Conser-
vation Biology 18, no. 5 (2004): 1262–71; S. Jha and C. W. Dick, “Shade coffee farms promote genetic
diversity of native trees,” Current Biology 18, no. 4 (2008): R1126–R1128; K. Williams-Guillén, I. Per-
fecto, and J. Vandermeer, “Bats limit insects in neotropical agroforestry system,” Science 320 (2008): 70;
A. M. López-Gómez, G. Williams-Linera, and R. Manson, “Tree species diversity and vegetation struc-
ture in shade coffee farms in Veracruz, Mexico,” Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 124 (2008):

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50 Robert Rice

160–72; A.-M. Klein, I. Steffan-Dewenter, and T. Tschartke, “Fruit set of highland coffee increases
with the diversity of pollinating bees,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, B 270 (2003): 955–61;
A.-M. Klein, I. Steffan-Dewenter, and T. Tschartke, “Bee pollination and fruit set of Coffea arabica and
C. canephora,” American Journal of Botany 90, no. 1 (2003): 153–57.
3. Robert Rice, “Agricultural intensification within agroforestry: The case of coffee and wood prod-
ucts,” Agriculture, Ecosystems, and the Environment 128 (2008): 212–18; R. Rice, “Fruits from shade
trees in coffee: How important are they?” Agroforestry Systems 83, no. 1 (2011): 41–49; P. Moguel and
V. Toledo, “Conserver produciendo: Biodiversidad, café orgánico y jardines productivos,” Biodiversitas
55 (2004): 1–7.
4. Another species, C. canephora, suited to lower elevations, is the other economically important type
of coffee globally.
5. J. Berger, Pig Earth (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
6. Rice, “Agricultural intensification.” Small producers throughout Latin America relate how a
number of plants left to grow within their coffee growing areas are used in making home remedies for
various maladies.
7. R. Rice, “A place unbecoming: The coffee agroecosystem in Latin America,” Geographical Review
89, no. 4 (1999): 554–79.
8. T. Tscharntke, A. Klein, A. Druess, I. Steffan-Dewenter, and C. Thies, “Landscape perspective on
agricultural intensification and biodiversity-ecosystem service management,” Ecology Letters 8 (2005):
857–74; P. A. Matson, W. J. Parton, A. G. Power, and M. J. Swift, “Agricultural intensification and
ecosystem properties,” Science 277, no. 5325 (1997): 504–9.
9. R. Rice and J. Ward, Coffee, Conservation, and Commerce in the Western Hemisphere, 1996, Smith-
sonian Migratory Bird Center, White Paper #2.
10. J. Vandermeer, M. van Noordwijk, J. Anderson, C. Ong, and I. Perfecto, “Global change and
multi-species agroecosystems: concepts and issues,” Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 67 (1998):
1–22.
11. J. R. Muschler Beer, D. Kass, and E. Somarriba, “Shade management in coffee and cacao planta-
tions,” Agroforestry Systems 38 (1998): 139–64.
12. J. M. Vandermeer, et al., “Global change”; R. MacArthur and J. MacArthur, “On bird species
diversity,” Ecology 42 (1961): 594–98.
13. J. Kellermann, M. Johnson, A. Stercho, and S. Hackett, “Ecological and economic services
provided by birds on Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee farms,” Conservation Biology 22, no. 5 (2008):
1177–85.
14. Jha and Dick, “Shade coffee farms.”
15. C. Staver, F. Guharay, D. Monterroso, and R. Muschler, “Designing pest-suppressive multistrata
perennial crop systems: Shade-grown coffee in Central America,” Agroforestry Systems 53 (2001): 151–70.
16. S. Philpott, B. Linb, S. Jha, and S. Brines, “A multi-scale assessment of hurricane impacts on
agricultural landscapes based on land use and topographic features,” Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environ-
ment 128, nos. 1–2 (2008): 12–20.
17. Rice, “Agricultural intensification.”
18. But see I. Perfecto, J. Vandermeer, A. Mas, and L. Soto-Pinto, “Biodiversity, yield and shade
coffee certification,” Ecological Economics 54 (2005): 435–46; C. Gordon, J. Sundberg Manson, and A.
Cruz-Angon, “Biodiversity, profitability, and vegetation structure in a Mexican coffee agroecosystem,”
Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 118 (2007): 256–66.
19. Lorena Soto-Pinto, Ivette Perfecto, Juan Castillo-Hernandez, and Javier Caballero-Nieto, “Shade
effect on coffee production at the northern Tzeltal zone of the state of Chiapas, Mexico,” Agriculture,
Ecosystems and Environment 80 (2000): 61–69.
20. S. Philpott, W. Arendt, I. Armbrecht, P. Bichier, T. Dietsch, C. Gordon, R. Greenberg, I.
Perfecto, R. Reynoso-Santos, L. Soto-Pinto, C. Tejeda-Cruz, G. Williams-Linera, J. Valenzuela, and
J. Zolotoff, “Biodiversity loss in Latin American coffee landscapes: Review of the evidence on ants, birds,
and trees,” Conservation Biology 22, no. 5 (2008): 1093–1108. No data on actual percent shade cover

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Culture, Agriculture, and Nature 51

were measured in this study, but diverse shade normally corresponds with higher percent cover than
single-species or less diverse shade systems (personal observation).
21. Y. Romero-Alvarado, L. Soto-Pinto, L. García-Barrios, and J. F. Barrera-Gaytán, “Coffee yields
and soil nutrients under the shades of Inga sp. vs. multiple species in Chiapas, Mexico,” Agroforestry Sys-
tems 54 (2002): 215–24. Open-sun coffee systems obviously produce more coffee—and demand higher
inputs like agrochemicals—but offer little in terms of habitat or soil protection.
22. Greenberg, Bichier, and Sterling, “Bird populations.”
23. R. Mordecai, “A threshold response to habitat disturbance by forest birds in the Chocó-Andean
Corridor, northwest Ecuador,” talk presented at a panel, “The Value of Shade Coffee,” Partners in Flight
Meeting, McAllen, Texas, February 2008.
24. A. Cruz-Angón and R. Greenberg, “Are epiphytes important for birds in coffee plantations? An
experimental assessment,” Journal of Applied Ecology 42 (2005): 150–59.
25. A. Cruz-Angón, T. S. Sillett, and R. Greenberg, “An experimental study of habitat selection by
birds in a coffee plantation,” Ecology 89, no. 4 (2008): 921–27.
26. Jha and Dick, “Shade coffee farms.”
27. D. Roubik, “Tropical agriculture: The value of bees to the coffee harvest,” Nature 417 (2002):
708.
28. T. Ricketts, G. Daily, P. Ehrlich, and C. Michener, “Economic value of tropical forest to coffee
production,” PNAS 101, no. 34 (2004): 12579–82; T. Ricketts, “Tropical forest fragments enhance pol-
linator activity in nearby coffee crops,” Conservation Biology 18, no. 5 (2004): 1262–71.
29. A.-M. Klein, I. Steffan-Dewenter, and T. Tschartke, “Fruit set of highland coffee increases with
the diversity of pollinating bees,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, B 270 (2003): 955–61.
30. A.-M. Klein, I. Steffan-Dewenter, and T. Tschartke, “Bee pollination and fruit set of Coffea ara-
bica and C. canephora,” American Journal of Botany 90, no. 1 (2003): 153–57.
31. J. Vannini, “Nearctic avian migrants in coffee plantations and forest fragments of south-western
Guatemala,” Bird Conservation International 4 (1994): 209–32; Greenberg, Bichier, and Sterling, “Bird
populations”; J. Wunderle and S. Latta, “Avian resource use in Dominican shade coffee plantations,” The
Wilson Bulletin 110, no. 2 (1998): 271–81.
32. S. Van Bael, S. Philpott, R. Greenberg, P. Bichier, N. Barber, K. Mooney, and D. Gruner, “Birds
as predators in tropical agroforestry systems,” Ecology 89, no. 4 (2008): 928–34.
33. Van Bael et al., “Birds as predators.”
34. I. Perfecto, J. Vandermeer, G. López Bautista, G. Ibarra Nuñez, R. Greenberg, P. Bichier, and
S. Langridges, “Greater predation in shaded coffee farms: The role of resident neotropical birds,” Ecology
85, no. 10 (2004): 2677–81.
35. Van Bael et al., “Birds as predators.”
36. Kellermann et al., “Ecological and economic services.”
37. Williams-Guillén et al., “Bats limit insects.”
38. Philpott et al., “Biodiversity loss.”
39. Not showing a loss of bird richness in the shade monoculture seems counterintuitive, but it is ex-
plained by the authors as being caused by two of the three studies in Veracruz, Mexico, having extremely
high richness levels. The Inga spp. shade cover in these shade monocultures was tall and dense, creating
an ambience more similar to a commercial polyculture; Philpott et al., “Biodiversity loss.”
40. Philpott et al., “Biodiversity loss.”

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8
A Guatemalan Coffee Farmer’s Story
A Challenging Life in a Beautiful, Harsh Land
Carlos Saenz

I am a small coffee farmer from Guatemala. I live in Genova Costa Cuca, Quetzaltenango,
about 50 kilometers south of the Mexican border. Coffee plantations cover about 2.5 percent
of Guatemalan territory; there are roughly 90,000 producers, with 45 hectares as the average
farm size. Today we are confronting a new crisis whose roots go back well into the twentieth
century. My family had to muster a great deal of courage to overcome the many obstacles
of the last few decades; their determination has given me the chance to continue cultivating
coffee. Finca Las Brisas—The Breezes—is the name of the farm that my family has worked
throughout four generations, me being the fourth.
I grew up learning day to day from my grandfather, who taught me simple things about the
harvest. For example, when I was a little boy I watched the women taking their baskets to collect
coffee, and I wanted to participate, so I took my own basket and did the job myself. Or when the
tractor passed by the main house taking coffee seedlings to the fields, I ran up to the farm cart
to take it with the workers. Little by little I started to really like the crop. I have learned so many
things living on the farm in good years as well as bad. For me, cultivating and processing coffee is
not a job; it is a way of living, of doing what I really like. I enjoyed it so much that when I gradu-
ated from high school I decided to study agriculture at Universidad Rafael Landivar in Guatemala
City, about four hours from the farm. However my grandfather was the one who taught me how
to be a farmer and to manage things from real life, beyond what we learned in college.
Today, I’m proud to say that I sell roasted coffee (ground or whole bean) locally and to
institutional businesses (hotels, restaurants, hospitals, etc.) and work daily to improve my
quality standards.

THE CIVIL WAR IN GUATEMALA

Guatemala lived through a long period of political insecurity, in which violence, distrust of
government and law, and a culture of fear dominated the country. That culture continues to
this day. Producers suffered from kidnappings, murders, invasions, arson of plantations or
complete farms, and heavy “war taxes,” levied by rebel fighters. The amount of money that had
to be paid to them varied depending on the size of each farm; the bigger the farm the higher

52

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A Guatemalan Coffee Farmer’s Story 53

the war tax. One year the levy might have been the whole crop and the next year it could have
been the money intended for payments to the workers. The guerrillas’ purpose was to keep
the landowners in fear so that most of them didn’t return to their farms. The guerrillas always
said that if we didn’t pay them they were going to take the lands.
The guerillas visited our farm many times. This group split off from the army of Guatemala
because one group of soldiers didn’t agree with the ones in charge. They adopted the flag of
the people most in need in the country, the really poor ones. The rebels wanted to take the
lands, especially coffee farms, and give them to all these people. Actually today some of the
ex-guerrillas form part of our government. They would ask us to give them “war taxes” in the
form of food, money, or simply time. We were sometimes obligated to listen for hours to hor-
ror stories about the government and the army, while the guerrillas tried to convince us that
what they were doing was correct. We could only listen and give them something to drink or
eat and obey their commands. We had to give them what they wanted or else they would burn
the farm or kill us. They would appear from anywhere, from streets or highways, or from any
direction in the mountains. From the government side, soldiers were killing entire villages that
they assumed had connections with guerrillas. There were problems from both sides. People
around our finca lived day by day with fear because we really didn’t know what could happen;
there were killings in the region.
Peace agreements between the government and the rebels, finally signed in 1996, were
meant to bring an end to the longest war in our history, one that had lasted 36 years. The
problems of the war years had a terrible impact on the entire national economy. Still today,
every week, I fear something terrible may happen. This insecurity is something we live with
constantly all around the country. It is hard to imagine a possible solution to the security
problem since we don’t have a government that provides security or law enforcement. In Gua-
temala you cannot even trust people who are in charge of our security.
Poverty, hunger, unequal land distribution, and racism continue. The indigenous people
suffered specially because of lack of opportunities and education. But the profound, con-
tinuing impact of the civil war is not the only problem we face; there are other important
challenges for Guatemalan coffee farmers. The government has never provided any policy or
support for coffee farmers who want to invest or succeed.

PRICE DROP

In 2001 the price of coffee fell from over $1 a pound on the world market to less than $0.50.
This collapse was largely due to the increase in supply from Vietnam, which became a major
coffee producer by the late 1990s, and because of the increases in Brazilian production. The
price drop has been a total disaster for us. One of our main difficulties is paying off the farm
debts. It’s hard to obtain loans at a low interest rate, for there has been a general lack of con-
fidence in the coffee business during this period. For this reason, over the past seven years,
we have paid a high rate of interest for loans, 20 percent annually, and have to pay a large
amount of money every month to the banks. Since we wanted so much to keep the farm, our
only option was to go deeper into debt. Some other farmers had to sell their lands and move
to other regions of the country.
During this crisis, many big farms that produced prime coffee and extra prime had disap-
peared because they were not paid well compared with prices for the hard and strictly hard
bean (SHB) coffee. And more small farmers in the high altitude mountains started cultivat-
ing coffee, producing strictly hard beans. The future for those farmers is bright because of the

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54 Carlos Saenz

quality beans they can produce at high altitudes. The main difference between strictly hard
beans and primes or extra primes is the acidity that is more accentuated in the SHB beans as
well as a more intense aroma and body.
Mine was one of the prime coffee farms that were about to disappear. In addition, it is
widely said that the average coffee farmer receives about 1 percent of the price of a cup of
coffee bought in a café. This is why I decided to add value to the green coffee I produced. I
invested in a coffee roaster, purchased with a loan at 18 percent, so that I could take produc-
tion from the seed to whole bean or ground, bagged coffee. Taking control of more steps in
processing coffee provided me with extra income, helping to preserve my family’s tradition.
Some of the farms in the area are beginning to offer ecotourism, which is attractive to people
who like the coffee environment.
The government started to promote agricultural diversification in the late 1990s, so that farm-
ers didn’t have to depend on just one crop, and if there was a decrease in price it wouldn’t cause
a national crisis. The government finally did something positive for coffee farmers. I already had
the roaster at this time, but not enough customers to consume the amount I used to produce.
My only way out of the problem was to eliminate more than half of the coffee plantation. Huge
swaths of land that formerly held coffee with beautiful stands of shade trees lay smoldering or
blackened, being readied for planting pastures for fattening cattle. My grandmother told me once,
“You are the only one in this family who has the guts to throw the coffee plantation away.” I also
have one part of the farm planted in rubber trees, which helps the farm to stay stable. Working
hard, twelve hours daily, six days a week, I have been able to expand my coffee production again
and increase my sales of roasted coffee, so I’ve been able to replant. The finca has 110 hectares
total, of which 45 are now planted with coffee. The rest has been planted with rubber trees.

MAIN CHALLENGES

In continuing to produce high-quality coffees, our main challenges are labor scarcity, high oil
prices, global warming, and competition from big farmers and large agrobusinesses. Our coffee-
growing costs, including fuel and other inputs, constantly increase. However, the biggest expense
is hand labor, especially in picking coffee. We rely on hand labor because the topography means
we cannot mechanize; most of our slopes are too steep to run machinery over them.
My pickers are families that live near the farm. But that’s not the case for all farms, most
of which have to transport pickers from long distances because of a lack of workers in their
regions. The conditions in which pickers live vary from farm to farm. On my finca they live
in concrete houses with running water and electricity generated on the farm. We also provide
a piece of land to each family so that they can cultivate corn for themselves. Of course there
are problems with roads, bridges, and infrastructure everywhere, so it can be very difficult to
move from one place to another.

SUCCESS

For coffee farmers, success is producing specialty coffee that commands a high price. If certain
other conditions, particularly the problems of labor and interest rates are solved, farmers can do
this in Guatemala: our coffee is cultivated in the best volcanic soils of the globe, under natural
shelter and with an adequate combination of altitude and specific microclimates of each region.
For this reason Guatemala’s coffee is positioned as a high-quality product. In Central America,
Guatemala is the largest exporter, followed by Honduras and Costa Rica, respectively.

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The use of large trees for shading coffee is a Guatemalan coffee-growing custom and is
said to have been initiated here. Coffee grown under the proper level of shade takes longer
to mature, which favors the development of rich and complex flavors. Shade-grown coffee is
an agroforestry crop that combines the goals of sustainable agriculture with environmental
protection. Many species of birds, reptiles, and insects live in these trees and are admired by
people who visit us, especially friends and family. I don’t offer ecotourism at the farm, but it
is something we want to do in the future. Since our coffee is shade grown, we form part of
Guatemala’s coffee forests, which bring environmental benefits, like protecting soils, biodi-
versity, and water resources, and help in diminishing the harming effects of global warming.
The biggest support for coffee farmers is provided by ANACAFE, the Guatemalan National
Coffee Association. It operates local offices that give small farmers like me access to technical
seminars and workshops, regional coffee fairs, and other services. ANACAFE offers services
like cupping seminars, lab analysis, market information, and service centers. ANACAFE’s
main goal is to promote internal quality coffee consumption. We are seeing that the market
inside Guatemala is growing. More and more people, especially young ones, are starting to
drink coffee. The country’s Cup of Excellence competition is highly beneficial because it
results in people constantly demanding more quality coffee. Producers are working harder to
obtain the quality the market is asking for.
Providing employment and education is another big success of coffee. About 9 percent of
the country’s working population is employed in the coffee sector. To help everyone in the
business, the Coffee Foundation for Rural Development, FUNCAFE, works to achieve hu-
man development in rural coffee communities. The foundation runs educational programs
and health centers and promotes food security. The last program teaches people how to pro-
duce and prepare nutritive food made from all sorts of esculent plants produced in a garden,
for example, small bunches of carrots and beet-root leaves, beverages, ice creams, marmalades,
and many other types of food preparations. I believe that all the efforts the foundation carries
out are giving positive results, especially with all the families that have been suffering because
of the natural tragedies of the last several years.
At Finca Las Brisas we have renewable energy because we have a hydroelectric facility. My
grandfather set it up sixty years ago, and we are operating it with the same equipment he in-
stalled back then. With it we can do wet processing of harvested coffee and provide reliable
electric energy for the main house and the homes of the workers, which have two bedrooms,
a kitchen-dining room, and a bathroom.

OPPORTUNITIES AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

We intend to look for markets in Asia and Europe to obtain better prices for our coffee,
which will reflect the high quality of our product. Today the U.S. absorbs about 40 percent
of Guatemalan coffee exports. As a strategy we have to go beyond the C price contract; we
aim to move coffees toward the premium-price markets like certified coffees, specialty grades,
and in-country auctions of excellent coffees. About 10 percent of my coffee is now sold as C
coffee; the rest we sell locally, already roasted and ground. My expectation for the future is to
sell my coffee already roasted directly to the U.S.
We also intend to produce coffees that command an even higher price, for example or-
ganic. Right now we don’t have any type of certification, but we are working on that. Cor-
ruption is everywhere here in Guatemala and certifying coffee is no exception.
Finally I can say that despite the problems we have faced we are thankful for having the
opportunity to produce one of the best coffees of the world.

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9
Pickers
Robert W. Thurston

At the bottom of the coffee commodity chain in terms of income are hired agricultural la-
borers, especially pickers. These are not necessarily unskilled people; anyone who has picked
coffee will say that the job is not easy and that to do it right takes at a minimum some experi-
ence. Unless the technique is crude strip harvesting, the cherry should be twisted slightly as
they are pulled from the tree’s branches. Forcefully pulling ripe fruit straight out from a tree
can damage a branch and harm the next year’s crop.
Pickers also have to be able to work on slopes that are steep, slick with moisture and often
mud, and located at altitudes where the air is thin. Sometimes the hillsides are so hard to work
on that the pickers tie themselves to larger trees. One false step and hours of work can be
spilled down the mountain. Stinging insects may also visit the trees and the humans.
Pickers must work fast, for two reasons. First, they are typically paid by the weight of the
cherry they bring in, with deductions for too many defective fruits, branches, or other excess
material. It is not unknown for some temporary hands, especially if they are not regulars on a
farm, to add to the weight of what they deliver to a collection point by loading a few stones
into a basket. Second, when the coffee is ripe, it needs to be picked quickly, lest the cherries
overripen on the branches and start to ferment, turning them into raisins.
Picking is hard physical labor. While not exclusively a man’s job, male pickers predominate
in the fields. Often pickers have to be able not only to fill basket after basket tied around the
waist and then empty each full one into a large sack but also to lift the sacks onto a truck and
from there into a collecting basin. It’s a humbling sight to witness an endless loop of workers
picking up sacks of wet coffee cherries; when a 125-pound person lifts his or her own weight
onto a shoulder repeatedly during a day, then day after day, the wear and tear on the body is
severe. Nevertheless, I have met pickers who have done this kind of work for four decades.
Family members, of course, are often pickers as soon as they can reach even the lower
branches of the trees. Kids may start to harvest coffee at the age of seven or eight. The temp-
tation or the necessity to keep children out of school in order to help on the farm is often
powerful, so that many young pickers never get the education that would be necessary to lift
them out of manual labor into better jobs. In Hawaii into the 1950s, the school year in some
areas was arranged to allow children time off to participate in the harvest.1

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Figure 9.1. A member of the La Pita, Nicaragua, coffee co-op picking in 2004. Photo by Wayne
Gilman.

Figure 9.2. Three pickers relax after a long day on La Combia Farm, Colombia, 2008. Behind
them is a building with showers and lockers. Photo by Robert Thurston.

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58 Robert W. Thurston

Besides the physical difficulties of picking coffee, it is always seasonal work. The job may
continue for several weeks, since the cherries do not all ripen simultaneously, and pickers may
have to make four or more passes through the orchards to collect all the mature fruit. Workers
may start at lower altitudes and over the course of several weeks go higher and higher, includ-
ing going to different farms situated at different levels above the sea. Pickers may migrate from
one region of a producing country to another, or across a border, as Nicaraguans often do
to work in Costa Rica or other countries. But, usually sooner than later, the annual harvest
is over. Somehow the hired hands, or the family members, must make a living until the next
harvest. As Price Peterson noted earlier, they don’t always survive.
Arnoldo Leiva, head of the Costa Rican Specialty Coffee Association, told me that Nicara-
guans who come to pick in his country never seem to earn enough money to buy their own
land back home. “What I’ve found is that they’re at least able to save money and send it back
to their relatives in Nicaragua. But I doubt they’re making enough money. Actually, when they
finish the harvest season in coffee they move to oranges, melons, sugar cane, and some of them
try to stay in construction as well. But in the case of Nicaragua this is a matter of basically
surviving for them because there’s no jobs in Nicaragua.”2
How much do pickers get paid? This brings the story back to the vexed question of the cost
of a cup of coffee in the consuming world compared to the money farmers or workers (peas-
ants) receive for coffee beans. In my various travels and readings, I have heard many figures
on how much pickers have earned. Here is a short list:

• Brazil and Cuba into the 1880s: zero. Pickers were slaves.
• Kona, Hawaii, 1928: $1–1.25 per “bag,” 110–120 pounds of cherry. A good picker could
fill ten a day. Then in the Depression, pay fell to 40 cents a bag.3
• Coopedota, a co-op in Santa Maria, Costa Rica (CR), 2008: $20–40 a day.
• Café Cristina, a private farm in Paraiso, CR, 2008: $30–40/day (though a really good
picker on a good farm in the region can earn twice that amount).
• Colombia, a general report from 2008: “800,000 people are employed each year dur-
ing the coffee harvest season; most of these workers migrate from one region to another
searching for farms where the harvest is still in progress. The most skillful pickers are
able to collect up to 550 pounds of ripe berries per day making around $30 US dollars.”4
• Finca La Esmeralda, Boquete, Panama, 2008: As Price Peterson noted, Indians who come
down from the high mountains to pick his coffee can make several hundred dollars each
in a few weeks. Peterson has provided housing with separate rooms, showers, and toilets.
A nurse, a dentist, and a doctor if necessary visit the pickers every week while they are
on the farm.5
• Sertaozinho farm, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, 2010: Pickers can make $1,200 a month, work-
ing for 24–26 days. But this figure refers to men driving mechanical harvesters.
• Guatemala: “Conditions for coffee workers on large plantations vary widely, but most
are paid the equivalent to sweatshop wages and toil under abysmal working conditions.
. . . coffee pickers have to pick a 100-pound quota in order to get the minimum wage of
less than $3/day. A recent study of plantations in Guatemala showed that over half of all
coffee pickers don’t receive the minimum wage, in violation of Guatemalan labor laws.
Workers interviewed in the study were also subject to forced overtime without compensa-
tion, and most often did not receive their legally-mandated employee benefits. The total
average income reported was Quetzales 1006 ($127.37/month).”6

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Pickers 59

Pickers, that is, those who harvest coffee fruit with their hands, will certainly continue to
be of great importance on the farms that put most emphasis on quality. However, just as in
the U.S. tomatoes, grapes, and a host of other crops are not picked by American citizens but
by poorly paid immigrants who work by the season, it will become increasingly difficult in
producing countries to find reliable pickers.
As the educational and living standards rise in any country, picking coffee becomes less
desirable work. Costa Rica and Hawaii are perhaps the best examples of this trend; in both, it
is difficult to find local people to do hard, dirty jobs. The success of a coffee-producing coun-
try can therefore be measured in a crude way by how hard it is to find people on the spot to
pick the fruit. Questions of where to get labor, how much people must be paid to pick, and
whether small mechanical devices can be developed to work on steep hills are pressing issues
in many areas.

NOTES

1. Gerard Y. Kinro, A Cup of Aloha: The Kona Coffee Epic (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
2003), 62.
2. Interview with Arnoldo Leiva, San Jose, Costa Rica, May 27, 2008.
3. Kinro, Cup of Aloha, 32. The bag size is taken from a personal communication from Kinro to
Shawn Steiman, May 1, 2012.
4. A post by Andres Castro on Barista Exchange, November 24, 2008, http://www.baristaexchange
.com/group/farmersproducers/forum/topics/do-you-want-to-know-more-about.
5. For more on pickers in Panama, see Emily Haworth, “Coffee Pickers: Why Should We Care?” post
on coffeegeek.com, May 8, 2012.
6. A post by the Organic Consumers Association, no date, but probably 2000. Unfortunately, the study
mentioned for Guatemala is not cited. At http://www.organicconsumers.org/starbucks/coffeelabor.htm,
accessed April 29, 2012.

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10
Coffee Processing
An Artisan’s Perspective
Joan Obra

If you only think of coffee as a beverage, you’re missing most of the experience. For those of us
lucky enough to work with coffee from harvest to roast, taste is just one part of the adventure.
We begin at the tree, tugging ripe coffee cherries from branches. We continue with fingers in
unroasted coffee, pulling out broken bits. And we end with long, airy sips of coffee, critically
evaluating the flavors in the cup.
Along the way, we ask questions. Do we want the delicate, clean feel of a washed coffee? Or
the more assertive, fruity aroma of a naturally dried coffee?
All of the steps in processing transform the seed of the coffee fruit into green beans ready
to be roasted. I hate the term processing. It’s too vague and inelegant for the art of coaxing
flavor from coffee. It doesn’t hint at the complexity of crafting artisan beans. “Processing” fails
to emphasize the importance of our jobs as coffee producers; simply put, if we deliver defective
beans, no skill in roasting or brewing can make that coffee exceptional.
What actually happens during processing? After harvest, the goal is to dry the coffee seed
while preserving its taste potential. Most times, we remove multiple layers of the coffee cherry
and expose the seed as it dries. Sometimes, we dry the seed inside the whole coffee cherries.
Every drying method runs risks of ruining the final cup. Mold is a big threat, as is fermen-
tation: too much of either and unwanted flavors can appear. With all of this in mind, let’s take
a closer look at coffee processing by Rusty’s Hawaiian, my family’s company. Our laboratory is
a twelve-acre coffee farm and micromill in the Ka’u District, a vast, rural area on the southern
side of the Big Island of Hawaii.
Perched on the Mauna Loa volcano with a view of the ocean, this old sugarcane field se-
duced my parents. After seeing it in the late 1990s, Rusty and Lorie Obra took a chance on
an early retirement, sold their house in New Jersey, and moved to Hawaii. Rusty dreamed of
creating high-quality coffee in Ka’u. But he died in 2006, leaving Lorie to fulfill his vision.
Since then, her green beans have won several domestic and international awards.
How did Lorie meet my father’s expectations? Here’s our theory: she approaches coffee
processing with the sensibility of a chef. Instead of building flavors in, say, a beef stock, she
builds flavors in coffee beans before they’re roasted. With the mentorship of R. Miguel Meza,
the former roastmaster of Paradise Roasters in Ramsey, Minnesota, Lorie learned the flavors
desired by the specialty coffee industry.

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Coffee Processing 61

She and Miguel study the different characteristics of our farm’s coffee varieties, such as
‘Red Bourbon,’ ‘Typica,’ ‘Yellow Caturra,’ and ‘Red Caturra.’ Lorie processes them in different
ways, with the goal of highlighting certain flavors in each one. “I’m always trying to figure out
how each coffee wants to express itself,” she says.
Lorie can spend years tweaking a processing method before she is satisfied. Taking this
approach isn’t easy, especially with the limited equipment and resources of a tiny family op-
eration. But we feel the investment in research and development is necessary. In the United
States, where labor costs are high compared with other coffee-producing countries, we must
compete with excellence, not low prices.
The payoff can be big. After two years of experiments, Lorie and Miguel developed a pro-
cessing method that heightens the acidity and sweetness of the ‘Red Bourbon’ variety. Called
Kenya-style Red Bourbon, this coffee won the 2011 Hawaii Coffee Association’s statewide
cupping competition.
Our price of $25 per 3.5 roasted ounces, or more than $114 a pound, reflects the distinc-
tion and rarity of the Kenya-style Red Bourbon. We have only about 120 trees of this variety.
Last year, we quickly sold out of the crop.
Other producers have taken a similar strategy of focusing on quality and have also fetched
high prices for green beans. For example, Finca El Injerto has won the prestigious Cup of Ex-
cellence Competition in Guatemala multiple times. Earlier this year, El Injerto auctioned off
a rare lot of its coffee for $210.50 per pound. It consisted of the rare ‘Mocca’ variety, treated
with washed processing. That figure is astronomically higher than the average cost of $2–$3
per pound of specialty-grade green coffee.
Now that the reasons for a quality-driven approach are clear, it can be examined in practice.
First, there are many ways to process coffee. Producers adjust their methods depending on
scale, equipment, resources, and location. Our experience is just one example, and it is by no
means definitive.
Much of the action at our little mill begins in the late afternoon, with the arrival of up to
hundreds of pounds of coffee cherries. We examine them anxiously. Most of the time, the
harvest shows varying degrees of ripeness.
Lorie pours the cherries into buckets filled with water. Using small colanders, we scoop up
any floating cherries and set them aside. These so-called floaters contain low-density beans
that won’t roast properly. We dump the rest of the cherries onto wire racks and begin to sort
them by color. Depending on the quality of the harvest, we may sort coffee by hand until
after midnight.
Greenish, underripe cherries are removed, because they’ll make coffee taste astringent and
grassy. Brown, overripe fruit also is discarded, because they lend a fermentation flavor to cof-
fee. Beyond these choices, there’s a range of ripeness that we must evaluate, cherry by cherry.
Our ideal: a ripe coffee cherry with full color, which will lend sweetness to the cup.
After this step, it’s time to consider other factors. For the next few days, for example, the
weather forecast may indicate lots of sun and wind. The beans will dry quickly, so it’s a perfect
time to make honey coffee. Also known as pulped natural coffee, honey coffee is one of our
most labor-intensive products. But there’s a payoff: If done correctly, its sweetness is terrific
in espresso blends.
We pour the ‘Typica’ cherries into the pulper. The pale coffee seeds, wet with mucilage,
spill out and pile into a plastic bin. We lug the coffee beans to wire racks, spread them out,
and shut down for the night.

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62 Joan Obra

Early the next morning, I’m back at the wire racks with a wooden rake. My task: rake the
beans periodically until they’re no longer sticky. If I’m lucky, the coffee will dry to the touch
by early afternoon. But if it rains, or if there is no wind, I’m stuck at the racks for the better
part of a day. Otherwise, the beans may clump together like caramel popcorn and run the risk
of turning moldy. Throughout the day, Lorie checks on my progress and looks at the coffee.
Soon, she’s picking out anything broken, misshapen, or discolored.
By the end of the day, her pile of rejects has grown. She’ll continue removing defective beans
during the next few days, until the coffee has sufficiently dried for long-term storage. At this
stage, the beans are covered in a papery covering known as parchment. Afterwards, it’s a wait-
ing game. We let the coffee beans rest for a few months to let their flavor mature.
When we think it’s time, we pull out a sample. The parchment is tinted a light golden color
from the dried fruit. Lorie pours the beans into the huller, which strips them of their papery
skins. “You smell that?” she says. Now missing their parchment covering, the green beans have
a light scent of sweet berries.
After roasting them, it’s time for a taste test. Miguel hands me a white ceramic cup with
the ground coffee. It smells like honey. When we taste it, Miguel points out the berry flavors,
fuller body, and sugar-like sweetness in the cup. “It has more intense aromas than a washed
‘Typica,’” he says. There’s only one thing left to do: remove any defects in the green beans.
Depending on the amount we need, we’ll pull out the defects by hand or machine.
This is just one example of a processing method. Equally challenging are natural ‘Red
Caturra’ and natural ‘Yellow Caturra.’ For natural-process coffees, we don’t remove the cherry

Figure 10.1. A fabulous bunch of ‘Typica’ cherries, Musula, Honduras. Photo by Martha Cas-
teneda.

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Coffee Processing 63

skins. Instead, we place the coffee cherries from these varieties directly on separate wire
screens, then rake them frequently to prevent mold and to dry them quickly. The results are
sweet grape flavors in the ‘Red Caturra’ and tropical fruit in the ‘Yellow Caturra.’
A less labor-intensive coffee is washed ‘Typica.’ We use the pulper to strip the skins off coffee
cherries. Then we cover the beans with water and allow them to ferment overnight. This is the
most important part of the washed process. Lorie discovered that small differences in the amount
of liquid and the length of fermentation have a drastic impact on flavor. Her goal: soak the beans
in water long enough to bring out bright flavors and floral, berry, and citrus tones.
The following day, we scoop the beans out of the water and spread them in thin layers on
wire screens. Fermentation has removed the mucilage clinging to the beans, making them
easier and quicker to dry; without the sugary mucilage, molds are less attracted to the seeds.
We rake the beans occasionally to speed the drying process.
Of course, Lorie continues to tinker with these methods and others. Like roasting and
brewing, coffee processing is a delightful mix of science and art—and a heck of a lot of work.
So when you drink your next cup of, say, washed ‘Caturra’ from Finca Villa Loyola in
Colombia, think about the processing method. Imagine that coffee producer soaking pulped
coffee beans in water or sniffing a handful of green beans. Think of the producer’s satisfaction
in producing artisanal coffee, as well as the intimate connection to the experience. Better yet,
visit our farms and mills. Chew on a coffee cherry. Peel parchment off of green beans. We
guarantee that coffee will never again be just a drink.

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11
Women in Coffee in Colombia
Olga Cuellar

In Colombia, gender inequalities have permeated all aspects of agriculture, including coffee,
through production, harvesting, postharvesting, distribution, and marketing. But women’s
presence in coffee farming has increased significantly over the last several decades, and women
now seek further advancement through the global market.
Profound economic and social changes in the past few decades have helped promote these
trends. The introduction in Colombia of free trade in coffee during the 1990s as the Interna-
tional Coffee Agreement ended, guerrilla activity, violent displacement of communities, male
migration to towns, and the lack of rural job opportunities have all contributed to change.1
In the last twenty years, Colombian conflicts between guerrillas, paramilitaries, and militaries
have cost the lives of at least 70,000 people. More than 3 million people have been internally
displaced and many have “disappeared,” in the classic Latin American sense, killed by one
side or another. War and violence were not considered a perversion of politics but efficient
mechanisms to achieve political goals.2
These factors present new challenges and opportunities for the Colombian coffee industry.
The situation has fostered the rise of market interest in coffee produced by women, the cre-
ation of female associations that increase the visibility of women’s needs, and the attention of
national and international organizations that improve access to financial support.
Since the mid-1980s, new concerns within the coffee industry, and in some cases national
and international programs arranged by international firms with producers, have led to an
increasing commitment to provide equal opportunities for men and women, thus creating
more balanced socioeconomic opportunities for producers without discrimination based on
gender, race, class, or ethnicity.
Migration patterns, new methods of coffee production, a growing global market, and a
decline in income due to the absence of male producers have all led to an increasing number
of women actively involved as coffee producers in order to provide daily sustenance for their
families. As Deere and León de Leal indicate, in the 1960s, women’s presence in agricultural
labor was related to the lack of alternative employment opportunities and male migration
to urban settings.3 Although women did contribute to agricultural production, men were
still considered the primary farmers. The same authors suggest that agricultural decisions
were part of the male domain.4

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Women in Coffee in Colombia 65

Today, the demands of capitalism and local circumstances have transformed labor divisions
and perceptions of appropriate work for women. In regions where men migrate from the
countryside in search of work, changes in gender-related labor division have affected local
attitudes that designate men as the primary agriculturalists and breadwinners. Women and
young children frequently remain in rural areas, while husbands and teenage sons and daugh-
ters migrate, leading to what has been called the “feminization of agriculture.”5
In the last decade, policy makers, researchers, and agricultural development organizations
have begun to acknowledge an increase in female participation and have sought to engage
women in development and sustainability projects. Before the early 1990s, little attention
was paid to how the transformation of the coffee industry affected women’s everyday activi-
ties. Now development projects regularly incorporate a gender perspective. Moreover, some
development agencies, including the World Bank, the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), the Food and Agri-
culture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the United Nations as a whole, have
resolved that by 2015, besides eradication of hunger and poverty, gender equality and the
empowerment of women’s lives, especially in rural areas, must be achieved.6 Several programs
within the coffee industry also reflect interest in helping women obtain leadership positions
and enhance marketing. Organizations such as the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) and the
International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA) are in the process of evaluating how pro-
grams can better address women’s needs. This article considers the voices of those not usually
heard at the national and international level regarding their experiences in the coffee value
chain, from farm production to marketing.
My research focuses on one organization, the Asociación de Mujeres Caficultoras del Cauca
(Association of Women Coffee Growers of Cauca, AMUCC), in the state of Cauca, Colombia.
Cauca is well known to coffee buyers for having the appropriate altitude, climate, and soil to pro-
duce exceptional coffee.7 Yet owing to the sociopolitical context, the state of Cauca has struggled
to stay informed of new advances in coffee production and to improve market opportunities.
This case study focused on the formation of a women’s association and the adoption of
new coffee quality standards in order to participate in the international market. AMUCC fits
into to what Goodman calls the “moral economy,”8 as the organization was formed due to an
appeal from a medium-sized Spanish coffee roaster, SUPRACAFÉ.9 The roaster established a
direct trade relationship with AMUCC to sell their coffee in Spain. In this arrangement, qual-
ity and ethical values will translate into premium prices, economic benefits such as assistance
to build infrastructure, and organizational aid to female members of AMUCC.10
In the summer of 2007, I conducted in-depth interviews with nine leaders of AMUCC, as
well as with other informants. Twenty-one other women filled out surveys. I wanted to explore
how women perceive themselves and their level of participation when they form part of a
mixed gender association and how they perceive themselves as coffee growers and members of
strictly female associations, as well as their roles in AMUCC’s decision-making process. I also
spoke with husbands, sons, and other male relatives.

CAUCA

AMUCC is located in Popayán, the capital of the state of Cauca, in the southwestern corner of
Colombia, facing the Pacific Ocean to the west. Cauca has approximately 1,250,000 inhabit-
ants11; AMUCC has members in twelve of Cauca’s forty-one total municipalities. The regional

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66 Olga Cuellar

economy is mainly based on agricultural production, including coffee, sugar cane, fique (a
natural fiber), and other cash crops.12 Cauca forms part of one of the seven coffee production
regions in Colombia.
Cauca has been populated by indigenous peoples, their Afro-Colombian descendants, and
peasants (mestizos). Historically, land distribution and ownership have created conflict among
these diverse populations. As a result of the resistance of the large haciendas’ owners to the
redistribution of land, struggles have occurred in the past. In the early 1970s the Páez and
the Guambianos (indigenous communities) as well as some peasants who occupied private
land invaded more than twenty haciendas in the state of Cauca.13 Agricultural laborers in
coffee have also demanded a regulated wage and welfare and social security benefits. Workers
have claimed abuse by landowners.14 The 1959–60 Agricultural Censuses showed that almost
50,000 Colombian farmers did not have titles to the lands they occupied and that farm man-
agers operated over one-third of Colombia’s agricultural land.15
A principal objective of Colombia’s 1994 Agrarian Reform Law was to eliminate the in-
equitable concentration of rural property. Most of the land struggles during the late 1960s
and early 1970s accompanied the emergence of agrarian capitalism, that is, production for
the market.16 After the land reform, small-scale producers represent 64 percent of all coffee
growers in Colombia. They own an average of one hectare per producer: 28 percent own 1–3
hectares, 5 percent own 3–5 hectares, 4 percent own 5–20 hectares, and just 0.56 percent own
more than 20 hectares.17
Most of the economic struggles of Caucan peasants still revolve around lack of access to
land, inequality of land distribution, difficulties in agricultural production, and competition
with products imported from Ecuador, which have been subsidized by the Ecuadorian govern-
ment. The combination of these economic and social struggles has led some peasants to begin
cultivation of illicit crops, especially coca.18 Cultivation of illegal crops has some benefits,
such as a secure market, ease of transport, and greater profit than other agriculture products.
Controlling production of illicit crops was and continues to be a complex challenge for the
government and local agencies. One woman coffee producer told me, “It is the reality. Money
from coca is easy; you have to work less and you get more. But at the same time it brings more
violence to the community.”19
The Land Reform of 1994 reassigned around 12 million hectares for redistribution to 65,000
rural families by 1998.20 Although generally successful, the reform produced several new prob-
lems. More than a few peasant and indigenous communities had to resettle and migrate to
other areas. Many poor peasants were excluded because they lacked the documents necessary to
acquire credit, they had unpaid debts, or the land was overpriced.21 Moreover, some distributions
were based on political favors and gave preferences to certain local elites. This unequal distri-
bution only created more conflict among various groups. The new legal codes promoted the
movement of peasants from one state to another, resulting in overpopulation in some regions.
According to Grusczynski and Rojas,22 in 2003 more than two-thirds of the land distributed
in 1994 presented high levels of desertion, indebtedness, and, in many cases, abandonment of
lands. Yet agrarian reform in Colombia in the early 1990s included among potential beneficiaries
poor peasant women or female heads-of-household who previously did not own property. Thus
land redistribution increased the number of independent women farmers.
Knowledge about agricultural quality is not easily disseminated in Cauca. This is due partly
to a dearth of technical assistants who help all coffee producers in the state. According to
conversations with some coffee technicians in Cauca in 2007 (based on information from the
1997 Coffee Census by the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia [FNCC]), there

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Women in Coffee in Colombia 67

were only 800 of them for more than 85,000 coffee producers. Nonetheless, coffee produc-
tion in Cauca has become more specialized, producing documented origin and differentiated
coffees, which have special qualities that add market value. At the same time, rural problems
have led women to become more involved in coffee production and to actively participate in
all stages of the coffee value chain. These changes helped prompt local initiatives to organize
women’s groups or organizations, among them AMUCC.

A PORTRAIT OF AMUCC

AMUCC was formed in 2002 at the request of SUPRACAFÉ. This company, another Spanish
foundation,23 and the local cooperative CAFICAUCA24 were interested in developing a line of
coffee produced by women. The first attempt took the form of a program for women that later
turned into an association, AMACA (Asociación de Mujeres Agropecuarias del Departamento
del Cauca). Three hundred women from a single municipality formed this group. After just
one year, a misunderstanding took place among AMACA, SUPRACAFÉ, and the cooperative,
leaving AMACA to sever ties with the cooperative and the Spanish company.
The two sponsoring organizations did not give up. They formed a new association that in-
cluded women from across different municipalities in Cauca. This was the birth of AMUCC.
Today, this association has 390 members—all women—who are producing coffee.
Each side in this arrangement has a specific role. The Spanish coffee company is the buyer
and evaluator of the coffee’s quality. The Spanish foundation provides financial backing to the
association. The role of the cooperative is to store, hull, pack, and export the coffee to Spain.
AMUCC’s goals, as well as those of the Spanish coffee buyer, include coffee production that
focuses on social and environmental sustainability, in addition to improving living standards
for coffee producers and their communities. Negotiation with the Spanish buyer generates
more opportunities for women members to sell their coffee at better prices and establishes
networks that create more options in the international market. In addition, producers are
becoming familiar with marketing processes. They are learning how to deal with coffee buy-
ers, while becoming aware of the quality of the coffee they have produced in order to obtain
better prices. The women conduct production cost and revenues analysis, interpret coffee
price fluctuations, and learn how to adjust to them, among other practices that facilitate their
access to the international market.
AMUCC’s wide coverage in Cauca makes its membership highly heterogeneous. Within
the association there are substantial differences in socioeconomic status, determined largely by
home municipality. For example, municipalities close to Popayán are more developed. Women
from these communities have better access to infrastructure, land, and economic assets. On
the other hand, women who live in southern Cauca, far away from Popayán, have less access
to such facilities and possibilities. This situation makes a considerable difference in produc-
tion costs and in the challenges women face in growing, transporting, and marketing coffee.
On average, members of AMUCC have from one to three hectares of land per producer. In
the state of Cauca, this plot size is considered small-scale production. Medium-scale producers
have from five to eight hectares, and large producers have more than ten hectares. In 2007,
AMUCC produced 2,500 bags of coffee, the equivalent of 10 exportable containers. From
these, the Spanish buyer purchased 40 percent, with the rest sold to local buyers.
To become a member of AMUCC, a woman had to own at least one hectare of land (with
a legal title), on which she had to produce high-quality coffee. As they considered joining

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68 Olga Cuellar

AMUCC, women had more leverage to demand legal title to land from a husband, family,
or the government. Once in the organization, women had much better access to the coffee
market, recognition as coffee producers, credit and cash income, training, and other services.
In some cases, these factors transformed the way women, families, and community members
perceived gender roles and women’s participation as producers in the coffee sector. Moreover,
when women have the opportunity to become active participants in commercial production,
they often increase their decision-making power within the household and the community.25

THE EMERGENCE OF WOMEN PRODUCERS IN CAUCA

The state of Cauca has been characterized as a colonial region in which class, gender, and ethnic-
ity have played profound roles in the construction of social and political relationships. Cauca was
populated by Spaniards, and a Catholic heritage has influenced Caucanos’ patterns of behavior,
activities, and labor division. In Cauca, additionally, there was a big difference in the sense of
gender roles and family traditions between rural and urban dwellers. Women in rural areas were
expected to do household chores and participate in communal responsibilities that did not
require a long commute from home. As a result, Caucanos assumed that there was a natural
gendered labor division, excluding women from active participation in public spheres such as
the market and other political and economic institutions. Nevertheless, in reality women and
men share the same spaces and they divide their responsibilities according to their necessities.
Cultural patterns stereotyped “women’s roles” and “men’s roles,” a dynamic reinforced by
political and religious organizations. For example, the FNCC and other coffee organizations
excluded women. The country’s customs have been strongly patriarchal. Into the mid-1960s,
women could not take part in forming coffee associations, which hampered their role in com-
munities’ decision-making processes.26 Nevertheless, local and external circumstances caused
women to get close to the public sphere.
AMUCC has experienced the problems and challenges of creating a women’s organization.
At the same time, the association’s story illustrates interactions among the diverse participants
in the coffee industry (coffee producers, associations, cooperatives, FNCC, NGOs, buyers,
roasters, and consumers) and how complex it is to establish direct trade, which includes trace-
ability and a more secure market for women. Women in AMUCC have demonstrated their
capacity to improve quality practices in coffee production and to strengthen their organiza-
tion. By sharpening these skills, women have been able to target a promising international
market. As this has happened, women have gone from being virtually unnoticed participants
in coffee to high visibility in the market and as primary coffee growers.
Members of AMUCC began to address topics such as access to land, technical knowledge
and assistance, inputs (agrochemicals, infrastructure, and transportation), credit and capital,
and the implementation of high-quality standards and sustainability. In order to meet the
demands of European roasters interested in women-produced coffee, the cooperative CAFI-
CAUCA developed the program Mujer Caficultora (Woman Coffee Grower) in 2000.

AMUCC TODAY

AMUCC is an association of 390 women. The membership is heterogeneous, composed of

married women (77 percent), single women (10 percent), and single heads of household (13

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Women in Coffee in Colombia 69

percent). Additionally, some members are from the indigenous communities of Guambianos (2
percent). The average age of AMUCC women is forty years old; there are few young members.
Most women have children, an average of four per family. The educational level of women in
the sample was typically middle school, while eight from the twenty-four finished only first or
second grade. Among the participants there is just one professional, an agronomist.
In order to join AMUCC, women must demonstrate that they own the land where they
grow coffee. According to a survey conducted by CAFICAUCA in 2005 among all of its
members, on average women own two hectares of land per producer, a statistic confirmed
by my survey. Women gained legal rights to land in two different ways. About 20 percent of
the twenty-four AMUCC members whom I interviewed have title to the property. Another
60 percent possessed a notarized paper stating that the owner—the woman’s family or her
husband—gave total right and control of a piece of land to the woman. The other 20 percent
had no legal claim but were in the process of obtaining a valid document; to join AMUCC,
these women must have at least a provisional document.

IMPACT OF AMUCC IN WOMEN’S LIVES,

HOUSEHOLDS, AND COMMUNITIES

More than a housewife, now I am also a coffee producer.

—Yolima, member of AMUCC, July 2007

Today I am not just a housewife, I am also a coffee grower. . . . maybe I always was, but I
did not identify myself like this.
—AMUCC participant27

When asked why they decided to become coffee growers, many women answered that they
were raised in the coffee industry and had never considered an alternative. For them, growing
coffee was a way to survive in the rural areas where they live. Other women chose to grow
coffee because it was then easier for them to work at home, where they could take care of
their children and household chores. Still other women started to grow coffee ten years earlier
because they thought it was a viable economic option. Just one converted from growing illicit
crops to coffee, because she and her husband realized that coca brought violence and more
social conflict to the region.
I asked AMUCC members why they thought the association was only for women. What
benefits do they receive now, and what do they expect in the future from a women’s associa-
tion? Women’s responses about the formation of a female group were all related to the new
opportunity of being considered as coffee growers and marketers. One woman said “Before,
we [women] did not know which coffee our husband took to sell to the local town, we did not
know how much he earned, how much he spent, nothing. We were outside the business.”28
Another AMUCC member, Ana, recalled that “we [women] did not have any rights. . . . men
always have been privileged by the FNCC and other organizations.” Camila commented, “we
were also workers but were not recognized for it.” Finally, Amelia noted that “women always
depended economically on their husbands, they were in charge of selling the coffee. . . . Now
women can do it also.”29 In general, AMUCC members were pleased to have the opportunity
to organize, unite, and experience a positive change in the coffee industry.

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70 Olga Cuellar

Women mentioned several tangible and intangible benefits that AMUCC provided: ac-
cess to the specialty coffee market by establishing a direct trade relationship with the Spanish
buyer, acquiring materials to build solar dryers, and gaining more knowledge about coffee,
prices, new markets, and buyers’ demands. Ana noted, “before we produced coffee and did not
acknowledge quality standards, prices, certification and better trade for our coffee.”30 Several
coffee buyers I spoke to felt that women add a special and unique touch to the coffee industry,
their ability to translate theory into practice, to produce quality, also their community focus
and their capability to establish priorities in order to benefit their families and their com-
munities, create a better scenario in coffee trade.31 Income, naturally, is a central concern for
women: Yolima said, “what motivates me to participate is to have another standard of living,
that’s what we want to have . . . our pesitos [money].”32 Another respondent said, “Now I do
not have to ask for money, also if I want I can provide education and supply the need of my
children. This is a great feeling. Before my economic contribution was less. Now I could be
become a role model for my own children and community.”33
Participants in the association noted that among their own gender, they felt more confi-
dence, received support, and had the opportunity to network with women from other mu-
nicipalities with whom they could share experiences. Association members also mentioned
that being in a group of just women could allow them to receive external support from
the market and from organizations interested in working with female coffee growers. In
sum, women’s associations allow women to feel comfortable and to create an environment
in which they can talk, give their opinions, and learn how valuable their contributions to
coffee production are. These feelings were also shared by women members of other coffee
associations in Cauca: “I was afraid to talk, but since I have been participating in the as-
sociation I am not shy anymore. Now I am not afraid to talk with important people, such
as international buyers. If I have to talk, I do. I see how other women are afraid to express
themselves and talk in front of multitudes. . . . I understand . . . but this is a process where
you will lose that fear when you start to speak up. ”34
The women in the study were affected on a personal level. Women mentioned several times
that one of the most memorable days as part of AMUCC was when they got the chance to
travel to Popayán to participate in a meeting. They see membership in AMUCC as an op-
portunity to escape from their daily activities as housewives and function as businesswomen.
They have become more economically independent of their husbands and have the feeling
of contributing to their household expenses. Women members from other associations have
described similar transformations in their lives. A female member of ASOMUCA (Asociación
de Mujeres de Cajibio) said, “Since we [women] are members of a group of only women, we
learn to speak up, we learn to negotiate with our husbands. . . . this is a great benefit, we have
won a space in our homes.”35
However, women also indicate an increase in their work. As Meertens mentioned, a
work day for rural women consists not just of tasks in coffee production but also household
chores.36 On average women work sixteen hours a day and men fourteen hours in rural areas
in Colombia. In extreme cases women work four or five hours longer than men.37 An activ-
ity especially burdensome for women has been cooking for wage laborers, an average of ten
per day, during the coffee harvest. Preparing food is an activity exclusively carried out by the
women. Even when these women had to attend the meeting in Popayán, sell coffee to coopera-
tives, or attend a training day, they still had to get up early to prepare food.
But husbands and younger members of the family have begun to help women more. For
example, in the case of cooking for laborers, husbands began to take food to the fields and to

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Women in Coffee in Colombia 71

wash the dishes, chores that only women used to do.38 When husbands were asked what they
think about their wives’ new roles, most men first expressed acceptance. However, when the
conversation continued, they complained about women’s new carelessness in some aspects
of household tasks. Some men protested that women were spending more time outside of
the home. Despite such complaints, most husbands support their wives’ efforts because the
household benefits economically. Natalia’s husband said, “I think her participation has been
beneficial for us, now we have solar dryers because of that . . . that helps improve quality
in our coffee.”39
A member of AMACA called membership “a process of awakening,” in which women
strengthened their capabilities.40 She also thinks women have gained more ownership over
the association because they have had to become more involved in all the processes, as well as
learning about all the market. Another member, Alicia, said, “Now we are not anymore in a
paternalistic relationship, we were and we did not want that this partnership ended like that.
. . . We learned a lot, we think and act by ourselves. . . . Now we know where and how to go.
. . . We have today a better business vision and we learned about accountability, administrative
and management process. For me, we are on the right path.41
Other women were pleased about what they had learned but also expressed a need for even
better information: “Before we just knew a few things about coffee, now we are aware of cost
of production, profits, and international prices in the market. But we need to learn more. . . .
There is a long way that we [women] have not crossed yet.” Another woman in a focus group
said, “We in this process have been able to improve coffee quality through accessing informa-
tion about quality standards, but in order to continue improving we need more consistent
technical and training assistance.”42
Finally, being part of AMUCC has brought some changes in women’s communal life. In
a municipality with eighty members of AMUCC, the association seems to have had a great
impact. The leader of this community mentioned that the group has helped unify neighbors
and families. This community has suffered from violence and a high presence of guerrillas and
paramilitaries. According to this respondent, AMUCC is the first formal organization in the
municipality. Florina stated that “one of the consequences of violence is the loss of trust in
the community, people tend to isolate themselves, they are afraid and there is no cooperation.
. . . Nevertheless, since we have been part of AMUCC there is more collaboration, integration
and we are starting to re-create community bonds.”43
Additionally, women mentioned that when other women from the municipality observe
improvements, this instills hope. Therefore, as Yolima noted, “a lot of people are seeing
women working and getting something back, thus people [women] get motivated and even if
they are currently not a member of any association, they get motivated to work in the field.”44
In sum, the significance of the AMUCC association for women is a source of “development,
peace, growth, a new space for women, a place in which we can share with other women,
friends and coffee growers all the difficulties, struggles, as well as the successes we have been
through, a context from which we learned a lot, and a significant space in which we come out
ahead and we have been able to speak up as women.”45

LAND, POWER, AND MONEY

Another gain has been the women’s access to land. In Cauca, access to land was not limited for
women, but it was expected that women were part of a family farm and that the owner of the

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72 Olga Cuellar

land was the head of the household, usually a man. In many regions, moreover, women are not
recognized as the primary agriculturalist within a family. This translates into their inability to
access or inherit land. In some regions in Latin America, even if a woman can inherit land, it
is expected that she will renounce, share, pass on, or sell it to a male relative.46
Women inherit land when they are the only daughter or when there are no male members
left in the family. Also, if the mother is a widow or her husband abandons her, this makes it
easier for the daughters to inherit the land. A female producer in Costa Rica mentioned that,
“I am glad that I never met my father. I can imagine if he was there I could not be here, I
could not have land, and my life would be totally different. With my mother as the head of
household, I was able to have more independence and be here today as a coffee grower with
my own land.”47
Members of AMUCC also identify as owners of land with the ability to gain other assets,
training, technical assistance, and key information for the production of high-quality coffee.
As Amelia pointed out in the interview, “Today I can say this lot of land, this farm is mine.”48
As another woman said, “We now can access our own piece of land; I manage it, and I know
how much I invest on it and how much I can earn. That makes a huge difference.”49 Women’s
income represents financial independence for them, which contributes to their sense of having
more authority and decision-making power in the household and community.
In sum, women members of AMUCC are today more than coffee growers and marketers:
they are also owners of land, economic contributors to their families, role models for their
children, leaders in their communities, and representatives of a new sociopolitical position
in Cauca. Women’s visibility in both production and marketing of coffee is thus increasing.
As the International Research Workshop on Gender and Collective Action50 pointed out,
access to information is a power resource that changes attitudes about family and economic
alternatives.51 As a result, although some of the relationships the women of AMUCC are in-
volved in are still highly unequal, they now coexist with greater opportunities for independent
action by the producers.
Moreover, women can share knowledge of practices and strategies with other women inside
or outside of AMUCC. They are learning how to access information, lead, organize, and
maintain the association. Their experiences with the market are giving women the tools to
create better opportunities in this same market, and this translates into women having power
to decide and negotiate.
As a result of women’s increased access to land and their improved profits, women can now
also obtain loans and credit. The majority of AMUCC members do not have credit today,
but they are planning to apply for credit in the future in order to invest in their farm or to
buy land. Also, being a member of AMUCC facilitates the application and approval of bank
loans.52 As is demonstrated in an FAO study, in Colombia women who have achieved property
rights have better access to credit.53
Global restructuring of the coffee industry, together with changes in local forms of patriar-
chy in coffee areas, continually reshape women coffee growers’ lives. Today, no one engaged in
coffee production can escape the demands of the international coffee market. Coffee growers
in many countries are now forced to seek alternative sources of income, such as producing
specialty coffee, in response to these new pressures and demands.
Over many years, women in Colombia have participated in the work of the farm as well
as of the house. Now the National Federation of Coffee Growers, as well as other NGOs and
local institutions, have recognized that AMUCC is a collective group of women who work
effectively in coffee and who operate projects targeted to meet the specific needs of women.

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Women in Coffee in Colombia 73

As a result of international gender equity policies and the creation of new organizations that
include women, today governmental and nongovernmental programs are highly interested in
working and creating partnerships with AMUCC, since they see the association as an exem-
plary role model for other women’s organization in Colombia. For instance, the president of
AMUCC was invited to participate in the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA)
Exhibition and Conference in May of 2008.
Nothing in this study is meant to imply that women’s continuing roles as housewives and
mothers have become unimportant. On the contrary, women can combine their tasks and de-
velop their roles as mothers and wives as well as producers and marketers. This will undoubt-
edly increase their work at home and on the farm in certain respects, but it is an economic
opportunity for them and a way to meet household needs.
There is no “fairy tale” where women will rise one day as coffee growers, produce their
coffee, and sell it with consistent success on the international market. Nor is there any easy
solution to basic problems of poverty. Sometimes pessimism creeps in: Florina said, “the cost
of production is more and more expensive every day and what we get from coffee is to pay
what we already owe and after we pay that, our hands are empty again. . . . We cannot save.
. . . Sometimes I see there is no future for us.”54 As women coffee producers begin to access
the international market, no linear process of growth and development occurs. Rather, a cycle
of growth and stagnation occurs, affected by many factors. This is not a simple commodity
transaction of production and consumption. It is also a life cycle that involves human, eco-
nomic, and social capital, as well as external factors such as price fluctuations, environmental
conditions, and definitions of quality set by the buyers and coffee industry in relation to terms
negotiations and marketing strategies.
Coffee is a commodity and a business; in order to be commercially viable, it has to attract
consumers. Women’s participation in the specialty coffee industry is not neutral. The bigger
companies use coffee produced by women as a marketing strategy, without assuming a real
social (in addition to economic) relationship with the female producers, one that would go
beyond paying a better price and would recognize coffee producers’ work while taking local
circumstances into account.
Even with all of the advances that this group has achieved, it must be emphasized that
variables such as increasing industrialization of coffee production, the use of new technolo-
gies, fluctuations of prices, and political violence in Colombia influence coffee production
and shape women’s decisions. Women located in insecure areas sometimes have to pay in-
surgent groups a percent of the money that they bring back to the municipality. They may
have to ask for permission to become members of the association, and they are aware that
this permission and other agreements could change, depending on the person in charge of a
guerilla-paramilitary group.55
In the more secure areas, many women have a higher socioeconomic status, have more ac-
cess to land, sometimes own cars and trucks, and have a better socioeconomic class position.
Also, children are able to attend private schools and some of them were even attending colleges
in Popayán. Young populations that belong to these higher socioeconomic groups have greater
economic and academic opportunities.
Even though in this research women acquired access to land and other infrastructure
assets, as well as membership in a legally constituted coffee association, economic indepen-
dence and the ability to make their own decisions for their land was often limited where
men were still considered the primary coffee growers. Women continued to be immersed in
the family system and supported by their husbands. Women and men in Cauca considered

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74 Olga Cuellar

the fact that women were getting more accessibility and recognition important; however,
husbands were concerned about the idea that these new patterns will change established
relationships in the family.
Much writing about agriculture links women to subsistence farming and men to commer-
cial production. But Caucan women are not merely “helpers”; they are full coffee producers
for the national and international market.56 The division of labor in coffee production remains
important, but no simple gender-based division exists. Interviews with producers indicated
that members of the household divided their tasks according to individual abilities, skills,
and preferences. In some families, men recognized that women have been developing better
strategies to produce high-quality coffee, and these men decided to apply those same methods
to their own production. In one of the families that I visited, a husband said, “My wife goes
to those workshops and she learns how to improve our production, when she gets here she
teaches me and we put in practice that knowledge in our farm.”57 Moreover, women declared
that men also contributed to their improvement and often the sexes complemented each other,
helping and establishing a collaborative and efficient system in which each one took turns as-
suming the same task in the coffee production, depending on the circumstances.
In summary, the objective of the household is to carry out activities that maintain its mem-
bers, following culturally defined “normal” standards of living.58 Therefore, a new program
or policy should not interrupt processes that have already been arranged within the family.
Future projects need to understand coffee farmers’ family patterns and dynamics, as well as
their mode of work as a family system. The focus on individuals and women as coffee growers
and marketers is a recent phenomenon. Hence, the issues over the division of labor and the
struggles for greater independence for women are new experiences for the entire family.
AMUCC opened new alternatives for household maintenance and enhanced women’s vis-
ibility. However, members are immersed in family, community, and a specific region. Coffee
production occurs in a family context, set in turn in broader social and cultural institutions.
As Jelin points out, “family was never, nor will be, detached or isolated from wider social,
political, and economical determinations.”59
True change must be the result of a long-term process shaped by attitudes about family
and gender. Considering the family as the basic unit of production allows project organizers
and business managers to understand how local people construct their own reality. This ap-
proach is fundamental to success, since it enables program directors to comprehend points
of view of various members of a specific community. Always the multiple forces shaping a
community, including history, physical and natural environment, and local customs, must
be taken into account.

NOTES

1. Edelmira Perez Correa and Luis Llambi Insua, “Nuevas ruralidades y viejos campesinismos: Agenda
para una nueva sociología rural latinoamericana,” Cuadernos de Desarrollo Rural 59, no. 4 (2007): 51.
2. G. Sánchez, “Guerra y política en la sociedad colombiana,” Análisis Político, no. 11 (1990), 9–11.
3. Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León de Leal, “Rural women and the development of capi-
talism in Colombia agriculture,” Women in Latin America 5, no. 1 (1979): 64.
4. Deere and León de Leal, “Rural women,” 65.
5. “Confronting the Crisis in Latin America: Women Organizing for Change,” Isis International and
Development Alternative with Women for a New Era (DAWN), 1988; Farah and Perez, Mujeres rurales;

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Women in Coffee in Colombia 75

Jane S. Jacquette and Gale Summerfield, eds., Women and Gender Equity in Development Theory and
Practice (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 143.
6. UN Web Services Section, 2005, State of Public Information, United Nations, http://www
.un.org/millenniumgoals/, accessed March 11, 2012.
7. Olga L. Cuellar interviews, Fieldwork in Cauca and Bogotá, Colombia, August 2007.
8. David Goodman writes in “The International Coffee Crisis: A Review of the Issues,” that, “Us-
ing labels and other discursive devices, intensely ‘local’ narratives of coffee-growing communities and
their farming practices are transported to distant global markets, building a relational ‘moral economy’
between producers and consumers.” In Christopher Bacon, V. Ernesto Mendez, Stephen R. Gliessman,
David Goodman, and Jonathan A. Fox, eds., Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Liveli-
hoods, and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 9.
9. Since 1990 Supracafé S.A. has specialized in the import and buying of exclusive high-quality
coffees. They exclusively sell high-quality, naturally roasted 100% pure arabica coffees with gourmet
classification, among other products such as specialty teas, sugars, and chocolates and a range of coffees
(http://www.supracafe.com/ingles/empresa.htm).
10. AMUCC receives a premium for its coffee, above the market price, from the Spanish Roasting
Company.
11. Luis Solis-Gómez, Los pueblos del Cauca, 2nd ed. (Popayán, Colombia: Libros de Colombia,
2000).
12. Misión Rural, “Una perspectiva regional,” Informe final, 9 (Bogotá, Colombia: IICA con TM
Editores, 1998), 60.
13. Leon Zamosc, The Agrarian Question and the Peasant Movement in Colombia: Struggle of the Na-
tional Peasant Association, 1967–1981 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 82.
14. Zamosc, Agrarian Questions, 144.
15. Dale Adams, “Colombia’s land tenure system: Antecedents and problems,” Land Economics 42,
no. 1 (February 1966): 45.
16. Zamosc, Agrarian Question, 74.
17. Encuesta Nacional Cafetera, Gerencia Técnica, Oficina de Estudios y Proyectos Básicos Cafeteros,
Sistema de Información Cafetera SICA, Bogotá, 1997.
18. Misión Rural, “Una perspectiva regional,” 60.
19. Cuellar interviews, June 2007.
20. Saturnino M. Borras, “Questioning market-led agrarian reform: Experiences from Brazil, Colom-
bia and South Africa,” Journal of Agrarian Change 3, no. 3 (July 2003): 377.
21. Roberto Forero, “Evaluación de Proyectos Piloto de Reforma Agraria en Colombia: Informe
Preliminar, Junio 15 de 1999,” unpublished World Bank document.
22. Diana Grusczynski and Manuela Rojas, “Notas sobre una reforma agraria distributiva y consid-
eraciones sobre el sistema de seguimiento de la política,” Planeación & Desarrollo XXXIV, no. 2 (2003).
23. Café Mundi was founded in 2004 by diverse small and medium-sized coffee roasters and has the
objective of developing some programs in coffee producer countries. Its mission is to develop programs
with a social responsible perspective, and its main goal is to improve coffee growers conditions. http://
www.cafemundi.org/quienessomos.htm.
24. Revista CAFICAUCA: Comercialización con sentido social. Popayán: CAFICAUCA, 2005.
25. Ana Spring, ed., Women Farmers and Commercial Ventures: Increasing Food Security in Developing
Countries (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000), 1.
26. Cuellar interviews, June–July 2007.
27. Cuellar interviews, June 2007.
28. Cuellar interviews, May–June 2007.
29. Cuellar interviews, June 2007.
30. Cuellar interviews, June 2007.
31. Diverse independent coffee buyers, May–June 2007.
32. Cuellar interviews, May 2007.

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76 Olga Cuellar

33. Cuellar interviews, July 2007.

34. Woman member of AMUCC, Cuellar interviews, July 2007.
35. Cuellar interviews, June 2007.
36. Donny Meertens, “Women’s Roles in Colonisation: A Colombian Case Study,” in Different
Places, Different Voices: Gender and Development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, ed. Janet Monsen
and Vivian Kinnaird (New York: Routledge, 1993), 264.
37. Meertens, “Women’s Roles,” 266.
38. Cuellar interviews, June–July 2007.
39. Cuellar interviews, July 2007.
40. Cuellar interviews, July 2007.
41. Cuellar interviews, July 2007.
42. Cuellar interviews, June–July 2007.
43. Cuellar interviews, June 2007.
44. Cuellar interviews, June 2007.
45. Cuellar interviews, June 2007.
46. Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León de Leal, “The Importance of Gender and Property,”
in Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2001), 7.
47. Cuellar interviews, October 2007.
48. Cuellar interviews, July 2007.
49. Cuellar interviews, July 2007.
50. As reported in Lauren Pandolfelli, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Stephan Dohrn, “Gender and collec-
tive action: Motivations, effectiveness,” Journal of International Development 20 (2008): 1–11.
51. And see Lourdes Beneria and Savitri Bisnath, ed., Labor Standards, Women’s Rights, Basic Needs:
Challenges to Collective Action in a Globalizing World (New York: Routledge, 2004).
52. Cuellar interviews, July 2007.
53. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), “La Situación de la Mujer Rural en Colombia,”
2006, 96.
54. Cuellar interviews, June 2007.
55. Cuellar interviews, June-July 2007.
56. Spring, Women Farmers, 295.
57. Cuellar interviews, June 2007.
58. Elizabeth Jelin, “Family and Household Outside World and Private Life,” in Family, Household
and Gender Relations in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Jelin (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall,
1991), 29.
59. Jelin, “Family and Household,” 37.

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12
How a Country Girl from Arkansas
Became an Importer Leading Other
Women in Coffee
Phyllis Johnson

I love the smells of fall. The ripening crops, the leaves, and the cooler temperatures were ex-
citing times for me growing up in rural Arkansas. I was taught at an early age to work hard,
believe in myself, and stay true to my beliefs. Most of our family activities involved working
on the farm. In the summertime we chopped cotton. Most people who aren’t familiar with
chopping cotton will say, “Oh, that’s like weeding your garden, right?” Not really. From the
time I can remember until I was sixteen years old, chopping cotton meant waking up at 5:00
a.m. during the summer months, getting dressed in long-sleeved, lightweight cotton shirts,
long pants, and a wide-brim straw hat. We were on our feet for twelve hours a day, five days
a week. My mom would pack our lunch and we would have a picnic every day underneath a
shade tree. I often wonder why chopping cotton had such a profound effect on my life. I think
because it was one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do both physically and mentally. At
the end of the summer the kids could spend a little money on school clothes and supplies, but
most of our earnings went to repair our home or for something the family needed. Growing
up in rural Arkansas as the youngest of eight children with only one parent on the scene taught
me the value of hard work and perseverance.
Chopping cotton for sixty hours a week in the hot sun prepared me to stick to completing
my college degree in microbiology, excelling as an employee in various jobs, and having the
faith to start and operate BD Imports while raising a family along with my husband. My com-
pany grew out of the desire to express myself through my life work, while discovering my capa-
bilities. After graduating from college, I worked as a researcher, buyer, marketing manager, and
regional sales representative for various scientific companies. I had great jobs that paid well
and allowed flexibility and creativity. But I felt there had to be something more. My talents,
my skills, my opportunities should not just be for my own benefit. I had to find a way to give
back to others. As an African American growing up in the South, I was constantly reminded
of the sacrifices made by others so that I could have the privileges that I enjoyed. I felt the
need to take advantage of every opportunity afforded me by my older siblings and my mom.
I had no idea the biggest way to give back would be coffee on an international level.
In my work after college, I traveled a lot around the U.S. I’d developed an appreciation
for African handmade crafts. On business trips I looked for retailers that sold rare and
unique pieces. In Minneapolis, I routinely visited a small shop in the downtown area, and

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78 Phyllis Johnson

eventually I became good friends with the Kenyan owner. He would tell me long stories
about his people and the meaning behind each craft. For me, the meaning behind the craft
was what made each piece special and unique. I felt that my purchases made a difference in
the lives of the crafters. In 1999 I was visiting the shop when I noticed a 132-pound bag of
green coffee the owner had brought back along with his crafts. I asked him about the large
strange-looking bag lying on the floor. He said, “That’s coffee, we grow coffee in Kenya,
the very best in the world, known as Kenya AA.” Before he could say anything more I said
to him, “That’s it! I’m going to import coffee from Kenya to the U.S.”
Back at my hotel, I started the process of forming my company. In my early childhood
my older siblings nicknamed me blood dog. I liked to fight and bite my siblings, who always
enjoyed taunting me, but always in fun. As I grew older they called me BD for short. So I
thought, BD Imports, it’ll take the tenacity of a blood dog to make this company work. I
remember calling my husband Patrick that night and telling him the story and the name of
the company. He and I had discussed our desire to own a business on several occasions. He
was excited and supported the idea from the very start.
I never thought about having to tell potential customers the meaning behind the name
until sheer embarrassment came upon my face when I was first asked by the owner of a small
coffee roasting plant in Madison, Wisconsin. Looking back over the past twelve years, it has
taken the tenacity of a blood dog to survive. I kept my day job as a regional sales representative
and studied coffee on the side. My husband continued his employment for a major technol-
ogy company while we both spent after hours working to build BD Imports. For four years
I would carry two briefcases in my car, one filled with scientific literature and wares and the
other with coffee samples. It was an exciting time for me. I enjoyed the visits to coffee roasters
more than talking to scientists. Still, I felt like a fake, not able to totally commit to what I re-
ally wanted to do for fear that I would not be successful. After years of trying to manage two
jobs I decided that I had to follow my heart, give up my scientific career, and engage fully in
coffee. I can truthfully say that in twelve years I’ve never regretted the decision or looked back.
The coffee community was and remains today extremely welcoming and exciting. BD Im-
ports was built on the idea of importing great coffees from Kenya, telling the beautiful stories
about the people to buyers, and making them feel the same way I did in that Kenyan craft
store. Needless to say coffee is quite different than handicrafts. I embraced the idea of learning
as much as I could about coffee, so I applied myself and did what it took to learn about the in-
dustry. Whenever I would feel intimidated I would always say to myself, “You chopped cotton
and passed organic chemistry; how hard can it be to learn about coffee?” Looking back, I now
realize there were so many things working in my favor, things I can’t explain. I was fortunate
when one of the largest exporters of Kenyan coffee decided to respond to a letter he received
from me looking for an exporter. Mr. Amu Malde was just about to retire from a thirty-year
career in the Kenyan coffee industry when he received my letter. He was so patient and walked
me through the process of how the Kenyan coffee industry worked. He helped to give me a
competitive advantage with his knowledge and cupping expertise. He devoted 100 percent of
his time to BD Imports. My samples of Kenyan coffee stood out head and shoulders above
the rest on cupping tables. There were times when I would meet with skeptical and reluctant
buyers to drop off samples and talk about my company and later receive a phone call from a
very excited and polite buyer saying they’d not seen Kenyan coffee like mine in years.
My company has gone through many changes through the years. I’ve lived life through BD
Imports. The real fabric of who I am has been revealed through my efforts in running the
company. A few years ago, we decided to stop doing business with one of our largest custom-

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Leading Other Women in Coffee 79

ers. I felt that BD was being misrepresented by the customer. We were showcased as a leading
minority supplier in their corporate publications, when we only sold about 25,000 pounds of
their 10 million pound total. A great deal of my time was devoted to educating this customer
about coffee and to assisting in assembling promotional materials about our relationships
with farmers. It became obvious to me that we were not going to grow our business with this
customer. This customer was interested in using BD Imports primarily as a way of advertis-
ing their efforts towards supplier diversity without offering us a real chance at expanding the
relationship. It was difficult to walk away from a relationship that I’d poured five years into
building. Being promoted as a key supplier without being able to realize a greater value for my
company made me think that this must be how coffee farmers feel. Since I ran the company
and had the final say, I could determine who to do business with.
Soon after we discontinued this relationship, the downturn of the global economy began.
Customers who’d relied on BD Imports as their primary supplier of African coffees looked
to alternate and cheaper suppliers. Despite never having missed a monthly payment in seven
years on our line of credit, our bank decided to end the relationship with BD Imports. The
bank had featured our company as part of a major advertising campaign in print and on radio.
Although I worried, I knew there was something more meant for us and the company. I just
didn’t know what it was.
In 2002 my husband and I made our first trip to Kenya. We decided to visit two coopera-
tives out of the twenty or so that we’d purchased coffee from since starting BD Imports. The
Kaburu-ini cooperative in Nyeri was expecting us and prepared a wonderful event in which
coffee farmers, local politicians, and cooperative officials came to greet us. The women sat
patiently on the damp ground outside of the tent while the men sat in chairs underneath it.
My husband and I along with other special guests sat at a head table. When it came time for
me to speak all the women got up from the ground and flooded the tent. There was a spe-
cial connection that I felt towards the women, and obviously they felt the same. Unknown
to me and my husband, BD Imports had purchased a small lot of about fifty bags at the
highest price the cooperative had ever received. The farmers were excited to meet the buyer
of their special coffee. They were thrilled that it was an African American woman from the
U.S. One local politician mentioned that they had expected a European male to show up.
The farmers gave me a Kikuyu name, Nyawire, meaning hard-working woman. I along
with the local politician planted a coffee tree on the land. While visiting the cooperative an
elderly man pulled me to the side and said that I should focus on helping the women in the
cooperative. He told me that they do all the work. Since 2002, BD Imports has purchased
coffee from Kaburu-ini many times.
Throughout the history of BD Imports, we’ve shown a commitment to women in coffee. In
2003 we purchased the first small lot of coffee produced by Buf Café in Rwanda. Epiphanie
Mukashyaka is an exceptional leader who was among the first women in Rwanda to own a
coffee washing station. She serves as a great role model for the many women who’ve entered
the industry in recent years. In 2004 she was featured on a PBS special highlighting the success
of Rwandan women after the genocide. I sat on my sofa filled with great pride watching her.
Later in the year I was invited by USAID, the United States Agency for International Devel-
opment, to speak in Washington about my experience in working with Buf Café. Meanwhile,
Epiphanie has gone on to great success. She competes in the Rwandan Cup of Excellence and
her brand is well known around the world.
In Kenya, BD Imports helped to establish one of the first indigenous Kenyan woman-
owned export companies, DEMAC Trading, and in Ethiopia the company purchased the

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80 Phyllis Johnson

first lot of coffee offered for sale by Amaro Gayo, a coffee processing station owned by Ms.
Asnakech Thomas. Ms. Thomas was one of the first women to own a coffee processing station
in Ethiopia. She has also gone on to build a strong brand for her coffee internationally. I’m
very proud that BD Imports offered opportunities to these women and many more.
I’d poured all that I had into building BD Imports while trying to help women in coffee. In
2009 I made the decision that even though business had become extremely difficult, I would
stay committed to my passion. With more time on my hands, I decided to volunteer with
some good friends who devoted time to the International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA).
They’d always looked to me to start the IWCA chapter expansion into Africa. Several obstacles
hampered that effort, namely that I’d been extremely busy trying to grow my company and
that I lived in the Chicago area, not in Africa. However, I was determined to make something
happen in Africa while I had time to devote to volunteering. Looking back, I realized that I’d
already tried through BD Imports to help advance women in coffee. I’d visited African coffee-
producing countries and seen the vital role that women played in production and harvest,
but I also noticed the lack of women involved in decision making roles. The IWCA offered
an opportunity to help advance women in a different way, through development efforts that
were supposed to lead to trade relationships. I wasn’t sure how this was going to work, but I
was more than willing to try.
We decided that we would hold a workshop in East Africa inviting women leaders in coffee
from various countries to discuss IWCA’s work in Central America. When seeking support
for the workshop, I was advised to contact the International Trade Center (ITC) in Geneva,
Switzerland, an affiliate of the United Nations and World Trade Organization. ITC senior
advisor Morten Scholer, who had been engaged in similar projects for years, agreed to help
sponsor our efforts. The ITC and Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) supported our first work-
shop in Africa. Concentrating on the workshop in Africa pulled me away from my company
for eight months. But I got an opportunity to lead work that I’m passionate about. I felt
extremely blessed to be in Uganda with a fantastic team of volunteers from IWCA along with
ITC representatives to speak to women from nine African countries. We talked about working
together as part of a global network to help advance women in coffee.
Although it made me feel great to give in such a way, it didn’t do very much toward getting
BD Imports back on its feet. On the third and final day of the workshop in Uganda, I was sit-
ting with other IWCA volunteers recapping the event and the excitement that we all felt from
the African women. That night my husband called to say that BD Imports had been awarded
a coffee contract to supply in-room coffee for a major international hotel chain. What great
news at a great time! Again, staying committed to our beliefs had paid off. The relationship
between BD Imports and the hotel company had begun three years earlier. The company’s
strategic sourcing manager said their decision was due to our integrity, passion, and the way
that we conducted ourselves, along with the quality of the product that allowed BD Imports
to compete with some of the giants in coffee.
Today, I continue to manage BD Imports while leading the ITC/IWCA Women in Coffee
Program. The company is growing, and the Women in Coffee Program is entering its third
year in 2012. We’ve established IWCA chapters in Burundi, Kenya, and Rwanda and are
working toward bringing on Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. This work has helped ignite
the interest of partners around the world. The IWCA chapter network has grown from five
countries in Central and South America to nine countries on several continents, with interest
from Brazil, India, Peru, Honduras, Indonesia, and many others. We anticipate that twenty
countries will join our network over the next three years.

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Leading Other Women in Coffee 81

The struggles women in coffee face have become even more real to me in recent years.
During 2010 I accepted with great humility the opportunity to speak about the ITC/IWCA
Women in Coffee Program at conferences in the U.S., Tanzania, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the
World Trade Organization’s celebration on International Women’s Day in Geneva, Switzer-
land, and the ITC Women Vendor’s Forum and Exhibition in Chongqing, China. Due to the
many speaking engagements I was absent when awarded by my local community the YWCA
Leader Luncheon award for empowering women.
Once I heard a story about someone given a choice to stay in what appeared to be a safe
situation on a boat docked in shallow water versus going out into the risky deep blue sea. The
storyteller carefully built a mental picture of what life was like in both situations. Obviously
it was more comfortable to stay in the shallow waters closer to the land. However, the shallow
waters were murky, had little plant and sea life, but lots of rocks and even broken glass. The
deep blue water was beautiful and clear, brilliantly colored with plant and sea life. Gaining
access to the many resources coffee has offered me has provided the opportunity to learn and
grow far beyond my beginnings in rural Arkansas. When I think of my experiences as a cof-
fee importer, I liken my story to the person who chose to take the boat to the deep blue sea,
experiencing all the brilliance of what life has to offer. Yes, I’ve run into some real dangers in
deeper waters, but I’m very happy that I chose new challenges.

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13
The Role of Nonprofits in Coffee
August Burns

Doña Cielo walks up the steep path deep in the heart of coffee country to the village of El
Cua in the northern highlands of Nicaragua. She thinks about Elena, the woman she will visit
today. Cielo works as a community health promoter, encouraging women from these remote
communities to travel to a rural clinic where local doctors can screen them for cervical cancer
using a fast, effective, and affordable method. She knows that cervical cancer is a community
issue, killing women in the prime of their lives while they are still raising children and are
relied upon by their families as major breadwinners. Doña Cielo’s first priority is women like
Doña Elena, the woman at the end of the dirt path. The cervical cancer screening is being
sponsored by the local coffee cooperative and is saving women’s lives.
Doña Cielo is one of hundreds of community health promoters who have been trained
over the past fifteen years by Grounds for Health in basic information, outreach, and health
communication skills to get women in remote communities the screening services they need.
Grounds for Health is a nonprofit organization based in Waterbury, Vermont, that works in
coffee-growing communities to address alarmingly high rates of cervical cancer. They have
found the coffee industry to be a key ingredient to success in addressing one of the major
killers of women across the globe.
From its founding, Grounds for Health has been steeped in the world of coffee. But it all
began rather by accident. Its founder, Dan Cox, a coffee business owner, was on a buying
trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, accompanied by a close friend, retired ob/gyn Dr. Francis Fote, who
was just along for the ride. While Dan spent the day buying coffee, Dr. Fote—or “Doc Fote”
as Dan calls him—traveled to a few clinics to get the lay of the land. At the end of the day,
Dan returned to the hotel to an excited and agitated Dr. Fote. “What’s gotten into you?” Dan
asked. Doc Fote explained he had visited a hospital that looked immaculate on the outside,
but was falling apart behind the front doors. He had spoken with a doctor who told him that
women were dying from cervical cancer at dangerously high rates—four to five times higher
than in the U.S. This was all despite the fact that cervical cancer is nearly 100 percent treat-
able. The reason? Women did not have access to simple, early screening or treatment.
“We have to do something,” exclaimed Dr. Fote. “Who is we and what is something?” replied
Dan. But he already knew the answer. Thanks to his business connections, the “we” became
the coffee industry, and the “something” was clear enough—to prevent unnecessary deaths

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The Role of Nonprofits in Coffee 83

from cervical cancer. A few phone calls to friends produced enough funding to get started
in that small Mexican community. The coffee industry has provided financial support for
Grounds for Health ever since.
From those first phone calls, Grounds for Health has grown to become a leader in the
global fight against cervical cancer, and it is the organization’s relationship to coffee that has
made it all possible. The success of Grounds for Health is a story of what can happen when
individuals have the vision and willingness to make a difference—to do something about a
problem rather than turn away and leave it for someone else to take care of. It is also a story
of the power of a private industry that contributes to the well-being of others and strives to
make the world a better place.
Worldwide cervical cancer claims more women’s lives than any other form of cancer, and
88 percent of these deaths occur in developing countries.1 This is despite the fact that cervical
cancer is nearly entirely treatable when detected early and treated right away. The reason for
these abysmal statistics is a lack of health care infrastructure for simple screening and treatment.
Most coffee-farming communities are located in developing nations, in rural mountainous
areas where a lack of roads, transportation, health facilities, and health care providers severely
limits access to health services. Women in these remote areas are often the most challenging
to reach with services of any kind. They suffer from a lack of information, difficult access,
obstacles to returning for follow-up, and the burden of other pressing demands on their time
and resources. When aid does come to developing countries, these rural women are often the
last to receive services, if at all. But for Grounds for Health and for the coffee industry, these
women—the ones at the end of the dirt path—come first.
Since 1996, Grounds for Health has provided direct services to thousands of women and
has trained hundreds of in-country doctors and nurses in up-to-date, high-quality medical
practices so they can continue screening for and treating cervical cancer on their own. By part-
nering with coffee companies, medical professionals, and local coffee cooperatives, Grounds
for Health works to create locally managed, sustainable, and effective cervical cancer preven-
tion and treatment programs in coffee-producing regions.

A PRACTICAL AND SUSTAINABLE MODEL

FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

The Grounds for Health model is an excellent example of best practice in a people-public-
private collaboration. It leverages three key partnerships: the community-based coffee coop-
erative, the local and national ministries of health, and coffee-industry funders.
Grounds for Health establishes programs in coffee-growing communities only upon invita-
tion from the coffee cooperatives. The co-op leadership must demonstrate commitment to the
program through community support and investment. Through the co-op, the community
mobilizes to ensure that members get the information they need and that women at risk are
identified and motivated to seek screening services. Because the co-op is a local organization,
it has the community’s trust. Thus the co-op can use its trucks to transport women to the
screening campaigns and guarantee support for follow-up care for the women who need it.
Grounds for Health provides the technical assistance, including capacity building and
management training for the cooperative, training of doctors and nurses in medical skills, and
donations of essential equipment to get the services up and running. Together with leaders in
the coffee co-ops, Grounds for Health partners with health authorities from the local ministry

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84 August Burns

of health to identify the medical personnel, facilities to be used, and to ensure ongoing support
and maintenance of services. These partnerships and local buy-in to the programs are vital to
ensuring sustainability.
This is all made possible through financial contributions from the coffee industry. Grounds
for Health programs are supported by donations from over 250 coffee-related companies from
the U.S., Canada, Australia, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and more. Coffee industry support-
ers contribute through direct donations, coffeehouse promotions, premiums on coffee sales, and
contributions of green coffee and merchandise to an annual online coffee auction. Most coffee
companies that buy beans from Grounds for Health’s coffee cooperative partners have a direct
interest in the health and well-being of the people who produce the product they sell. Yet even
companies that do not work with partner co-ops recognize the importance of supporting the
programs. The economic and social burden of cervical cancer is significant and impacts many
families and coffee farms, making it an important issue for all players in the coffee supply chain.
The impact of Grounds for Health’s relationship to its funders cannot be overstated. Many
nonprofits devote much of their time researching, writing, and reporting to funders. The
unique collaborative model developed in our case not only links women to life-saving services,
but it also provides Grounds for Health with a steady source of income to stay focused on
its mission. Because of the philanthropic efforts of the coffee industry, Grounds for Health’s
funding is direct and immediate, without cumbersome strings attached. This gives Grounds
for Health the much-needed flexibility to discover and implement what works in each of the
individual communities it serves.
For example, over the past decade the World Health Organization and the Gates Founda-
tion have invested in developing alternative methods for the early detection and treatment of
cervical cancer in low-resource settings. One such method, called single visit screen and treat
or the single visit approach, meets their requirements for “low-resource appropriate” technolo-
gies. Using simple vinegar, cotton balls, and a good light, the single visit approach has been
shown to be as effective as the Pap smear in detecting early cell changes,2 but requires few
resources, demands no special equipment, and only costs 25 cents per woman in materials.
Research has concluded that the single visit screen and treat method is safe, acceptable, and
cost-effective. This simple method relies on visual changes on a woman’s cervix that indicate
early disease presence when simple household vinegar is applied. When pre-cancers are identi-
fied, this test is then followed by immediate treatment with cryotherapy. If every woman had
access to even one screening in a lifetime (and timely treatment of any pre-cancer), it could
reduce the rate of cervical cancer by 30 percent. With three screenings in a lifetime, it could
be possible to realize a 64 percent reduction. This is a goal worth striving for.3
However, and perhaps most importantly to this reduction of the rate of cervical cancer,
the single visit approach provides immediate results—the key to getting women to same-day
treatment and stopping the disease. Instead of sending a woman away to wait for results and
then asking her to return to the clinic for follow-up care, she gets her results on the spot, and
any treatment necessary can be performed at the same time. She only has to make the long,
difficult trek once, which is essential since the hardships of travel have proven to discourage
women from returning for follow-up care.4
Thanks to flexible funding from the coffee industry, Grounds for Health was able to be-
come one of the first organizations in the world to integrate this innovative approach into its
programs. By being early adopters, Grounds for Health has learned how to best implement the
single visit approach and has transformed the organization into an internationally recognized
resource for preventing cervical cancer in low-resource settings.

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The Role of Nonprofits in Coffee 85

Grounds for Health has been able to capture and share its lessons learned with the global
network of organizations focused on cervical cancer prevention. Without the work of the cof-
fee industry to improve women’s health, these lessons might have remained undiscovered by
other groups.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

Grounds for Health has found several keys to success in its operations:

• Community support and ownership of a program are keys to sustainability. People

invested in their own progress and well-being will work to ensure that health services
continue long after outside help is gone.
• The single visit approach is feasible in low-resource settings.
• The single visit approach is effective; it saves women’s lives.
• Minimally trained health care personnel can attain excellent competency through highly
focused, hands-on interactive training.
• Providing cervical cancer prevention services creates a gateway for poor women in rural
areas to access other reproductive health services.
• By providing women’s health services, the co-op gains credibility as a positive community
resource, which can help the co-op attract new members and strengthen its negotiating
power, thereby having an economic impact as well.
• Funders who buy coffee from Grounds for Health co-op partners benefit from a healthy,
strong coffee community, which ensures long-term supply.
• All funders can share Grounds for Health’s story with their customers, which helps cause-
related marketing campaigns and can increase brand loyalty.
• The community benefits from better health services for years to come.

Grounds for Health is distinctive in its targeted approach and proven results. The organiza-
tion is dedicated to cultivating lasting partnerships and sustainable programs that focus on
saving women’s lives and provide positive change for everyone involved. The generosity of the
specialty coffee industry has led to a major public health breakthrough with results that will
long be felt in the communities it touches—in all developing nations, not just coffee-growing
ones. It is a model of socially responsible giving that other industries should be inspired to
follow, and it shows that the coffee industry has the power to transform lives.

NOTES

1. http://globocan.iarc.fr/factsheets/cancers/cervix.asp.
2. C. Sauvaget et al., “Accuracy of visual inspection with acetic acid for cervical cancer screening,”
International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics (2011): doi:10.1016/j.ijgo.2010.10.012.
3. S. J. Goldie, L. Gaffikin, J. D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, et al. “Cost-effectiveness of cervical-cancer
screening in five developing countries,” New England Journal of Medicine 353, no. 20 (2005): 2158–68.
4. S. Luciani and J. Winkler, Cervical Cancer Prevention in Peru: Lessons Learned from the TATI Dem-
onstration Project (Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization, 2006).

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14
Hunger in the Coffee Lands
Rick Peyser

Editor’s (RT’s) note: The film Men with Guns (dir. John Sayles, U.S., 1997), features disturbing
images of “coffee people” starving in a fictitious, composite Central American country. In October
2004, I traveled in Nicaragua and visited the umbrella co-op CECOCAFEN that Rick Peyser
mentions below. Further into the mountains, I heard stories of extreme food deprivation, even of
starvation, in the months following the coffee harvest.
Nicaragua remains the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, above only Haiti. Per
capita income in 2011 was estimated at $3,000, putting Nicaragua in 167th place around the
world. One-third of all adults are illiterate, while water-borne infectious diseases weaken or kill
many people (The World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
geos/nu.html). Given these points about Nicaragua in general, coffee farming is not the only cul-
prit in food insecurity. However, the monoculture of coffee, like old-style cotton production in the
American South, can be an important factor in leading to hunger.
For a recent review of the efforts by wealthier countries to improve food security in poor lands, see
“Feeding the World in the 21st Century: Exploring Connections Between Food Production, Health,
Environmental Resources, and International Security,” published by the Program on Food Security
and the Environment, The International Initiative, Stanford University, 2009.

HUNGER AMONG COFFEE FARMERS: NICARAGUA AS A CASE STUDY

In August of 2007 I flew with Don Seville of the Sustainable Food Lab, based in Hartland,
Vermont, from our cool home state to steamy Managua, Nicaragua. There we connected with
representatives from CIAT (the International Center for Tropical Agriculture), an agricultural
research organization based in Cali, Colombia, that works all over the world.
We gathered in Managua to prepare for a week of one-on-one interviews with small-scale
coffee farmers. Shortly after completing my twentieth year at Green Mountain Coffee Roast-
ers (GMCR), I took on a new role in the company: director of social advocacy and coffee
community outreach. I wanted to know more about the specific challenges and opportunities
that small-scale coffee farming families were facing.

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Hunger in the Coffee Lands 87

The questions we would ask were partly to collect basic information on families (e.g.,
number of children, education levels, literacy), as well as on coffee production (including the
amount of land owned, the family’s earnings from coffee last year, its costs of production,
and certifications). Were the farmers happy with the prices they received? From there, we
discussed more personal issues. Were there any other sources of income? Did farmers receive
remittances from family members abroad? Had they ever thought of doing something other
than growing coffee? Had they ever thought of migrating, to a city or another country? Did
the family have any health problems last year, and if so, what did they do about them? And
finally, did the family have any periods of extreme food scarcity last year, and if so how did
they cope with the problem?
We were only going to interview the farmer. If the farmer’s spouse was on hand, we could
interview him or her separately, not together. CIAT made it clear that interviewing them
together could influence the answers that either or both of them gave.
The next morning, we left Managua; about two hours later, we arrived at the offices of CE-
COCAFEN, where we met with Santiago Dolmus, manager of this fair trade umbrella coop-
erative’s social programs. Santiago had helped to arrange interviewees and meeting places for us
in communities that supplied CECOCAFEN with coffee. After sharing with him the interview
questions and procedures we would follow, we headed north to El Coyolar and the La Esperanza
cooperative—a primary-level community-based cooperative within CECOCAFEN.
For ninety minutes we rattled on through potholes of varying sizes and depths. At La Espe-
ranza, my first interview was with Norma Velasquez. We sat down in a large, dimly lit room,
on two of the white rigid plastic lawn chairs that are ubiquitous in Nicaragua.
After a few minutes of introductory chit-chat, I explained to Norma that I would be ask-
ing her a series of questions and that I wanted to write down her answers. I told her that the
information she shared with me would be kept confidential (Norma is not her real name). She
asked what we were going to do with the information and told me that a number of people
had already come through El Coyolar conducting surveys, collecting information, but they
have never seen them again. I explained to Norma that we weren’t sure what we were going
to do with the information, since we didn’t know what the information was yet, but that one
thing we would do—and I promised here—was come back and share it with those we inter-
viewed. The cooperative’s management wanted to know the results as well, and we felt that it
was important and right to share the results with those we interviewed.
Norma and I moved through the questions smoothly, without any interruptions or difficul-
ties. Everything was in Spanish, and I was keeping up well. Finally we arrived at the last ques-
tion: “Did your family have any periods of extreme scarcity of food last year, and if so what
did you do about it?” When I asked this question, Norma put her head down and stared at
the table for what seemed like an eternity. Soon she reached into a small pocket in the simple
skirt she was wearing and retrieved a piece of clumped up tissue paper that she carefully un-
folded and used to soak up the tears that had started running down her cheeks. I didn’t know
what to think. Had I said something wrong? I waited for Norma to compose herself. After
about a minute she began to answer; she and her family had three to four months every year
of extreme food scarcity. I asked her which months. She answered, “Usually the end of May
through October.” “What caused these months of scarcity?” I asked. Norma explained that the
coffee harvest usually began the end of October or beginning of November and usually ended
by late February. She said that most of her family’s earnings from coffee were largely depleted
by the end of May, which also marked the beginning of the rainy season and the time each
year when basic food staples (corn and beans) increase in price before they are harvested in

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88 Rick Peyser

late autumn. This left her family with three to four months when they had very little income
or savings to purchase food. As if this wasn’t enough, they had to contend with the moving
target of rising food prices.
I probed further: how did Norma and her family deal with this challenge? She said that
there were three ways they approached this problem. The first was to eat exactly the same diet
but to consume fewer calories. The second way was to eat less expensive foods that they were
not accustomed to eating most of the year. And the third tactic was to borrow from friends,
neighbors, relatives, or the local cooperative. Norma explained that this debt had to be repaid
by the end of the next harvest—thus creating a cycle of debt.
This was my very first interview, so I thought (hoped) that Norma and her family were not the
norm, that their experience was exceptional. These interviews were taking place with members of
CECOCAFEN, whose farmers were advantaged in the sense that they received all of the benefits
of fair trade certification—transparency, a social premium, and a guaranteed minimum floor
price, among others. I was serving on the FLO (Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International)
board of directors at the time, so Norma’s story was very disturbing to hear.
What was even more disturbing during the week of interviews was that I received the exact
same answer to the question on food security from each respondent. At the end of the first
day, I shared my experience with the team members. They had each received the same answers
from their interviewees.
In the following days, we continued to interview families, in different communities sepa-
rated by over an hour on rough roads. After talking to farmers at their cooperative offices,
in their homes, or right in the field, I finally arrived by pickup at a small, modest home to
conduct my last interview of the week. The driver dropped me off on the outskirts of a small
hamlet. I walked down a small hill to a 20 foot by 20 foot wooden plank home with a tin roof.
I approached the house to knock, but there was no door, so I knocked on the doorframe. A
few seconds later Eduardo, a farmer, appeared and invited me into his home. The house had
a cement floor and looked sturdy. I commented on the structure, and he said that the house
was sixty years old and had served his family well. He didn’t know how much longer it would
last, though, as it was infested with termites.
The home had a wooden wall separating its two rooms. After about five minutes of in-
terviewing, Eduardo’s wife, Esmeralda, came around the partition, and started helping her
husband answer my questions. I knew that this wasn’t what CIAT had wanted, but I couldn’t
ask her to leave her own home! Soon their four children, all between five and sixteen years
old, came around the corner.
I thanked them for taking the time to speak with me. When I had walked about halfway
up to the road I turned around and looked back. There was the family, all huddled in their
doorway, watching me walking back up to the road. We waved at each other. All of a sudden,
I felt the great weight of all the stories I had heard that week. This was a moment that changed
me as a person, as much or more than my first trip to origin. Tears welled up in my eyes as
I realized that this family could be my family; it could be your family; it could be anyone’s
family. It was simply the luck of the draw that my family lived in Vermont and had plenty of
everything we needed. Hearing one family after another share their struggle to put food on
their family table months of every year was painful to hear. It just wasn’t right.
The next morning, as I waited for my plane to take off, I couldn’t stop thinking about the
families who had so openly shared their lives with me, both their dreams and this awful an-
nual period of food scarcity. I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue to work in the industry that
I had grown to love. How could I not have known about this challenge? I had spent months

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Hunger in the Coffee Lands 89

volunteering in coffee communities, spending many weeks in the homes of coffee farmers. No
one had ever spoken of this period, yet it was so common in Nicaraguan coffee communities
that it has its own name: “los meses flacos” (the thin months) or “la vaca flaca” (the thin cow).
I felt stupid and almost betrayed. After I arrived home I took a week of planned vacation.
During this week I called Dan Cox, a friend and former colleague. Dan, who founded Coffee
Enterprises, had been in the coffee business for twenty-six years and had traveled to coffee
lands many times over the years. He asked me to come visit him in his new offices on the
edge of Lake Champlain. As he showed me around the beautiful rooms, he asked me, “So
what have you been up to?” I told him about the interviews and what I had learned about
food insecurity. He said, “You’re shitting me.” I said, “No, I wish I was.” I continued to reach
out to others I knew in the industry, who had also been in the industry for years and who
had spent plenty of time in coffee growing communities. All of them were surprised by what
I had heard from families.
Two months later, CIAT came to Vermont to share the results of their interviews, not just
in Nicaragua but in two departments of Guatemala and two states of Mexico. In total, 179
hour-long interviews had been conducted in all three countries. About 67 percent of those
interviewed said that they had experienced between three and eight months of extreme scarcity
of food last year, and all but 16 percent had experienced some scarcity of food last year. As the
meeting came to a close, Sam Fujisaka, part of the CIAT team that came to share the results,
turned to me and said, “So Rick, what are you going to do with this information? Are you
going to put it in a nice binder and put it on your office bookshelf and do nothing with it like
most companies, or are you going to do something with it?” Sam’s question hit a nerve and I
immediately replied, “Of course I’m going to do something with this,” not having a clue what
that “something” was going to be.
I realized that the new role I had started with GMCR provided me with the opportunity to
perhaps make a small difference for at least some families in our supply chain. In the spring of
2008, after sharing the interview results with the interviewees and CECOCAFEN’s manage-
ment team, Green Mountain sponsored a meeting where members of the co-op, with the par-
ticipation of some local NGOs, developed two primary strategies to overcome these months of
food insecurity: (1) diversify the family’s coffee parcel to grow coffee and food for the family’s
own consumption and to sell in the local market, and (2) grow and store basic grains.
When this “strategic summit” ended, CECOCAFEN developed a proposal to GMCR to
launch a food security project based on these two strategies. In the early summer of 2008,
GMCR agreed to support this project, with the goal of benefitting approximately 300 families
(or 1,800 people) who live in CECOCAFEN communities.
I saw that this challenge of food insecurity had to be fought on two fronts. First we had
to work with other communities, too, and second, we had to generate awareness within the
specialty coffee industry. How could this phenomenon, so common in coffee communities,
be unknown or not spoken about in the halls of the industry? This challenge was too big for
GMCR to take on by itself.
In 2010, I shared the CIAT results with the industry at the annual SCAA Symposium and
Conference. In 2011 the film After the Harvest: Fighting Hunger in the Coffeelands premiered
at this gathering. This unbranded twenty-minute film, narrated by Susan Sarandon, brought
the images and voices of coffee farmers in the midst of this challenge, as well as their solu-
tions, to many members of the industry. People were moved, and we are still working to build
collaborative efforts that will help families develop sustainable answers to this annual period
of food insecurity.

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90 Rick Peyser

Figure 14.1. La Pita kids. Photo by Robert Thurston.

For me, I was finally able to see this challenge as a new beginning of my career in coffee. To-
day, the food security projects that GMCR supports are helping 47,000 families (or 227,000
individuals) become more food secure.
Food, of course, is fundamental; it is the basis of good health, the ability to learn, and the
ability to work. Without adequate nutrition, children under the age of three may experience
stunting that can have an irreversible impact on their physical and mental capacities for their
entire lives.
The families who grow specialty coffee have something in common with many people in
other rural areas around the world. Their children are leaving. They are migrating to urban
centers where they perceive greater opportunities for a better life. For the first time on our
planet, there are more people living in urban centers than in rural areas. Given the challenges
presented by food insecurity, limited health care services, impure water, and lack of access to
a secondary education in coffee communities, why should they stay? Would you? This begs
the billion dollar question: Who is going to grow the next generation of specialty coffee, if we
don’t provide families with the tools they need to improve the quality of life so young people
want to stay and continue to grow high-quality coffee?

Editor’s postscript (RT): A recent study of Nicaraguan coffee farmers identifies severe problems
among those who raise certified coffee.1 The authors surveyed 327 co-op members living in the
departments of Madriz and Nueva Segovia. All farmers were growing arabica. But “certified pro-

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Hunger in the Coffee Lands 91

ducers are more often found below the absolute poverty line than conventional producers. Over
a period of ten years, our analysis shows that organic and organic-fairtrade farmers have become
poorer relative to conventional producers.”2 In the regions studied, one-third of all coffee farmers
have incomes below the extreme poverty line of $1/day/person ($246.80/year/person); among
organic and organic/fair trade (FT) certified, the figure is 45 percent.
The additional production costs of organic, which may include hiring labor outside the
family, not to mention the cost of becoming and remaining certified, are often greater than
the premium farmers receive for organic beans. These costs are even higher for farmers who are
certified both as organic and as FT. Organic producers also tend to have less land, but more
family members, than non-organic farmers do. Moreover, organic yields, because of the extra
labor involved, can be lower than for conventional coffee, which also depresses the amount
the family earns for certified coffee.
Fair trade farm gate prices, money actually paid to farmers themselves, rather than to a
co-op, can actually be lower than for non-FT farmers at the same level of bean quality, for
instance if a co-op has to pay off debts. Conventional farmers may also earn more overall
income than FT co-op members, by selling animals and raising other crops.
The study’s authors are cautious in their conclusions, as their respondents had to have oc-
cupied the same farm for at least ten years, and the selection of farmers may not have been ab-
solutely random. Yet the investigators conclude that “coffee yields, profitability and efficiency
need to be increased, as prices for certified coffee cannot compensate for low productivity,
land or labor constraints.”3

Excerpted from an interview with Price Peterson, La Esmeralda Farm, May 24, 2008:
Peterson: The Nogöbé Indians [who live at higher altitudes and come down to pick coffee
for us] are very poor. Generally they’ll come to harvest here, families of two three four, and
leave here with $300 or $400 in their pocket, after three or four months. But they’ve spent
money while here buying some things. And literally they need to live on that the rest of the
year. So we’re talking about people well below the extreme poverty level; this is much less than
a dollar a day per person. They go back into the mountains about March. In April, May they’ll
plant a little bit of corn, a little bit of this and the other. And by July they’ve usually run out
of money . . . if they haven’t just run out there’s been a family emergency, they’ve had to spend
$200 to get someone to a hospital.
Numerous times, you’ll have maybe a sixteen-year-old woman with a seventeen-year-old
husband, and they’ve got two kids and a baby. And they finish one year and come back the
next year and there’s only two kids, where’s the baby, ay, . . . the milk dried up in July, the baby
died. I remember, this happened several years ago, when a returning family came in and I said,
you know, how are things going, oh they’re not very good, and I said what do you mean, and
he said well you know we’re down to one meal. Well, one big meal a day, you can get by on
that. And he said, Mr. Price, you don’t understand, one meal a week.

NOTES

1. Tina D. Beuchelt and Manfred Zeller, “Profits and Poverty: Certification’s Troubled Link for Ni-
caragua’s Organic and Fair Trade Coffee Producers,” Ecological Economics 70 (2011).
2. Beuchelt and Zeller, “Profits and Poverty,” 1316.
3. Beuchelt and Zeller, “Profits and Poverty,” 1323.

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15
The “Price” of Coffee
How the Coffee Commodity Market Works
Robert W. Thurston

For some 130 years, most green coffee has been sold through urban commodity exchanges that
can seem utterly chaotic: a bunch of men in the pit, also called the ring, wave bits of paper, yell
in a language all their own, use several telephones simultaneously, and apparently parasitically
absorb much of someone else’s money day by day.
It would be good for anyone who cares about coffee, or any aspect of transnational business,
to step back from such images for a few moments. First, commodity transactions are steadily
moving out of “pits” to quiet cubicles and computers. Much more important is to understand
how commodities markets work, what the coffee industry and the media call the price of
coffee, and why that figure is important at any time. The main issues will be listed first, then
will be explored in more depth.

1. A commodity is anything that can be bought, sold, or traded, including labor and ser-
vices. Coffee is designated a “soft commodity,” along with other nondurable, agricultural
products like cocoa, sugar, and frozen concentrated orange juice. Coffee as a soft com-
modity, referring to all coffee, should not be confused with commodity coffee, which
refers to any beans below specialty coffee.
2. There is a “spot” or cash market for coffee acquired and paid for today.
3. There is a long-term or “futures” market that allows purchasers to contract for a certain
amount of coffee, of a certain quality, to be delivered in New York or another port on
a specified date.
4. When articles or films about coffee talk about its “price,” the word usually refers to
the dollar figure that arabica coffee currently sells for on the New York commodities
exchange, which handles both spot and futures trades. The exchange used to be called
the New York Board of Trade, NYBOT for short; in 2007 IntercontinentalExchange
acquired NYBOT, so now the exchange is ICE.1 On the exchange, several grades of cof-
fee are sold; the most common one is called Coffee “C”®. Anyone who wants to get a
rough idea of how the arabica coffee business is going needs to look at the C price and
how it is changing over time. The “benchmark contract for Arabica coffee” and “the
world’s leading coffee contract,” Coffee C is the figure that the industry and the media
look at to price arabica.2 The C price is also the mark that Fair Trade and other buyers

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The “Price” of Coffee 93

use to write contracts. Robusta is traded largely on a London exchange; this chapter
won’t discuss that side of the industry, but the outlines of robusta trade are virtually the
same as for arabica.
5. Big producers, importers and roasters, and speculators all buy and sell on ICE. In addi-
tion to simply trading in actual coffee, anyone with deep pockets and a willingness to
take large risks can purchase or sell coffee futures or options on them.

This commerce is big: on ICE, coffee futures and options trade the “equivalent of 7 times the
world’s coffee production annually.”3 That is, contracts may be bought and sold so often that
their dollar value, added up, is seven times greater than the actual value of the coffee.
Why go to all this trouble and expense in dealing with coffee? Wouldn’t it be a great deal
simpler, and probably cheaper, just to send someone down to a coffee farm, buy the coffee
there, and ship it to a roaster? The answer to the first question has to do with history, the
answer to the second with the logistics and financing of large volumes of coffee. On the
other hand, Fair Trade and direct trade do not go through the ICE, while a select group
of farmers, among them Price Peterson (in “Strategies for Improving Coffee Quality”), has
been able to sell through annual Internet auctions. This article explores why most arabica
is bought and sold on ICE.

THE HISTORY OF COFFEE TRADING

Although coffee beans and the beverage were for sale on the streets of some Italian cities by the
1620s, the first market in the beans as a commodity developed in Amsterdam in the 1640s.
The Coffee Trader, a novel by David Liss, re-creates the excitement and risks of the bourse, as
dealers shout offers to buy or sell in Latin, Dutch, and Portuguese. The traders are Danish,
French, German, Dutch, and Jews exiled from Spain and Portugal.4 Everyone tries to find out
what is happening on the markets in London, Hamburg, and cities farther afield. From a very
early date, the business of buying and selling coffee was truly international.
As the novel shows, a trade in coffee futures also dates back to the seventeenth century. In
these arrangements, dealers agree with a commission merchant to buy a specified amount of
coffee, usually of a stated quality, to be physically delivered on a later date. Producers or, more
likely at this early point in the business, middlemen who had purchased coffee from Arabs
in the Middle East could sell futures in Amsterdam through commission merchants. We will
return to what these possibilities still mean for the business.
Despite the early appearance of futures, purchasing coffee long remained overwhelmingly
a matter of using the spot market. This was largely because not only was the crop highly
unpredictable but transporting goods over long distances in sailing vessels was as well. A ship
would arrive in New York or another port, news of the cargo would spread among dealers,
and bidding would begin. In early 1871, for example, dealers in New York bought 1,375 bags
(200 pounds each) of Brazilian coffee brought into port by the ship Contest, and another 967
bags from the Freya.5
But spot trading proved to be chaotic and ruinous for many businessmen: “uncontrolled
cash market speculation brought about a calamitous market collapse in 1880.”6 Two years
later, a group of coffee buyers formed the Coffee Exchange of the City of New York so that,
following the lead of a cotton exchange founded in 1870, coffee futures contracts could be
bought and sold.

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94 Robert W. Thurston

Another basic part of the story has to do with transportation. During the 1870s, railroad
building boomed in numerous countries, and regular transoceanic steamship lines began to
handle whatever the rails brought to the ports. These developments hardly reached into all
parts of coffee country then or for decades to come; into the 1950s or beyond, much coffee
came down from the mountains on the backs of donkeys or people. To this day, roads in Africa
or Mexico, for example, are often so bad that moving coffee is slow and expensive.
Yet by the time the New York Coffee Exchange opened in 1882, shipping had become
cheaper and more reliable. In 1886, a telegraph cable connected Brazil with the U.S.,7 so that
information about supply in the biggest producing country reached American traders almost
instantaneously. The business settled into the framework that continues to the present. Within
a few years the telephone, then later computers and the Internet, sped up trading coffee but
did not change its essential contours.

THE CREATION OF THE COFFEE “C” PRICE

In theory, any product might be sold using a system of futures, contracts to pay something
now and the full agreed-upon sum when the product is delivered. But few people would sign
a contract to purchase, for example, a car six months from now, knowing that cars will be
available for sale at that time. The price of the car you want will probably be about the same
in six months, barring swings in the price of gasoline that would favor either sippers or guz-
zlers. Buying futures is a way to take some of the risk out of purchasing any item that can
change rapidly in quantity and availability, a problem that applies above all to agricultural
commodities. Signing a contract for the delivery of a specified amount and quality of coffee
smoothes, or tries to, the peaks and troughs of the business that in the past brought down so
many companies. Doing business through futures makes life more predictable; by purchasing
futures, a candy manufacturer, for example, can know in March what he will pay for sugar in
September and can plan around that cost. The candy maker can “discover” the price of sugar,
as the commodities people put it.
This desire for predictability eventually led to the creation of the C price. It is determined
on a given day, or hour by hour as trading goes on, by averaging the “nearby” futures contracts
for delivery of mild, washed (wet processed) arabica coffee from nineteen different countries.
Brazil, in an important new move that recognizes improvements in quality there, will soon be
added to the list. “Nearby” means on the next possible arrival date.
Beans sold through C contracts might be called fairly good coffee, but certainly not great
according to the best palates in the industry. Some countries’ coffee commands a premium
over the average C price, while coffee from other lands is discounted below the C level. In
early 2001, Colombian coffee, for example, traded at a premium of four cents, Mexican cof-
fees at a discount of seven cents a pound. But by July 2011, Mexicans had reached par, while
Colombians commanded a 2 cent premium (or 200 “basis points”); Ecuadorans were minus
4 cents. Effective with delivery for March of 2013, Rwandans will rise from a 3 cent to a 1
cent discount, while Brazilians will be discounted 9 cents a pound,8 which means that dealers
think their quality still has much room to improve.

FUTURES TRADING IN COFFEE

How do futures work? To buy futures in a logical way, the users of a commodity have to know
their costs of production, including, of course, for the commodity itself. So if an importer

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The “Price” of Coffee 95

figures that a profit can be made on a certain kind of coffee when it can be bought for $2 a
pound, he will buy it at that price. But the spot price keeps jumping around; it has always
been dangerous to buy coffee only on the spot market, since the price may suddenly go well
above the amount an importer can pay and still make a profit. On the spot market, as noted,
little if anything is predictable about the cost of coffee. The solution, at least in theory, is to
keep track of the futures market and, when the price for delivery in the future goes down, in
our example to $2 or less, sign a futures contract. Any number of firms and individuals are at
their computers, watching weather reports and other information from producing countries.
The opinions of respected prognosticators on how much coffee Colombia will produce in a
given year, for instance, have great influence on the futures market.
Contracts for futures are economically useful in another way: they keep capital in the hands
of the importer, since only a small fee must be paid to the broker, plus a “margin” of good
faith money deposited somewhere. This amount is like escrow for a house purchase, to make
sure the contract is fulfilled. In recent years even the brokers have sometimes been eliminated,
as people can buy futures on their computers.
Large importers, for example Folgers, buy arabica through ICE. More specialized compa-
nies may test many different beans from, for instance, one branch of the Andes mountains of
Colombia. Then, having selected the best coffees of the hundreds available from that region,
an importer can offer a list of ten or twelve to a roaster. That firm will receive small amounts
of these coffees, several ounces or a pound at a time, and prepare them in a sample roaster.
On the basis of the sample batches, the roasting company will decide which beans it wants to
order in bulk. The importer does the leg, mouth, and paper work on the ground so that the
roaster can concentrate on the business of getting the coffee ready for customers. Only the
biggest or best-known roasters can afford to send their own people over seas and miles of bad
roads to individual farms or co-ops. Even then, as the Folgers example shows, the largest firms
may simply buy through the exchange. “Great” coffees—another highly imprecise term!—are
discovered in producing countries by intrepid souls willing to endure difficult travel and
months away from home.9
To flesh out our hypothetical C purchase, imagine that an importer, who follows the
weather and the political situation in the producing countries closely, decides in March to
buy coffee for delivery in September. Since the coffee will arrive several months from the date
of the agreement, the importer signs a futures contract with a broker or makes a deal directly
on the Internet, and the importer deposits the margin. Let’s say the price set in the contract is
$2 per pound for Colombian coffee of a certain quality delivered to New Orleans on July 12.
C contracts start at a minimum of 37,500 pounds of coffee; an agreement to buy may stipulate
multiple C contracts, meaning multiples of the minimum quantity.10 This kind of trading is
not for the faint of heart or those with shallow pockets.
If in the meantime our importer can make money by buying or selling futures contracts, so
much the better. Of course, speculators are in the game just to deal in such contracts, without
even thinking about physically acquiring coffee, much less roasting it. And, in the ultimate
complication, an importer might hedge his risk by buying another futures contract for a little
protection: if the first contract was in effect a bet that the spot price would go down, the
second contract may be a bet that it will go up. The point is to prevent a catastrophic loss if
the price goes against the original plan.11 (To hedge on a commodity purchase should not be
confused with “hedge fund,” the ultimate form of gambling, in which wealthy people take
great risks in buying stock, real estate, and so forth.)
Anyone purchasing coffee who senses that the C price will change can also purchase op-
tions. If you foresee an increase in price, for instance because a frost in Brazil will hurt supply,

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you can buy a “call” option. This gives you the right, but not the obligation, to purchase coffee
at a guaranteed figure. Then, when the coffee arrives, you can sell it for the higher spot market
price, which produces a profit on the contract itself. Given the same trend, you could also
sell a “put” option. In this case, you reserve the right to sell your coffee at a designated price;
of course, someone has to buy the put option. Then, when the spot price rises, you sell the
contracted amount at the agreed-on price, and you buy replacement coffee at the lower spot
figure. Once more, you have made money on the contract alone, without roasting beans, and
often without ever taking delivery of coffee or even seeing it.
Suppose you believe that the spot price will fall. Then you act in the opposite direction;
you will sell call options and/or buy put options. Anyone who has bought a call from you
must pay the agreed-on price, while you purchase coffee on the spot market at a lower figure.
Anyone who has sold a put to you has to honor that price, that is, pay the stipulated amount
per pound, while you buy at a lower figure on the spot. Or so you hope.
These are the bare bones of trading large amounts of coffee, one of the key factors that
affects its price. There are many other aspects of the C market—for example, “strike incre-
ment”—that are not discussed here. But these are the basics.

RECENT TRENDS IN TRADING

Someone will always need to buy coffee on the spot market. Suppose that an importer isn’t
interested in betting on futures but has a large inventory of green coffee on hand. If the spot
price goes up, she can sell the warehoused coffee for more than the agreed-upon futures price;
when the shipment comes in, she can renew her inventory at lower cost. Thus it pays to be a
big player with inventory and plenty of cash or credit on hand.
Again, all of this is supposed to take a lot of the risk out of dealing in coffee. But futures
hardly cure everything. To take just a few recent examples of price swings, between the spring
of 1994 and August 1995, Coffee C first shot up more than four times in value, then plunged
down even lower than its starting point fourteen months earlier.12 Here is the way the C price
changed from March to June 1997, admittedly an especially wild period in the business:13

• February 14: 180. Prices rose to this level after a story that South American countries
would not loosen export quotas.
• February 27: 172.85. Prices had obviously fallen since the previous story, but on this
date the New York Times noted that Coffee C had risen 59 percent since January 1. The
increase for February 27 was because heavy rains threatened Colombia’s harvest.
• March 13: 205. No explanation available.14
• March 14: 182.25. Prices fell on a report that Brazil and Colombia were increasing
exports.
• March 26: 179.3. Having continued to fall for a few days, the price now jumped on the
expectation that supplies would tighten.
• April 10: 189.7. A Colombian official indicated that crops in his country and Brazil
would be disappointing.
• April 17: 208. Prices surged after a report that inventories were lower than expected and
because Brazilian dock workers in the main port, Santos, staged a job protest.
• April 30: 226. Folgers, the biggest American roaster, raised its retail prices, “heightening
worries about this year’s supply.”
• May 14: 241. A report of “dryness” in Brazil sent prices up.

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• May 20: 253.1.15 Expecting a small Brazilian crop, Folgers again raised retail prices.
• May 30: 318 was the day’s peak; C closed at 314.8. The jolt resulted from news of a pos-
sible frost in Brazil and of small harvests in Nicaragua and other producers.
• June 3: 254. Futures fell 22.45; fears of a Brazilian frost had ended.
• June 18: 208.7. Prices had continued to fall due to the improved Brazilian picture; now
they rose because U.S. inventories might be “tight” before the South American harvest.
• June 24: 175.5. A crop forecaster predicted a bumper crop in Brazil.

Such oscillations have continued, although not in such abrupt succession, to the present,
and probably will go on for a very long time to come. Reports like those of 1997 reappear, are
confirmed, denied, or countered, all with a profound effect on the C price. Maybe a predic-
tion is wrong, only a rumor, or an outright lie; brokers can’t always be sure. Certainly no one
trading coffee in 1997 foresaw the great rise a few years later of production in Vietnam, which
contributed mightily to pushing the C price down by the early 2000s.
On the ICE market, or indeed for the price of green coffee anywhere, changes in the sup-
ply of any kind of coffee, including robusta, can have a major impact on how much roasters
must pay. When huge amounts of robusta began to emerge from Vietnam in the late 1990s,
the price of both robusta and arabica tumbled. The reason for a fall in robusta’s price is obvi-
ous, but why did arabica also drop? That happened because big corporations used robusta in
their canned blends, and some Italian and French roasters in particular used, and still use,
robusta in espresso blends. In addition, the biggest players began to find ways of taking some
of the harshness out of robusta by forcing water through the beans after roasting. Then more
robusta could be added to the blends. As a result, demand for arabica dropped, taking the
price down with it.
When the C price rises, as it did steeply from June 2010 to April 2011, it tends to pull the
price of better coffee up with it. Tom Owen, a widely respected buyer and coffee expert for
Sweet Maria’s Coffee, remarks that “prices we pay importers, and what importers pay farmers,
are generally tied to the C market, with a contract written for ‘C market + $0.40 + import
costs’ or ‘C market + $0.40.’ So when the market goes up the contract is worth more.” In late
2010, Sweet Maria’s contracts for purchasing coffee directly from farmers averaged “something
. . . like $2.79/pound.”16 But since those contracts were tied to the C price, the cost to Sweet
Maria’s and other importers of buying coffee also had to rise. Eventually, if the C figure goes
up, importers will increase the price of the coffee they sell to roasters.
Even with all these complications, the C price is the best way of following the market price
for arabica. At any time, the C figure is used to judge the state of the coffee business. When the
price slid to just above 40 cents in late 2001, that amount was generally well below the cost of
production for Latin American and other farmers. In short, it was not worthwhile to grow coffee,
and many producers left the business. Coffee in the middle range, between robusta and the best
arabica grades, was in deep trouble. But by October of 2010, Coffee C had climbed above $2.00,
due to increasing demand around the world and a poor harvest, the third in a row, in Colombia.
In late April of 2011, the price reached $3.10, the highest it had been since 1997. As noted, all
of this applies to pretty good coffee. The best beans do not go through ICE.

IMPLICATIONS FOR FARMERS

When the C price is high, every segment of the coffee industry reacts; all players must pay
more for their beans because overall demand rises. Growers can get more for their crops,

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particularly for medium-quality coffee (the demand for superior coffee, cupped at 80 points
and above, is much less elastic). When farmers can get more money, considerable difficulties
can arise for co-ops, as members may break ranks and sell coffee to middlemen instead of
honoring a previously signed common contract. It can be extremely difficult to refuse to sell to
someone who shows up at a farm and offers cash on the spot for a crop. The local buyers, often
called coyotes, hardly a term of endearment, may offer low prices in bad times; but whether
prices are high or low, ready cash is often a farmer’s dream, or desperate need.
Collecting from a co-op after it finally delivers coffee and receives payment may mean that
a family waits a long time for income. Once a co-op is broken in periods of good prices, it can
be extremely hard to reconstruct it.

None of these ways of buying and selling coffee, whether on the ICE or otherwise, guarantees
a profit. If someone bets via contracts that the price will rise, but instead it falls, he loses.
Hedging protects traders only to a certain extent.
Are the brokers and the speculators parasites? They don’t grow coffee, often don’t care about
it—it’s just another commodity—and they may never see it. They may operate by using other
people’s money. But they do enable capital to flow from place to place and into productive
enterprises, and they earn money, if things go right, for someone. That’s the way of the world,
and whatever is in your cup, the C market marches on.

NOTES

1. ICE Futures U.S., Coffee C® Futures, https://www.theice.com/publicdocs/ICE_Coffee_Bro

chure.pdf, accessed July 9, 2011.
2. ICE Futures U.S., Coffee C® Options, July 9, 2011, https://www.theice.com/productguide/
ProductDetails.shtml?specId=14.
3. ICE Futures U.S., Coffee C®, Brochure, July 9, 2011.
4. David Liss, The Coffee Trader (New York: Random House, 2003), especially 126–27. The scene
on the floor of the Amsterdam exchange is on 346–51.
5. “Commercial Affairs,” New York Times, February 13, 1871.
6. Coffee Futures and Options (New York: New York Board of Trade, 2004), 6. See also Mark Pend-
ergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic
Books, 2010), 63–66.
7. Victor M. Berthold, History of the Telephone and Telegraph in Brazil, 1851–1921 (New York:
1922), 14.
8. ICE Futures U.S., Coffee C®, Brochure, 4, except for the 2013 figure for Rwandans and Brazil-
ians, in ICE Futures U.S., Coffee C® Futures.
9. See tales of such journeys in Michaele Weissman, God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect
Coffee (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008).
10. New York Board of Trade, “Coffee Mini ‘C,’” New York: NYBOT, n.d.
11. New York Board of Trade, Understanding Futures and Options (New York: NYBOT, 2004), 9; Joe
Parcell and Vern Pierce, “Commodity Futures Terminology,” http://agebb.missouri.edu/mgt/risk/terms
.htm, accessed December 8, 2008.
12. Parcell and Pierce, “Commodity Futures Terminology,” 7.
13. Unless otherwise noted, each date is from the New York Times, referring to the previous day’s
trading.
14. New York Board of Trade, Coffee Mini ‘C’ (New York: NYBOT, n.d.), 2.
15. New York Times, May 22, 1997.
16. “What Happens When Coffee Prices Go through the Roof?” http://www.sweetmarias.com/library/
content/oct-nov-2010-what-happens-when-coffee-prices-go-through-roof, accessed August 22, 2013.

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16
Appreciating Quality
The Route to Upward Mobility of Coffee Farmers
George Howell

All too often in the coffee industry, mediocre quality has been the norm. Until very recently
with the rise of a new generation of coffee roasters, growers whose coffees are on difficult
mountainous terrain (where most coffees with the great potential are raised) were not incentiv-
ized to produce great quality; their goal was simply “acceptability.” As time goes on, however,
this model has become more and more economically unsustainable. Commodity prices for
run-of-the-mill coffee have hovered below and just above the cost of production. With profits
at a bare minimum, producers could not sink money into the kind of artisan production that
would result in high-quality coffee.
The distribution of marketplace prices for coffee still reflects the old ways of a market geared
almost exclusively towards quantity and the immaturity of a genuine quality market, such as ex-
ists in tea and wine. The price of the vast bulk of coffee today is well under $10 a pound, retail.
Only a minute percentage of coffees rise above $10. Then, like detached stars high above, appear
small island coffees; these are Hawaiian kona, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Saint Helena, made
famous by Napoleon’s imprisonment there. Thus Saint Helena’s coffee can sell for over $50 a
pound. All islands, all nearly unobtainable, all story and myth. While Jamaica’s Blue Mountains
have great potential and Hawaii does produce some very good quality, these coffees are not mul-
tiples better, let alone better at all, than the great Central Americans and the exquisite Kenyans,
by any stretch of the imagination. Capsule coffee may sell for well over $20 a pound, but the
consumer is paying for the convenience of having an individualized stale cup, not for quality.
The most expensive coffee in the world is kopi luwak—$300 and more for one pound.
Frankly, this is coffee from assholes for assholes. On the other hand, the prices of tea and
of wine are totally different. These are the “noble” beverages, developed over millennia by
cultures that valued ever greater efforts to produce higher qualities. Prices vary over a huge
range of qualities and prices while offering great solid values for customers. Where is there
anything remotely like that in coffee? Prices for the highest quality coffees must begin to chal-
lenge the $10 to $15 price limits before specialty coffee farmers are really going to benefit by
being incentivized to produce ever better qualities. La Esmeralda in Panama and El Injerto in
Guatemala have achieved this kind of commodity independence. Many more should follow.
At $10 a pound for coffee, you are paying less for a twelve-ounce cup of coffee than for a
twelve-ounce can of Coke. From a $10 bottle of wine, generally considered not very expensive,

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100 George Howell

the cost is $4.73 for a twelve-ounce serving, versus $0.53 for a twelve-ounce serving of coffee
at the same price. At $4.73 for a twelve-ounce serving of coffee you would pay $85.00 per
pound. Quite a leap!
Coffee is in its infancy. It first appeared as a brewed beverage a mere six hundred years ago,
when tea and wine were already established. The methods used to bring out this coffee were
exceedingly primitive. Only recently has coffee developed the technology to really produce
a perfect cup. Harvesting, processing, shipping, storage, and roasting have dramatically im-
proved in recent times as well, thanks to modern technology. Drip and espresso brewing are
only now being perfected and really becoming able to bring out coffee’s great potential. It’s
our time’s choice to make coffee a noble beverage alongside tea and wine, or not. The flip side
is that if farmers in difficult regions are not incentivized, they will give way to industrialized
coffees without great distinction, grown in flat lands at lower altitudes. Heirloom varieties that
release great flavor notes will be gone.
The wine market has seen the results of its emphasis on high quality. Even when the price of
average-quality wine has decreased, the fine wine market has remained strong: “It seems coun-
terintuitive, what with France, Italy, Spain, and Australia suffering wine gluts over the past few
years, and the E.U. contemplating yanking out vines, even California’s central valley has seen one
hundred thousand acres culled in the past five years, but the premium end of that market, wines
costing twenty five dollars a bottle and up, is on a tear, with sales growth averaging more than
thirty percent over the past three years.”1 Wine Spectator noted the same great disparity between
average and the highest-quality wine: “The highest priced wines usually come from places where
at least one winery gets twice the price of anybody else making the same kind of wine.”2
This is where specialty coffee should aim; it needs heroes, it needs great estates. We are
beginning to see this happen in places like Huehuetenango, Guatemala, where El Injerto has
become a legend. Until now all the well-known coffee companies of specialty have mainly
sold blends, blends that keep the coffee farmer anonymous and therefore chained to a buyer’s
market. The newest wave of coffee shops is beginning to emphasize the farm or the smallest
unit cooperative that is producing the coffee, the variety, the region, and the country. Coffee
has begun to enter the age of branding.
If we imagine a quality pyramid, specialty coffee sits atop a giant trapezoid of mass market
coffee and forms somewhere around 20 percent of coffee sales. This specialty piece is not
divided into horizontally layered qualities but rather vertical slices—dark roast, light roast,
fair trade, organic—not one better quality than another, just different kinds side by side. And
then, on top of the pyramid, constituting far less than 1 percent, sit the estate coffees, whether
from small farms, cooperatives, or large farms.
Yet that highest if terribly small segment of coffees can have a huge effect. That’s what
the Cup of Excellence was all about in 1999 when it was first launched in Brazil. Suddenly
people in specialty found an enthusiasm that they had been completely missing. People from
around the world came and drilled down from “acceptable” coffees to masterpieces over several
intensive days. Each day they drilled down further, re-cupping coffees that had come from the
earlier batches, culling each time, and then arriving to the ten finest.
These ten winners went on to an Internet auction, where roasters competed against each
other, and still do, yearly, in eight different countries, on the Internet to buy these fine, very
small lots of coffee. Last year, one particular farm in Guatemala sold its coffee for over $80
per pound, green. Panama’s La Esmeralda sold for over $100 in one of these competitions
several years ago. Luxury markets are marked by excess. Excess reflects a product’s status. It
affects the price chain far down that product’s quality ladder. Coffee’s future will be one of
more segmented qualities and prices. Wine has shown us the way.

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Appreciating Quality 101

To appreciate truly fine single-estate coffees, it is best to drip-brew using a paper filter. Ex-
traction and control are maximized and the resultant beverage is clear, allowing the flavor of
the brew to be highlighted—as opposed to cloudier preparations that obscure the nuanced
complexity of a finer bean, much like a cloudy wine. The purpose of brewing roasted coffee is
to extract a fairly precise amount of the bean’s soluble solids (a sugar cube is a soluble solid).
Up to 30 percent of a coffee bean can be extracted, but 18 to 22 percent is the ideal, the
range where black coffee is sweetest. Extracting more will result in bitter, harsh, tobacco-like
flavors. This simple rule is often unrecognized by fine restaurants and even in cafés. Extrac-
tion using the drip method involves correct temperature, ideally right around 200°F; it
requires mild turbulence in the filter to make sure all the grounds are evenly extracted and,
equally important, calibration between time and grind: the coarser the grind, the longer the
ground coffee should be in contact with hot water; the finer the grind, the shorter the time.
Espresso takes seconds and thus requires extra fine grind; Chemex, having an extra-thick
filter, coarse grind—all to extract that 20 percent from the coffee. In the realm of drip grind,
finer grinds will result in a greater proportion of dust—which releases everything (therefore
over-extracts) immediately.
It is better to aim for coarser grinds, thereby reducing the percentage of dust and extra fines,
and to lengthen the time—up to six minutes for a full pot of coffee. Finally, the quality of
the water (having correct mineral content), quality of the coffee, and quality of the filter are
critical. A paper filter needs to be rinsed with hot water before brewing to eliminate all the
off-flavors paper will otherwise transfer to the drink.
Espresso is made to be consumed immediately after being brewed. It is like a brandy and
should be served immediately; but for a drip, it is not a matter of tasting the first sip when it
is piping hot and judging it then and there. Fine, lighter-roasted, drip coffee is to be savored,
experienced over twenty to thirty minutes as the coffee cools and gradually reveals itself. Really
hot coffee will sting and close your taste buds. At the initial temperature, the most one can get
is the first aromatic glimpse of what is coming.
As the cup cools to an ideal 135°F, look for sweetness and clean cup, sweetness from the
ripeness of the coffee, clean cup from the processing. A coffee that is not perfectly clean is
murky, muddled, often confused with “rich.” Only after the coffee begins to cool should one
look for the aromatics in the drink itself and begin to perceive layered notes of chocolate, nuts,
honey, fruit, and flowers in changing combinations as the temperature changes. Great coffees
come in a rainbow of their own natural flavors—as long as they are truly fine and not overly
roasted with caramel and bitter “saucy” notes.
Along with flavor come acidity, body, mouthfeel, and finally aftertaste, which ideally
should sweetly disappear. The great diversity of coffee’s flavor profiles has only begun to be
explored by the industry, let alone the consumer. But mistakes in properly producing a quality
coffee, from farming to processing to shipping to roasting to storing and, finally to brewing,
can dull flavor profiles until all colors smear into brown and everything tastes the same. That’s
if the coffee doesn’t taste awful!

NOTES

1. Janet Morrisey, “Fruit of the Vine,” Time International (Atlantic Edition), November 12, 2007.
2. Matt Kramer, “QPR,” Wine Spectator, May 31, 2001.

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17
What Is Specialty Coffee?
Shawn Steiman

At the SCAA meetings and trade show in 2011, The Morning Cup, published daily while the
show was going on, asked coffee professionals “What does specialty coffee mean to you?”

Here are four answers:

Hannah Eatough, Harrogate, UK: “It means fantastic quality and coffee that is ethically
sourced. It’s fantastic coffee you want to drink again and again.”
Chris Demarse, Muncie, Indiana: “There are a few characteristics basic to specialty coffee:
transparency, sustainability, equity, and quality.”
Mary Metallo-Tellie, Scranton, Pennsylvania: “It means great taste, made with great passion,
great quality . . . lots of fabulous things.”
Jean Mare Irakabaho, Kigali, Rwanda: “High-quality coffee that is correctly processed. It’s a
coffee that makes consumers happy, boosting the income and livelihood of farmers.”1

WHAT IS SPECIALTY COFFEE?

The world has a lot of coffee waiting to be drunk. It can be bought in bags, cans, tins, jars,
and bricks. It can be whole bean or ground, waiting to be brewed, instant, or pre-made
and ready-to-drink. It can be drunk at home or away, prepared by person or machine. All
these possibilities, and many others, will produce a different experience for the drinker who
eventually tries the coffee; to put it mildly, not all cups of coffee are the same. People, with
their inherent and economic needs to categorize and differentiate objects, strive to group and
understand all those different cups of coffee—how they taste and how they came to taste that
way—by indicating a sense of quality in the liquor.
According to Don Holly, administrative director of the Specialty Coffee Association of
America (SCAA), writing in 1999, Erna Knutsen coined the term specialty coffee in 1978.
She was describing coffees that came from specific geographic microclimates and had unique
flavor profiles. She observed that not all coffees tasted the same, and the ones that were clearly
differentiated by taste, in a good way, were special. Holly’s exploration of defining specialty
coffee, which works its way through the process of producing coffee, highlights a point that

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What Is Specialty Coffee? 103

is likely shared by many in the industry: “It is not only that the coffee doesn’t taste bad; to be
considered specialty it must be notably good.” He ends his piece with an acute summation:
“Specialty coffee is, in the end, defined in the cup.”2
A decade after Holly wrote his definition, Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the SCAA,
ventured a more detailed explanation. Writing from the vantage point of a more developed
industry, Rhinehart’s discussion not only covers the process of coffee, from seed to cup, and
the ultimate result of that process, but includes the actors of that process. Rhinehart writes,
“In the final analysis specialty coffee will be defined by the quality of the product, whether
green bean, roasted bean or prepared beverage and by the quality of life that coffee can deliver
to all of those involved in its cultivation, preparation and degustation.”3
Unfortunately, neither Holly nor Rhinehart quantified how a specialty coffee tastes differ-
ent from a nonspecialty coffee, known as commercial coffee; rather, their definitions were
philosophical propositions that explained what must happen in order for a special cup to exist
and who must benefit from it. Any person foolish enough to attempt a definition, including
this author, recognizes that the task is impossible before it even begins.

IN THE BEGINNING

Perhaps, at one time, the world of coffee was dichromatic. There was mass-produced, some-
what generic, caffeine-laden coffee, and then there was other, coffee that could no longer be
considered just coffee. This coffee, newly (re)discovered, excited a handful of artisans who
cherished it, sought it out, and celebrated it to the point where their efforts and ideals created
a new industry: the specialty coffee industry.
Through its rapid growth and expansion, specialty coffee continued to define itself as other,
a significantly amorphous construct that allowed specialty coffee to be an umbrella term for
anything that was different. The lack of a more stringent definition permitted the flourishing
of coffees and beverages that rightfully can be called specialty. Now, this other is full of many
others, and the leaders of the industry are left to philosophize about what they want specialty
coffee to be, not necessarily what it is.
Certainly, the SCAA, the original and largest, most influential trade group and voice of the
specialty coffee industry, has a place in defining the term that is their name and mission. They
can and should categorize the amorphous world of specialty coffee. To some extent, they and
other influential organizations have. The groundwork has been laid.

SCAA STANDARDS

In 2009, the SCAA published revised quality standards for green coffee.4 It established physi-
cal criteria necessary to be deemed “specialty,” but it also states that the coffee must meet a
minimum cupping score of 80, based on its cupping protocol and assessment scheme.5 The
cupping protocol establishes a 100-point scoring system by which all coffees can be assessed.
Exactly what the 80-point demarcation delineates for the cup quality is not absolute, as the
point count from the various categories that make up the scoring system can vary for indi-
vidual coffees. In general, though, as long as the coffee doesn’t have any detectable defects like
moldy or sour, it is likely to reach the 80 mark.
While the users of the system all agree that this is a reasonable demarcation, few, if any of
them, would be excited to drink an 80-point coffee. The demarcation, while practical, hardly

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104 Shawn Steiman

represents desirable or sometimes even acceptable coffees; “not bad” is not exactly “special.”
Nonetheless, this numeric turning point of specialty-or-not is necessary, as it establishes mini-
mum qualifications and a benchmark to which everything can be compared. Unfortunately,
making the specialty grade says little about what the coffee actually tastes like.

SPECIALTY COFFEE: THE GRAY AREA

It is one thing to acquire a carefully sourced, carefully roasted, carefully brewed coffee, rate
it, and identify it as specialty. It is quite another to go out into the active marketplace, pick a
product off the shelf, and celebrate or decry it as specialty. Arguably, this is where the specialty
coffee industry, in its amorphous glory, struggles the most with its identity.
Hardcore specialty coffee fanatics tend to think that only plain, black coffee, sourced and
prepared with great intention and care, can ever really be specialty coffee. Yet the specialty
marketplace is full of options that are nothing like that but, by most definitions, are, in fact,
specialty. In any given U.S. supermarket, one can find roasted and bagged coffee, ready-to-
drink beverages, and individually packaged coffee pods and cups, that are grouped separately
from what is universally accepted as commercial coffee (industrial/canned coffees produced
by gigantic companies whose coffee component is often only a small part of their business
model). These coffees often have a provenance and history that fits the specialty definition.
While they may not be quite as fresh as they could be and they may not get brewed to the ex-
acting standards of the industry, many of the coffees themselves will garner an 80-point score.
Yet not all members of the specialty industry agree that they are specialty.
The lines become blurred when one flavors coffee after roasting or, in the café, flavor is
added to the final beverage. The addition of a sweetener, a time-honored practice, certainly
changes the flavor of coffee, arguably putting it underneath the 80-point score. The murkiest
place is at the juncture of black coffee and milk. A coffee, acquired from a specific farm and
carefully crafted into a beverage, may not be specialty when milk is added. Yet brew that same
coffee as an espresso and mix it with textured milk, and the resulting cappuccino is a hallmark
of specialty coffee.
At the core of the gray area is a lack of agreement about what specialty coffee can be and
when it is allowed to be specialty. The 100-point SCAA scale is meant to evaluate green coffee,
and the protocol defines what coffees are likely to ascend to the 80-point mark. It isn’t able
to cope with the life of the coffee after that moment. If chocolate macadamia nut flavoring is
added to a 95-point coffee, is it still specialty coffee?
This highlights the challenge of defining specialty coffee. Is it measured by what is actually
in the cup or by the beans that, at one point in time, were able to make the grade? This ques-
tion alludes to the problem of specialty coffee being composed of others and no single person
or entity having authority or justification to delineate membership for a global phenomenon.
Holly and Rhinehart understood this problem. This is why they never discussed what spe-
cialty coffee tasted like. They understood that specialty coffee isn’t something that is drunk or
experienced; it is an idea to be embraced. There never can be a definitive, quantitative descrip-
tion of specialty coffee. Coffee quality and specialty coffee are moving targets that shift with
culture, the times, and the drinkers defining them.6 Thus, the definition of the specialty coffee
beverage must constantly be revisited and reworked as needed. Specialty coffee is defined not
by what the coffee itself tastes like but by the people who interact with it.

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What Is Specialty Coffee? 105

Specialty coffee is the idea that some coffees, both directly and indirectly, make a difference
in the lives of all those who come into contact with them. To farmers, it may give them greater
income or personal pride. To consumers, it may give them a taste that lingers in their memory,
not just their mouth. As Rhinehart wrote, it is about the quality of life.
Taken one step further, it is coffee that changes our perception of the world. Specialty coffee
is coffee that makes us think. It makes us think about what we taste, what we feel, and how
that coffee influences the world around it.

NOTES

1. “SCAA asks: What does specialty coffee mean to you?” The Morning Cup, April 30, 2011, 2.
2. Don Holly, “Coffee FAQs: What is the definition of specialty coffee?,” SCAA Chronicle (December
1999).
3. Ric Rhinehart, “What Is Specialty Coffee?,” June 2009, http://scaa.org/?page=RicArtp1, accessed
February 28, 2012.
4. SCAA, SCAA Standard | Green Coffee Quality, revised November 21, 2009.
5. SCAA, SCAA Standard | Cupping Specialty Coffee, revised November 21, 2009.
6. For a more thorough discussion of coffee quality, see “Coffee Quality and Assessment” in this volume.

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18
Where Does the Money Go
in the Coffee Supply Chain?
Robert W. Thurston

We’ve all handed over cash to a coffee seller, but have you ever wondered what that cash pays
for? The trail from the coffee tree to your street is long, and the SCAA offered a snapshot,
adapted here, of all the stops along that trail.
Let’s say that you own a coffee bar. To stay in business and to live, you need to make a
profit. That means money in the bank after all your expenses have been paid. Just what are
your costs? This example covers expenses at each of the stages from export to a cup sold in
your shop, using certified Fair Trade, organic coffee. Your part comes in toward the end. The
journey starts with milled green coffee—that is, coffee beans that have only the silverskin as
a remaining cover—sold in a producing country to a U.S. importer at $1.50 a pound. The
importer must then pay additional fees and costs (all figures are per pound):

• .095 for shipping and customs entry

• .05 for warehouse and logistics
• .095 for finance and storage
• .15 for importer margin

Thus to this point, the importer has added .39 to the cost of a pound of coffee, making the
total of inputs so far $1.89 per pound.
The coffee is then shipped to a roaster. Costs mount up this way:

• .12 for shipping

• .44 shrinkage loss at 18% of weight (such loss is typical in the roasting process, since
some of the weight of the green beans is in water that will escape as steam)

Now the total cost is $2.45/pound. The next costs are these:

• .39 for packaging

• .55 direct labor
• .10 Fair Trade USA fee for maintaining certification

This brings the coffee’s cost to $3.49.

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Where Does the Money Go in the Coffee Supply Chain? 107

But the roaster/wholesaler has other expenses:

• .94 for wages, excluding direct labor

• 1.68 sales, general, and administrative
• .38 interest, depreciation, amortization, lease

Now the total invested in the pound of coffee is $6.49.

Assuming that the roaster sells the coffee to a café at $7.25, the pre-tax profit is .76. On
this amount, state and federal taxes are .27, leaving the roaster’s net profit per pound at .49,
about 6.7 percent of the sale price.
You, the retailer, now make coffee as a beverage in your shop.
One pound of coffee yields 7.5 liters (about 253.5 ounces by volume) of coffee beverage,
using 60 grams (22.12 ounces by weight) of ground coffee per liter (33.8 ounces by volume)
of water. The costs of serving this coffee are as follows:

• a cup of coffee, for this illustration, is 475 milliliters (let’s say 16 ounces by volume)
• therefore 16 cups of coffee per pound brings the shop $28.00
• Hold on: you need to pay out, besides the 7.25 you already spent on the beans,
• 2.00 for cups
• .46 for lids
• .16 for stir sticks
• .56 for condiments (milk, sugar, cream, artificial sweeteners, and so on)

Still, so far you have made a gross profit per pound of $17.57. Sounds pretty sweet. But there
are some other matters to take care of:

• 5.60 for labor!

Labor in the coffee bar is the biggest single expense of all, more than 3.7 times what the green
beans sold for as they were exported from the producing country. So the value added to the
product is overwhelmingly in the consuming countries. We are closer to understanding why
the farmers do not receive a huge portion of the cost of a cup of coffee in an American or
European shop.
But of course there are further costs in your shop. Sticking with the U.S. example, they are:

• 1.96 for the lease

• .70 for utilities
• .84 for marketing
• .56 for repairs and maintenance
• 4.20 for general and administrative expenses (e.g., telephone, wireless, bookkeeping)

All this drops your net profit to $3.71/pound. And we’re still not done! You will have to buy
new equipment at some point to keep going, and unless you have big bags of your own money
lying around, you will have to borrow funds. Therefore you must spend:

• 1.12 for depreciation, amortization, interest

• .91 for state and federal taxes. Did you think the tax men would forget you?

Your net profit now stands at $1.68, or 6 percent of the sales income.

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108 Robert W. Thurston

Let’s review the retail segment. You paid for the coffee, labor, condiments, heat, light, rent,
and so on, a total of $20.72 per pound of coffee. Subtracting the $7.25 paid for the roasted
coffee beans leaves $13.47. In other words, you, the coffee bar owner, paid 1.8 times as much
for everything else as for the coffee. Buying the beans amounted to about 35 percent of your
total expenses. We are now much closer to understanding why the farmer gets only a small
portion of what it costs for a cup of coffee in a café.
Here ends the SCAA’s tale of where the money goes. Of course, expenses vary hugely across
the U.S., not to mention Europe and Japan. In some locations, rent and labor are much higher
than suggested here. Moreover, the example is of certified Fair Trade organic coffee. Other
coffees of similar quality may cost significantly less, while the most desirable ones, rated at 90
points and above, would cost more. And, to state the obvious, the price of green coffee rises
and falls with the weather, production around the world, political unrest, and other factors.
When the price rises, you may find it difficult to pass the additional cost on to your custom-
ers. The squeeze is on.

My own interviews with coffee bar owners suggest amendments to the outline above. Retailers
say their expenses to buy beans are usually less than 20 percent of all costs. Everywhere labor
is the greatest expense. Skilled baristas, who need at least six months of on-the-job training
before they can serve customers independently—amid orders from impatient people for lattes,
double espressos, macchiatos, cappuccinos with skim milk, small, large, and ultra-grande, all
to be made and served now—command much more pay than those who merely push a few
buttons and wait for a machine to pour the brew.
Every shop owner will be asked for donations or to sponsor many events. There should be
trips to origin, to coffee shows and conventions, perhaps for more training.
When the numbers are crunched hard, the injustice of the infamous $3 a day for farmers,
$3 for a cup of coffee in the U.S. becomes a highly slippery matter. To be sure, the average
barista or coffee bar owner, if she stays in business, lives a good deal better than the average,
say, Kenyan farmer. But the two countries are really different. If Kenya had the infrastructure
and especially the labor costs of the U.S., the farm/cup comparison would be much more
valid. As things are, it is not a particularly useful exercise to think about how much a peasant
earns per day in terms of how much it costs an urban westerner to buy a cup of coffee, espe-
cially one laced with milk in some fashion.
The simple fact of the coffee chain is that value is overwhelmingly added in the consuming
areas. That remains true if the example concerns a café in a producing country. The cost of mak-
ing a cup of coffee in Sao Paulo or Nairobi is high, partly because transportation and energy
expenses are serious there. Labor is cheaper outside of Western Europe, Japan, and the U.S., but
it is hardly free. In any event, consumers everywhere do need to think carefully about how the
farmers can receive more money for their crop; the future supply of coffee depends on this issue.
As for the moral question of who lives better, consider the plight of peasants who don’t have
coffee or a similar desirable commodity to sell. Manual labor, whether in a field in Nicaragua
or a McDonald’s in Los Angeles, does not add very much to the final cost of a processed item.
Everyone who drinks coffee should look squarely at the way expenses mount up along the chain;
we cannot ignore the reality of business expenses, which does not help solve farmers’ problems.

NOTE

This chapter is adapted by Robert W. Thurston from a project of the Specialty Coffee Association of
America, 2010, with permission.

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Part II
THE STATE OF THE TRADE

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19
The Global Trade in Coffee
An Overview
Robert W. Thurston

From the trickle of coffee that went from the Middle East to Western Europe in the early
seventeenth century, the global trade in coffee has grown to huge proportions. Contrary to
popular belief, coffee is not the second most valuable commodity traded legally around the
world. Instead, coffee is “the world’s most widely traded tropical agricultural commodity, ac-
counting for exports worth an estimated $15.4 billion in 2009/10, when some 93.4 million
bags were shipped.”1 But at a total value, in some reports, of $100 billion annually, the entire
business of coffee, from tree to coffeehouse and your house, is doing well. That is not to say
that farmers in many lands are prospering.
Several articles in this book discuss the growth of coffee agriculture and trade into the
twentieth century. Any number of attempts to stabilize if not control the price of coffee rested
on the efforts of individual countries, especially Brazil, in the early twentieth century. The
first of these was the “valorization” scheme of 1905–08, in which the Brazilian government
bought up large amounts of coffee and stored it, while tax policy aimed at driving produc-
tion down—and prices up—by imposing new levies on coffee hectarage.2 In the 1930s, Brazil
burned copious quantities of coffee and dumped tons more into the sea. Residents of Rio de
Janeiro and Sao Paulo reported that there was a permanent cloud of coffee smoke above each
city. In 1937, the country destroyed 17.2 million bags, at a time when global consumption
was 26.4 million bags.3 But the Depression drove prices down so far, to less than 7 U.S. cents
a pound, that these programs did little to improve the situation.
In 1940, when World War II was already under way in Europe, the U.S. government feared
that the low price of coffee coming from Latin America, and the resulting poor incomes for
farmers there, would push many of them into sympathy with either fascism or communism.
The American side therefore proposed the Inter-American Coffee Agreement (IACA); it stipu-
lated that the U.S. would import no more than 15.9 million bags a year, while Latin American
governments would control production. This agreement succeeded in doubling the price of
coffee by the end of 1941.
By the mid-1950s, equilibrium between supply and demand developed, and all interna-
tional agreements lapsed. But fluctuations in price and new fears in the U.S. of communism
in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 spurred the regions’ governments to
try once more to control supply, and hence prices. The year 1962 saw the first International

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112 Robert W. Thurston

Coffee Agreement (ICA), which set export quotas for most of the world’s producing nations.
When the price fell below $1.20 a pound, quotas would be tightened, reducing the amount
of coffee on the world market and pushing the price up. At a price of more than $1.40,
quotas were loosened—in what was called the corset system—allowing countries to export
more and sending the price down.4 When weather conditions caused a steep rise in prices,
as in 1975–77, the quota system was abandoned entirely. This first ICA went through three
revisions before the whole arrangement collapsed in 1989. By that time, American fears of
radicalism in Latin America had subsided, while some producing governments felt that the
quota system restricted them unfairly.
Although a new ICA finally emerged among producers in 1994, and was revised in 2001
and 2007, the agreement did not set quotas or other mechanisms to control production and
export. Other attempts to regulate the market have foundered. When controls disappeared in
1989, the International Coffee Organization, created in 1963 to oversee the first ICA, be-
came a body dedicated to gathering information and running programs designed to enhance
quality and production.5 In this new guise, the ICO, which now has thirty exporting members
and five importing ones (U.S., the European Union, Tunisia, Norway, and Switzerland) has
proven to be a rich source of data and knowledge about coffee.
ICO figures for the period from 1999/2000 to 2009/2010 show that the total production
of coffee around the world has not surged upward. However, the price free on board (written
as FOB, meaning that all charges, taxes, duties, and other costs in the producing country have
been paid, and the coffee is on board a ship ready to head out to sea) has fluctuated a great
deal, and the value of exported coffee has risen dramatically since 2004/05. Here are samples
from the data:6

Table 19.1. Quantity and Value of Global Exported Coffee, Selected Years
Value of Exports US Cents per
Year in US$ (billions) Million Bags Pound FOB
1999–2000 8.7 89.4 74
2000–2001 5.8 90.4 49
2001–2 4.9 86.7 43
2004–5 8.0 89.0 76
2007–8 15.0 96.1 118
2009–10 15.4 93.4 125

While consumption increased rapidly in Japan after 1980, making the country the third
largest importer in the world, behind the U.S. and Germany, Japanese demand has leveled off
in the past decade. Western European consumption overall is down slightly from the numbers
of the early 2000s; this drop appears to be due to the aging of the population and the at-
traction of energy drinks among young people. On the other hand, coffee is steadily gaining
popularity in Eastern Europe, especially Russia, whose imports are now roughly on a level
with the UK’s. The chapters on individual consuming countries in this section provide more
information on specific nations.
Robusta continues to amount to about 30–40 percent of all coffee exported, arabica
60–70 percent. Soluble (instant) coffee, made largely from robusta, continues to dominate in
Eastern Europe and in much home consumption, for example in the UK. Robusta produc-
tion is likely to rise as global warming makes more land suitable for the hardier variety and
unfavorable for arabica.

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The Global Trade in Coffee 113

Brazil continues as the uncontested king of production of both basic species, and output is
likely to increase there, barring extensive frosts. Mechanization, particularly in harvesting, is
already well developed in Brazil, making its productivity much higher than in countries where
picking is by hand. Colombia, which used to be the world’s second largest producer, has suffered
in recent years from the coffee berry borer, climate change, and some diversion of agriculture
into coca. Colombia’s difficulties are among the factors that have driven the price of arabica
much higher since 2009. For the first time, Ethiopia’s production surpassed Colombia’s in 2012.7
Although dependence on coffee for foreign export earnings has fallen as a percentage of
virtually all producing countries’ income,8 coffee continues to be extremely important in the
economy of many lands. Burundi leads this group, with 59 percent of its foreign earnings
coming from coffee. Ethiopia is next at 33 percent in 2010–11, followed by Rwanda at 27
percent and Honduras at 20 percent. For Brazil and Vietnam, the figure is only 2 percent.9
A major, continuing concern throughout the coffee industry is that only a small portion of
the aggregate wealth generated stays in the producing countries. An Oxfam report of 2002,
admittedly near the nadir of coffee prices in recent decades, found that ten years earlier, ex-
ports captured one-third of all value of the coffee market. At the time of the report, that figure
had fallen to less than 10 percent.10 Of a total market value estimated at $70 billion in 2006,
exporting countries reportedly earned only $5 billion.11
However, the increase in the total “value” of coffee has come from many sources, of which
most are incurred in consuming countries. Advertising, wages, rents, insurance, utilities, trans-
portation, and other costs all figure into the ultimate value of coffee. In producing countries,
prices of fertilizers, pesticides, and fuel for transportation rose considerably from the early 1990s
to 2006; only in the current recession has the cost of some of these items fallen. More precisely,
their cost has fluctuated considerably. See “Where Does the Money Go in the Coffee Supply
Chain?” for more information on why coffee in consuming countries costs as much as it does.
Whatever the causes of the falling share of producing nations in the total value of the coffee
market, the global industry has tried and is trying many ways of raising farmers’ income.
What the future may hold is always uncertain, more so for agriculture, and still more so
for coffee. Plant a tree, wait two to four years for it to bear usable fruit, and hope; a great
deal can change in a short period. Nonetheless, a few guesses seem safe. The ICO predicted
in early 2009 that consumption would exceed production by a large amount during that year,
which proved to be the case. Colombia’s problems combined with increased demand for coffee
within Latin America, Europe, and Japan caused the overall picture to tip in favor of demand
over supply.12 As of late 2011, the deficit of coffee relative to demand was some 2.9 million
bags, mostly arabica.13 It seems safe to predict that at least in the short term, many farmers will
try to increase arabica production, even as climate change works against it.
In October 2010, a “wildly diverse group of coffee professionals from around the world”
met in Texas “to decide whether and how the coffee industry should support a global research
and development program to increase supply and quality of arabica coffees.” After three days
of discussion, the group unanimously agreed that was an important, global goal. In early 2012,
attendees at the original meeting and other individuals and organizations, including leading
companies in the specialty coffee industry, decided to establish World Coffee Research, an
organization that will provide information and assistance to arabica growers everywhere.14 To
ask whether this and other efforts to boost the quantity of arabica will send the world into yet
another cycle of over-production and falling prices is sheer speculation. We can only hope that
the intricate mix of factors affecting the supply of arabica will align well enough with demand
to maintain and raise farmers’ income.

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114 Robert W. Thurston

Figure 19.1. Coffee still grows wild in Ethiopia, but it will be a battle to preserve wild genetic
stock in view of increasing population pressure and deforestation in the country. Photo by Robert
Thurston.

NOTES

1. “World Coffee Trade,” International Coffee Organization, http://www.ico.org/trade_e

.asp?section=About_Coffee, accessed February 23, 2012.
2. William H. Ukers, All About Coffee, 2nd ed. (New York: The Tea & Coffee Trade Journal Com-
pany, 1935), 458–61.
3. Bryan Lewin, Daniele Giovannucci, and Panayotis Varangis, Coffee Markets: New Paradigms in
Global Supply and Demand. Agriculture and Rural Development, Discussion Paper no. 3 (Washington,
DC: Agriculture and Rural Development Department, World Bank, 2004), 24.
4. Aashish Mehta and Jean-Paul Chavas, “Responding to the Coffee Crisis: What Can We Learn from
Price Dynamics,” Staff Paper No. 472, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Agriculture
and Applied Economics, March 2004, 4; http://www.aae.wisc.edu/pubs/sps/pdf/stpap472.pdf, accessed
February 23, 2012.
5. International Coffee Organization, History, http://www.ico.org/history.asp, accessed February 23,
2012.
6. “World Coffee Trade,” ICO.
7. International Coffee Organization, “Exporting countries: total production, 2007–2012” http://
www.ico.org/prices/po.htm, accessed May 29, 2013.
8. Charis Gresser and Sophia Tickell, Mugged: Poverty in Your Coffee Cup (Oxford: Oxfam, 2002), 8.
Figures at that time for coffee as a proportion of export earnings were, for example, Burundi 79 percent,
Ethiopia 54 percent, and Honduras 24 percent.
9. “World Coffee Trade,” ICO.

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The Global Trade in Coffee 115

10. Gresser and Tickell, Mugged, 2.

11. http://tutor2u.net/economics/revision-notes/as-markets-coffee.html, accessed February 25, 2012.
For an estimate that producing countries captured 20 percent of “total income” in coffee in the 1980s,
but 13 percent in the mid-1990s, see David Goodman, “The International Coffee Crisis: A Review of the
Issues,” in Confronting the Coffee Crisis, ed. Christopher Bacon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 6.
12. Bloomberg News, “Global Coffee Deficit May Hit 8 Million Bags, ICO’s Osorio Says,” Febru-
ary 12, 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=apdey3NI.1FI, accessed
February 25, 2012. Osorio is Nestor Osorio, executive director of ICO.
13. This is according to a report by Maquarie Research, as reported in C&C, Coffee and Cocoa Inter-
national 38, no. 5 (November 2011): 4.
14. “WCR Ready to Launch Research,” World Coffee Research News, March 1, 2012.

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20
Coffee Certification Programs
Robert W. Thurston

For coffee, certification means that an external agency, either governmental, a private firm,
or an NGO (non-governmental organization), has determined that particular coffees, farms,
or co-ops have met certain standards. These may relate to the price paid for the coffee, agri-
cultural practices, environmental conditions, presence of shade trees and wildlife on a farm,
or conditions for farmers and hired workers. As of 2009, 16 percent of all U.S. coffee imports
had at least one certification. In the Netherlands, this figure reached 30 percent. The global
figure, however, is about 8 percent.1
The certifying agency typically arranges educational and monitoring programs for coffee
growers. If non-governmental, these programs are funded by donations and by encouraging or
requiring importers to pay more for certified coffee than the current market price for similar,
non-certified beans. A major goal of most certifying bodies is to ensure that coffee is traceable;
that is, the consumer will know where the coffee came from, as opposed to purchasing coffee
in a can that may, at best, be marked simply “arabica.”
The major certifying groups, with their criteria and method of operation, are discussed in
the following sections.

USDA

The United States Department of Agriculture certifies products sold in the U.S. as organic.
Various agencies of individual states, for example California, impose additional requirements
for organic certification within their borders. Many other countries, from Canada across West-
ern and Central Europe to Japan, administer their own certification programs. USDA works
through the National Organic Program and provides guidelines (such as the “National List
of Approved and Prohibited Substances”) for organic agriculture production. New substances
may be added on either side, or existing ones shifted, as new scientific information becomes
available or as the public petitions for changes. The USDA list is important for certification
of any product sold as organic in the U.S., whether produced here or abroad, as well as for
foreign certifying programs.

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Coffee Certification Programs 117

FAIR TRADE USA

Fair Trade USA (formerly TransFair USA) signs export contracts with associations of pro-
ducers, usually co-ops. Fair Trade (FT) agreements are made with producers for coffee FOB
(free on board, meaning that the coffee is loaded onto an export vessel and has had all of its
costs paid, including taxes, duties, and loading charges, and is therefore ready for export). FT
contracts provide a minimum price for coffee, which can rise if the C price goes higher than
the minimum, but can never fall below that figure. As of April 2011, the FT minimum for
natural processing arabica became $1.35, for washed processing beans $1.40, and for or-
ganic $1.70. FT contracts also require that purchasers pay a “social premium” of an additional
20 cents a pound. Money gathered by co-ops from this charge is to be spent on projects to
improve the quality of life for farmers, for instance schools or a clean water supply.

UTZ KAPEH GOOD INSIDE

Utz Kapeh Good Inside is largely concerned with conditions for farm workers. “Utz Kapeh” is
a phrase from a Mayan language meaning “good coffee.” The organization’s website proclaims
that its seal “is the guarantee that your coffee is responsibly grown.”
Utz does not entirely oppose the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers; however, it
urges farmers to keep their application to a minimum and “requires certified producers to
train its employees on health and safety procedures and the correct use of pesticides.”2 All chil-
dren living on certified farms must have access to education, and workers and their families
must be provided with “decent housing, clean drinking water and healthcare services.” Utz-
certified farms must work to reduce water usage and erosion, in part by using native trees to
hold the soil and provide shade. More widely known in Europe than in the U.S., Utz is now
steadily adding businesses that use its coffee on both sides of the Atlantic.
Unlike Fair Trade, Utz does not play a role in negotiating prices for farmers, but importers
are expected to pay a premium above the going market price for the coffee.

RAINFOREST ALLIANCE

Some two decades old, Rainforest aims to halt and reverse deforestation, promote the use of
shade trees on coffee farms, and support sustainable agriculture, not only in coffee but for
other crops and even livestock. Like Utz Kapeh, the Alliance is not totally committed to or-
ganic farming. Here is Rainforest’s statement on its website regarding agrochemicals:

Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) standards are based on an internationally recognized inte-
grated pest management model, which allows for some limited, strictly controlled use of [synthetic,
non-organic] agrochemicals. SAN standards emphasize two important goals: wildlife conservation
and worker welfare. Farmers certified by the Rainforest Alliance do not use agrochemicals pro-
hibited by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the European Union, nor do
they use chemicals listed on the Dirty Dozen list of the Pesticide Action Network North America.
Managers of certified farms are required to use biological or mechanical alternatives to pesticides
whenever possible. When farmers determine that agrochemicals are necessary to protect the crop,
they must choose the safest products available and use every available safeguard to protect human
health and the environment.

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118 Robert W. Thurston

Like Utz Kapeh, Rainforest is not involved in writing contracts for coffee or other products.
But the group notes that “most farmers are able to receive a price premium because their farms
are certified.” In early 2010, Rainforest Alliance made a “significant change to its fee structure.
Previously, it had charged farmers $7.50 per hectare (about 2.5 acres) for certification. Now,
like most certification organizations, the Alliance imposes its fee on coffee importers, charging
1.5 cents per pound.”3

SMITHSONIAN BIRD FRIENDLY

The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) encourages the production of shade-grown
coffee and the conservation of migratory birds through its “Bird Friendly®” seal of approval.
This designation is given to shade-grown coffee produced on organic farms, which must meet
USDA standards. Farmers seeking to join the Smithsonian program must work with an ap-
proved private or public coffee certifying agency; these are located in several Latin American
and European countries, Indonesia, and the U.S. All of the agencies on the Smithsonian list
are also allowed to confer organic certification as well as the Bird Friendly seal. Becoming
Bird Friendly requires at least three years of visits by an approved agency, which, on behalf of
Smithsonian, checks the amount and type of shade on the farm.
The SMBC maintains, although other specialty coffee experts detect no difference, that
shade-grown coffee is better tasting, because “beans ripen more slowly in shade, resulting in a
richer flavor.” There are also important advantages in improving the health of farmers; number
and variety of birds on the land, which can boost ecotourism; amount of organic matter added
to the soil as trees die and rot and from annual leaf litter; wood and fruit products from the
shade trees; and “potential for a premium price in excess of the organic premium.” In this
program, farmers bear the costs of certification, although importers are expected to pay above
market for the coffee.

4C

The 4C Association, inspired by the United Nations Millennium goals of 2003, which are
designed to eliminate poverty and hunger across the globe, was organized in 2006. 4C “aims at
increasing coffee producers’ net income through quality improvements, improved marketing
conditions, cost reductions, increasing efficiency and optimization of supply chain functions.”
Any farmer or business in the coffee chain may join the organization. The fee for a small-scale
producer is a one-time only charge of €7.50 (about $9.52 in the fall of 2012), “making the 4C
Association accessible to a huge number of coffee growers worldwide, whereas trade and in-
dustry members pay up to €160,000 [about $203,200] annually.” Roaster members commit
to buying increasing amounts of certified coffee over time. 4C’s guidelines relate to improving
sustainability in growing, processing, and marketing coffee. “Through its global network, 4C
provides support services including training and access to tools and information.”4

C.A.F.E.

Starbucks’s own certification program, C.A.F.E., stands for Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices.
Through this label and through Fair Trade, Starbucks imported about 155 million pounds of

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certified coffee into the U.S. in 2006,5 the last year for which data are available. The guidelines
for C.A.F.E. have to do with wages, prohibitions against child labor, worker safety and training,
environmental practices, and workers’ access to decent housing, medical care, and education.6
Workers must be paid the regional or national minimum wage. Farms and processing facilities
must score above a certain number of points altogether and in each category to quality for the
program. Starbucks then pays a premium for beans certified under C.A.F.E.

Certification itself has become a contentious issue; the numerous studies on whether certifica-
tion delivers more money to the farmer are inconclusive. Some research shows higher income
when farmers sell certified beans, while other research does not. A problem for small produc-
ers in many regions, and perhaps in entire countries such as Nicaragua, is that the costs of
certification and of producing organic coffee may not be offset by higher prices received for
the beans. “Certified coffee producing families, especially organic-fair trade certified ones, face
labor constraints and thus need to hire additional labor.”7
A study of 327 randomly selected farms in Nicaragua found that organic producers have
the highest level of productivity, followed by conventional farmers, while organic–fair trade
farmers ranked lowest. The last category receives the highest farm gate price for coffee. Yet
these producers have a lower level of profitability than organic (non-fair trade) producers.
This can be due to various factors, among them yield per hectare, labor costs, and family
labor constraints. Finally, the same survey finds that the increased labor costs of organic farm-
ers put their average income below the national poverty line, while the other two groups are
somewhat above it. The authors of the study conclude that productivity and efficiency of the
farms must increase, as “prices for certified coffee cannot compensate for low productivity,
land or labor constraints.”8
The issues surrounding certification become especially acute when coffee prices are high. Of
course, prices have lurched up and down as long as anyone has kept track of them; however,
as we suggest elsewhere in this book, a number of factors now in place seem likely to keep the
price of good arabica beans, at least, high for years to come.
Coffee writer Rivers Janssen points out that when the C price was low, as in 2000–05, “For
coffee farmers earning well below the cost of production, a potential premium of several cents
per pound was at least a lifeline, and many were willing to take on the additional labor, cost
and risk of certifications in hopes of making a better living.” But today, “some roasters are
wondering whether certifications hold the same relevance they did just a few years ago.”9 Paul
Rice, head of Fair Trade USA, was moved in a recent report to remark that, “In today’s high
‘C’ market, it’s only natural to ask if Fair Trade is still relevant.” Rice asserts that it is, because
FT works for sustainable agriculture and for development projects that benefit farmers.10
But when prices are high, co-op members may break ranks and, instead of delivering coffee
as promised to the co-op, sell to “coyotes,” independent buyers who visit farms. Coyotes with
cash in hand can be tempting to farmers in any circumstance, because they pay immediately–
farmers don’t have to wait for the co-op to complete its contract and distribute money, which
often occurs only once a year. Janssen also notes that farmers and co-ops alike may pursue
certification and then not find buyers for their more expensive beans.11 Certification costs can
be expensive, the process of gaining it lengthy, and the paperwork daunting for producers.
When the price of all coffee is high, there is less incentive to separate excellent beans from
run-of-the mill ones, which obviously takes time, labor, and special care.
Rainforest Alliance appears to have less of a problem in this scenario than other certifica-
tion systems because most of its approved farms are estates that do not need to sell to coyotes.

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120 Robert W. Thurston

I have seen this principle at work on the extremely large farms of Ipanema Coffee in Brazil’s
Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais states. 4C, with its minimal cost to small farmers, may also do
well in keeping them in the system.
Even as the current economic downturn and the sharp rise in the C price began, roughly
in September 2008, the report “Seeking Sustainability” found that, “A majority (60 percent)
of certified farms [surveyed in five countries] reported an improved overall economic situa-
tion due to certification and generally superior net incomes as compared with conventional
farms, and this despite the fact that a majority (62 percent) of certified farms reported re-
duced yields.”12 In other articles in this book, authors report increased yields with the use of
shade trees or organic methods. Yet the problem remains that if yields on certified farms are
not significantly higher than in conventional agriculture, and all the difficulties of becoming
certified remain in place, farmers may sell outside of certification schemes if the price is right.
After all, as John Gaberino of Topeca Coffee puts it, “The farmer wants a better quality
of life. Period.”13

NOTES

1. Daniele Giovannucci and Jason Potts with B. Killian, C. Wunderlich, G. Soto, S. Schuller,
F. Pinard, K. Schroeder, and I. Vagneron, “Seeking Sustainability: COSA Preliminary Analysis of Sus-
tainability Initiatives in the Coffee Sector,” September 2008, 2, Committee on Sustainable Assessment,
Winnipeg, Canada. COSA is affiliated with the United Nations, the International Coffee Organization,
and government agencies in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.
2. All citations, unless otherwise noted, are from the website of the organization being discussed.
3. Pan Demetrekakis, “Sustaining interest: What’s the true value of ‘sustainable’ coffee?” Specialty
Coffee Retailer (July 2011): 18.
4. http://www.4c-coffeeassociation.org/en/4c-in-a-nutshell.php.
5. Giovannucci and Potts, “Seeking Sustainability,” 4.
6. http://www.scscertified.com/retail/docs/CAFE_GUI_EvaluationGuidelines_V2.0_093009.pdf,
accessed September 5, 2011.
7. Tina D. Beuchelt and Manfred Zeller, “Profits and poverty: Certification’s troubled link for Ni-
caragua’s organic and fairtrade coffee producers,” Ecological Economics 70 (2011): 1317.
8. Beuchelt and Zeller, “Profits and poverty,” 1321, 1323.
9. Rivers Janssen, “The Certification Conundrum: Are Certifications Still Important?” Roast Maga-
zine, May–June 2011, 26.
10. Fair Trade Certified, in Coffee Review 2010–2011, 4, available at http://www.fairtradeusa.org/sites/
default/files/Impact%20Report%202010-11%20COFFEE-LowRes.pdf, accessed September 3, 2011.
11. Janssen, “Certification Conundrum,” 27.
12. Giovannucci and Potts, “Seeking Sustainability,” ix.
13. Janssen, “Certification Conundrum,” 26.

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21
Direct Trade in Coffee
Geoff Watts

Most innovations come about in response to a specific need or as the result of an effort to
solve a specific problem. Sometimes they take form in a very deliberate way, step-by-step,
the product of organized research and careful planning. In other cases they develop more
spontaneously, sparked by a simple idea or inspiration or even somewhat accidentally. What
successful innovations typically have in common is that they somehow make things better.
The concept of direct trade (DT) as it exists in coffee came to life in response to a tangible
need, for a reliable supply of high-quality coffee. But DT has also been an attempt to solve a
host of other dilemmas common to the coffee trade. In the coffee industry, business and poli-
tics, agriculture and communities, national economies, and commodity markets all intersect.
Many parts must move in tandem.
DT was born out of frustration with the options available to progressive coffee companies
that wanted to buy and sell a caliber of coffee that was limited in production and difficult
to consistently access and whose vision for their business included a strong desire to address
sustainability issues that are inextricably tied to coffee production. DT evolved as a means of
surmounting the many obstacles that confront roasters frustrated by an inability to impact
the conditions in which the coffees they sell were produced or to obtain a level of quality that
would give them a competitive advantage in an increasingly taste-driven marketplace.
The lack of availability of what we will call “exceptional quality”—coffees that can legiti-
mately qualify as culinary delights by virtue of their intrinsic sensory traits, and which are in
every meaningful way artisanal products rather than commodities—was dramatic at the time
the term “direct trade” was coined. There were many reasons for this, but the most fundamen-
tal was a grave lack of transparency and traceability in the way coffee was typically handled.
A chasm existed between coffee roasters and coffee farmers, arguably the two most important
actors in the coffee supply chain in regard to quality. They were separated by geographic
distance, language barriers, and an opaque chain of custody progression in the coffee supply
chain. Roasters often felt that buying coffees was much the same as shopping for clothing at
a retail outlet store—buyers were essentially getting coffees “off the rack” and were limited to
choosing from the available stock on hand. Extremely high quality was scarce and finding it
was akin to hunting for buried treasure. There wasn’t much opportunity to participate in its

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122 Geoff Watts

Figure 21.1. An ox-drawn cart (carreta) still in regular use on coffee farms in Honduras as of
2012. Photo by Martha Casteneda.

development or creation. It was extremely difficult to know exactly who produced the coffee,
under what conditions it was cultivated, and how the grower was compensated.
Following the clothing analogy, there was a need to work closely with a tailor to create
something specific that would possess all of the traits of exceptional coffee. This is a more
costly way to go about acquiring goods, but as long as the goods are of especially high quality
there is plenty of tangible value to justify the increased expense.
To better understand why DT has become so important in coffee, it is useful to consider
some of the basic motivations that led roasters to seek alternatives to the traditional approach
to sourcing coffees. One key is differentiation; for specialty coffee to succeed in attracting
consumers away from mainstream commodity coffee, it must offer something qualitatively
different. If consumers are asked to pay more for their coffee than they have in the past, it
is critical that they be able to easily grasp the value proposition; the coffee must taste signifi-
cantly better than the baseline established by average commodity coffees they are accustomed
to. The story matters, too, and it surely makes it easier for coffee drinkers to get excited about
a beautiful coffee if they have some assurance that the farmers responsible for its creation are
materially benefiting from its sale. Telling compelling stories about coffee and the benefits to
farmers that are tied directly to boutique coffee, and providing detail about where the coffees
come from, can create connections that allow consumers to feel good about their purchases
and feel attached to them in a way that doesn’t happen when coffees are sold in an anonymous
manner. The knowledge that there are ethical reasons to support high-quality coffee can help
enhance its perceived value.
But ultimately the coffee must be able to tell its own story by way of taste. Once consum-
ers have made the decision to upgrade the quality of the coffee they drink and begin to pay
more attention to taste details, their expectations rise further, and at that point differentia-
tion becomes even more crucial. The decision about what coffees to drink doesn’t always get

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Direct Trade in Coffee 123

permanently locked in as a binary proposition of quality or lack of quality; instead it often

becomes increasingly nuanced, where ever-higher levels of quality are sought. The farther away
from the baseline a coffee can get the more chance it has to succeed. And as the presence of
high-quality coffees in the marketplace grows, more options become available to consumers,
at which point differentiation takes another leap forward.
Once consumers embrace the idea that coffee should taste good, their next step is to begin
trying to identify their preferences within a spectrum of coffees where all have some degree
of “goodness.” For this reason the pursuit of better quality is and will always be one of the
primary motivations for most roasters that engage in direct trade with coffee growers. They
want to roast and sell something that their competition does not have, and they acknowledge
the need to become more active participants in the supply chain if they expect to gain access
to great coffees. They can phrase the effort to acquire coffees that will give them a competitive
advantage as a problem-solving endeavor, where the aim is to overcome some of the common
obstacles that face companies seeking separation from the mainstream coffee industry. These
companies are setting themselves up to succeed within the specialty sector. What follows is a
list of obstacles to this quest and a brief explanation of how a direct trade approach can provide
the solutions to overcome them.

PROBLEM ONE: FINDING EXCEPTIONAL QUALITY COFFEE

This is the most fundamental underlying problem in coffee: the huge majority—somewhere
far north of 90 percent—of the coffee produced in this world is patently low in quality. The
biggest reason for this is economic: prices paid to farmers for raw coffee are generally not high
enough to cover the added costs involved in improving quality. Growers have little incentive to
spend more on cultivation, harvesting, and processing when there is no reliable mechanism for
recovering those costs and profiting from the increase in quality. Unless there is clear reward
for higher quality coffees, reality dictates that farmers will choose to produce as much coffee
as possible each year at minimum cost.
This is one obstacle to quality that can be effectively resolved through a DT approach.
If a roaster desires an exceptional level of quality, the most straightforward way to obtain it
is to find a farmer (or group of farmers) capable of producing it and create agreements that
give them a compelling reason to do so. The alternative is to engage in a perpetual needle-
in-a-haystack search that leads to inconsistency in product quality and excessive costs due to
scarcity in the marketplace.

PROBLEM TWO: INVESTMENT REQUIREMENTS

Of course it isn’t as simple as making an agreement and waiting for the results to appear. There
are many other obstacles to achieving quality goals that need to be explicitly addressed in order
to raise the probability of success. Farmers need access to the financial resources needed for
investments that result in better quality. Most of the costs involved with producing great cof-
fees accrue well before the eventual sale of the coffee, and many farmers don’t have adequate
capital or access to credit to finance the crop from start to finish. Those who do are often
borrowing from local institutions at prohibitive interest rates that can outweigh the profit
earned from the increased quality, making the whole proposition break-even at best. Thus the

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124 Geoff Watts

roasters/importers must often invest resources in helping kick-start the process by identifying
expected increases in production costs and finding pre-financing solutions, either themselves
or through third-party microfinance organizations.

PROBLEM THREE: THE DIFFICULTY OF

CREATING EXCEPTIONAL QUALITY

Creating neutral, inoffensive coffees is a relatively formulaic endeavor, but producing extraor-
dinary ones is still an elusive pursuit. There is no single blueprint or simple recipe. The fact
that few farmers evaluate their own coffees in a systematic way from a taste or sensory perspec-
tive complicates matters further. There are many growers who, even if quality is their goal,
are disconnected from the end result in a way that makes the whole idea of quality somewhat
elusive. Managing all the variables that lead to great tasting coffees is a daunting task in any
circumstance, but becomes especially challenging absent the ability to measure results and de-
termine what is working and what is not. Sensory analysis is a world unto itself, and detailed
coffee quality evaluation conducted by way of tasting is a skill that requires some level of
practice, especially if the goal is to identify cause-and-effect relationships between things that
happened in the field and tastes manifested in the prepared coffees.
Therein lies a conundrum: although a general formula of sorts can be followed that should
increase the likelihood of a quality outcome, agriculture is tricky and methods need to be
adjusted based on a large number of environmental variables specific to each farm and each
growing season. Significant research that correlates small details in cultivation and processing
with quality-related nuance in top-tier coffees is practically nonexistent, so those pursuing it
are for the most part left to their own devices to create those correlations. That means lots of
experimentation and trials, which are necessarily a slow and long-term process given the fact
that coffee harvests occur just once annually.
The challenge is compounded when the very definition of quality is itself variable—al-
though there is some basic agreement across the industry about what a good coffee ought to
taste like, there are many different ideas about what makes a coffee great. The buyer is ulti-
mately the one who qualifies the coffee and pays the premium, so that farmers trying to create
quality without having specific knowledge about who will buy it and how they are assessing
value are in effect chasing a moving target when making decisions during harvest that impact
the eventual taste of the coffees.
DT can help to solve this dilemma, since roaster and farmer become partners who can
create a relatively specific quality target and calibrate with one another to ensure that they
are applying the same lenses and metrics when evaluating the coffees post harvest. With a
feedback loop in place, farmers and roasters can work towards ever-increasing quality in a de-
liberate way. Quality-related experimentation can be done with reduced risk since both parties
are participants and can agree to share responsibility for the outcome. Successes can be more
easily quantified and replicated when the farmer and the buyer are keeping score as a team.

PROBLEM FOUR: FARMERS’ CONSERVATIVE APPROACH TO

PRODUCTION COSTS AND THE FLUCTUATING MARKET

Since the value of coffees has long been tied tightly to the commodity market (the C price),
farmers without specific buyers who choose to increase their production costs in an effort to

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achieve higher quality are always at risk that their investment will fail to yield a return and
that any loss could well be compounded if the market sinks when it comes time to harvest and
sell. There are plenty of farmers who know they could produce better coffees but simply do
not choose to because they feel the risk that the extra expenses will be wasted is just too high.
By partnering with a roaster willing to make price commitments well in advance of harvest,
much of the risk of investing in improved quality is alleviated.
In these agreements, roasters take on a degree of risk, given that they are locking themselves
into a price level that could end up being significantly above market once harvest time comes.
Moreover, there is really no guarantee that the coffees themselves will meet every degree of
expectation with regard to quality. But those risks are somewhat mitigated by other factors.
If the farmers have the necessary resources, the right motivations, and a true commitment to
doing the best work possible, there is a high probability that the coffees will be excellent. And
for every year that the market tanks, it will probably surge another time, so there is only a
small potential downside to long-term commitment. If roaster and farmer can find a valuation
arrangement in which both stand to benefit each year, then market fluctuations and volatility
become far less relevant than they would be otherwise and each side can proceed to invest in
growth with a relative degree of confidence.
Mitigating volatility in the market is something that both parties crave, and establishing
direct relationships based on real production costs can be a powerful advantage for each.
Developing a consistent supply chain is a paramount concern to those companies looking to
stay competitive.

PROBLEM FIVE: THE NEED FOR TRACEABILITY

AND TRANSPARENCY IN THE SUPPLY CHAINS

As mentioned earlier, traceability has been difficult to establish in the coffee industry due
to the way the crop is brought to market. Most farmers have no idea where their coffees
end up once they leave the farm, and most roasters cannot trace the coffees they are selling
all the way back to origin (the farm where it was grown). Coffee often changes hands three
to six times before it reaches the roaster, and intermediaries in the supply chain do not like
to disclose their costs or sources. Most coffees are anonymous by the time they reach the
consuming markets. That presents a myriad of additional problems for the roaster. How can
coffees be marketed when little is known about their source? How can any sustainability
be assured without direct knowledge of how and where the coffees were produced? How
can anyone tell what percentage of the final price of the green coffee went to the actual
farmer—that is, what is the farm gate price?
Frequently the primary producers (the farmers) receive far lower a share of the price paid
for the exported coffee than is warranted based on their role in the coffee’s production. This
difference is due to inefficiencies in the chain or their distance from the final buyer. All this
obscures and dilutes the connection between a coffee’s intrinsic quality and its value to the
farmers responsible for its existence. Without a clear, tangible, and consistent link between the
quality of a coffee and its worth as measured by actual return of profit to the farm gate, there
is little to no incentive for a farmer to increase quality beyond a certain acceptable level. By
working directly together, roasters and producers can better define the role of any necessary
intermediaries, quantify the costs of their participation in the chain, and protect an agreed-
upon farm gate price. By negotiating directly and defining the value of the coffees on their
own terms, the roaster and farmer effectively change the way in which the coffee is traded,

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126 Geoff Watts

relegating intermediaries to a role that is more easily replaceable and where they can be com-
pensated at competitive rates for the services they provide.
A large degree of control over the exchange is moved out of the hands of the traders or ser-
vice providers and into the hands of the primary producer and roaster. Transparency and trace-
ability concerns are mostly alleviated in a single stroke. Equally important, this means that
premiums paid for quality are far more likely to be invested in improving quality, since the
financial benefits are more easily measured by the farmer. A very useful mechanism in many
DT models is a tiered pricing structure, where a baseline quality is established and incremental
premiums are agreed upon for coffees that beat the mark. In this way, quality and price move
together in tandem, in effect validating the idea of a perpetual quest to push quality upwards.

PROBLEM SIX: ENVIRONMENTAL ABUSES

IN SOME FARMING SYSTEMS

As with most agricultural products, there are many different ways to produce coffee. Some
approaches to growing coffee are ecologically sound, others not so much. One of the most im-
portant environmental issues in coffee production systems surrounds the use of water in coffee
processing. The two biggest concerns are the unnecessary waste of vital water resources and the
disposal of contaminated water from fermentation tanks. By working directly with farmers,
roasters can influence the way coffees are being produced and verify that good practices are
being followed at the farms. In most cases coffee growers are not looking to be intentionally
wasteful or to contaminate the environment around their farms, but many are unaware of the
impact that they are having or unfamiliar with new methodologies that can address water is-
sues. The idea of water conservation in many traditional growing areas is relatively new—not
too long ago, water seemed to be endlessly abundant—and many farmers simply don’t realize
that there are ways they can dramatically reduce usage without compromising quality. When
it comes to wastewater management, various low-cost solutions can be implemented, some of
which actually create useful byproducts. DT provides roasters with the opportunity to either
choose to work with farmers who are already practicing sustainable production techniques or
to assist farmers to reduce impact on the environment.

HOW DIRECT TRADE MAKES THINGS BETTER

DT is not a passing trend. It is a proven, effective model founded upon a powerful idea: that
coffee roasters and coffee farmers, through close collaboration, can solve many of the chal-
lenges they each face, even though their respective challenges differ. As coffee consumption
becomes more differentiated, strategies for success in the industry change profoundly. Creat-
ing better-quality coffees has become a legitimate way for coffee farmers to separate themselves
from the unforgiving commodity market and achieve a level of stability that was elusive in the
past. Roasters understand that they need exceptional and consistent quality in order to avoid
the race to the bottom that characterizes the traditional coffee marketplace, in which the aim
is to maximize efficiency and offer coffees for a slightly lower price than the competition. The
traditional model places the goals of farmers and those of roasters in perpetual opposition, a
condition that leads to ever-deteriorating quality and has yielded few real benefits to anyone
other than perhaps savvy traders who can make money in the margins.

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Direct trade is actually an ancient practice; producers and sellers of all sorts of goods have
found ways to work closely together for centuries to solve various problems. The idea is be-
coming more attractive to farmers and roasters today, largely owing to the fact that the coffee
landscape has fundamentally changed over the last couple decades. Unprecedented volatility in
the commodity market, changes in climate conditions, and significantly increased production
costs have led farmers to seek alternatives to the traditional trade channels.
Further benefits follow. As direct trade relationships grow and scale up in quantity, roasters
can become hubs for new networks that connect like-minded farmers from many different
countries who would otherwise not be in contact with each other. Those networks facilitate
the transfer of knowledge between farmers and provide a platform for the sharing of valuable,
hard-won experience related to quality improvement. Innovative methodologies for process
control, plague prevention, soil management, and other critical farming practices can be
exchanged between places as distant from one another as Kenya and Honduras. This type of
exchange was rare prior to the advent of a DT approach to coffee sourcing, but it has become
exceptionally useful.
Another characteristic of DT that makes it so effective is its inherent flexibility; it can be
adjusted to afford maximum benefits to both farmers and roasters (and by extension to con-
sumers) in each context where it is applied. It is a form of trade that has many of the same
characteristics of human relationships, where the needs of each participant can be expressly
addressed in response to changing conditions. One of the most challenging aspects of buying
coffee is that the rules change from country to country and place to place. There are some
common threads, but working with coffee farmers in Rwanda is a qualitatively different expe-
rience than working with growers in Costa Rica or Guatemala. The same goes for Indonesia,
Peru, Ethiopia, Kenya, Bolivia, and so on. Substantial differences exist in the way coffee is
produced and the chain of custody it undergoes (often governed by local law, sometimes as a
result of historical circumstance or tradition) that a truly effective model needs to be tailored
and custom-fit to each particular place.
When roasters engage with growers and ask them to help find the best possible methods
of working together, the results can be truly inspiring. Really it is that one idea, farmer and
roaster working together in solidarity for mutual benefit, that defines direct trade more than
anything else. The fact is that roasters need farmers to be committed to doing the best possible
work and elevating the quality of their coffees up towards their topmost potential, and farm-
ers need roasters to help fund that work, create markets for their coffee, and teach consumers
to recognize that quality and sustainability are both inextricably tied to prices. The coffee
industry has been eating itself from the bottom up for many decades, creating a dysfunctional
economy that actually discourages quality production, suppresses upward mobility for the
farmer, and puts roasters in a position where they are marketing style rather than substance.
DT was designed as a solution to that tragic reality, and it is becoming more effective with
every passing year. It is a perpetual work-in-progress rather than a static system, which is espe-
cially important given how quickly the world is changing, and offers a compelling alternative
to traditional approaches to working with coffee.

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22
Fair Trade
Still a Big Plus for Farmers and Workers
around the World
Paul Rice

In a high C market, it’s only natural to ask if fair trade is still relevant. It is, of course, because
fair trade is about so much more than price. Fair trade is a comprehensive approach to sustain-
able development that supports farmers with quality improvement, environmental stewardship,
business capacity training, access to credit, and community development funds to help improve
lives. Moreover, consumers are increasingly looking for the credibility of third-party certifica-
tion to provide assurance that their coffee was ethically and sustainably sourced.
This chapter looks at some of the most important missions of Fair Trade USA, the premier
certifying organization in the United States.

MARKET ACCESS

Market access and supply chain stability are core objectives of Fair Trade USA. We constantly re-
cruit, train, and certify new producer groups, expanding benefits to more farming communities
each year. Since 2005, the number of Fair Trade coffee producer groups has more than doubled.
In addition to farm-level certification, importers and roasters frequently enlist our support to
help them identify and partner with high-quality Fair Trade farmers in specific origins. We also
partner with global financial institutions, industry partners, NGOs, leading social entrepreneurs,
and in-country service providers to help maximize the benefits of Fair Trade for producers and
businesses. These partnerships enable targeted projects that help farmers improve quality, in-
crease productivity, improve access to capital, and become stronger business partners.
One big success is a Brazilian program in partnership with the U.S. Agency for Interna-
tional Development and an NGO called SEBRAE-MG. Together we have invested over $2
million in infrastructure, training, and technical assistance for nearly 6,000 farmers from Sao
Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Espirito Santo.

ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP

In a high-price market, farmers may be tempted to cut corners to maximize yields and income.
Fair Trade encourages farmers to take a long-term approach to agriculture, embracing sustain-

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Fair Trade 129

able practices that conserve natural resources. Our rigorous environmental standards protect
water resources and adjacent forests, restrict the use of hazardous pesticides, agrochemicals,
and GMOs, promote organic farming, and help reduce carbon emissions. Farmers must
comply with these core standards to get certified and then implement progress requirements
every year in order to get recertified.

ACCESS TO CREDIT

Improving access to affordable credit is another fundamental objective of Fair Trade. Without
inexpensive credit, farmers are more vulnerable to middlemen and cooperatives are unable to
compete effectively with larger traders. Several multinational lenders are working with Fair Trade
cooperatives in Kenya, Sumatra, Guatemala, Colombia, and Nicaragua to provide credit so that
farmers can upgrade equipment and invest in the processes that promote quality production.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Another core benefit of Fair Trade is the community development premium that buyers are re-
quired to pay to certified farmers. This premium, currently set at 20 cents per pound (green),
goes directly back to growing communities to invest in things like education, health care, clean
water, job training, organic conversion, and microloans. Over time, these premiums have had
an enormous impact on the quality of life for farmers. Since 1998, Fair Trade certification has
helped the U.S. coffee industry deliver more than $93 million in premiums back to coffee
farmers, $32 million in 2012 alone.

A CASE STUDY OF FAIR TRADE IMPACT: RWANDA

More than a decade after the genocide, Rwandan farmers still struggle to earn a decent
living. In 2007, Fair Trade USA joined with the Stichting Het Groene Woudt, a leading
Dutch foundation, to empower seven cooperatives that support more than 100,000 people.
The three-year program helped cooperative members improve their organizational capacity,
strengthen internal transparency and democratic governance, and raise management skills.
These cooperatives then invested in improving their coffee quality by building new cupping
labs and learning how to cup from international experts. One of the participating groups,
COOPAC, won the 2010 Rwanda Cup of Excellence.
In Rwanda, Fair Trade certification has translated into schools, clean water wells, and long-
term economic security. According to Christine Condo, executive director of the Rwanda
Economic Development Initiative, “In Africa, it’s very difficult for villagers to attend school,
but since these cooperatives became Fair Trade, the majority of members, over 90 percent, can
send their children to school.”

Fair Trade remains committed to consumer education and awareness building, not just about
coffee but for a whole range of products. It is just one of many organizations working to bring
fair trade benefits to the coffee industry. We hope, through our work, to help people under-
stand the positive difference their small, everyday purchases can make.

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PRODUCER COUNTRY PROFILES

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23
Hawaii
Shawn Steiman

For most people, coffee from Hawaii—the only commercial coffee producer in the United
States—is associated with Kona, a region on the Big Island (also called Hawaii Island) com-
prising two political districts: North Kona and South Kona. People rarely know that coffee
is grown on five islands in ten geographic regions across the state. While Kona was the only
region producing coffee for nearly a century, that changed in the early 1990s. Kona’s long
dominance is a bit surprising, considering that when coffee first arrived to Hawaii, it came to
a different island.
Coffee most likely reached Hawaii in 1825, via Brazil.1 While there is no certainty about
what variety those first plants were, they were all arabica. Coffee was first planted in Mānoa
valley on the island of Oahu but soon moved to other islands. By the end of the century, cof-
fee grew commercially in various regions across the islands, and Kona had won a reputation
for high quality. In 1892, the variety ‘Typica’ arrived via Guatemala and found favor among
farmers. Then a crash in world coffee prices in 1899 pushed coffee out of most regions in
Hawaii, where it was replaced with sugarcane. Only in Kona, where the land was unsuitable
for the new sugarcane machines and sugarcane production infrastructure was not in place,
did coffee remain.2
For the better part of the twentieth century, commercial coffee agriculture existed in the
islands only in Kona. Without competition from other growing regions, Kona became syn-
onymous with Hawaiian coffee. Coffee spread around the state again, ironically, because of
sugarcane. Hawaii could no longer compete with other sugarcane growers around the world,
so sugar-growing corporations began diversifying into other crops, with coffee the most suc-
cessful. By the 1990s, four large, mechanically harvested coffee farms were producing coffee
on other islands. The emergence of specialty coffee and the Internet helped spur on small
farms in other regions of the islands; the two new developments created demand for single-
estate coffee and also offered a way to market coffee to people living outside of Hawaii.
The state of Hawaii classifies growing regions according to the political district in which
farms are located. Thus there are eight coffee regions in Hawaii: O‘ahu, Moloka‘i, Kaua‘i,
Maui, Kona, Hamakua, Puna, and Ka‘ū. The last four are all on Hawaii Island. Coffee grows
at elevations from 100 to 1,000 meters (350–3,200 feet) at latitudes of 19–21° north. These

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134 Shawn Steiman

relatively high latitudes result in lower temperatures at low elevations, permitting high-quality
production at what is considered low elevations in most other producing countries.
In 2010, the 830 coffee farms of Hawaii, planted across 3,237 hectares (8,000 acres) of
land produced 3.2 million kilograms (7 million pounds) of green coffee. That was less than
.04 percent of total world production!3
As in most producing origins, Hawaiian farms are typically small, less than 2 hectares (5
acres). Some twenty to thirty farms range in size from 2 to 60 hectares (5–150 acres). The four
largest farms, all mechanically harvested, range from 60 to 1,215 hectares (150–3,000 acres).

Figure 23.1. Japanese-American families were able to acquire good coffee land
in Hawaii beginning in the 1920s. Often the whole family, children included—but
only after school—worked on the farm. Here are typical Japanese coffee farm
tools, preserved at the Kona Coffee Living History Farm, Captain Cook, Hawaii.
Photo by Robert Thurston.

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Hawaii 135

Aside from a few corporate operations, farms in Hawaii are family owned. In Kona, where
many farms have been in the family for several generations, owners tend to be descendants
of the Asian immigrants who came to work on coffee and sugar farms. Today, they usually
harvest cherry and sell it to a mill. The mills then sell most of the coffee as green bean and
a smaller part as roasted coffee. The rest of the farms in Kona and around the state have been
more recently acquired. These are usually estate farms that sell their coffee as green bean or
roasted product, although some do occasionally sell cherry.
Until recently, Hawaii coffee was not plagued with any particularly bothersome pests or
diseases. Hawaii’s remoteness and the state-enforced quarantine of incoming coffee material
managed to keep them all at bay. In 2010, however, the coffee berry borer was discovered in
Kona. Currently contained in Kona and Ka‘ū, it is only a matter of time before other regions
of the state will confront this pest.
Few farmers in Hawaii grow their coffee organically, and the ones that do often raise it for
philosophical reasons, not a price premium. Yet with so little pressure from pests and diseases,
the use of synthetic treatments on any farm has been minimal.
Of the certifications common to the coffee industry, only organic is present in Hawaii. As
farmers in the U.S., Hawaiian producers are subject to many social, political, economic, labor,
and environmental laws. These laws assign rights and obligations that most certifications have
designed for coffee farmers elsewhere. Consequently, the notion of fair trade Hawaii coffee,
for example, doesn’t make much sense. Coffee in Hawaii will always be traded fairly and likely
even more “fairly” than certified coffees from elsewhere. Environmental certifications, which
sometimes demand stronger rules than U.S. laws, do not fit the uniqueness that is Hawaii; the
islands have never been a stopping ground for migrating birds, while the diversity of native,
overstory tree species is much lower than in most other coffee origins. So, while there could
be a place for certifications, the regulations need modification to make sense for Hawaii.
As a producer origin, Hawaii is unusual. Farmers tend to be wealthier than farmers else-
where, so they have access to considerable information and agricultural resources, particularly
from the local scientific community, which has been making relevant contributions since the
1950s. Transportation within Hawaii is sophisticated: nearly all roads are paved, and shipping
coffee locally or abroad, either green bean or roasted, is simple. As part of a highly developed
country, Hawaii has a readily available and accessible local market not just locally but across
the United States.
Hawaii coffee is often considered to be overpriced. At their lowest, green beans tend to
fetch around $8 per pound but can cost $20 or more, independent of any quality rating.
These levels are well above the C price and often higher than Cup of Excellence prices. Yet,
no competitions have set Hawaiian prices; the market determines them.
The simplest explanation for such prices is that consumers are willing to pay them. The
demand for Hawaii grown coffee is fairly high and supply is fairly small. Still, other origins
have similar conditions but lower prices. What else contributes to this anomaly? Beyond the
supply-and-demand situation, there are four pieces to this puzzle.
First, Hawaii has some of, if not the, most expensive coffee production costs in the world.
Hawaii is remote; the U.S. mainland is over 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) away. No re-
sources such as farm equipment, fertilizers, building materials, and packaging are produced
within the state; everything must be shipped across the ocean. Labor costs, too, are high, as
farmers must comply with U.S. labor laws.
Second, obeying environmental, safety, and business laws also adds to the cost of farming.
The U.S. is an expensive place to do business, hence the export of jobs to other countries.

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136 Shawn Steiman

Third, Hawaii is a costly place to live, and farmers want to live like comfortable Americans.
Farmers want the luxuries any U.S. resident wants: cars, mobile phones, TVs, a decent home,
and disposable income. To maintain a reasonably high American standard of living, farmers
must charge more for their coffee. One can argue that Hawaiian coffee is not expensive, but
that all other coffees are undervalued.
Fourth, Hawaii is paradise. At least, that is how it is marketed to tourists and nonresidents
(though most residents readily appreciate their good fortune). Hawaii really is an archipelago
of beauty and wonder. This image is used to market many Hawaiian products, including cof-
fee. While this alone doesn’t increase the price of coffee, it does help maintain a high price,
as many consumers of Hawaiian coffee want to capture a vicarious experience or relive one
they’ve already had in the islands.
Hawaii coffee is relatively expensive and is likely only to become more so. Transportation
and production costs are linked to petroleum prices. The coffee berry borer has been devastat-
ing to marketable yields, and efforts to control it have created additional production costs.
How consumers will respond to higher prices in the long run is unknown.
The maturation of the specialty coffee industry has influenced Hawaii farms. Some farm-
ers are beginning to explore methods and varieties that will produce interesting and diverse
brews. For example, some farmers are experimenting with pulped natural and natural cherry
processing methods. Others are planting recently released, not-yet-named varieties from a lo-
cal breeding program. These coffees are marketed to savvy consumers who are willing to pay
higher prices for these complex beans. Other farmers, whose classic markets may dry up with
higher prices, will likely begin catering to the high end specialty market, helping to bolster an
industry suffering from ever-growing production costs.
Hawaii will remain a paradise, and the islands’ producers will be able to supply people not
just with morning coffee, but with a cup that evokes the sun and beaches of Hawaii, even for
those who only know the islands through movies and legends.4

NOTES

1. Andrew Bloxam, Diary of Andrew Bloxam, naturalist of the “Blonde” on her trip from England to
the Hawaiian islands, 1824–25 (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum Special Publication 10, 1925),
appendix.
2. Gerald Kinro, A Cup of Aloha: The Kona Coffee Epic (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
2003), 16.
3. USDA, NASS, Hawaii Field Office, “Hawaii Farm Facts,” August 2011, 4.
4. For more information about the Hawaii coffee industry, we recommend Shawn Steiman, The
Hawai‘i Coffee Book: A Gourmet’s Guide from Kona to Kaua‘i (Honolulu: Watermark, 2008), 134.

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24
India
Sunalini Menon

The history and romance of coffee in India dates back to the seventeenth century, when a
Muslim pilgrim saint, Bababudan, brought seeds to the country from Mecca. He is said to
have planted the seeds around his hut in Chikmagalur, the region where Indian coffee cultiva-
tion began.
The British began to establish coffee farms in India systematically in 1792. Today, coffee is
grown mainly in the southern part of the country through the untiring efforts of the farmers,
who cultivate coffee against all odds of nature—pests, diseases, climate, and environment.
India is a department store for coffee, growing both arabica and robusta, under filtered
shade, at altitudes of about 1,500 feet (457 m) to about 4,500 feet (1370 m). The shade com-
prises evergreen leguminous trees, with nearly fifty different species being found on the planta-
tions. A diversified pattern of intercropping is the hallmark of Indian coffee plantations, with
pepper, cardamom, cloves, vanilla, areca (betel) nut, as well as fruits such as jackfruit, oranges,
and bananas growing alongside coffee.
Globally, India ranks sixth in coffee production. However, the top coffee-growing country,
Brazil, produces around nine times as much as India does. Total production in the 2010–11
season was 302,000 metric tonnes of green beans, with arabica accounting for approximately
35 percent of the total. About 65 percent of the coffee is exported; India’s share in global
production and exports is 4 percent.1
As of 2010–11, the total area under coffee cultivation in India was 404,645 hectares. Some
99 percent of the farmers are smallholders with less than 10 hectares of land. The productiv-
ity of arabica was approximately 513 pound/acre (575 kg/ha), and robusta was 942 pound/
acre (1,056 kg/ha).
The traditional coffee growing areas are the three southern states of Karnataka (Coorg,
Chikmagalur, Bababudan, and Biligiri districts), Kerala (Wayanad, Travancore, Nelliampathy,
and Kannan Devan districts), and Tamilnadu (Nilgiris, Shevaroys, Pulneys, and Anamalais).
The nontraditional areas where coffee is grown are in Andhra Pradesh and Orissa in south
India and in Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Assam, and other northeastern states.
Until 1996, Indian coffee was marketed through the Coffee Board of India, the nodal orga-
nization of the government of India devoted to the development of coffee, located in Bangalore.
In January 1996, the market was liberalized, with all sections of the coffee farming community

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138 Sunalini Menon

then allowed to market 100 percent of their coffee on their own. In the new scenario, many
small farmers sell their coffee directly from their farms in the form of dry cherry or parchment
to traders and exporters. The large farmers sell coffee in the clean and graded form, either di-
rectly to exporters or through private auctions. Liberalized marketing has helped overseas buyers
purchase Indian coffee either at auction or through farm gate purchases, brokers, registered
exporters, and, above all, directly from the farmers. Finally, the crowning improvement is that
the Indian coffee farmer can now function not only as a grower but also as a dry miller, a trader,
an exporter, and a roaster.
As a result of these changes, quality has taken the front seat. The producer ensures strict on-
farm monitoring of quality. With this emphasis, pride, and tradition in processing coffee, the
Indian farmer has ventured into estate branding of his produce and also into direct marketing
relationships with overseas buyers. The era of relationship coffee has commenced in India.
The processing and quality standards for coffee continue to follow the Coffee Board of In-
dia’s specifications, which are mandatory for the coffee farmer. The Board has developed logos
that provide identity for coffees by region, an important innovation considering that many of
the regional beans have distinct flavor notes in the cup.
While the Coffee Board is no longer concerned with marketing, it maintains departments
for research and development, extension, promotion, and quality control. In general, the
Board aims to increase the productivity of coffee without increasing the area under cultiva-
tion, to undertake measures to reduce production costs, to encourage coffee farmers to prepare
special, estate branded and specialty coffees, to standardize and ensure the quality of Indian
coffee, to conduct training programs for quality awareness, and to educate consumers on how
to prepare a good cup of coffee. A good example of awareness work is the popular “Kaapi
Shastra” program, conducted in cities and towns to educate coffee entrepreneurs and consum-
ers on the art and science of coffee brewing.
Of the almost twelve arabica cultivars that have been released to the field, through the
tireless efforts of the Central Coffee Research Station (CCRS) of the Coffee Board of India,
many are found to possess special intrinsic quality traits, enabling India to prepare special
and specialty coffees. The important arabica plant cultivars are ‘Kent,’ ‘S. 795,’ ‘Sln. 9,’ and
‘Chandragiri.’ To give two examples of successful hybridization, ‘Sln. 9’ developed with an
Abyssinian connection and maintains fruit flavor notes of its Ethiopian parent. ‘Chandragiri’
is a cultivar not just resistant to various pests and diseases, particularly the leaf rust, but of
good yield and cup quality.
Research on plant material involves robustas as well as arabicas. Wide tracts of robusta
coffee-growing regions in India have been planted with ‘S. 274,’ which has been well received
around the world. ‘S. 274’ is an offspring of the Old Robusta/Peradeniya cultivar, which ini-
tially came into the country from Sri Lanka. A more recent robusta selection is an offspring of
‘Congensis,’ as one would expect from Congo. It produces large beans with very fine cupping
nuances, resembling those of an arabica.
Considering labor for the plantations is now in short supply, a disciplined, organized, and
efficient manner of sorting has been developed on the farms. Only ripe cherries are moved
to washed processing or natural processing (sun drying). In India, natural fermentation
is being followed by many farms for removal of mucilage during the preparation of washed
coffees, be they arabica or robusta, enabling the latent intrinsic flavor notes in the coffee
beans to emerge. However, at present farmers do not follow a standard model for processing,
but rather experiment with the beans and seek to develop techniques that highlight their
intrinsic flavor notes.

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Sun drying is the main method of drying coffee, considering that, in India, it is the best and
most cost effective, usually on raised tables. Today, given climate change and the labor short-
ages of recent years, trials with mechanical dryers are under way to examine whether drying
can be efficient and not adversely affect quality.
The environment too is preserved by treating the effluents from the pulp house naturally,
utilizing anaerobic and aerobic methods of lagooning, which help bring the BOD (biochemi-
cal oxygen demand) levels down to acceptable limits.
Well-equipped dry milling factories carry out the hulling, grading, and sorting of the coffee
beans into carefully defined grades. The coffee beans are finally bulked and packed in special
jute “IJIRA bags,” which are manufactured with vegetable oil. These bags are not only eco-
friendly but they also preserve the quality of the coffee. The markings on the bags are most
often applied with vegetable dyes, an innovation encouraged by the Coffee Board.
Specialty coffees such as Monsooned coffees, Mysore Nuggets EB, and Robusta Kaapi
Royale are offered to coffee connoisseurs around the globe. The Monsooned Malabar and
Monsooned Basanally coffees were launched by the Coffee Board of India as early as 1972
and have found acceptance by discerning drinkers. These coffees are specially prepared from
quality arabica cherries on the west coast of India. During the monsoon rains, between June
and September of a year, the beans are allowed to absorb moisture and undergo distinct visual
and organoleptic changes during the preparation.
Some 99 percent of exports comprise good quality grades without foreign or extraneous
matter. The export houses, many of which have been in business for many years, have earned
the reputation of being reliable, quality oriented, and honest. There are also a number of
experienced clearing and forwarding agents, who ensure safe delivery of coffee consignments.
Domestic consumption of coffee in cafés began to increase sharply in 1996, when the first
coffee bar opened its doors. This café was started by a coffee farmer at a time when computers
were making headlines in the Indian market. A cup of coffee with an hour of surfing on the
net was introduced by what became the first indigenous café chain from India, Café Coffee
Day. Today, a large number of domestic and international chains have set up cafés all over
India, so that “café culture” has helped to increase domestic consumption of coffee, from a
stagnant figure of 55,000 metric tonnes in 1995 to more than 110,000 tonnes in 2011.2
Today, the Indian coffee industry is undertaking a number of measures to upgrade qual-
ity. Breeding programs are being reviewed and new cultivar development, for both arabica
and robusta, is in progress. The Coffee Board of India is also examining mechanization,
including for harvesting. The Board has been carrying out trials with the equipment avail-
able in the market. Measures are also being implemented to increase production efficiency
and research is under way on mitigating the effect of climate change on the quantity and
quality of coffee. The extension services of the Indian Coffee Board are being strengthened,
in addition to self-help groups being organized amongst small farmers. Value addition to
coffee is encouraged, with the government of India also providing a subsidy for coffee roast-
ing and grinding equipment.
“Cupping culture” is blossoming and a postgraduate diploma course on coffee quality has
been introduced by the Coffee Board of India; young graduates are trained on all aspects of
quality, at every stage of production, enabling them to help in upgrading the quality of Indian
coffee. The “Kaapi Shastra” program has already been mentioned.
As competitions tend to spur quality improvement and benefit famers, “The Flavour of
India” cupping competition was introduced in 2002. Every year, the competition is conducted
for both arabica and robusta coffees.

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140 Sunalini Menon

Coffees of distinct plant varieties and unique processing techniques, marketed as “estate
brands,” have been gaining ground recently. Balehonnur Corona, Merthi Mountains, Bala-
noor Bean, Harley Classic, Veer Attikan, Sethuraman Sitara, and Buttercup Bold are some of
the estate-branded coffees that have been well received by the international market.
Since 2002, the coffee industry has conducted the India International Coffee Festival
biannually. It provides a platform where sellers and buyers can interact, where Indian coffees
can be showcased, and where information can be exchanged on the latest developments in
the coffee world.
Prospects for Indian coffee are encouraging, in spite of the difficulties farmers face. Indian
coffee, until recently considered a “filler” product, has risen from mundanity to a quality
stand-alone product, with microlots finding their way into coffee cups around the globe.
Indian coffee is an excellent base for espresso blends. The future of coffee in our country is
bright and getting brighter. The Indian coffee industry is determined, diligent, and innovative.
It will continue to improve the quality of the product, the livelihood of the farmers, and the
sustainability of the environment.

NOTES

1. Database on Coffee, Publication of the Coffee Board of India, June 2011, 4–5.
2. Database on Coffee, 75.

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25
Indonesia
Jati Misnawi

Coffee is not original to Indonesia, but over time, coffee has spread to almost all corners of the
country. Coffee entered Indonesia because of the ambition of Dutch colonial entrepreneurs,
the Dutch having conquered the region from earlier invaders, the Portuguese, in 1596. Cul-
tivation of coffee became the backbone of the colonial economy and has been internalized by
various cultural communities.
Nicolaas Witsen, a mayor and governor of the Vereenigde Amsterdam Oost-Indische
Compagnie (United East India Company, VOC) initiated coffee cultivation in Nusantara,
the original name of the island group in Old Java. Witsen recommended that coffee plants be
imported into the areas of Dutch colonial rule that had appropriate soil fertility and climate.
Above all, that meant Java Island. In 1696, the head of the Dutch colonial administration in
Malabar, India, Andrian van Ommen, sent coffee seeds to Java.
Given the Dutch desire to develop a commercial crop in their colony, coffee plants spread
across Nusantara under the auspices of the VOC. Cultivation began in Priangan land, in West
Java, Java island. The people were soon required to grow coffee in massive quantities. Villag-
ers had to sell all of their production to the VOC and, after the Company went bankrupt in
1798, to the Dutch government, at very low prices.1 Despite the great difficulties imposed
on people by the Dutch colonial system, farmers came to understand both the cultivation of
coffee and its commercial value.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDONESIAN COFFEE

Centuries later, coffee became an important commercial commodity of Indonesia. It still

provides significant economic benefits to the country. Of course, the government has received
huge profits through foreign exchange earnings from coffee exports. Coffee still figures among
the top ten largest sources of foreign exchange outside of oil. Approximately 67 percent of
Indonesia’s coffee production is exported. In the upstream sector, coffee has provided an op-
portunity to the people to demonstrate their expertise and ability to become competent inves-
tors. More than 95 percent of the country’s coffee plantations are managed by smallholders,
whose land is one hectare or less. When big companies, both private and government owned,

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142 Jati Misnawi

showed reluctance to develop coffee plantations, millions of smallholders increased their pro-
duction. Smallholder coffee has spread to almost all the islands of Indonesia, resulting in world
famous coffees such as Toraja, Mandheling, Lampung, Java, Bali, and Flores.
Until the late nineteenth century, the Dutch government, colonists, and entrepreneurs reaped
the benefits of coffee from Nusantara. But in 1885 the golden age of coffee for the Dutch colony
began to fade. Direct government involvement in the industrial coffee business started to de-
cline. At the same time, the number of private estates and individuals involved in coffee produc-
tion soared. Then beginning in 1891, many large planters in Sumatra replaced coffee with crops
that were currently more profitable, in particular rubber, whose price was then increasing rapidly.
In 1918, the Dutch colonial authorities ended all involvement in coffee regulation. From then
on, most of the Java and Sumatra coffee business was held by private companies.
After government involvement ended, the study of coffee cultivation grew rapidly. Several
new coffee varieties were imported, while improved breeding and processing techniques were
developed. One of the leading pioneers was Teun Ottolander, founder of the Nederlandsche-
Indische Landbouw Syndicaat (Dutch East Indies Agricultural Syndicate). It was his idea to
start a research institute in Besoeki. This institute, now known as the Indonesian Coffee and
Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI), has since relocated to Jember.
Into the twentieth century, all coffee exported from the Dutch East Indies was known as
Java Coffee, although the beans came from all of Nusantara, including areas outside of Java
such as Sumatra, Timor, and Sulawesi. But that labeling practice ended in 1921, when the
U.S. Department of Agriculture required the brand “Java Coffee” to be applied only to arabica
coffee from Java itself (more particularly, East Java). This step was taken even though, accord-
ing to William Ukers’s All About Coffee (1932), the best arabica coffee at that time actually
came from Mandheling and Ankola of Sumatra Island.
World War II considerably damaged the coffee industry in the islands. Planters turned to
food crops such as rice, maize, and cassava. Consequently, the coffee harvest in 1950 was only
one-eighth of the pre-war peak.
Indonesia declared its independence in August 1945, but had to fight a bloody war against
the Dutch before gaining full sovereignty in 1949. The coffee industry entered a new era when
the Indonesian government began nationalizing Dutch companies. Dutch and other foreign
companies were nationalized into Perusahaan Perkebunan Negara, or PPN (Government
Owned Plantations) in 1958, which then became the pioneer of PT Perkebunan Nusantara
(PTPN) (Government Owned Estate Companies Limited). The government divided the plan-
tations it acquired into fourteen companies, based on their location and main crops, in order
to decentralize and improve management. PTPN XII, located in East Java, is the main govern-
ment owned company that produces coffee beans. One of its famous coffees is labeled Java.
However, starting in the 1970s, private farmers began to enter the coffee business, aided by
government agencies. Private farmers spread their operations out from North Sumatra, Aceh,
Lampung, Jawa, Bali, Sulawesi, Timor, Flores, and Papua. Data from 2010 show that today
most Indonesia coffee farms are owned by smallholders, who control 95.5 percent of the total
1.3 million hectares planted in coffee. The remaining land is owned by PTPN (1.7 percent)
and private groups (2.8 percent). Small farmers, not the government or private companies,
became the real investors and producers in the industry.

THE SITUATION AND PROBLEMS OF SMALL FARMERS

Coffee grows on almost all the islands of Indonesia. Sumatra Island dominates with 74.2
percent of all production, with the largest crops in Bengkulu, Lampung, and South Sumatra

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Indonesia 143

areas. The rest of the crop is distributed among Sulawesi (9.0 percent), Java (8.3 percent),
Nusa Tenggara (5.8 percent), Kalimantan (2.0 percent), and Maluku and Papua (0.6 percent).
More than half of the national production comes from five provinces, South Sumatra (21.4
percent), Lampung (12.6 percent), Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam (8.7 percent), Bengkulu (7.4
percent), and East Java (7.2 percent).
Not only the long history of coffee in Indonesia but also the economic value of the crop
makes many farmers rely on its cultivation. Currently, coffee farmers in Indonesia number
about 1.97 million, with an average of 0.6 hectares of land ownership. Assuming an average
of four family members, at least 7.9 million people depend on coffee and are subject to its
wide price fluctuations.
The contribution of coffee in the national economy is quite significant. Coffee is one of
Indonesia’s main agricultural commodities. The volume of exports in 2009 amounted to
433,000 tons or 7.6 percent of total world exports. The value of exports reached $849.9 mil-
lion (about IDR 8 trillion). Coffee by value is 0.71 percent of Indonesia’s exports, while coffee
is 0.16 percent of total GDP. Throughout the last three decades, average annual coffee exports
reached 327,000 tons worth $489 million.
Small coffee producers are still plagued by the low price for their crop. Since the 1970s,
the prices have overall tended to fall. Farmers gain around 19–22 percent of the total price
of a cup of coffee sold in consuming countries. Even the recovery of green coffee prices since
2004 has not made a great difference in this percentage. The farm gate price in Indonesia, as
elsewhere, is inversely proportional to the value added to coffee in consuming countries. As
yet, the small farmers of Indonesia have little bargaining power in the industry.

COFFEE SPECIFICITY

Lying entirely within the tropics, Indonesia is well situated to produce various types of coffee
with unique flavor and character. The same coffee variety can produce beans of different char-
acters in different parts of the islands. Arabica coffee grown in Sumatra can be quite different
from the same cultivar produced in Java or Sulawesi. In general, the taste of coffee reflects the
region of origin. Two major factors in producing different characters in the cup are variations
in soil nutrients and climatic conditions. Many Indonesian coffees have become well known
as specialty coffee, such as Java, Mandheling, Gayo, Flores, Lintong, Kintamani, and Toraja.
In Sumatra, coffee grows well from the tip of Aceh to Lampung. The Gayo Aceh region
also produces coffee. Varieties of arabica coffee produced from plantations that stretch along
the Gayo highlands at an altitude of 1,200 meters above sea level (masl), in Central Aceh and
Bener Meriah province, are generally prepared by wet processing methods. Gayo coffee has a
strong aroma and balanced body.
Besides Gayo coffee, the Aceh region also produces a popular robusta coffee, ‘Ulee Kareng.’
This coffee is produced from the area of Lamno Geumpang Pidie and Aceh Jaya. Ulee Kareng
shows gentle character, but it seems bitter with a salty-astringent taste on the tongue at first.
Specialty coffee can also be found in North Sumatra, namely Mandheling, Lintong, and Sidi-
kalang coffee. Everything from these regions is arabica.
Mandheling coffee comes from fields in South Tapanuli, North Tapanuli, Simalungun, and
Deli Serdang. The term Mandheling derives from the local name of the Batak tribe, Mandail-
ing. Mandheling coffee has complex body, low acidity, little bitterness, and a spicy, slightly
earthy, and small fruit-like flavor.
Lintong coffee, with clean character and good body, comes from Lintong Nihuta of Hum-
bang Hasundutan district in North Sumatra. Sidikalang coffee is produced from the area

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144 Jati Misnawi

Sidikalang Sumbul/Sidikalang of Dairi district at an elevation of 1,500 masl. Sidikalang is

known as an arabica coffee with a strong and sharp flavor, high acidity, and balanced body
with a slight sensation of grassy and green flavors.
Sumatra also produces robustas. One is the widely recognized brand Lampung Robusta.
There are four robusta coffee-producing regions on Sumatra: Bandar Lampung, Lampung
Barat, Tanggamus, and the Way Kanan. Interestingly, although these coffees come from one
province, their characteristics differ significantly.
Since Java Island was the first part of Nusantara where coffee was grown, its coffee is justly
famous. One variety is called simply Java Coffee; it is produced from arabica plantations in
East Java under the management of PTPN XII. Java arabica coffee’s character is medium body,
chocolaty, flowery, and balanced. Java arabica grows well around Mount Ijen, at its peak be-
tween 900 and 1,400 masl. Java arabica is wet processed, fermenting for 24–36 hours, then
sun dried. After the Dutch departed, Java coffee spread to five other areas.
Although popular only since the 1990s, Bali is also known for producing special coffee,
Kintamani–Bali Coffee. Coffee is widely cultivated in the mountains of Batur at an altitude
of 900–1,500 masl. Coffee is intercropped there with older orange trees. Bali has particular
soil and climatic conditions thought to determine the cup profile, fruity taste with mild acid-
ity. Most lovers of this coffee are from Japan, the United States, the Netherlands, and France.
Kintamani coffee is the first agricultural product in Indonesia to obtain a certificate of Geo-
graphical Indication recorded by the Indonesian government.
Other parts of Indonesia, Sulawesi and Nusa Tenggara, are the source of Toraja and Flores
Bajawa coffee, the flagship specialty coffee. Popular Toraja Arabica coffee actually comes from
two areas of South Sulawesi; therefore there are two popular brands, “Toraja” and “Kalosi.”
Toraja coffee has a highy complex character with the sensation of chocolate, sweetness, and
spicy herb notes.
Bajawa Flores coffee is grown on the island of Flores. There the mountainous landscape,
dotted with active volcanoes, is marked by andosols: dark, highly porous soils derived from
volcanic material that have a high aluminum content. This soil is ideal for arabica coffee.
Flores coffee grows at altitudes between 1,200 and 1,800 masl. The cup characters are choco-
laty, sweet, fruity, and a slightly citrus aftertaste.

KOPI LUWAK (CIVET COFFEE)

Indonesia has yet another generic brand that is also globally famous. This is kopi luwak (or
just luwak) coffee. This coffee has the quasi-mythological reputation of being the most expen-
sive coffee in the world. Civet coffee beans are actually removed by hand from droppings of
the civet cat, an animal of the weasel family. Civets eat the best ripe coffee fruits, both arabica
and robusta. The cats have, one might say, done a good bit of processing of the beans as they
pass through the animals’ digestive tracts. Not surprisingly, kopi luwak is amazingly expensive.
In the world market, coffee prices have reached $150 per kilogram. Civet coffee has become
so desirable around the world partly because the price is so expensive. Civet coffee stocks are
rare. Naturally, it has a unique and special flavor. In the cup the coffee has balanced body,
high acidity, and some bitterness, although the characteristics depend on the coffee’s nature
and handling. Kopi luwak’s aroma is intense with sweetness and sometimes a fruity flavor.

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HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

Benefits from coffee production have a great impact on small farmers’ lives. They hope for
stability of coffee prices and achievement of fair price distribution among farmers, processors,
retailers, and traders. The Indonesia Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI), with gov-
ernment support, contributes to finding good planting material, developing best agricultural
and good handling practices, developing sustainable coffee, promoting the coffee sector at the
national and the global level, and determining the need and suitability for increased coffee
farming across the country. Specialty coffee is one of the main components in reaching overall
coffee sustainability in Indonesia.

NOTE

1. Editor’s note (RT): The Dutch system of extracting products from the Indonesian people for little
or no payment, resulting in great misery for peasants, is described in the novel Max Havelaar: Or the
Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, by Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker). First published
in 1860 in Dutch, the book appeared in English in 1868.

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26
Colombia
Luis Alberto Cuéllar

Coffee has been cultivated in Colombia since 1723. The Jesuits are credited with having
introduced coffee production, at the junction of the Meta and Orinoco rivers. Production
on a large scale began in Colombia around 1830 in Salazar de Las Palmas, a municipality
in the Norte de Santander department. The village pastor, Father Francisco Romero, played
an important part in spreading this crop, as it was his custom to impose as a penance to his
parishioners the planting of coffee trees.
Three branches or cordilleras of the Andes, which constitute the heart of the country, traverse
Colombia from south to north. The landscape of high peaks and deep valleys is the most densely
populated zone and the most important coffee-growing region. Here are the departments of
Antioquia, Caldas, Cundinamarca, Risaralda, Tolima, Quindío, Valle del Cauca, Cauca, Nariño,
and Huila. To the northeast and in the slopes of the Eastern Range, coffee is grown in the depart-
ments of Norte de Santander, Santander, and Boyacá. On the northern coast, it is grown on the
slopes of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, in the departments of Magdalena and Cesar, and on
the slopes of the Guajira Mountains in the department of Guajira.

COFFEE AS AN EXPORT

Colombia began to export coffee in the decade 1830–1840. Initially, 75,000 70-kilogram
bags were exported per year. Between 1880 and 1890, coffee exports reached 240,000
70-kilogram bags annually. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, coffee became
a key item among Colombian exports and began to represent a fundamental part of the
country’s trade balance.
By 1905, exports rose to 500,000 70-kilogram bags annually. The one million 70-kilo-
gram bag milestone was reached in 1913 and the two million figure during the 1920s. This
decade featured the departments of Caldas and Antioquia as the largest producers, above
Santander. Until 1923, Colombian exports were financed and managed mostly through
international brokerage firms with representatives in Colombia. Trade and exports were
channeled down the Magdalena River through important ports such as Girardot, Honda,
Puerto Salgar, and Puerto Berrío.

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Colombia 147

CREATION OF THE NATIONAL FEDERATION

OF COFFEE GROWERS OF COLOMBIA

In 1927, the most dynamic sector of the Colombian economy decided to assemble coffee
growers to promote the crop and to combat chronic social ills: alcoholism, lack of education,
poor communications infrastructure, and deficient public health services. Since the end of
the nineteenth century, coffee had been the main export product and the economy’s growth
engine. The Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia was founded in 1927 by the Sec-
ond National Coffee Growers Congress and was composed of all coffee growers. Its members
received agricultural extension services, including technical assistance for coffee cultivation
and diversification of crops native to the coffee zones. Law 72 of 1927 created the coffee tax,
a levy on each bag of coffee leaving the country. Revenue from this tax became the Federación’s
principal source of income.
The organization conducted health, nutrition, and educational campaigns and built
infrastructure such as rural roads, aqueducts, and electrification in the coffee regions. The
Federación also organized farmer groups at the village level, helped organize cooperatives,
and created mechanisms and credit lines and other services that benefited coffee growers and
their families.
Another focus area of the Federación has been coffee research. The National Coffee Research
Center, Cenicafé, began operations in 1939 in the central coffee region, the department of
Caldas, with several research stations spread across the country. The Center has carried out re-
search work in the areas of phyto-improvement of coffee and associated crops, agroclimatology,
entomology and physiology of the coffee tree, industrial uses of coffee, the nature and quality of
coffee-growing soils, and development of new varieties resistant to insects and diseases.

COFFEE IN THE 1930s

The First International Coffee Congress took place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on May 15, 1931.
It was attended by the world’s leading producers, especially the Latin American countries.
The Congress resolved to create the International Coffee Bureau as the basis for cooperation
among producing countries.
The coffee industry sank into a deep crisis by 1935 as a result of overproduction, strong
competition from coffee substitutes, and high import duties imposed by European countries.
In this difficult situation, the Federación invited governments and private agencies of the
world’s coffee-producing countries to a meeting in Bogota in October of 1936. The American
Coffee Conference, as the sessions were titled, discussed price stabilization, which would pro-
vide adequate compensation to farmers.
Overproduction also led to an agreement between Brazil and Colombia, at that time the
second largest producer of coffee. In 1933, Brazil presented a formal proposal for cooperation
at the London Monetary and Economic Conference. The most important agreement reached
at this meeting was the creation of the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, charged with standard-
izing the coffee policies of Latin American countries.
As these programs went forward, the Federación created the National Coffee Fund (FNC)
in 1940. Its purpose was to regulate internal commercialization and manage inventories to
facilitate the fulfillment of the Inter-American Agreement export quotas, agreed upon in
Washington in the same year.

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148 Luis Alberto Cuéllar

COFFEE IN THE 1950s

Between 1954 and 1956, prices reached record levels of an average of US$0.80 per pound,
partly due to a frost in Brazil. Revenue from foreign currency increased considerably due to
higher volumes exported as well as higher prices. By this time, there was no doubt about the
huge economic impact that macroeconomic policy had on coffee. In fact, in order to offset
the impact of the coffee-price bonanza on the economy, authorities advocated expanding the
liberalization of imports that had started in 1951. They also introduced currency exchange
controls. Consequently, a few months later, coffee prices began to fall and thus the exchange
control was applied. Between 1956 and 1968, international coffee prices fell to US$0.40 per
pound. The impact of this crisis was severe, given that coffee then represented 80 percent of
Colombia’s exports. As a result, the balance of payments went into deficit, the economy be-
gan to decelerate, and inflation spiked. During this time, the country had to stop paying its
external debt and to halt import liberalization.

COFFEE IN THE 1960s AND THE

INTERNATIONAL COFFEE AGREEMENT (ICA)

With the support of the United Nations, a conference was held in New York in July 1962 to
discuss a proposed agreement between producing and consuming countries. The conference
adopted a plan that went into effect at the end of 1963, once certain requirements had been
met. Forty-two exporting countries and twenty-five importing countries, representing 99.8
percent of exports and 96.2 percent of imports, signed the agreement.
The main objectives of the 1962 agreement were to do the following:

• Reach a reasonable balance between coffee supply and demand, on foundations that
ensured adequate coffee deliveries to consumers and markets, at equitable prices for
producers
• Mitigate the difficulties caused by onerous surpluses and excessive fluctuations in coffee
prices, which harmed both producers and consumers
• Contribute to the development of productive resources and to the promotion and
maintenance of employment and income levels in member countries to help achieve fair
wages, a higher standard of living, and better working conditions
• Increase the buying power of coffee-exporting countries by maintaining prices at fair
levels and increasing consumption
• Promote coffee consumption by all means possible
• Stimulate international collaboration to address global coffee problems, acknowledg-
ing the relationship between the coffee trade and the economic stability of industrial
product markets.

COFFEE IN THE 1970s

This decade started with the ICA as an exchange manager between producing and consum-
ing countries through the use of export quotas, in Colombia with the Federación in charge
of oversight.

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Colombia 149

In addition, the ICA established supply contracts with the most important international
roasters. Colombia implemented supply agreements with domestic roasters, to which green
coffee supply quotas were assigned.
Given that the annual quota assignment for producing countries was linked to production
and inventory accumulation, the Federación and the government decided to increase the pro-
ductivity of planted areas and, as a result, promoted a change in the crop profile. A monocrop
technology was vigorously developed with the ‘Caturra’ variety, which involved eradicating
shade on the coffee plantations. Between 1975 and 1980, production doubled, from six to
twelve million bags. In taking this direction, the environment and social sustainability were
not taken into account.

COFFEE IN THE 1980s

The 1980s marked the consolidation of the controlled coffee economy in Colombia. Mono-
crops escalated aggressively, exports doubled, and revenue from exports tripled. The promo-
tion of monocrops was carried out by directing credit only to those who decided to eliminate
shade and establish the freely exposed ‘Caturra’ variety, with densities over 5,000 coffee trees
per hectare. Then in 1989 the quota system under the ICA ended.
The U.S. State Department had asserted in 1986 that the quota system had transferred
resources from developed countries to developing ones, thus hindering the market’s ability to
set prices. In addition, the State Department argued that the goal of achieving higher prices
was untenable in the medium term, given the cycle of an increase in production resulting from
higher prices, then a large supply that would drive prices down. Finally, coffee sales to non-
ICA member countries increased in volume and evoked strong objections from ICA countries,
as coffee was sold at a lower price to the outsiders.
Under pressure from the U.S. and given the objections about prices, the ICA was then
continued without export limits. ICO members agreed to keep the organization going as a
discussion and statistical forum.

COFFEE IN THE 1990s

In 1991–92, Colombia recorded its highest harvest ever, close to 16 million bags. This bumper
crop resulted from an extensive program involving the renewal and planting of improved variet-
ies promoted by the Federación at the end of the 1980s. These two good harvests temporarily
improved coffee revenues despite low market prices. Yet the breakup of plantations in land re-
form, the serious infestation of the coffee berry borer in 1995–1998, and renovations of an im-
portant coffee area combined to significantly reduce the national harvest in the following years.
The National Coffee Fund responded by paying growers a bonus for adopting new crops in
place of coffee, at approximately US$1,250 per hectare. Production then fell from 17 million
bags in 1992 to 11 million in 2000. Still, Colombian coffee exports for the coffee year 1999–
2000 rose to 9.0 million bags and in 2000–01 to 9.5 million bags. The value of those exports
was US$1.245 billion and US$878 million FOB, respectively. Despite the slight increase in
exports during the last coffee year, revenues were 30 percent lower. Although Colombia’s ex-
ports held a 10 percent share by volume of the global coffee trade in 2000, the share of total
exported value was 14 percent, an acknowledgment of the high quality of the country’s beans.

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Figure 26.1. For certain demanding customers, coffee goes through a final hand-sorting in Co-
lombia. The beans move down the lighted conveyor while the workers, mostly women, pick out
defective or even slightly questionable beans. In other countries where labor is even cheaper, for
example Ethiopia, nearly all sorting is done by hand. Photo by Robert Thurston.

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Colombia 151

By 2000–01, Vietnam became the world’s second largest producer, displacing Colombia,
whose production was then 10.5 million 60-kilogram bags. The value of the coffee harvest for
that year was US$876 million, about 40 percent less than the figure reached in the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, coffee lost its economic importance among Colombia’s exports. Coffee’s share
of total GDP fell from 10 percent in the 1950s to 2 percent in 2000. Coffee’s portion of ex-
ports declined from 80 percent in the 1950s to 6 percent in 2000. During this same period,
which coincided with the free market era, the National Coffee Fund’s revenue stabilization
efforts were highly limited, given its financial restrictions. In general terms, Colombia’s coffee
policy sought to defend producers’ income, while providing greater transparency regarding
foreign purchase prices and internal sales prices, as the C price and coffee harvest volumes
both declined. These trends undermined the collection of the coffee export levy and accentu-
ated the deterioration of the Fund’s finances.

THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF COLOMBIAN

COFFEE GROWING: SOME CHALLENGES AND PERSPECTIVES

Colombian coffee-exporting activity is divided among private traders and the National Coffee
Fund in proportions that have been changing for several decades; currently they are 79 percent
and 21 percent, respectively. The United States has displaced Germany as the principal buyer
of Colombian coffee. Factors such as the change of preferences in the German market toward
cheaper coffees like Brazilian naturals and robusta have influenced the German market share.
The third most important destination of Colombian exports is Japan, which in recent years
has acquired close to 1.2 million bags annually.
The most powerful and important instrument of national coffee policy has been the
FNC. It operates as a public treasury account administered by the Federación. The financial
resources of the FNC are provided by the country’s coffee producers through the coffee con-
tribution (export levy).
Since the liberalization of the international coffee market in 1989, allocations of the FNC’s
funds have been constantly debated, as many coffee growers have pressed for greater expendi-
tures on restructuring Colombian coffee agriculture. Nonetheless, significant resources have
gone to a number of initiatives:

• To guarantee purchases of national harvests and stabilization of coffee revenues

• To finance agricultural research and extension
• To make national investments in companies that support the sector and regional invest-
ments in areas such as aqueducts, schools, and roads
• To restructure debt
• To promote internal and international consumption of Colombian coffee

Since World War II, the Fund has also invested in a series of companies that support the
productive sector and in fulfillment of agreements involving the sorting of Colombia’s coffee
supply. Among companies created in this way are banks and an insurance company; Almacafé,
which monitors coffee inventories; Cenicafé, responsible for research and transfer of tech-
nologies; and regional structures of departmental coffee grower committees and cooperatives,
which oversee policies for purchasing harvests and quality control.

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152 Luis Alberto Cuéllar

These companies performed important services during the term of the international coffee
agreements and represented a substantial financial effort by the National Coffee Fund. The
crisis in the international coffee market during the 1990s, as well as the new global tendencies
towards liberalization and greater competition of markets in general, generated significant
financial difficulties in many of these companies, which drained FNC’s equity.
The national debate regarding the role that the National Coffee Fund should play in the fu-
ture has been very extensive. What is clear is that resources are very limited to continue lever-
aging diverse investments in regional infrastructure or in national corporations supporting the
sector. The fund’s function of stabilizing prices and, even more challengingly, coffee revenues
is not widely considered to be viable. Negotiations held with the national government have
been geared toward complementing FNC’s resources with funds from the national budget to
maintain purchases of harvests and to sustain rural extension services in coffee-growing de-
partments. Nonetheless, there are not sufficient resources to cover all of the estimated 500,000
coffee growers in the country.
The coffee model established between the National Federation of Coffee Growers and the
central government responded effectively when export-quota agreements were in effect, but
it encountered problems when facing the free market. In general, the traditional institutional
arrangement has sought to protect the direct producer from market events and trends. Regula-
tion and legal norms that govern the Colombian coffee sector and centralized decision-making
and planning have already begun to give way to the flexibility required of private initiative in
search of new business management alternatives.
Several proposals to end the crisis have emerged, such as supporting the promotion of
regional, specialty, and sustainable coffees with high quality standards. This step would be an
acknowledgment of Colombia’s existing competitive advantages in the international coffee
trade, so that producers and their organizations could establish direct relations with purchasers
in a sustainable manner.
Another serious problem facing Colombian coffee involves recovering its production level,
down from an average of 11 million bags in 2008 to 7.5–8.0 million bags, a reduction of over
30 percent. This decline has been due to intense rains, climate change, an increase in coffee
berry borer infestation, new attacks of coffee leaf rust, and loss of production as some areas
are renewed with resistant and specialty coffee varieties. The replanting is an institutional
program directed by the Federación congruent with its strategy to increase competitiveness.
Given the current relatively high price of coffee and what appears to be growing demand for
superior arabica beans, Colombian growers can be cautiously optimistic.

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27
Ethiopia
Willem Boot

Coffee aficionados should consider themselves very lucky. Just imagine how our beloved bev-
erage would fare without Ethiopia’s legendary status as its linchpin. Despite Ethiopia’s unique
heritage as the birthplace of the arabica bean, the motherland of coffee has only partially
defined the evolution of the international coffee trade and only marginally contributed to the
proliferation of the beverage itself. Why then have so many coffee professionals and enthusi-
asts developed an unconditional devotion to Ethiopia?

THE EVOLVING COFFEE LANDSCAPE

For thousands of years, Ethiopia has harbored a boundless diversity of coffee species and
genotypes. Wild coffee trees can still be found by the millions in the country’s diminishing
forests in the south and west; these plants are the remnants of a vast coffee ecosystem without
equal on Earth. Ethiopia’s special place in coffee expresses itself most profoundly through the
great array of flavor attributes in the liquor. Professional cuppers, who generally don’t shy away
from using unconventional superlatives, often find their traditional jargon of taste attributes
too limited to describe the mesmerizing range of coffee flavors from Ethiopia. For many afi-
cionados, the intensity and spectrum of Ethiopian flavors elicits a need to understand what is
in the cup, and at the same time evokes a quest for the essence of Ethiopian coffee. It appears
that the country enjoys a special set of historical, botanical, and sociological conditions that
together formed an ideal set of circumstances for the creation of a large international family of
Ethiopian coffee zealots. In addition, we should factor in the unlimited kindness of its people,
the embedded culture of coffee consumption in daily life, and the ingrained dependency of
Ethiopia’s economy on coffee.
Ethiopia is a large, landlocked country in the eastern Horn of Africa. It is about three times
the size of California in area, or approximately the same size as France, Germany, and the
United Kingdom combined. Ethiopia is also the second most populous country in Africa,
with an estimated population of 85 million. The famous Great Rift Valley cuts through the
heart of Ethiopia, and indeed many of the world’s most famous coffees grow along the valleys
and mountainsides that make up this feature.

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154 Willem Boot

ETHIOPIAN LEGENDS AND COFFEE’S HISTORY

Various studies assert that the term “coffee” originates from Kaffa, a region in the southwest of
Ethiopia. Coffee is “bunn” or “bunna” in most Ethiopian languages, it is called “tukke” in the
Sidama language, “kahwah” in Arabic, and “kahveh” in Turkish. A French cultural anthropolo-
gist and botanist, Jacques Mercier,1 described how three men, Abol, Atona, and Baraka, went
on a retreat in search of god. They hoped to receive manna (food) from the sky, but nothing
came down, and they almost starved to death. Finally, god appeared to them and described the
miraculous impact of two different remarkable plants, “kat” and “coffee.” His advice was to
chew the leaves of the first plant and to make a special preparation of the second. This could
be done by roasting the berries, then boiling them to make an infusion. Miraculously, their
hunger disappeared, and they were able to continue their journey. According to the story, each
of the men prepared three consecutive infusions. The first infusion is called “abol” (from the
Semitic word for “awal” or first), the second one is “atona” or “tona” (from the Semitic “itnin”
or second), and the final infusion is “Baraka,” meaning blessing, indicating a rite that takes
place at the end of the coffee session.
A different legend, which goes back to 1451 CE, concerns an Abyssinian goat herder named
Kaldi, who tried the coffee berry himself after observing how his charges became surprisingly
wild and jumpy after eating the fruit of the coffee bushes. Kaldi also tried the fruit, which
made him mildly intoxicated and invigorated. The monks of a nearby monastery noticed his
condition, and soon all the monks chewed the berries before their nightly prayer.
Yet another story has been reported by the French ethnologist Marcel Griaule.2 While on a
visit to Zege, a peninsula at the northern Ethiopian lake Tana, he documented a myth about
the origin of coffee telling the story about a local saint Batra Maryam, who lived in the seven-
teenth century. During one of his prayer sessions, he drove his “mekuamia” (measuring stick)
into the ground. Miraculously, the stick developed roots and a coffee tree started growing that
produced berries. And this is how coffee was first planted in Zege.

ETHIOPIA VS. YEMEN

In Yemen various stories circulate about the history of coffee. Unsurprisingly, many Yemeni
claim the origin of coffee as their country’s national pride. One of the Yemenite legends men-
tions Abu Bakribn Abdallah Al Aydarus as the discoverer of the use of coffee. In the story,
Abu Bakr visited the Muslim order of the Qadiriyya in Harar, Ethiopia, in the early sixteenth
century. During one of his travels to the region, he accidentally tasted the sweet, juicy berries
of a coffee tree while resting beneath it. He immediately noticed the invigorating effects that
the fruit had on him.
According to Yemenite legend, three key persons introduced Ethiopian coffee into Yemen:
Said Al Dabani, Abu-l- Hasan Ali Ibn Umar Al Sadili (a Sufi who spent time in Yifat, Ethiopia
during the fifteenth century during the reign of Emperor Yishak), and Abu Bakr. In any event,
it appears that coffee trees were first transplanted from the Ethiopian highlands to the bare
Yemeni mountains during the fifteenth century.

PROLIFERATION OF COFFEE TREES IN ETHIOPIA

Many nineteenth-century travelers to Ethiopia reported the widespread presence of coffee

trees in the highlands of Abyssinia. For example, Theophile Lefebre conducted a three-year

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Ethiopia 155

exploration of Ethiopia between 1839 and 1843 for the French navy; he identified Ethiopia
as the homeland of coffee.3 Coffea arabica was found growing wild throughout the entire
Changalla region (southwest Ethiopia) and under cultivation around the town of Jimma and
the area of Kaffa.
Opinions differ about the actual birthplace of the coffee tree within Ethiopia. Some reports
mention Kaffa (western Ethiopia) as the birthplace while other reports suggest that the east-
ern Harar province was the true birthplace. Major W. C. Harris conducted a survey for the
English army in the 1840s on the abundance of coffee in Ethiopia. His book The Highlands
of Aethiopia, 1844, notes that “coffee grows wild in every wood to the height of eight to ten
feet and bends under the load of fruit in Limmu Enarya.”4 He also observed that coffee was
dispersed by the civet cat over the mountains of the Itoo and Arsi, where it has flourished for
as long as anyone can remember in Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian civet cat, of the same family as the Asian Paradoxurus hermaphroditis, is a
mammal, whose name is derived from the Arabic “qat al-zabad.” This animal has been uti-
lized in Ethiopia for the production of “civet,” a secretion produced by the anal glands. In
captivity, the substance is harvested by scraping the secretion from the anal glands; it is then
used as an aromatic base for perfume. Charles Jacques Poncet, a French physician who visited
Ethiopia in the year 1700, reported that merchants kept as many as 300 civet cats, feeding
them wheat and milk and harvesting the civet from their glands every week.5 We can assume
that the civet cat has been important for the proliferation of coffee throughout Ethiopia, for
its natural behavior is to eat the ripe berries of the coffee tree and to spread the seeds in its
excrement around the forests. Many wild coffee trees in Ethiopia are found along river banks
and mountainous areas, in the same places where civet cats and other mammals and birds
roam in their search for food.6

COFFEE AS A FOOD ITEM

The Ethiopian historian Tekettel Haile-Mariam conducted interviews with elderly persons in
Kaffa in 1972 and recorded their stories about the traditional use of coffee in the region. Cof-
fee was originally consumed with other food grains; it was particularly important as a sort of
energy victual for warriors. As recently as the mid-nineteenth century, coffee cherries would
be mixed with butter, red pepper, and other spices, providing a snack for the guests of honor
of the family. According to Tekettel’s sources, trade in coffee cherries spread throughout Kaffa
province for their nutritional value.7 Only the fresh cherry was in demand, and because of
its perishable nature, it had to be transported fast and in a limited radius from the source of
cultivation. This aspect of berry freshness must have motivated officials and landlords to plant
their own coffee trees in their own administrative zones.
James Bruce, who travelled to Ethiopia between 1768 and 1772, reported on the consump-
tion of roasted coffee beans. “The Gallas (Oromos) ate the roasted bean which they pulver-
ized and mixed with butter to form hard balls about the size of those used in billiards, which
kept them in strength and spirits during a day’s fatigue better than a loaf of bread or a meal
of meat.”8
Overall, it appears that Ethiopians have embraced many practices to use the integral coffee
tree and its fruit to the maximum extent. One example is the coffee drink “chemo,” which is
still quite popular in the westernmost regions of Ethiopia. Chemo is made by toasting or drying
coffee leaves, then crushing and boiling them, while adding various spices and herbs from the
forest, for example ginger, pepper, onions, garlic, salt, and tena adam (fringed rue). The drink is

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156 Willem Boot

preferably served slightly chilled. It has an engaging bouquet of flavors: spicy, refreshing, mildly
grassy, and a salt/sweet aftertaste with a noticeable boost due to the extracted caffeine.

ON THE COMPLEX POLITICAL HISTORY OF COFFEE’S HOMELAND

The political history of Ethiopia doesn’t lend itself easily to a brief description. From the es-
tablishment of the Axumite Kingdom in the first century CE until the abdication of Emperor
Haile Selassie in 1974, Ethiopia enjoyed more than nineteen hundred years of successive
dynasties involving kings, emperors, and other regional and local feudal rulers. Except for the
brief Italian invasion from 1936 to 1941, the country has never been colonized or annexed by
a foreign country. Ethiopia’s position on the crossroads between the Arabs and western Africa
has produced for centuries a rich dynamic between Muslim, Christian, Judaic, and indigenous
religions. The year 1974 witnessed both the discovery of the legendary fossil humanoid Lucy
in the Rift Valley and the birth of the Derg regime, a Marxist-Leninist state. Agricultural
reform policies were implemented. All private landholdings were nationalized. Suspected
enemies of the Derg regime were tortured or killed. A period of political and economic havoc
followed, intensified by droughts and famine.
In 1991 another revolution followed, instigated by the EPRDF (Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolu-
tionary Democratic Front), which has since maintained political control of the country. From
1995 on, a process of gradual reform and modernization has taken place under the leadership
of long-term president Meles Zenawi.
The Ethiopian coffee industry has been evolving gradually but slowly. Around the start of
the twenty-first century, new policies were adopted to alter the coffee sector from a partially
government controlled monopoly to a more diverse industry involving private exporters and
cooperative unions.
Around 2005, the maturing international specialty coffee industry resulted in a surge of
demand for high grade Ethiopian coffee beans. Despite rising coffee export numbers, farmers
were still losing out in their quest to build a sustainable livelihood from arabica production.
Higher demand and increasing exports did not work well in the prevailing internal coffee
marketing system, which involved too many middlemen (akrabies and sabsabis) and an inef-
fective national coffee auction platform. The government responded with new policies that
greatly upset the international specialty coffee community.
In 2009, the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) was established; it introduced a
high-tech coffee trading platform involving many quality differentiated classes and categories.
Unlike the previous auction system, the ECX does not allow any collusion between buyers
(exporters) and sellers (producers), in the attempt to guarantee a fair price discovery system
that ultimately can create major financial benefits for the coffee farmers.
Specialty coffee buyers were initially appalled by the new commodity exchange, which in its
original context did not permit any significant form of traceability of the traded coffee lots. To
further exacerbate the grief of coffee aficionados, the ECX de facto mandated the blending of
potentially precious coffee lots with potentially mediocre beans.
What has the impact of the ECX been? One can argue that the plight of Ethiopian coffee
farmers was alleviated significantly with or despite the introduction of the new system. Coffee
industry specialists conclude that the architects of the new model were simply lucky, because of
the concurrent major rise in international coffee commodity prices. Time will tell. In any case,
with the evolution of the Ethiopian coffee industry, a new category of specialty coffee exporters is

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Ethiopia 157

emerging: the private estate holders. Projections are that by the year 2025 the combined produc-
tion of these new “coffee barons” will exceed 25 percent of Ethiopia’s coffee exports.

ORIGIN OF ORIGINS

As the “origin of all origins,” Ethiopia has countless unique features, especially the thousands
of heirloom varietals that grow in the hundreds of thousands of small coffee plots around the
country. In many cases, farmers grow their own unique heirloom varietals. In most regions,
from eastern Harar to southern Sidama and to the western highlands of Lekempti, smallholder
farms pool their coffees at local milling stations, each farmer contributing his or her privately
crafted coffee. The result is a complex mélange of unique flavors, the truest expression of lo-
cal terroir to be found anywhere on the planet. The rich complexity in a cup of Yirgacheffe,
for example, is largely a product of these special circumstances that occur nowhere else in the
world. It is impossible to make generalizations about the flavor and essence of Ethiopian cof-
fee, which is as varied as it is rich.9

NOTES

1. Jacques Mercier, Art That Heals: The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia (New York: Museum for African
Art, 1997), esp. 63.
2. Marcel Griaule: Abyssinian Journey (London: Miles, 1935).
3. Theophile Lefebre et al., Voyage en Abyssinie exécuté pendant les années 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842,
1843, 1845–51.
4. William Cornwallis Harris, The Highlands of Aethiopia (London: Longman,1844).
5. Charles Jacques Poncet, in William Foster, ed., The Red Sea and Adjacent Countries at the Close of
the Seventeenth Century, series 2, no. 100 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1949), 136–37, quoted in Karl H.
Dannenfeldt, Journal of the History of Biology 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 422. See also Ronald S. Love,
“A French Physician at the Court of Gondar: Poncet’s Ethiopia in the 1690s,” Proceedings of the Western
Society for French History 31 (2003).
6. Christine B. Schmitt, Montane Rainforest with Wild Coffea Arabica in the Bonga Region (SW Ethio-
pia): plant diversity, wild coffee management and implications for conservation (Göttingen: Cuvillier, 2006),
31, 39, and 62.
7. Tekettel Haile-Mariam, “The Production, Marketing and Economic Impact of Coffee in Ethio-
pia,” PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1973.
8. James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile: in the years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772,
and 1773, vol. II (Edinburgh: Ruthven, 1790–91), 469.
9. For more on Ethiopian coffee, see Yared and Lemma Getachew, “History of Harar Medhane-Alem
Secondary H.S.,” Basha Mawi, Speech at the Roundtable Conference, Harar, Ethiopia, 2008; and Daniel
Humphries and Willem Boot, Ethiopian Coffee Buying Manual (Washington, DC: USAID, 2011).

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28
Vietnam
Robert W. Thurston

The big story in Vietnamese coffee, and in fact in global output, is the huge increase in
production that began there in the early 1990s. As late as 1980, the country produced only
a negligible quantity of beans, and exports were almost unheard of. In the postcolonial, post-
Vietnam war era, coffee was first exported in 1981, with 68,700 tons leaving the country. By
1987, about 100,000 hectares were devoted to coffee. By 1997–98, Vietnam produced 5.8
million bags, or about 348 million kilos, putting it into fourth place globally, behind Brazil
at 22.5 million bags, Colombia at 10.5, and Indonesia at 6.7.1 By 2000, Vietnam had moved
into second place.
Various figures have been offered for the size of the 2011–12 Vietnamese harvest, from
18.5 million to 21.67 million bags,2 while Brazilian production for the harvest year 2012–13
is projected at 50.6 million bags.3 The Vietnamese may well have permanently outstripped
Colombia, at 8.5 million bags in 2011–12.4 Today in Vietnam about 500,000 hectares are
planted in coffee, a figure the government wishes to stabilize.
Robusta makes up 97 percent of Vietnamese production by foreign estimates, just under
93 percent by government figures.5 Although the country is trying to switch gradually to ara-
bica, the Ministry of Agriculture does not anticipate any change in robusta’s share of the crop
for at least five years. The country ranks first in the world in robusta production, at around
4.3 million bags in 2008–9. While Vietnam has found, or created, a great niche for itself in
robusta, that does not mean that the country’s income from coffee has made farmers wealthy.
Robusta is always considerably cheaper than arabica on the import markets; in late January
2012, robusta was selling for 111.08 delivered in New York, while arabica fetched 220.08 (or
$1.11/pound versus $2.20/pound).
Coffee was first planted in Vietnam in 1857, by French landowners or, in some accounts,
missionaries. The plant grew on only a few thousand hectares into the 1970s. Then several
developments spurred the country’s meteoric rise. The International Coffee Agreement
collapsed in 1989 after the United States withdrew from it, complaining that free market
principles were undermined by the accord, which set quotas for each country’s production,
and that the price of coffee was too high. Then in 1994 and again in 1997, bad weather in
Brazil caused world prices to soar; this trend lured both the Vietnamese government and many

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Vietnam 159

farmers further into coffee production. Moreover, after 1991, state-owned import companies
brought in fertilizer at prices considerably below world market figures.6
When the price of coffee beans slumped terribly once again, beginning in early 1998 and
reaching an abysmally low point in 2002–04, many blamed the situation on the flood of beans
from Vietnam.7 Certainly the increase in Vietnamese production contributed significantly to
the slide in prices, for two reasons. First, although the coffee exported was overwhelmingly
robusta, so much coffee was available globally, and so many drinkers stuck with instant coffee
or cheap grocery-store blends containing robusta, that the price of all coffee fell. Second, the
largest importers found they could remove some of the bitterness inherent in robusta by forcing
steam through batches of beans. But, as numerous parts of this book show, the demand for cof-
fee overall and for specialty coffee in particular has driven the price of all beans up once more.
Did the World Bank encourage Vietnamese farmers to plant coffee at the expense of farm-
ers elsewhere? Did the Bank want to push down the cost of coffee so that Western consumers
would pay less or Western companies would make more money? The Bank has vehemently
denied such charges, for example in a “Frequently Asked Question” and response released in
September 2004:

Q: Did the World Bank encourage Vietnamese farmers to plant coffee to the detriment of farmers
in other coffee producing countries?
A: Vietnamese coffee expansion began well before 1994. The Bank only began lending again in
the rural sector in Vietnam after 1996. The Bank has supported Vietnam’s very successful drive to
grow its economy and reduce poverty, but none of its investments has been designed to promote
coffee production.8

Thus the World Bank denied playing a major role in Vietnamese coffee expansion. Of course,
loans for any purpose would have freed some capital inside the country for investment in
coffee production. In any event, since 2004, rising production in Vietnam has mirrored the
general increase in the price of coffee, not lowered it.
The World Bank’s policies are designed to promote capitalism and privatization, but those
goals appear to have fit well with the Vietnamese government’s own plans after the late 1980s.
State agencies maintained price controls on basic foodstuffs while supporting the expansion
of coffee production by several means. These included providing farmers with subsidized
land and preferential loans and in some cases seedlings, fertilizer, irrigation, and agronomic
support.9 Loans to farmers by state banks were at rates as low as 1 percent interest. Into the
late 1980s, most land was government-owned; then came a switch to cultivation by private
farmers, mostly operating with long-term leases. By 2003, only 5 percent of coffee acreage was
still government-owned and operated. These policies were in line with a general set of projects
that allowed more entrepreneurial activity.
To summarize Vietnam’s rise to second place in global production, the country has had
some of the world’s lowest production costs and highest robusta productivity. A large pool
of labor was available and willing to work cheaply, sometimes for a dollar a day. The coffee
industry now employs about 600,000 workers, 800,000 at the peak of the harvest season.10
Cheap land, government policies and subsidies, the increased demand for robusta around the
globe, and the collapse of the ICA all played a role. The World Bank’s contribution should be
placed fairly far down on any list of reasons for Vietnam’s success.
For a country desperately trying to recover from decades of war and to raise a low general
standard of living, coffee represented a way to enter world markets, earn hard currency, and

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160 Robert W. Thurston

put people to work. A secondary benefit from the government’s point of view was the op-
portunity to move more people—especially ethnic Vietnamese—onto the land. This trend has
come at the expense, for example, of ethnic Cambodians who once lived in the central and
western highlands, the main area of Vietnamese production.
Serious challenges confront Vietnam as it tries to lower costs and improve coffee quality.
“Vietnamese production is . . . heavily dependent on intensive irrigation and a massive use of
inputs and fertilizers.”11 The cost of farming this way, in terms of inputs and damage to the
land, cannot be sustained. Water for irrigation is becoming a precious and expensive resource.
According to the Vietnamese Coffee & Cocoa Association (Vicofa), some 137,000 hectares
of old and low-quality coffee trees need to be replaced, accounting for more than 25 percent
of the total area in coffee.12
Most of the country’s coffee is grown in the western highlands, at an elevation of 500–700
meters. The relatively low altitude will hamper efforts to switch to arabica. Few fields have
shade trees, and farmers are reluctant to take land out of coffee production to plant them. Cli-
mate change is a problem here as elsewhere; severe droughts have occurred within the normal
dry season, while rainfall as the plants flower has become more erratic. About 70 percent of
the arable land in coffee is planted from seeds; 30 percent is planted from clonal stock. This
agricultural structure may leave Vietnam particularly open to plant diseases and pests, already
a serious problem in the country. Low quality remains a challenge, as, for example, ripe and
unripe berries are often mixed together in the harvest. More coordination among farmers is
needed, while capital for expanding the use of dryers and patios, among other improvements,
is in short supply.13
On the bright side, Dang Le Nguyen Vu opened the first Vietnam-owned gourmet coffee
shop in Ho Chi Minh City in 1998. By 2004, his franchise network employed more than
6,000 people, and his company had opened export branches in Tokyo, Singapore, Taipei,
New York, Toronto, Paris, and other European Union cities.14 As in China, Vietnamese entre-
preneurs direct their coffee marketing efforts at home to a young clientele. The international
chain Gloria Jean’s ran six coffeehouses in Vietnam by the end of 2011 and planned to open
twenty more in the next five years.15 Starbucks plans to enter the country in 2013.16 Such ex-
pansion is taking place in a context of rapid economic growth: Vietnamese per capita income
rose from $220 in 1994 to $1,168 in 2010.17 With due allowance for the economic setbacks
suffered around the world beginning in 2007, Vietnam seems likely to continue on this gen-
eral upward trajectory. Internal consumption will likely rise along with exports. The country
has proven itself amazingly resilient in the past, and it has a good chance of overcoming its
current problems in coffee production and quality.

NOTES

1. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/coffee/map.html.
2. The first estimate is from International Coffee Association [ICA], “Monthly Coffee Market
Report,” December 2011, 5. The second estimate is from http://www.topcommodities.net/2011/09/
vietnamese-coffee-production-forecast.html.
3. ICA, “Monthly Coffee Market Report,” 5.
4. ICA, “Monthly Coffee Market Report,” 6.
5. Bui Ba Bong, [of the] Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development [Vietnam], “Vietnam:
Sustainable Coffee Development,” presentation at the World Coffee Conference, Guatemala, February
26–28, 2010, 10.

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Vietnam 161

6. Daniele Giovannucci, Bryan Lewin, Rob Swinkels, and Panos Varangis, 2004 Vietnam Coffee Sec-
tor Report (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004), 21. 50 percent drop in prices in VN.
7. See, for example, Charis Gresser and Sophia Tickell, Mugged: Poverty in Your Coffee Cup (Oxford:
Oxfam, 2002), 18. Available at www.maketradefair.com/assets/english/mugged.pdf. While this report
only briefly mentioned Vietnam’s increased production as a major factor in the then-crisis in coffee,
Anthony Wild in The Independent, April 3, 2004, saw a darker purpose in the World Bank’s role in
Vietnam. Perhaps that was an appropriate stance for the author of Coffee: A Dark History (New York:
Norton, 2005), published soon after.
8. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTSITETOOLS/0,,contentMDK:2026394
1~menuPK:534295~pagePK:98400~piPK:98424~theSitePK:95474,00.html.
9. Giovannucci et al., 2004 Vietnam Coffee Sector Report, 21 (p. 3 of Background section).
10. Giovannucci et al., 2004 Vietnam Coffee Sector Report, 20.
11. ICA, “Monthly Coffee Market Report,” 6.
12. As noted in United States Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service GAIN Report,
May 15, 2011, 2.
13. This description of problems is largely based on Bui Ba Bong’s presentation in Guatemala.
14. The Vietnam Investment Review, December 15, 2004.
15. The Australian, November 14, 2011.
16. The Belfast Telegraph, July 9, 2011.
17. United States Department of State, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, “Diplomacy in Ac-
tion Background Note, Vietnam,” January 5, 2012.

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29
Brazil
Carlos H. J. Brando

A silent revolution has swept across the Brazilian coffee business in the last two decades. New
approaches, recent technologies, and a modern view of the market have helped Brazil to re-
shape the business, from seed to cup.
Improvements in efficiency and quality have made Brazilian coffees more competitive and,
at the same time, changed the image of the country from a producer of volume to a producer
of quantity and quality. From the choice of varieties to be planted to cultivation, harvesting,
and postharvesting processing, an emphasis on quality started to influence many activities.
Brazil is not only producing some very fine coffees but it is also tightening quality controls at
all levels of the business and orienting its marketing to focus on coffee quality.
Coffee plantations migrated to the north, away from frost prone areas, in the direction
of the flatter, more easily mechanizable areas of the Cerrado, the Brazilian savannah. Drier
regions started to use irrigation increasingly to counter the negative effects of periodic
droughts. Brazil already irrigates more than 10 percent of its coffee plantations: about 40
percent of the conilon (the Brazilian robusta), areas of Espirito Santo and South Bahia,
and almost 25 percent of the arabica plantations in western and eastern Cerrado, in Minas
Gerais, are currently irrigated.
Coffee yields that used to be only ten to twelve 60-kilogram bags per hectare have already
reached twenty bags per hectare and are about to go even higher, a national average that few
countries have achieved. New, high-density planting techniques, coupled with advanced soil
fertilization and disease-resistant varieties, have enabled whole regions to produce average
yields in excess of thirty bags per hectare. Certain areas, like the Cerrado of Bahia, reach fifty
bags per hectare.
The matrix of production changed, along with the portfolio of products offered to the mar-
ket. Today Brazil produces almost all types of coffee that the market demands, in volumes and
qualities that please operations from the microroaster to big multinationals. The production
share of conilon, which used to vary between 15 and 20 percent of the national output, may
reach 25 percent over the next years. The crop estimate for 2012 indicates that Brazil may
produce between 48 and 52 million bags of coffee, of which around 12 million were conilons.
The logistics and cost of processing and transporting the crop have improved greatly with
bulk handling and the privatization of highways. Vitoria harbor has gained in export share

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Brazil 163

Figure 29.1. A good example of large-scale “technified” Brazilian production. Rio Verde farm,
Sao Paulo state, Brazil. Photo by Robert Thurston.

compared to Santos, as conilon production increased more than 50 percent in recent years.
The sophisticated exporting sector demonstrates that it can deliver large crops without bottle-
necks. In 2012, Brazil exported 33.4 million bags of coffee, a new record for the sector, with
revenues of about US $9 billion.
Domestic coffee consumption is an especially bright spot; it doubled from 6.5 to 13 million
bags between 1992 and 2002. More recently, the consumption of coffee has been growing at
5 percent per year in Brazil, while world consumption has been increasing at just 2 percent
per year. In 2011, national coffee consumption surpassed 19 million bags, and the industry
expects that it will soon reach 21 million bags. Brazil is now the second largest consuming
country in the world, after the United States. Local consumption represents a captive market
for 30 to 40 percent of Brazilian coffee production, an unquestioned competitive advantage.
The quantitative and qualitative advantages of the Brazilian coffee business have been
heavily supported by the research and development model implemented by the Coffee Re-
search Consortium, managed by Embrapa (the Brazilian Agricultural Research Company).
The consortium is unique in the coffee world. It brings together the most traditional and
prestigious research institutes in the country with younger centers exploring new technologies
or located in new producing areas in a model that is decentralized and pluralistic, monitored
by all involved in the sector. All research work is oriented to the needs of the clients, be they
coffee growers, the industry, or the consumer. This intensive research effort created the basis
of the revolution in the Brazilian coffee business that is still going on; there is much more to
come in future years.

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164 Carlos H. J. Brando

THE FUTURE OF COFFEE PRODUCTION IN BRAZIL

Although the future of the Brazilian coffee sector seems bright, some doubts remain. The
strong Brazilian currency and increasing production costs, especially labor, have caused the
country’s formerly low production costs to reach levels comparable to those prevailing today
in Colombia and in the most costly Central American producers. The challenge now is how to
benefit from the temporary “price bonanza” on the global market to increase competitiveness
through both lower costs and higher added value. If that is not done, it is highly unlikely that
Brazil will be able to retain the high market share achieved in recent years.

ARABICA

Brazilian growers of arabica coffee need to address three critical areas to retain their leader-
ship: irrigation to increase yields, mechanization to lower costs, and quality enhancement to
improve price differentials.
Average Brazilian yields grew from 10–12 bags/hectare to 18–20 bags/hectare mostly due to
higher coffee tree densities. The next round of increases in arabica average yields, perhaps to
30 bags/hectare, is likely to come from irrigation. Less than 20 percent of the area under ara-
bica is irrigated today, which causes the country to lose as much as one full arabica crop every
six to seven years due to droughts that affect different growing areas. Not only is a wide array
of irrigation technologies available today, but prices of equipment have fallen substantially in
recent years. Demand for irrigation equipment is soaring.
Harvesting will be the central focus of mechanization efforts. Only 20 percent of the
arabica crop is mechanically harvested today. Manual strip harvesting will be progressively
replaced by mechanical stripping, using handheld harvesters that are compatible with coffee
planted on mountain sides, no matter how steep. This change can increase a picker’s efficiency
four- or fivefold; it is no surprise that pickers themselves are buying such machines for as low
as US $500 per unit. Large coffee harvesters, with their own wheels and engines, are the pre-
ferred choice for areas that are flat or have moderate slopes; in this case each machine replaces
up to a hundred pickers.
The technology to bring about this new revolution is already available because the Brazilian
Coffee Research Consortium has done a great job itself and in cooperation with the private
sector, especially the fertilizer, agrochemical, and equipment manufacturers. The great obstacle
is how to make this technology reach the largest number of arabica growers quickly and at a
reasonable cost. What may be required is the creation of management and technology “pack-
ages” adapted to the main arabica producing regions, including financial support for reconver-
sion and renovation and also efforts to expand technical assistance and rural extension services,
especially for smallholders.
Competitiveness can be greatly enhanced by climbing the “quality ladder.” Whereas hus-
bandry can help improve quality substantially (for example, in the choice of varieties and
nutrition practices), the largest potential gains lie in postharvest processing, especially in the
use of the pulped natural processing system that produces coffees known in Brazil as CD
(“Cereja Descascado”). Pulped naturals command a higher price because they have the typical
sweetness and body of high-quality naturals, yet are free from the astringency that can occur
in Brazilian naturals when climate is adverse. CD production has gone beyond the specialty

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coffee niche and has already surpassed seven million bags in some years. Washed Brazils will
become deliverable at ICE Futures New York in 2013.
In spite of the safety net of domestic consumption, which absorbs about 30 percent of the
average arabica production, Brazilian growers of arabica will have to gain competitiveness in
order to retain their current share of world exports. This task is difficult but not impossible,
as there are still large traditional areas to be technified. Irrigation may lower production costs
by ensuring production in dry years, and there are new frontiers to be explored, especially
technological, but also geographical. However, these are mid- to long-term solutions. In the
short run, improved farm management, better use of existing financial instruments, and value
addition have a better chance to enhance the competitiveness of Brazilian arabicas.

CONILON

The future of conilon growing in Brazil looks positive from either perspective, domestic
consumption or exports. Total demand for conilon in 2012 is estimated at approximately 14
million bags, against production of 12 million. Some 9 or 10 million bags went to domestic
roasters and 3 to 4 million bags went to the soluble industry (about 80 percent of which will
be exported as soluble coffee), leaving a million or so bags for export. Conilon definitely has
room to expand.
Conilon production may increase in three different ways: greater yields in current areas, new
plantings in traditional conilon areas, and the opening of new areas. Technology developed on
some farms in the leading producer state of Espírito Santo has steadily improved yields to first
6, then 10 and now a record breaking 12 tons/hectare, whereas the average yield for the state
is 25.5 bags/hectare (1.5 tons/hectare) to be compared with the average national yield of 22
bags/hectare (1.3 tons/hectare).1 There is much room for growth in existing areas, particularly
considering that the high yields reported above have not been obtained in test plots but in
actual plantations and refer to four-year sliding averages. Since high-yielding conilon is mostly
planted in low altitude areas that are not very far from the ocean and that benefit from lower
labor costs, existing technology will have to be tested and most probably adapted as conilon
moves into higher areas that are considering this alternative to arabica production.
Another area gaining attention is quality improvement, with increasing interest in the pro-
duction of washed conilons for the high end of the domestic market and exports.

FINAL REMARKS

High coffee prices pose a unique opportunity for Brazil to continue its production revolution
in order to ensure its competitiveness when coffee prices fall back closer to historical levels.
Sustainability may be the basis of the new coffee revolution in Brazil, which is today the
world’s largest supplier of sustainable beans. The potential to increase volumes of this type
of coffee is still huge. Brazil’s high yields bless the country’s growers with the unique ability
to invest in order to become socially and environmentally responsible, as well as to produce
coffees that are truly sustainable.
The challenges are huge, the tools are readily available, and good coffee prices create the
conditions for their use. The big question is whether recent and future profits, before coffee

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166 Carlos H. J. Brando

prices fall down again, will be enough to offset the decapitalization (and even losses) that af-
fected most Brazilian coffee growers this decade and whether the coffee sector and government
will together devise and implement policies to support the turnaround. If not, we will have
only the survival of the fittest, which are not few, and Brazil will no longer increase its market
participation and will certainly lose market share in arabica.
At the same time, the Brazilian coffee sector as a whole should be looking for ways to add
value to the share of its coffee production that is today exported as green coffee. Considering
that Brazilian coffees are key components of most blends around the world, Brazil should open
its frontiers to imports from other origins to enable the country to become an export platform
for finished products—roast and ground as well as soluble—to be made by the private sec-
tor (i.e., existing or new national and multinational companies). This export platform might
eventually create for arabicas the same price protection shield that today exists for conilons.

NOTE

1. Editor’s (RT) note: The figures for average production in the state and in Brazil as a whole are taken
from P&A Coffee Newsletter 5, no. 51, October 7, 2011, http://www.peamarketing.com.br/coffidential/
coffidential-051.pdf, accessed April 10, 2012.

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30
Supporting Coffee Farmers’ Response
to Market Changes
Jeremy Haggar

The decade 2000–2010 witnessed dramatic changes in the world price of coffee, starting with
a global oversupply of coffee and prices of less than $0.50 per pound (New York C price) and
ending with unsatisfied demand and prices rising to $3.00 per pound in 2011. During the
period of the extremely low coffee prices between 2000 and 2003, export earnings from coffee
halved and accumulated losses in Central America amounted to $800 million.1 This led to half
a million workers losing their jobs and poverty levels in coffee regions rising significantly. Sim-
ilar effects were seen on the 20 million families worldwide that depend on coffee production.
At the same time, consumers have demanded better quality, and the markets for certified
socially and environmentally responsible coffee have grown considerably. During this period,
considerable engagement has taken place between the producer sector, the coffee industry, and
international development agencies, which are looking to manage and support producers in
responding to this dynamic environment. This article will examine some of the results of this
dynamic in Central America.

THE RESPONSE TO MARKET CRASH IN COFFEE PRICES

In response to social and economic impacts of the fall in coffee prices between 1999 and
2003, the major donors in Central America—The World Bank, Inter-American Development
Bank, and USAID—called a meeting in April 2002 in Guatemala of all interested parties in
the coffee sector and presented and discussed a strategy for response.2 In essence, the donors
indicated they were not willing to refinance the sector to continue as before, but were willing
to invest in changes to increase the competitiveness of the coffee sector, essentially focusing
on improving quality for specialty coffee markets and diversification for areas that were not
competitive. Among other initiatives stemming from this event were three regional projects:
one funded by USAID, implemented by Chemonics; a second funded by IADB, implemented
by Technoserve; and a third funded by the World Bank, implemented by the Tropical Agri-
cultural Research and Higher Education Centre (CATIE). Similar initiatives were undertaken
in other parts of the world such as by ACDI-VOCA in Colombia and Technoserve in Tanza-
nia. These projects had similar objectives overall: to improve the quality of coffee produced,

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increase the business capacity of the producer organizations, and strengthen ties to the buyers
of quality coffee. Between 2004 and 2007, the CATIE project “Linking Farmers to Coffee
Markets” was implemented in alliance with the National Coffee Association of Guatemala
(ANACAFE), the Honduran Coffee Institute (IHCAFE), and the Association of Small Cof-
fee Producer Cooperatives of Nicaragua (CAFENICA). The rest of this article will use this
project to illustrate the process of building capacity in forty-nine producer cooperatives across
Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, with a combined membership of about 3,500 families.
These co-ops, in turn, were members of ten marketing co-ops.

SUPPORT AND TRAINING FOR FARMERS

Although the productive part of the strategy of Linking Farmers to Coffee Markets focused
on coffee quality, it was also evident that productivity was very low, and this also affected the
economic viability of coffee farming. Therefore, training was provided on recuperating the
productivity of existing coffee plantations, primarily through improved agronomic practices
such as pruning to recover plant productivity, shade regulation, soil fertility management,
and management of pests and diseases. This was provided as a year-long series of training
sessions covering the main topics of coffee management at the time of year that corresponds
to that management. During harvest and processing, the project prioritized aspects of qual-
ity control during harvest. The project provided training of between twenty and thirty
extension agents and farmer promoters in each country who in turn trained some 2,000
farmers across all countries.
The business aspect of the program was designed following a diagnostic of the entrepre-
neurial capacity of the producer and marketing cooperatives—which revealed considerable
differences in capacity. To cope with these, a series of formal training sessions in strategic
planning, financial management, and commercial management were given but with indi-
vidual follow-up with each cooperative to adequately apply these principles to their needs
and capability. Both farmers and cooperatives were supported in developing capacity to man-
age certification processes, where this was an objective of the cooperative. Also, marketing
cooperatives received training in improving their quality control and traceability systems, in
collaboration with the Technoserve/IADB Central American Coffee Project. Furthermore,
equipment was provided to establish cupping laboratories in each country. In the area of
marketing support, promotional leaflets, videos, and web pages were developed for the differ-
ent organizations, and participation in the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s annual
symposium and expo was supported with experienced facilitators organizing and mediating
meetings with coffee buyers.

TRAINING OUTCOMES

Coffee farmers made modest improvements in their management of coffee with a 10–20
percent increase in the number of farmers pruning bushes, fertilizing, and regulating shade.
Slightly better improvements were achieved in implementation of practices to ensure coffee
quality with a 20–50 percent increase in the number of farmers only picking red cherries, cor-
rectly fermenting the coffee, and grading the washed coffee. Likewise, almost twice as many

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Supporting Coffee Farmers’ Response to Market Changes 169

farmers (the majority) improved their record keeping of farm management, contributing to
compliance with certification standards.
In the area of business management, the majority of cooperatives developed strategic
plans, revised or developed financial management procedures, analyzed their cost structures,
and reviewed their strategies of marketing alliances. Seventeen of the cooperatives achieved
new certifications, mostly with Rainforest Alliance, Utz Certified-Good Inside, and C.A.F.E.
Practices (about half of the co-ops were already certified organic prior to the project). Prob-
ably most significantly, as a result of the analysis of marketing alliances, in Honduras, six
cooperatives that previously had no affiliation to a marketing cooperative decided to form a
new marketing cooperative, CORECAFE. Although this initiative took time to establish and
CORECAFE was only legally formed in the last months of the project, four years later, the
organization managed to export eleven containers of coffee, four of them certified Rainfor-
est Alliance. Overall, the prices received by uncertified coffee farmers improved from $0.77/
pound to $0.87/pound, also halving the negative differential against the New York C price
(the negative differential being a function of the perceived quality of coffee from these country
origins). The price for organic coffee, however, remained stable at $1.02/pound. No sales of
other certified coffees were made during the period of the project.
The combined effects of improved production, quality, business capacity, and marketing
came together in Honduras, where the producers increased their participation in the an-
nual Cup of Excellence program, achieving three winners in the 2007 competition. One
of these, from a small organic cooperative, attracted attention from a specialty coffee buyer,
Atlas Coffee, which has subsequently bought the coffee from this cooperative every year.
Another winner was Dona Maria Irma Gutierrez, who attributed her success to the training
provided by the project.

OUTCOMES IN THE LIVES OF COFFEE PRODUCERS

The changes in coffee production and income were different among the three countries.
In Nicaragua and Honduras between 2004–05 and 2006–07, coffee productivity among
participants increased by 10–25 percent, while net income almost doubled (from $724 to
$1,591 per family in Nicaragua and $2,192 to $4,040 per family in Honduras). In Guatemala,
productivity declined by 11–13 percent, although net income of organic farmers stayed the
same ($880 per family) and it decreased for conventional farmers (from $2,887 to $2,146 per
family). The main reason for this difference is that, during this period, the daily wage rate in-
creased by 30–50 percent in Guatemala, limiting the capacity of Guatemalan farmers to invest
in improvements while increasing their costs. Nevertheless, averaged across Central America,
the income of 2,000 farming families increased by $800 per family. The volume of coffee sold
by the cooperatives increased by 24 percent to over 95,000 100-pound sacks while the value
of sales increased from $6,695,000 to $9,094,000, an increase in value of over $2 million.
It can never be certain to what degree the project contributed to these changes, but we do
know that improvements occurred through increased efficiency of production and improved
market differentials, areas in which the project worked, and not through a simple increase in
world price, which was fairly stable during this period. Nevertheless, we obtain a clear picture
of how coffee producers were able to respond to changing market conditions. Prior to the proj-
ect—during the coffee crisis of historically low prices (2001–2003)—small-scale farmers were

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170 Jeremy Haggar

making $200–300 per year net income from coffee production. During the recovery period
covered by these projects, this situation generally improved, with farmers able to moderately
increase investment in production, although still without sufficient income to completely
renovate the coffee plantations as would be required to substantially improve yields. However,
farmers did increase net income to between $1,000 and $4,000 per year (for coffee farms of
an average 1–3 hectares [2.5–7.5 acres]). Subsequent collaboration with these same farmers in
Nicaragua and Honduras has shown that although they have increased gross income from cof-
fee production by 20–70 percent, this gain has been consumed by ever increasing daily wage
rates and prices of inputs such that in 2009–10, their net incomes were largely unchanged.
Price increases during 2010 and 2011 may once again affect the scenario, possibly enabling
farmers to finally invest in renovating coffee plantations to increase productivity. As ever, the
hope is that this doesn’t then sow the seeds of overproduction and another coffee price crash.
Planning the economic and agronomic management of a crop whose productive lifespan is
over twenty years and during which prices may fluctuate sixfold is a perpetual challenge for
both producers and the industry.

NOTES

1. F. Castro, E. Montes, and M. Raine, “Centroamerica La Crisis Cafetalera: Efectos y Estrategias para
Hacerle Frente,” Sustainable Development Working Paper No. 23, 2004, The World Bank, Washington.
2. IADB/WB/USAID. “Managing the Competitive Transition of the Coffee Sector in Central
America,” Discussion Document, presented Antigua, Guatemala, April 2002.

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CONSUMER COUNTRY PROFILES

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31
Introduction to Consumer Countries
Jonathan Morris

Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, coffee was essentially grown in three areas—
Asia, Africa, and Latin America—in order to be consumed in two others—Europe and North
America.1 Producing countries rarely consumed their own coffee: locals preferred other
beverages, for instance mate in Latin America, while several producing countries, which were
dependent on the crop for valuable external revenues, prevented their peoples from sampling
the final product. Kenya, for example, refused to allow coffee to be roasted in the country
until 2002. The only major exceptions to these continental divisions were Ethiopia, where it
is estimated that around half of the crop is consumed by domestic drinkers, and Japan, which
became one of the leading consuming countries after 1945.
The situation today looks rather different. Between 2000 and 2010, the share of world
production consumed in the traditional markets fell from 60 percent to around 52 percent,
while the amount of coffee remaining in producer countries rose from 25 percent to 31 per-
cent. Meanwhile the emerging nontraditional markets have continued to increase their share
of world consumption, from 15 percent to 17 percent. In terms of absolute volume, world
consumption increased by 27.4 percent between 2000 and 2010, but while in the traditional
markets this figure only grew by 11.6 percent, in the producing countries it rose by 56.7 per-
cent and in the emerging markets by 41.9 percent. 2
The ICO’s figures for 2010 show that Brazil is now in second place, behind the U.S., in
terms of the total volume of coffee consumed, and catching up fast with an annual growth rate
of 4.1 percent to America’s 1.6 percent. In seventh place is the Russian Federation, whose 16.9
percent increase in imports between 2009 and 2010 saw it overtake such traditional markets as
Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Yet the Russian Federation, although the largest of
the emerging markets, is far from the fastest growing. That title goes to its neighbor Ukraine,
where the total volume of coffee consumed during the first decade of the twenty-first century
rose at an annual rate of 23.6 percent.
The expansion of consumption in Russia and Ukraine is symptomatic of a phenomenon
that Slavenka Drakulic, a Croatian writer, pointed out in her 1996 book Café Europa:3 that
a Western-style café, often called “Europa,” sprang up quickly in every major European
city east of the Elbe River following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These shops
became a key symbol of aspirations for a new life and a longing, especially among young

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174 Jonathan Morris

people, to be more “European.” Coffeeheaven, a leading coffee shop chain in Poland, Latvia,
Bulgaria, and Slovakia, now operated by Costa Coffee, used to claim that its coffeehouses
“feel as familiar and relaxed as a café in London, Paris or Rome. . . . the Coffeeheaven con-
cept combines the best of two converging worlds: Western experience with ‘new’ Europe’s
aspirations, talent and youth.”4
In emerging markets outside Europe, however, the reference point is nearly always America,
with coffeehouses appearing to offer access to the Western style of life. Starbucks, along with
McDonald’s and KFC, have built their appeal in China partly on the appeal of experiencing
something American while eating and drinking.
In the traditional markets too, change is afoot. European countries such as France, Ger-
many, and the United Kingdom have developed very different consumption patterns and
industry structures over time, but the impact of the specialty, or perhaps more precisely
espresso, revolution that swept out of home markets at the end of the twentieth century, has
impacted them as much as the U.S. and Italy. The rise of single-portion (capsule) systems
promising to bring the experience of the coffee shop into the kitchen threatens to overturn
these even further. Meanwhile consumers are increasingly influenced by ethical factors in their
coffee choices, as our detailed discussion of Denmark demonstrates.
If this book is updated ten years into the future, we may well be discussing different con-
sumer giants—perhaps China, which is already showing great interest in the bean among
its elite, or Turkey, which is rapidly increasing its consumption after over a century of tea
as the dominant beverage in the country that first brought coffee to Europe. For now these
profiles give a flavor of the evolution and current nature of coffee culture in some of the
world’s leading consumer markets.

NOTES

1. See “Coffee: A Condensed History” in this volume. Australasia, with relatively low absolute
volumes of both production and consumption in world terms, remains classified among the emerging
markets by the ICO.
2. Robério Oliveria Silva, ICO, “International Coffee Outlook,” presentation to India International
Coffee Festival, New Dehli, 2012.
3. Slavenka Drakulic, Café Europa: Life after Communism (New York: Norton, 1997).
4. http://www.coffeeheaven.eu.com, accessed May 25, 2006.

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32
Denmark
Camilla C. Valeur

Examining Danish consumers’ interest in sustainability and certification is a useful case

study of current trends in the market for certified coffee.1 The Danish domestic market is
in the top tier in regard to coffee consumption per capita and market share of sustainable
coffees. Danes are the second thirstiest consumers in Europe at 9.7 kilograms per person
annually.2 According to the Danish Coffee Association, imports of green (not decaffein-
ated) coffee into Denmark from all sources amounted to 35,592 tons (593,200 bags) in
2010, compared with 30.889 tons (514,817 bags) in 2009. This is an increase of 4,703 tons
(78,383 bags) or 15 percent.
Four companies dominate the Danish market: Sara Lee, Kraft Foods, BKI, and Peter
Larsen. These four are responsible for about 90 percent of the retail and the home/restaurant/
café (known as “horeca”) market, while fifteen to twenty microroasters make up the rest.3
Most importers and roasters offer sustainable coffees, in particular organic and Fairtrade In-
ternational certified. Some microroasters present their entire product line as sustainable and
as integral to their business philosophy (see, for example, Just Coffee.dk). In supermarkets,
the four bigger companies dominate, while microroasters are found in the specialty shops and
in the out-of-home market.
Danish consumers are in the top tier as well in demand for sustainable products in gen-
eral and in particular regarding coffee. About 40 percent of consumers are regular buyers of
fair trade–certified products, and sales of Fairtrade coffee have been growing over the last
five years, although 2011 witnessed a small decline. The main reason for the decrease from
2010 to 2011 was the significant price increases of raw materials; the value of imports has
risen while the amount of coffee has declined. The financial crisis has affected price elasticity
among consumers, and higher prices for coffee have created a downscaling effect in which a
number of consumers have started to buy cheaper products. But for consumers of certified
coffees, this trend has been weaker; those who buy certified coffees tend to be more loyal and
less price sensitive.
Danish consumers are also in the top rank around the world in spending on organic prod-
ucts. Per capita annual outlay on organic products in 2009 was the highest in the world, and
the market share of organic food sales was 7.2 percent.4 In comparison, organic food and
beverage sales represented approximately 4 percent of overall food and beverage sales in 2010

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176 Camilla C. Valeur

in the U.S.5 The market share of sustainable coffees in the U.S. was 11 percent in volume and
14.5 percent in value in 2010, 10.7 percent in volume and 14.2 percent in value in 2011.6

TRENDS IN CONSUMPTION AND THE ISSUE

OF SUSTAINABILITY IN DANISH COFFEE

A key reason that Danish consumers buy certified coffee is concern for the farmers who pro-
duced it. Another factor is health concerns (consumers of organic food products in particular
cite health as an important reason for choosing organic products over conventional). Consum-
ers claim that they are willing to pay around 10 percent more for Fairtrade-certified products
if they feel certain that the extra cost is benefiting farmers. According to a study from 2008,
the principal reason Danish consumers cite for their purchase of Fairtrade products is that
they want to feel that they make a difference in the world and to help farmers and workers.7
It is therefore crucial that consumers have faith in certification. According to a survey
carried out by Capacent Epinion for the Danish Chamber of Commerce, nearly a third of
the respondents (31 percent) replied that the main reason for increasing their consumption
of Fairtrade products is their growing trust in the Fairtrade label as a guarantee of distinct
benefits for the farmer.8
This response implies that consumers do not buy anything that claims to do good unless
they feel sure that a product delivers on this promise. Sociologist and consumer analyst Eva
Steensig maintains that a paradigm shift is under way: consumers increasingly abandon the
“because it feels good” economy and demand documentation for sustainability, health or en-
vironmental benefits, or indeed whatever a product or company may claim.9 Anthony Aconis
has recently argued that one of the eight emerging global trends in consumerism is “Clean-
Real,” a megatrend that refers to consumers demanding clean products from clean companies.
That means no hidden chemical ingredients, no unsustainable production methods, and most
of all no misleading or unreliable communication. “Consumers want proof that farmers are
actually benefitting from Fairtrade or any other sustainability claim on the product.”10 This
trend is confirmed in a report from 2011 on “Trends in the Food Sector” from the Aarhus
School of Business,11 in which the authors explain that consumers want to buy products
grown or developed with respect for social and environmental issues.

WHO TO TRUST?

We don’t trust companies,12 but Danish consumers have a high level of trust in the European or-
ganic label and the Fairtrade label. A survey undertaken by Capacent Epinion notes that 75 per-
cent of respondents agree that labels like Fairtrade are guarantees of sustainability in agriculture.13
A threat to consumers’ trust in the labels is reports that the labels are not upholding their
claims. So when cases emerge that show some farmers selling organic products are not uphold-
ing organic principles or that farmers are not benefiting from the Fairtrade premium, consum-
ers’ trust in the labels can weaken.14 At the same time, it seems that a majority of consumers
are not changing buying habits due to negative stories. Purchasers seem to know that the fair
trade issue is a complex process in which results and impact are not always easily measurable.
Simultaneously, consumers believe that most organic farmers are meeting the standards for
that designation.

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Denmark 177

Since the value of the labels depends on consumers’ trust, and since thorough checks
of results are the key to maintaining confidence, many labels are strengthening their in-
ternal monitoring and evaluation. Further, to be able to document impact is crucial, and
the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labeling (ISEAL) Alliance
has launched a multistakeholder process to help their members—including the govern-
ing bodies of Fairtrade, Organic, Rainforest Alliance, Utz Certified, 4C, and many other
systems—to improve their understanding and implementation of credible forms of impact
assessment. Many of the leading sustainability labeling organizations have independently
begun working with IISD’s (International Institute for Sustainable Development) Com-
mittee on Sustainability Assessment (COSA) to better understand the effects of their work
at the field level. These and other efforts indicate the complexity of impact measurement
and the importance given to this issue by the certifiers and by their stakeholders. A newly
published Fairtrade report documents the number of farmers involved in Fairtrade and also
the benefits for farmers related to the Fairtrade Bonus.15 The Fairtrade organization in Den-
mark, Fair Trade Danmark, has announced that it will greatly increase its documentation of
impact in order to show more clearly how Fairtrade makes a difference.

HOW SHOULD THE DOCUMENTATION

BE COMMUNICATED TO CONSUMERS?

With growing demand from consumers, there are now efforts to provide evaluations or portals
for more transparent and credible information. This goes beyond basic corporate sustain-
ability reporting guidelines such as those promoted by the Global Reporting Initiative. New
organizations such as Global Impact Investing Network, Big Room Inc., and People4Earth
.org are all interested in consumer-accessible platforms that more explicitly examine sustain-
ability efforts. Some groups are developing ratings that reward companies and products that
contribute to sustainability and expose those that disregard sustainability values or even use
unsavory or fraudulent practices. According to various sources in the Danish coffee industry
and in the retail market, the growing interest in traceability systems is another indication for
the expanding need to document sustainability.
Utz Certified, like organic systems before it, stands out as an early mover in the implemen-
tation of traceability systems for sustainable coffees and has used its online traceability system
as a parameter for differentiation in the market since 2002. A pilot project currently being
tested in a large supermarket chain with Utz coffee allows consumers to use smartphones to
scan the coffee packaging on a screen located close to the coffee shelves and to see precisely
the farmers or cooperatives that have produced and delivered the coffee and to learn about
their stories. The pilot project is the result of close collaboration among figures throughout
the value chain: the producer cooperatives, the importer and roaster, and a certifier with a
traceability system.16
According to a large Danish retailer, traceability systems will play an important role in the
future and will be used to trace more and more variables, like carbon footprint and product
freshness, and will communicate this information to consumers by using a mixture of differ-
ent technologies.17
The big challenges here are determining what information to offer to consumers and where
and when to make it available. The example just given dates from 2009; it showed that over
time consumers ceased to scan the product in the supermarket, whereas a mobile solution that

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178 Camilla C. Valeur

came later was much more preferred. The mobile solution meant that consumers with smart-
phones could scan the product in their home at any time, which implied a greater likelihood
of finding the right moment to do so.
Requirements for information about sustainability may be different in the business-to-busi-
ness (B2B) market. According to a Danish trader, importers increasingly expect more from
their suppliers in communicating and documenting the effects of their sustainability initia-
tives, not only through certifications but also other documented sources.18 In business-to-con-
sumer (B2C) markets this can take place by describing specific corporate social responsibility
(CSR) projects and initiatives on the web page or through other channels of communication.
In B2B markets roasters and importers can invite their customers to visit selected suppliers in
coffee-producing countries to “document” the effect of their initiatives.19

THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND CO2 DOCUMENTATION

The Danish National Consumer Agency has noted that climate is currently very much the
focus of many CSR efforts and is ranked number three of the issues that most preoccupy Dan-
ish consumers.20 Their 2008 report indicates that Danish consumers are very interested in a
carbon footprint label; three out of four consumers agree that a climate label would facilitate
their shopping for more climate friendly products.
According to a survey undertaken by Aspecto for AgroTech, an authorized technological
service institute, consumers do want more clear and accurate information, but they don’t
necessarily want more labels.21 They feel they are already drowning in an information swamp.
One solution could be to integrate the carbon footprint aspect into existing labeling systems.
Still, there is increasing interest in information on climate and sustainability, as evidenced by
the common use of Ecological Footprint, the Global Footprint Network measures,22 and the
emergence of basic standards platforms such as People4Earth. At the field level, COSA has in-
tegrated carbon sequestration into its metrics for all production systems and intends to measure
the differences between conventional approaches and the various sustainability initiatives. The
goal is to determine whether there is a significant difference in their ability to manage carbon and
thereby mitigate negative climate effects. According to certification organizations like Utz and
Rainforest Alliance, it is almost certain that carbon control will be a part of future sustainability
labeling systems even if it is unclear how or when such systems will be marketable.
In 2009, the Danish Coffee Network hosted a Coffee Climate Conference in Copenhagen
intended to motivate further communication and research on how the coffee value chain is
affecting global climate and vice versa.23 The network has also worked with roasters and cof-
fee bars in Copenhagen to reduce their companies’ CO2 emissions and to create value out of
their waste. The latter initiative, which has been implemented together with the municipality
of Copenhagen’s engineers, gives companies the right to use a Climate+ logo as a way to com-
municate their efforts to consumers.

THE WAY FORWARD

Danish and other organizations dedicated to fairly traded commodities and sustainability now
need to do two important things:

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Denmark 179

• Provide credible and transparent information in the right amount (what), at the right
time and place (where and when)
• Increase collaboration between certification schemes and researchers as well as between
companies and researchers (especially within private labeling)

Danish consumers have significantly increased their consumption of sustainable coffee

since 2005 and are willing to pay a higher price as long as they feel confident that their
purchases affect farmers and the environment positively. Consumers increasingly request
documentation on sustainability, which has put greater pressure on the entire supply chain,
including roasters and certification organizations, to credibly document impact. Many coffee
companies depend on certification to communicate sustainability impacts effectively, without
overburdening consumers with information or requiring too much effort. One of the more
immediate challenges is to develop a trustworthy system to measure the CO2 footprint of
products and to integrate the data into existing sustainability labels.
Expectations that companies will take responsibility for the sustainability of their products
and the demand for documentation are likely to increase the use of traceability systems in
some form. At a minimum, these will be systems that can trace improvements and violations
of ethical standards. Some of the challenges in this effort stem from the fact that many cof-
fee farmers are living in distant rural areas, with no access to the Internet. Some are illiterate.
Simultaneously, since these systems will have to be both reliable and relatively low-cost, it
is likely they will need to be integrated into proven field metrologies, for example radio fre-
quency identification (RFID), to make the necessary information available to end-consumers.
In some cases, such as B2B markets where direct verification is possible, this trend may not
need to rely on technology alone but can also involve dialogue and field visits (which in any
event are important elements in the direct trade concept).
In the last several years, consumer price elasticity has shrunk as the price of coffee has risen.
These trends make the market for sustainable coffees more difficult to operate in. Yet basic
questions related to sustainable coffee and how to communicate its social and environmental
value to consumers remain valid.

NOTES

1. Sustainable approaches in coffee refer to organic, Fair Trade, Organic, UTZ CERTIFIED, Rain-
forest Alliance, and other certifications, including private standards, with a stated objective to improve
the social, environmental, and economic conditions of small farmers, their land, families, and so on.
2. According to the European Coffee Report (2010/2011), European Coffee Federation, www.ecf
-coffee.org. However, some sources place Norway’s consumption ahead of Denmark’s.
3. Association of Danish Coffee and Tea Importers.
4. Research Institute of Organic Agriculture.
5. Organic Trade Association’s 2011 Organic Industry Survey.
6. Source: AC Nielsen. It is important to note that between 65 and 75 percent of fair trade–certified
coffees also are organic certified and may thus be represented twice in the data extractions.
7. Analyse Danmark 2008.
8. Capacent Epinion 2008.
9. Eva Steensig, “Fairtrade out and robots in,” interview on Danish Radio (DR), December 3, 2008,
http://www.dr.dk/P1/Krause/Udsendelser/.

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180 Camilla C. Valeur

10. Anthony Aconis, Storegasm: Eight Global Trends That Define Our Shopping Today and Tomorrow
(Copenhagen: Where2go, 2008), 80–93.
11. Athanasios Krystallis Krontalis, Joachim Scholderer, Karen Brunsø, Klaus Grunert, Lars Esbjerg,
Lisa Lähteenmäki, and Tino Bech-Larsen, “Trends i fødevaresektoren 2010–2015,” Lecture, Aarhus
School of Business, MAPP Centre, 2010.
12. According to a survey by the Danish National Consumer Agency (2008), 50 percent of consum-
ers believe that companies have the primary responsibility for the sustainability of products that are
produced in Denmark, including raw materials. However, consumers do not trust firms to accurately
measure or report their own sustainability and their actions toward it.
13. Capacent Epinion.
14. In Denmark a documentary made in 2008 by Tom Heinemann claimed that Fairtrade made
no difference to workers on tea estates. He had visited tea estates in Asia and Kenya and found that
“fairtrade workers were working under miserable conditions just as the workers at conventional estates.”
In 2009 some Danish organically certified milk farmers were caught not upholding the standards for
medicinal use.
15. Monitoring the Scope and Benefits of Fair Trade, 3rd ed., 2011.
16. Anita Aerni, Key Account Manager Europe, Utz Certified.
17. Brian Sønderby Sundstrup, Social Responsibility Developer, CSR FDB.
18. Lis Correa Rasmussen, Trader, NAF Trading.
19. Kurt Dalsgaard, Director Kontra Coffee.
20. Danish National Consumer Agency (2008).
21. AgroTech 2009.
22. http://www.footprintnetwork.org.
23. The Danish Coffee Network was created in 2005 with financial support from the Danish De-
velopment Assistance (Danida) with the objective to improve the Danish coffee culture and promote
sustainability in the coffee value chain. Members of the network are micro roasters, larger industrial
roasters, traders, importers, retailers, cafés, certification organizations, and private consumers.

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33
France
Jonathan Wesley Bell

If Italy and Germany can be said to lead European industry and markets through innovation,
engineering, design, and economic persuasion, then it falls to France to lead in fashion and
discernment. Appreciating fine coffee in France, more than anywhere else, is a matter of class.
Two French classes have set the coffee standard in fashion and appreciation for centuries and
continue to do so: the elite and the intelligentsia.
During the centuries that France governed European cultures in language, philosophy,
art, and literature, the café became a signature of this imperialism. The coffee consumed in
the nation’s vast landscape of cafés was mainly colonial in origin, largely robusta from the
empire’s various coffee-producing areas. But not all French cafés served rough coffee. Excel-
lent coffees from many different origins were and are a remarkable aspect of this corner of
the French market.
Above the café realm, coffee became “French” first in court at Versailles. Louis XV not
only had coffee grown in the botanical gardens there, he also roasted it himself. The power
in fashion of the French king and his court throughout Europe is of considerable importance
in understanding the continuing authority of French consuming trends. This explains why
France is a market that coffee powers covet and where new concepts in coffee are often zeal-
ously promoted.
It is not surprising that a quarter of Nespresso pod global sales, at the time of this writing,
are in France. Nor that it is the French who first gave Senseo a bonanza in sales.
Twenty-five years ago France still lingered in its imperial days and the masses largely drank
robusta; arabica coffees were for the intelligentsia and the elite. Except for the United King-
dom, no country in Europe has witnessed greater coffee change in the past quarter century
than France. It has gone topsy-turvy.
The national cup by green coffee contents is now 80 percent arabica. Coffee for home
consumption has become a near monopoly of the super-hyper markets. This is roast and
ground; whole beans have almost disappeared from these stores, although their sales by coffee
boutiques and such are increasing. The brand array in big stores is now staggering; a “hyper”
market in France may shelve more than sixty coffee references.
In the process of radical change in its coffee market, France lost control of its own once
grand coffee industry. The great French green coffee trading houses are almost gone. The

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182 Jonathan Wesley Bell

Figure 33.1. Even in coffee-producing countries, instant coffee counts for a lot.
This roadside ad is from rural Kenya, 2004. Photo by Robert Thurston.

country’s ports formerly bustling with colonial coffees have turned to other commodities.
Antwerp and Hamburg handle most of the coffee that eventually reaches France.
The nation’s coffee roasting has been subsumed as well by international interests. The
bulk of the market is shared by Kraft, Sara Lee, and Nestle, with much of the rest taken by
store-brands plus the Italian companies Lavazza, Segafredo, and Illy. Even Malongo, a vigor-
ous roastery located in Nice and known for its staunch promotion of the finer origins and of
so-called ethically traded coffees, is owned by the Belgium company Rombouts.
Horeca (hotel-restaurant-café) sectors continue to be the lifeblood of smaller local roasters,
who provide most of the coffee going to cafés. Yet change is sweeping even this fabled French
market segment. The number of cafés has declined by about 20 percent in past years. Some of
the decline in regard to coffee is due to competition from new concepts in home consumption—
the pod and capsule. Other competition arises from dedicated espresso bar and coffee shop
chains. These include McCafé, Columbus, Starbucks, and other companies—all in expansion.
What coffee trends are in fashion and demand? Most certainly Italian-style espresso.
Single-estate or single-origin coffee (as opposed to arabica blends). Bio and “ethical” coffees
are also seeing rapid growth.
France is a wealthy nation, and its coffee market is worth billions of euros. The market also
benefits from population growth, unlike most other European coffee-drinking nations. This
growth partly explains the steady if modest expansion of consumption. The nation drinks
beverages made from something more than 300,000 tons of coffee per annum.
Setting France aside as a mass coffee market is its zest for fashion, in good taste of course.
Also setting it apart is the enduring passion for coffee among its elite and the intelligentsia.
It is these classes that now profile the best French cup as a single-origin coffee of distinction,
lightly roasted, served in porcelain. The famed French “nose” remains the ultimate arbiter.
Even the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s aroma kit is called “Le Nez du Café.”

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France 183

The nation’s cultural prowess in thought, art, and literature in combination with the French
genius for nuances in taste and aroma are what make its coffee market unique to this day.
Any commentary on coffee in France should honor the work of Philippe Jobin. He rep-
resents the small class of French experts/enthusiasts for coffee study class at its most distin-
guished. His astonishing book The Coffees Produced throughout the World remains both classic
and alive.
To summarize the current French market:

• France is the second largest coffee market in Europe.

• About 80 percent of consumption in roast and ground coffee is of arabica. The national
cup is characterized by a large percentage of Brazilians, followed by Vietnamese, Colom-
bians, and other milds.
• Ground/roasted coffee (R&G) dominates the store sector. The sector is controlled by
labels belonging to KJS (Maison de Café), Sara Lee (Douwe Egberts), and Nestle. Almost
80 percent of sales are of 100 percent arabica blends.
• By format, store sales show a flattening of R&G coffees to about 70 percent. Single-
portion sales have gained to nearly 30 percent of the sector and are the most dynamic.
• More than 10 percent of shelf sales are of single-origin coffees. Bio/ethical coffees have
risen to 5 percent of sales.
• Something more than 20 percent of French consumption is in soluble. Another 5.5
percent is in decaffeinated coffee.
• Out-of-home coffee drinking comes to 25 percent of France’s total consumption, of
which 17 percent is through horeca.
• Of total coffee, 26 percent is now brewed from pods, capsules, or sachets. This makes
the brewer accessory market of great and expanding added value importance.
• At-home drinking is a strong growth sector for espresso pods and capsules, where Nes-
presso leads, as well as coffee-in-bag formats such as Senseo.
• In all, 72 percent of the French people drink coffee every day, and more than 90 percent
of French home kitchens have a coffee maker of some kind.

Generally, either at home—with traditional roast and ground, or now increasingly in

single-service products—as well as in the out-of-home sector, the profile is clear: the French
are electing to move upwards in coffee quality and are willing to spend money to enjoy a dif-
ferent, better kind of cup.

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34
Italy
Vincenzo Sandalj

Italy, the fourth biggest coffee-importing country, is the birthplace of espresso and the
cradle of one of the most popular coffee cultures in the world. The country boasts a lively
coffee industry, which has become one of the biggest exporters of roasted coffee and its
related equipment.
While coffee consumption developed relatively late compared to other more affluent West-
ern countries, it took off strongly during the second half of the twentieth century. Per capita
consumption grew from an average of 3.5 kilograms in the 1970s to 5.7 kilograms in the first
decade of the new millennium. Recently, it appears to be leveling off at this high figure.
Home consumption accounts for about two-thirds of the total quantity and about half
of the value of coffee consumed, while the remainder is out-of-home consumption (hotel-
restaurant-café, or horeca market), supported by a noteworthy 150,000 coffee bars. If we also
add the restaurants that serve espresso, the total number is well in excess of 200,000 units.
Decaffeinated coffee accounts for 7 percent of the market, while soluble coffee hovers just
above 1 percent. Certified, organic, and ethical coffees are slowly becoming more popular but
consumption is still far below the levels reached in the northern European countries.
Until the 1950s, Italians used to prepare coffee at home with the napoletana, a “flip over”
drip brewing system. This device was later widely replaced with the moka—a stovetop brewer
utilizing steam pressure—which remains the most popular coffeemaker in Italian households.
A much bigger revolution occurred in the out-of-home market. During the first half of the
twentieth century, espresso machines were first patented and then produced commercially,
while mass consumption of espresso and cappuccino developed in the 1950s and 1960s.
The proportion of domestic consumption among all coffee drunk has remained relatively
stable in recent years. Bigger changes can be observed in the horeca market, where a steady
decline in bar consumption has been counterbalanced by an increase in vending and in single-
serving coffee machines; these already account for 10 percent of total coffee imports and a
much higher proportion of the value. This segment features a very high growth rate, close to
20 percent per year. In the single-portion market, paper pods account for 25 percent of the
value, while plastic capsules account for about 50 percent. Aluminum capsules, the remaining
25 percent of the market, show the highest rate of growth. These capsules are mainly closed
systems that can be used only with dedicated machines.

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Italy 185

Figure 34.1. Italy’s cities and towns are still graced by gorgeous settings in which to have coffee,
read a newspaper (but not to web surf!), or listen to music. Caffe Pedrocchi, Padua, is a center
for art and especially classical music in the city. Photo by Robert Thurston.

Italy imported 7,684,913 60-kilogram green coffee bags in 2010 and re-exported the
equivalent of 2,460,015 bags, almost exclusively roasted coffee. The continuous rise in total
imports is supported by a steady increase in roasted coffee exports, which grew 9.6 percent in
2010. The main suppliers of green coffee are Brazil, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, and Uganda,
while the market share of the different groups is the following: Colombian milds 4.59 percent,
other milds 19.25 percent, Brazilian naturals 37.33 percent, and robustas 37.76 percent.
Italy had no coffee-producing colonies, except Ethiopia for a very few years, so importing
patterns do not reflect any particular historical tie. The development of taste preferences was
mainly due to economic reasons, but the strong Italian emigrant community in Brazil may
have played a role in promoting commercial cooperation. In 1959, an important warehouse
was established by the Instituto Brasileiro do Café in Trieste, in order to sell its stocks of old
coffees at discounted prices, and remained active for more than a decade. In those years, the
percentage of Brazilian coffee in Italian blends rose significantly.
The main ports of importation are Trieste, Savona, and Genoa. There are over 900 roasters
catering for a widely differentiated market. Italians have very strong and historically rooted
regional culinary traditions, and coffee is no exception. Since in Italy a coffee blend is the
starting point of a true espresso cup, there is a very specific Italian approach both in choosing
the appropriate components and in blending them into the right product. There are several
thousand blends available to the final customer, but most of them conform to the regional
preferences in the various market areas.
In northern Italy there is a preference for arabica-based blends, with variable or no robusta
component, while in southern Italy robusta coffees are the main or sole ingredient of the mix
chosen by the roasters. In central Italy, a golden 50/50 rule is customary. The roast degree also

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186 Vincenzo Sandalj

changes accordingly, with northerners preferring a lighter one and the southerners a darker one.
Furthermore, the extraction in the cup will be longer in the north, while in the south only a true
ristretto will be accepted, with sugar floating on the thick crema. Even cappuccinos are a north-
erly preference and nearly absent from Rome downwards. This substantial variety often puzzles
foreigners, who tend to wonder what the “real” Italian espresso is. The answer is, there are many.
Among the key players, Lavazza is by far the biggest roaster and accounts for nearly half of
the domestic consumption. Segafredo Zanetti, the leader in out of home consumption, has
a smaller overall market share but, if the international operations of the group are taken into
consideration, it is notably bigger than Lavazza. Kraft Foods owns the brand Caffè Splendid,
which is second in home market share. Nestlè, including its soluble coffee, is very active in
vending and especially in the single-serve capsules market with the worldwide brand Nes-
presso. Illycaffè is the leader in the out-of-home, high-quality market segment, with a grow-
ing single-serve market share and other important ventures. Café do Brasil, with the brand
Kimbo, is the market leader in southern Italy. There are another twenty medium-sized to large
regional companies and a galaxy of small to medium roasters scattered all over the country.
Altogether they have sales of nearly 3 billion euros (about $3.95 billion at the exchange rate
of mid-April 2012), of which 1 billion are outside Italy.
In spite of the large number of bars, which are mostly individual- and family-managed
operations, Italy has not developed significant coffee bar chains. The only notable exception
is Autogrill with its brand Acafé, located on highways, stations, and airports, and the newborn
Enicafé, found in gas stations. The remaining coffee bar chains are relatively small, and there
is no indication that they might change the established market patterns because of the extreme
fragmentation and low profitability of the sector. The price of an espresso cup, at around 1
euro, is one of the lowest in Europe. The retailer can survive only by selling other beverages,
spirits, and food and by exploiting the elasticity of family labor. These low margins, combined
with the culture of quickly consuming coffee while standing at the bar (that is, without table
service) would make it very difficult for a chain such as Starbucks to function in Italy, as con-
sumers would be unlikely to accept the high prices it charges to cover its costs.
The biggest Italian roasters purchase their green coffee directly from international traders,
usually through brokers and agents, while the smaller companies buy predominantly from
local importers, based in the main ports and cities. The world leader in coffee logistics is the
Trieste-based Pacorini group, with operations in many countries around the world. Another
important part of the Italian coffee sector is the mechanical industry, which includes produc-
ers of espresso machines, roasting and packaging equipment, vending machines, and related
services. Among the most well-known brands are Faema-Cimbali, Astoria-CMA, Brasilia,
and Rancilio. Italy is the world leader in some of these sectors, which rely heavily on foreign
markets for their double digit growth of recent decades.
The big number of coffee players in the Italian market has given rise to several trade associa-
tions. Assocaf Genova and Associazione Caffè Trieste, established in 1891, are the historical
trade associations that pay special attention to their respective ports and related trade. The
most important roasters’ associations are AIIPA and Associazione Italiana Torrefattori, while
the Federazione Caffè Verde groups green coffee importers. The main coffee associations are
represented in the national Comitato Italiano Caffè, but there are several other regional trade
associations, like Altoga and Gruppo Triveneto Torrefattori. The Trieste Coffee Cluster is the
only officially recognized industrial coffee cluster in the world.
There are two main coffee events in Italy, which alternate each year. The biggest is the
HOST/SIC which takes place at the Milan fair, probably the single biggest coffee show in the

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world, while TRIESTESPRESSO EXPO is held in the Adriatic city. Among the numerous
trade magazines that are focused on the world of coffee, we can mention Bargiornale, Cof-
feecolours, Coffee Trend Magazine, L’Assaggio, Mixer, and Notiziario Torrefattori among many
others. The Milan based e-journal Comunicaffè is dispatched daily to 25,000 subscribers.
The dissemination of Italian coffee culture is the main task of several schools, training
centers, and institutes, such as Università del Caffè, Istituto Nazionale Espresso Italiano, and
Accademia del Caffè, to mention just a few. Many roasters and individuals have small collec-
tions of historical machines and coffee makers, but the most complete private collection of
espresso machines is the one owned by Enrico Maltoni and featured regularly in exhibitions
around the world.
Italy can pride itself on an extremely vigorous coffee culture and industry that has spawned
offspring on all continents. In spite of stagnating domestic consumption due to the aging
population, the local market is a lively laboratory of new coffee styles and products. Italian
coffee and equipment manufacturers export an ever growing proportion of their output. This
development is likely to continue in the foreseeable future, supported by the unstoppable craze
for espresso and cappuccino in emerging markets.1

NOTE

1. For more on the Italian coffee market, see Coffitalia, 2011–12 Directory (Milan: Beverfood, 2012);
Caffè (Rome: Comitato Italiano Caffè); Coffee Market Reports, International Coffee Organization, Lon-
don; and Jonathan Morris, “Making Italian espresso, making espresso Italian,” Food and History 8, no.
2 (2010): 155–84.

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35
United Kingdom
Clare Benfield

The British are traditionally a nation of tea and instant coffee drinkers at home, but out of
home it’s a different story. The UK (population 62.4 million) is becoming a nation of spe-
cialty coffee drinkers, most of whom, unlike their continental counterparts, favor longer,
milky drinks rather than straight espresso.
So widespread has the uptake of café culture been in the UK since its initial growth spurt
in the 1990s—in cafés, restaurants, motorway service stations, offices, leisure centers, and so
on—that it is now a successful sector indeed. The UK currently leads in Europe in the growth
of consumption and number of outlets, defying a recession that for many around the world
is the toughest since the 1930s.
The branded coffee shop market in the UK totaled 4,871 outlets in 2011, marked by
more than 8 percent growth from the previous year. Turnover in 2011 was some £2.1 bil-
lion, more than twice the 2005 figure. When independents and nonspecialist coffee-serving
operators are added, this total rises to over 15,000. Allegra Strategies, which has compiled
these numbers, predicts a grand total of 18,000 coffee retailing outlets here and a £7 billion
turnover by 2015.1
Among the branded, coffee-focused chains are 1,342 Costa outlets in the UK, almost
twice the number of Starbucks and well ahead of Caffè Nero, AMT Coffee, Caffè Ritazza,
Café Thorntons, and Esquires. Other major, coffee-serving brands in the out-of-home
(hotel-restaurant-café, or horeca) sector with a national UK presence, but who are food-
focused, include Prêt à Manger and EAT. Smaller, regional, coffee-dedicated mini-chains
such as SOHO Coffee Company and Coffee #1 in the South West are on the rise. Indepen-
dents, too, who have tremendous scope to create a strong consumer draw by specializing in
premium, artisanal coffees, are making their presence felt, providing leading-edge inspira-
tion for the bigger players.
The UK’s more traditional venue for drinking, eating, and socializing, the local pub, has
faded away in many places or undergone a more female-friendly makeover in order to survive.
Until quite recently, many local authorities actively encouraged the arrival of café culture in
their areas to counteract fears of a binge-drinking culture after the UK relaxed licensing laws
in 2003. Lately, as residents and consumers see high streets that all look the same, the artisan
retailer is increasingly courted, but then challenged by high rents.

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In both rural regions and the cosmopolitan cities (not least London, where the City in par-
ticular provides an affluent, high-foot-traffic testing ground for new foods and beverages), UK
consumers have embraced espresso-based drinks and allied products, for example healthy
smoothies and indulgent cakes.
Overseas travel has led to greater product knowledge and, coupled with education—
encouraged by many of the sector’s main players, the majority of whom are responsive to the
public’s concerns about sustainability and ethical sourcing—means that more and more UK
consumers recognize, if not expect, high-quality specialty coffee beverages wherever they are.
Brands such as Whitbread-owned Coffee Nation, which became Costa Express, have also
brought premium coffee to the nation’s vending machines.
Thus, despite economic uncertainty, UK consumers are refusing to give up what, for many,
has become part of their lifestyle. One in ten UK adults now visits a coffee shop daily, accord-
ing to Allegra, even though in 2011 consumers spent slightly less per visit than before.
Frequently taken away, coffee is also savored in relaxed, lounge-type venues that can be any-
thing from a trendy extension of home to a hotel, pub, community hub, bistro-style farm shop
or garden center, or a Wi Fi-enabled meeting place that’s a comfortable alternative to the office.

IN AND OUT OF FAVOR

Coffee drinking in the UK began, most writers maintain, in the 1650s. For more on the
drink’s history in Britain, see “Coffee: A Condensed History.” In the eighteenth century, as-
sisted by the rise of the British empire and its many tea-producing lands, cheaper tea took
over and coffee took a back seat. The ceremony of afternoon tea at home gravitated from the
aristocracy to all classes. This trend has experienced a certain a resurgence today as hotels look
to optimize their sumptuous backdrops, and tea shop entrepreneurs attempt to take on the
perceived might of the coffee shops by reminding us of our traditional national drink. For the
moment, though, it seems that when it comes to coffee’s main UK beverage rival, we are only
truly happy with our tea if we can make it in our own way, at home. Conversely, with coffee,
we have increasingly come to appreciate and value the art, skill, and convivial input of baristas
and their espresso machines.
The close of the nineteenth century saw the start of the iconic Lyons Corner Houses. In ef-
fect, these were cafés selling tea and coffee, as well as food such as cakes and sandwiches. They
served all classes and became places where women could meet and socialize on a “respectable,”
unaccompanied basis. However, rationing during and after World War II curtailed their suc-
cess, as ingredients became scarce or too expensive.
The availability of vacuum-packed, freeze-dried instant coffee during the war meant that
consumers no longer needed to visit cafés to have a coffee. But what did begin to change after
the end of rationing in the 1950s was the gradual rise in quality, even if the coffee-serving
outlets themselves alternated between becoming places for the young, then the not-so-young.
Less than efficient coffee-making machines which, in many cases, only succeeded in
producing boiled and frothy, coffee-flavored water were replaced by espresso machines that
formed the heart of many a coffee bar in cities across the land (such as Bar Italia’s iconic
Gaggia machine in London’s Frith Street). These enterprises became places for the young to
socialize, leaving the pubs to the older generation until the late 1960s, when coffee venues
started to decline in popularity, while the alcohol-serving public houses lured the nation’s
youth to an edgier venue.

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190 Clare Benfield

It wasn’t until the 1980s, after the launch of Costa’s first railway-focused coffee retailing
kiosks, that trends really started to favor coffee again. With a range of issues at play from a
greater demand for more portable food items “to go” for an increasingly time-poor consumer,
as well as an interest in all things European—not least the fashion and style of Italy, and its
espresso tradition—the stage was set for a revolution, still under way today.

THE MARKET

For 2009, the International Coffee Organization (ICO), by combining its own consump-
tion statistics with Euromonitor market research data, calculated the UK’s breakdown of
coffee imports at over 2.1 million 60-kilogram bags of green coffee (of which 57,420 were
re-exported), 861,628 60-kilogram bags GBE (green bean equivalent) of roasted coffee
(184,851 were re-exported), and over 1.1 million 60-kilogram bags GBE of soluble coffee
(649,991 were re-exported), totaling 4.131 million 60-kilogram bags. This equated to a
total consumption of over 3.2 million 60-kilogram bags, a per capita consumption of 3.14
kilograms per year in 2009 (the ICO reported a figure of 2.6 kilogram GBE at its 107th
session in 2011).
In 2010, the total UK consumption figure reportedly fell slightly to just over 3.1 million
60-kilogram bags (the 2010 breakdown of green, roasted, and soluble imports had not been
published at the time of writing), while the total import figure rose to 4.292 million bags.2
Of particular note, the ICO believed, was the share of fresh versus soluble consumption,
with fresh outperforming soluble in the U.S., Germany, France, Japan, Italy, and Spain but
not in the UK or the Russian Federation, although in all of these countries more coffee was
consumed at home than away.
Between 1997 and 2010, the majority of the UK’s imported coffee came from Vietnam (14
percent), Brazil (11.7 percent), Colombia (9.4 percent), and Indonesia (6.1 percent), totaling
41.2 percent, and 32.1 percent was composed of re-exports from Germany (13.6 percent),
Netherlands (7.6 percent), Spain (4.1 percent), Ireland (2.4 percent), France (2.3 percent),
and Italy (2.1 percent), according to ICO figures. Thus re-exports accounted for nearly a third
of the UK’s coffee.
Soluble coffee still predominates in the UK, accounting for 79.8 percent of the UK’s na-
tional coffee consumption (most of which is at home), but the consumption of roasted coffee
has grown from 15.8 percent in 1997 to 24.9 percent in 2010. According to the market ana-
lysts Mintel, the in-home UK coffee market is worth £55.3 million in volume sales and £831
million in value sales.3 Currently, when adults reach the 65-plus age bracket, their instant cof-
fee consumption falls from an average of 13.4 cups a week to 11.9, leading industry analysts
to suggest that more could be done to promote the energy and health-enhancing properties
of the beverage.
Influenced by the rise of the coffee shop and specialty coffees, consumers are increasingly
buying more premium roast and ground coffees, and indeed coffee beans, together with
investing in the associated brewing techniques. Most homes at least have a French press, if
not some form of filter, stove top, or pod machine. However, some of the latest pod devices
are far more premium than others, so some consumers view them as too expensive. Espresso
machines of both modern and bygone eras are popular, as fashionable kitchen accessories
for some—not least the rising number of “coffee geeks,” even if they lack the necessary skill
to use them!

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INDUSTRY PLAYERS

The UK coffee sector can be divided into two halves: one comprises the big, consumer retail
brands (Nescafé, Kenco, Douwe Egberts, etc.) drunk at home and outside of it too, as many of
these companies also serve caterers—Nestlé’s Milano, for example. The second sector consists
of the out-of-home café and coffee shop brands and supplier network.
Company-owned and franchised, or licensed, outlets (often within other retail concepts,
such as department stores or service stations, for example)—namely Costa, Starbucks, Caffè
Nero, Café Thorntons, AMT Coffee Ltd, BB’s Coffee & Muffins, Coffee Republic, Puccino’s,
and Krispy Kreme—typify the way the branded coffee shop chains operate in the UK, result-
ing in a uniform product offering, style of outlet, and use of suppliers. For independents,
there is greater freedom to source rarer coffees and use bespoke machines and coffee-making
processes. As is often the case on the Continent and elsewhere, it is not always usual in the
UK for a business’s equipment to be supplied free on loan. This may be because coffee is not
drunk in as high, regular volumes as it is in other countries.
Coffee is bought and sold by roasters, investors, and price speculators as a commodity, and
the number of coffee roasters is on the rise. Many small, up-and-coming roasters are on the
scene, together with long-established and highly respected names like Matthew Algie. On-site
roasting by small outlets remains rare but is likely to take off.
Most of the coffee-making equipment and associated technology used in the UK comes
from mainland Europe, with the majority of coffee machine companies having an agent or
their own UK presence (Cimbali UK, for example). The UK has one homegrown espresso
machine maker—Birmingham-based Fracino, which is a successful exporter, too. As barista
skills are still lacking, bean-to-cup machines are popular, although most of the big-name
chains operate semi-automatic espresso machines.

TRADE ORGANIZATIONS, MEDIA, AND EVENTS

Trade associations include the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE), which has
a UK chapter dedicated to promoting high standards in coffee making and to helping adjudi-
cate and organize the yearly Barista Championships.
Other groups active in promoting high-quality beverage-making include the Beverage
Standards Association and the Café Society. The Coffee Trade Federation is an amalgamation
of other organizations that represented roasters, merchants, and brokers, having joined forces
with the British Coffee Association in 2008. The London-based ICO promotes coffee con-
sumption via programs designed to increase consumption as well as aid the coffee producer,
and the London-based Fairtrade Foundation is heavily involved in coffee.
UK trade magazines with a specific coffee focus include Café Culture, Fresh Cup, Coffee
Trend, Food and Drink Network UK, Café Business, and Vending International.
The Caffè Culture exhibition is a yearly coffee trade show. The “lunch!” show also has
strong coffee sector appeal. Increasingly, the big, alternating Hotelympia and IFE hospitality
shows feature a coffee emphasis. Other events of note include UK Coffee Week, the London
Coffee Festival, and the Bath Coffee Festival.
London was also home to the world’s first dedicated tea and coffee museum, the Bramah
Tea and Coffee Museum (founded by Edward Bramah, who died in 2008). The museum
has closed, aiming to re-open after refurbishment, but no definite plans or location has been
announced to date.

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HERE TO STAY

Many people in the UK food business, and for that matter unrelated business sectors, look at
the recession-defying coffee sector with envy in these challenging economic times.
UK chain and independent restaurants, as well as quick service restaurants like McDonald’s,
look set to continue upping the quality of their coffee offering as they seek a “me, too” stake in
what’s proving to be a highly profitable and persistent coffee shop phenomenon. No ambitious
UK food business can afford to ignore this area in times of so-called austerity.
Allegra predicts that the UK’s branded coffee chain market will drive the overall market.
They expect it to grow at 6 percent compound annual growth and exceed 6,000 outlets by
2015, with sales to grow by 10.7 percent annually, to £3.2 billion by 2015.
At the same time, the presence of UK brands abroad will likely increase. Costa may still be
viewed by Britons as a UK-bound entity, but become an expanding global force, with more
European outlets (1,444) than its U.S.-based rival, Starbucks (in third place with 1,253 after
McCafe with 1,326).4
An increasingly older, but better-informed and more coffee-aware, connoisseur-level con-
sumer seeking to balance quality with value for money, health, and sustainability consider-
ations, is likely to characterize the future of the UK’s coffee sector.
Barista training will be in greater demand. A more scientific approach, notably at inde-
pendents, to preparing and serving, say, more single-origin, shop-roasted coffees will ensure
that these artisans continue to engage customers. In turn, this will influence the nature and
product quality in the chains. They will be increasingly debranded yet will attempt to further
foster a local community feel by valuing their human resources and partnerships (business and
charitable) as a critical component of success at home and worldwide.

NOTES

1. Allegra Strategies, Project Café 11 Europe (London: Allegra Strategies, 2011).

2. ICO, “Drinking Patterns in Selected Importing Countries,” Report, 107th Session of the ICO,
London, September 26–30, 2011.
3. Mintel, “Coffee—UK,” Report, April 2011.
4. Allegra Strategies, Project Café 11 Europe.

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36
Russia
Robert W. Thurston

From the late seventeenth century on, Russia became a tea-drinking country. Good coffee,
by the standards of the day, became available in the largest cities of the Russian empire only
toward the end of the nineteenth century. After the revolution of 1917, coffee became a rar-
ity. When I first lived in the USSR in 1978–79, “coffee drink” (kofeinyi napitok, which could
also be translated as caffeine drink) was the only product resembling coffee that was regularly
available. It tasted harsh, thin, and burnt. Then, during the last decades of the Soviet period,
some Cuban and then Vietnamese coffee, in cans, appeared in food stores. These products
represented a big step up in quality, to something like American grocery store brands.
On more recent visits, I have tried coffee shops in the major cities of Russia and Ukraine.
Quality varies immensely but can be quite good. A store in Khar’kov, a large city now in
independent Ukraine, sold a nice array of home espresso machines as early as 2002. Latte ap-
peared, too. With the rise of the “new Russians” (a misnomer, as people from various ethnici-
ties are in the group) who have solid middle or upper class incomes, luxury items of all sorts
have become widely available.
As Andrew Hetzel recently put it, “Russia is still a sort of Wild West capitalist gold rush,
meaning that huge opportunities are everywhere—particularly in the segment of specialty
goods and services that includes coffee.” Hetzel reports that one Russian company with which
he has worked, Soyuz Coffee Roasting, has developed “three brands of specialty with quality
standards set on par with the better micro-roasters of North America, only at three to five
times their size.”1 Sarah Allen of Barista Magazine, commenting on a military band/horse
show now held each summer on Red Square, says “This is Moscow, Russia. It’s not go big
or go home, as much as go big, bigger, biggest, or you might as well leave the country.” The
show, called the Spasskaya Tower Military Music Festival, featured coffee booths for the first
time last summer. Seven of the top baristas in the world, including several world champions,
made coffee nonstop for five nights.2 But I would add that the capital and St. Petersburg are
far wealthier and up to date than the rest of the country.
Russians actually consume very little coffee in their “coffee” shops. These stores typically
make less than 5 percent of their revenue from coffee sales. The rest comes from long food
menus, alcohol, and cigarettes.3 Yet coffee is a hip drink for young people.

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194 Robert W. Thurston

The International Coffee Organization, which has kept data on Russia for only a few years,
reports that in 2010 the country imported 1.445 million bags of green coffee. But this figure
was far outstripped by imported soluble coffee, at 2.302 million bags. Consumption per
capita was 1.57 kilos,4 far below American figures, let alone Scandinavian thirst. But Soyuz
Coffee, and undoubtedly a host of competitors that will soon follow, will work hard to wean
Russians from instant to good, better, and finally as-good-as-it-gets coffee. While revenue
from oil exports holds out, the country will surely continue to raise its coffee standards.

NOTES

1. Andrew Hetzel, “Russia,” part of a longer essay entitled “The New Frontier: Specialty Coffee’s
Emergence in China, India, the Middle East and Russia,” Roast Magazine, January–February 2012, 32.
2. Sarah Allen, “Field Report: Russia,” Barista Magazine, October/November 2011, 24.
3. Hetzel, “Russia,” 32–34.
4. International Coffee Organization Statistics, Country Data Sheets, 2010, Russian Federation,
http://www.ico.org/countries/russia/pdf, accessed May 5, 2012.

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37
Ukraine
Sergii Reminny with Jonathan Morris

Ukraine, with 49 million people, was once the second largest republic in the Soviet Union.
But after gaining its independence in 1991, the country is now following its own path, in
economics, politics, and coffee. Ukraine has recorded by far the most dynamic growth in cof-
fee consumption within the emerging markets during the past decade, with an average annual
increase of 23.6 percent between 2000 and 2010. By comparison, its nearest competitors—the
Russian Federation, Turkey, and Israel—experienced annual growth rates of around 7 percent
in the same period.1
Since the dawn of the new millennium, Ukrainian coffee consumption per capita has risen
nearly tenfold, from 0.2 kilograms in 2000 to 1.96 kilograms in 2010. What explains this
dramatic growth? The answer is simple: Ukraine’s geographical position, and in particular its
western extension into the heartlands of Central Europe. We can distinguish four main areas
of the country, each with distinctive drinking patterns.

• The West: The western area includes the major cities of Lviv and Uzhgorod. The vitiesi
(“westerners”) are by far the biggest coffee consumers in the country, drinking three to
four times the Ukrainian average. These so-called “pro-European regions,” are still influ-
enced by their historical connection to Austrian or Hungarian coffee culture.
• The Center: The central area’s major city is Kiev. The Ukrainian capital has always ac-
counted for 20–25 percent of the national turnover, and its central position and admin-
istrative importance explain why modern coffee development in the Ukraine began here,
with the first private restaurants, fast-food chains, and supermarkets chains reaching into
the provinces from the capital in the 1990s.
• The East: The major cities in the east are Donetsk and Kharkov. The east, where the
Ukrainian language often yields to spoken Russian, has traditionally been influenced by
that country’s culture. The relatively affluent industrial cities in the east have experienced
the highest rate of economic development over the last decade and have quickly begun
to adopt the consumption of specialty coffee, starting with espresso.
• The South: The principal cities in the south are Odessa, Simferopol, and Yalta. Also
predominately Russian-speaking, it includes subtropical Crimea and is an attractive
tourist region. The atmosphere is more relaxed in the south, befitting the beauty and

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196 Sergii Reminny with Jonathan Morris

climate of the region, and coffee has quickly become popular under the independent
state. The season for tourism and coffee in the south is really summer; winters are quiet
and uncrowded.

As Slavenka Drakulic, a Croatian writer, pointed out in her 1996 book Café Europa,2 a
Western-style café, often called “Europa,” sprang up quickly in every major European city east
of the Elbe River—a zone that includes Ukraine—following the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991. These shops became a key symbol of a new life and of a longing to join “Europe.”
Ukraine, or major parts of it, has adopted this same object of desire.
After more than a century of alternating rapid industrial growth, war, and stagnation, Ukraine
may be poised for significant economic improvement, although that also depends on the pur-
chasing power of Western Europe and of Russia. Whether Ukraine can exploit these tentative
opportunities to improve standards of living and to drink more coffee remains to be seen.

NOTES

1. Robério Oliveria Silva, ICO, “International Coffee Outlook,” presentation to India International
Coffee Festival, New Dehli, 2012. Annual growth rates over 2000–2010 in the Russian Federation were
7.0 percent, Turkey 7.7 percent, Israel 6.8 percent.
2. Slavenka Drakulic, Café Europa: Life after Communism (New York: Norton, 1997).

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38
Japan
Tatsushi Ueshima

Coffee was introduced to Japan by Dutch merchants at the Dejima Trading Post in Nagasaki
in the 1690s, during the Edo era, a period of national isolation. It was not until the Meiji era
(1888) that the first coffee shops appeared in towns across Japan. Coffee in those days was still
a luxury item imported from abroad, like wine, and it barely reached the general public. It was
only when trade resumed after the Second World War that coffee began to spread in Japan.
In 1950, a mere forty tons of green coffee were brought into the country, but the amount
rose after the complete liberalization of imports in April 1960 and again after Japan joined
the ICO in 1964. Japan currently imports over 410,000 tons of coffee per year, a result of
the postwar westernization of lifestyles and rapid economic growth. Japan ranks as the third
largest coffee-importing country in the world.
Besides the increase in population and the improvement in living standards after about
1950, major factors in the growth of Japanese coffee consumption have been efforts by the
industry to create a unique domestic coffee culture, to encourage competition based on a
national understanding of fair rules, and to build consumer awareness.

A UNIQUE COFFEE CULTURE IN JAPAN

Coffee shops started to reappear across Japan in the mid-1960s. These shops, somewhat dif-
ferent than their U.S. counterparts, all had wait staff looking after their customers. The coffee
shop business was seen as an appealing business. “I could run something like a teahouse” and
“My only option is a coffee shop,” were common attitudes. No experience was necessary,
there was no limit on age or gender, and a relatively small amount of capital was required to
be independent. The image of coffee shops was not bad compared with the bar business; it
was neat and clean, enjoyed respectability, and provided a site where owners could exercise
their creativity. Consequently, the number of shops increased by 3.2 times in twelve years,
from 50,000 shops in 1970 to 160,000 shops in 1982. People with no experience whatsoever
danced to their own business tune.
Shops made coffee in ways different than home users, using flannel cloth filters and coffee
siphons. They also developed new-to-Japan menu items such as iced coffee, which helped

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198 Tatsushi Ueshima

create a uniquely Japanese coffee culture. In addition, ways to provide coffee outside cof-
fee shops were explored and developed to satisfy the new Japanese drinker, who lacked the
long history of café and in-home coffee-drinking culture that the Europeans and Americans
enjoyed. Coffee specialist shops for over-the-counter coffee sales to customers began to
sell single-origin coffees such as Mocha and Kilimanjaro by weight. Furthermore, a wide
variety of coffee products was developed, such as single-serving options, to address the
increasing number of single-person households and single-serving meals.
Coffee has become an essential beverage for various aspects of life in Japan, with a variety of
ways available for buying and consuming coffee, such as regular coffee, instant coffee, ready-
to-drink coffee beverages, and office coffee. Among the different options, the greatest impact
came from the development of canned coffee. Canned coffee was developed for the first time
anywhere in the world in 1969 by the founder of Ueshima Coffee Company, Tadao Ueshima.
This pioneering invention, which provides hot or cold coffee in a can, transformed the nature
of coffee into a readily available casual beverage, creating new coffee-drinking occasions and
needs. Canned coffee quickly became widespread in Japan. This trend also paved the way for a
new sales channel, vending machines, which could operate without particular problems in the
relatively crime- and vandalism-free Japanese environment. The vending machines dramati-
cally expanded sales opportunities.
As a result, the market for coffee for industrial use, defined as on-the-spot beverages such as
canned coffee, grew to account for 40 percent of the overall non-instant coffee market in the
four decades since canned coffee was invented. This growth shows the extent of the impact
that canned coffee invention had on the development of the coffee industry in Japan.

COMPETITION BASED ON FAIR RULES

As the coffee market in Japan grew and developed, a spate of new companies entered the mar-
ket and competition intensified. Fair competition, Japanese style, was seen as a prerequisite for
the healthy growth of an industry. Therefore in 1977, the Fair Competition Code for Coffee
Beverages was adopted, which required labeling detailing the amount of coffee contained in
the ready-to-drink product. To regulate labeling for both regular and instant coffee, the All
Japan Coffee Fair Trade Council was formed in 1991. The Council established a self-imposed
code, regarded as the strictest in the global coffee industry, which stipulated that products had
to display the name of the producing country of the main coffee beans contained (measured
by percentage of weight) and to require a minimum content of 30 percent of those coffee
beans when indicating the coffee-producing region and variety. These rules helped to boost
consumer confidence in coffee and to raise the position of coffee in the Japanese culinary
world. Here was a major turning point in the transition of Japan’s coffee market from “expan-
sion of volume” to “pursuit of quality.”

CONSUMER AWARENESS CAMPAIGN

An industrywide awareness-building campaign was essential to the development of the coffee

market in Japan. When the All Japan Coffee Association was launched in 1980, a comprehen-
sive effort to raise awareness about coffee began across the industry, with the goal of advertis-
ing and promoting the taste, joy, and health benefits of the beverage.

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Japan 199

The campaign evolved with the times, and new scientific information on the effects of cof-
fee in the human body was published in Japan during the 1990s. This publicity was needed to
dispel the deep-seated, negative image that coffee was bad for health. In 1995, the Association
for Science and Information on Coffee (ASIC) held its biennial conference in Kyoto on the
theme of “coffee and health” in an effort to improve the image of coffee.
As coffee drinking at home became more established, the Association of Regular Coffee
Industry for Household Use was established in 1990 to promote the trend. After the specialty
coffee boom arrived in Japan, the Specialty Coffee Association of Japan was formed in 2003.
The Association sends Japan’s top baristas to world competitions to showcase their high-level
skills, and it promotes sustainable coffees, such as organic and certified coffees, in the pursuit
of true specialty coffee from seed to cup.
Industry participants have exerted themselves to reach each aspect of everyday life and to
raise the value of coffee for the Japanese people in each trend of the times, and this effort has
contributed to the increase of coffee consumption and the growth of the coffee industry.

THE DECLINE OF THE COFFEE SHOP

As these trends continued, the coffee industry in Japan continued to explore ways to meet
new demands while responding to shifting social structures and consumer tastes, with the goal
of ensuring continued growth and development. The years since 1980 have been an exciting
time for the coffee industry, which owes its success to the passionate industry players and the
eagerness of consumers. Many long-time industry members are grateful to all those who have
contributed to its success. However, the country’s economic growth is slowing against the
backdrop of an aging society and a low birthrate, which together result in population decrease.
The coffee market has entered a period of stability or little growth; the number of coffee shops
has declined by almost 50 percent since its peak in 1982.
Another cause of this decrease has been the overlapping governmental structures that
regulate the coffee industry. The Ministry of Agriculture supervises green coffee trading; the
Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry monitors retail businesses; and the Ministry of
Health, Labor, and Welfare watches over retail food services. At times the policies followed
by these agencies contradict each other, and it can be very difficult to get the ministries to
cooperate in approving a change that affects all of the coffee industry. As a result, cross-
sectional efforts for the overall market became sluggish and development across sections
was insufficient.
Yet another factor contributing to the decrease in the number of Japanese coffee shops
was the introduction of fashionable self-service cafés, where, like cafés or fast-food service
establishments in the U.S., customers ordered and received their coffee across a counter.
Some of these self-service cafés sold a cup of coffee for a mere 150 yen, half the average price
charged by coffee shops at the time. The main target market of the self-service cafés was
the baby-boom generation. Following the end of the war in 1945, a total of 8.06 million
people were born between 1947 and 1949. According to some estimates, the self-service
café’s ability to pull in customers was three to four times higher (or 400 to 500 people per
day) than coffee shops could attract. Self-service cafés won overwhelming support from the
baby-boom generation of salaried workers, whose wallets were under pressure from mort-
gages and the costs of educating their children.

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200 Tatsushi Ueshima

COFFEE SHOP REVIVAL

The number of coffee shops perhaps declined too far for the current, quickly changing demo-
graphic structure. The baby-boomers have retired, have disposable income, and have time on
their hands, but relaxing places are scarce. These people find the tall stools in self-service cafés
uncomfortable and the menus complicated and difficult. Efficient management, not comfort,
is the current business model for self-service cafés, which mainly follow the culture of the
West. For these reasons, coffee shops with tables and wait staff have been undergoing a revival
of late. Lifestyles change in a thirty-year cycle, as do generations. The ability to respond swiftly
to new lifestyles determines the growth or decline of an industry.
The coffee industry in Japan has absorbed Western business models while responding to
domestic taste and demands for high quality and has managed to develop and expand the
market, overcoming numerous challenges. The twenty-first century is said to belong to Asia,
and the Japanese coffee industry will focus its efforts on increasing the number of consumers
by renewing its ability to address, improve, and revolutionize any issue important in a market
of three billion people.

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39
Germany
Britta Zietemann

Germany is the second most important coffee-importing country in the world, following
the United States. Only the U.S. and Brazil consume more coffee than the Germans. More-
over, Germany is an important manufacturer of decaffeinated and soluble coffee, and the
harbor cities Hamburg and Bremen are major hubs for the import and re-export of green
and processed coffee.

HISTORY

Coffee was a luxury product when it was first introduced to Germany. In 1673, the first Ger-
man coffeehouse, “Schütting,” opened in Bremen; it is still there. Coffeehouses opened in
other German cities in the seventeenth century, for example Hamburg, Leipzig, and Munich.
With this development, the coffee market began to flourish, although at this point only the
wealthy could afford coffee. As Germany (or rather Prussia at that time) had no colonies
where coffee grew, the country had to buy green coffee from neighboring nations. To prevent
the public from buying green coffee and hence sending German money abroad, Frederick
the Great implemented a roasting duty that in effect prohibited private roasting. The coffee
market remained in royal hands until Frederick died in 1786.
After the abolition of the state monopoly, and with the beginnings of industrialization,
coffee increasingly became a beverage for all citizens. Poorer people used coffee to stay awake
when working long hours in the factories and as a substitute for beer or food. The phenom-
enon of the Kaffeeklatsch, groups of women who met for afternoon coffee, cake, and chat,
spread throughout the classes as coffee became democratized. At the same time, important
inventions for the coffee industry were made in Germany. A German chemist, Friedlieb Fer-
dinand Runge, isolated the caffeine molecule in 1819, having been encouraged to study coffee
by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In 1905, the German Ludwig Roselius succeeded
in decaffeinating coffee, and Melitta Bentz, a German housewife from Dresden, invented the
paper coffee filter system that bears her name.
By the start of the twentieth century, coffee was an internationally traded good with
Hamburg supplanting Le Havre as the principal European trading port. Then two world

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202 Britta Zietemann

wars led to phases of overproduction, declines in consumption, and the implementation of

international trade agreements.
After World War II, Germany was split into two states that formed the frontline of the Cold
War: the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a member of NATO usually known as West
Germany, and the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany), part of
the Soviet bloc. In the 1950s coffee was seen as a symbol of economic success and reconstruc-
tion, as well as of social status. During that decade, almost all West Germans could afford to
drink coffee, whereas in the GDR, coffee was out of ordinary people’s reach. In East Germany
coffee was also mostly mixed with cheaper surrogates such as peas, chicory, or roasted cereals,
leading to consumer protests in the 1970s. In order to improve the quality of coffee, the GDR
sought an ideologically friendly country to supply it with reasonably priced coffee and signed
a contract with Vietnam to promote coffee plantations there. This arrangement helped spark
the expansion of production in Vietnam, which accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
resulting in the country becoming the second biggest supplier of green coffee, largely robusta,
in the world (see “Vietnam” in this volume).
In the 1970s, many small and medium roasters, as well as hundreds of importers and
agents, were based in Hamburg. During the last decades of the twentieth century, the number
declined, and coffee was seen as a bit old-fashioned. Recently, however, these sectors have
begun to grow again. Currently, around 300 roasters and about 10 importers and agents serve
the German market.
Over the last decade, the image of coffee has changed. Coffee is now seen as a modern
beverage that symbolizes the dynamic, mostly urban, society. It fits well into the healthy and
modern lifestyle of the twenty-first century and is the most consumed beverage in Germany.

MARKET PROFILE

Imports and Exports

Germany is an important trading and manufacturing hub for coffee. In 2010, imports of
green coffee into Germany reached a volume of 18.2 million 60-kilogram bags (1.1 million
tons), an increase of 3.7 percent compared with the figures from 2010. Some 580,092 tons
were re-exported in 2010, either processed or unprocessed.
In 2010, Brazil remained Germany’s largest supplier (more than 6.2 million bags) and Viet-
nam the second biggest (3.3 million bags). Colombia, the third most important supplier until
2008, has dropped significantly, to eleventh place in 2010, due to lower production. In 2011,
Peru (1.4 million bags) and Honduras (1.2 million bags) were the third and fourth largest
sources of imports into Germany. In fifth place was Ethiopia with 909,503 bags.
Most of the re-exported nonprocessed green coffee goes to Poland, followed by Austria,
Denmark, Hungary, and the UK. Decaffeinated coffee is primarily exported to the U.S., then
Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Coffee extracts, soluble or liquid, are exported to
the UK, France, Ukraine, Poland, and the Netherlands.

Domestic Consumption
Coffee is the most consumed beverage in Germany with an average of 149 liters per capita,
equivalent to 6.4 kilos of green coffee per person. In comparison, Germans drink 135 liters of
water and 107 liters of beer each year.

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Altogether, the country’s consumption in 2010 amounted to 406,500 tons of roasted coffee
(377,500 nondecaffeinated roasted coffee and 29,000 decaffeinated coffee) and 16,600 tons
of soluble coffee. Included in the total of roasted coffee are 59,000 tons of coffee for use as
espresso and 37,650 tons of single-portion pods and capsules. Around 76 percent of the
market for roasted coffee is dominated by roasted and ground (filter) coffee. Nevertheless, the
consumption of espresso and caffè crema increased by 10 percent in 2010 compared with the
year before. German use of espresso has increased especially rapidly within the last few years.
Single-portions (pods and capsules) are on the rise in Germany. Compared with the year be-
fore, the capsule segment grew by 30.4 percent in 2011. The consumption of pods increased
by 1,000 tons and amounted to 31,000 tons in 2011. Use of single portions has increased by
five times since 2005. The consumption of soluble coffee has remained steady for many years,
with a slight increase of 1.2 percent in 2011 compared with 2010.
The demand for certified coffee is growing. In 2011, the market share of certified coffee
was 3 percent. A rise is expected from this point forward, as many industrial roasters and
manufacturers of soluble coffee have signed agreements to shift the entire or a high percentage
of their coffee to sustainably produced products within a few years.

Out-of-Home Consumption
The out-of-home market amounts to 25 percent of the total coffee market and includes
consumption at gastronomic venues such as cafés, coffee shops, coffee bars, hotels and restau-
rants (hotel-restaurant-cafés, or horeca) as well as in offices and other workplaces. Most of the
coffee consumed out of home is drunk in bakeries (31.5 percent) and cafés (13.5 percent).

Figure 39.1. Caffe Moro, Heidelberg, Germany. This shop, which sells a great deal of coffee and
has a loyal clientele, benefits from its location on the longest pedestrian-only street in Europe. It
is indeed a kind of “third place.” Photo by Robert Thurston.

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204 Britta Zietemann

Some 9.9 percent is bought at vending machines, 10.2 percent when travelling and at petrol
stations, and 7.9 percent in coffee shops or coffee bars. Other venues where coffee is consumed
out of home are bars or pubs (4.8 percent), fast food restaurants (5.3 percent), and restaurants
(5.5 percent).
A total of 2,147 coffee shops existed in Germany in 2011. They have contributed to the
growing popularity of espresso-based drinks. About 47.2 percent of the beverages consumed
out of home are coffee specialties, with cappuccino being the most popular (16.6 percent)
followed by latte/macchiato (16.3 percent) and caffè latte (13.9 percent). The largest per-
centage (52.8 percent) is still traditional coffee, while 0.4 percent is pure espresso.

STRUCTURE OF THE INDUSTRY

AND THE GERMAN COFFEE ASSOCIATION

The coffee industry in Germany is divided into coffee importers, agents, warehouse keepers,
roasters, decaffeinators, manufacturers of soluble coffee, manufacturers of roasting equipment,
gastronomical venues, and sustainability organizations. The German Coffee Association,
based in Hamburg, represents the entire industry throughout the value chain, as many market
players in all segments are members. The Association’s duties are principally active lobbying,
maintaining positive legal and political conditions, providing an expert information service
for members, and promotion of a positive image of coffee in Germany.
The German Coffee Association is the most important group for the country’s coffee
industry. Among the 130 members are almost all the big market players and many smaller
industry members. The Association has an extensive network of contacts with other insti-
tutions and organizations. Nationally, the German Coffee Association has close partner-
ships with the Federation of German Wholesale, Foreign Trade and Services (BGA) and
the German Federation for Food Law and Food Science—Food Matters (BLL). Moreover,
the German Coffee Association is a member of the German Institute for Standardization
(DIN) and the Research Association of the German Food Industry (FEI). On an interna-
tional level, the German Coffee Association is an active member in the European Coffee
Federation (ECF), the Association for Science and Information about Coffee (ASIC), and
the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE). The Federal Republic of Germany
is a member of the International Coffee Organization (ICO). All memberships and co-
operating partnerships ensure close collaboration on national and international issues. The
network also enables the German industry to gather and spread information and create
positive conditions for the coffee industry.
Most of the importers, agents, warehouses, decaffeinators, and bigger roasters are based in or
around Hamburg and Bremen. Some other major roasters and manufacturers of soluble coffee
process their coffee in Munich, Frankfurt, and Berlin; smaller roasters are spread nationwide.
In Germany, there are several trade fairs that include coffee, but they mainly deal with hotel
and catering services (Internorga) or vending machines (EUvend). There is one distinctive
trade fair that focuses on coffee, COTECA (trade show for coffee, tea, and cacao), held in
Hamburg every two years. It is concerned with the coffee industry from bean to cup.

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Germany 205

CURRENT TRENDS AND FUTURE PROSPECTS

The German coffee market has changed significantly during the last few years. Consumer habits
have shifted toward a greater focus on quality, convenience, and lifestyle but also on the fresh
preparation and instant consumption of the product. The growth of espresso and espresso-based
beverages, as well as the increased use of single portions, underline this development. Neverthe-
less, a majority of German coffee drinkers still consume roasted, ground coffee.
Projections are that total consumption will remain around the level of 149 liters per capita
but that the proportions of beverage types used within the coffee market will fluctuate and
may change profoundly. Conveniently brewed and consumed coffee as well as quality and
sustainable production and preparation are the big issues for the future.

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40
United States
Robert W. Thurston

Steven Topik and Michelle McDonald in “Why Americans Drink Coffee” discuss the growth
of demand here in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article’s goal is to de-
scribe trends in consumption over the past several decades and to suggest some directions that
American coffee drinkers will take in the future.
USDA figures show that Americans’ highest per capita consumption of coffee occurred in
1946, at 16.5 pounds, and 1949, at 19.1 pounds. The figure has varied since, but moved more
or less steadily downward after the late 1940s, so that in 1960 the rate was 15.9 pounds per
person and by 1970 only 13.6. The nation reached the nadir of consumption to date at an
even 6 pounds in 1995. From there a modest rise began, so that Americans drank 7 pounds
in 2009, the last year for which data are available. That level meant we drank less per person
than in 1910 (the first year USDA kept track), when the nation consumed 7.7 pounds per
man, woman, and child.1
The numbers from 1946 to 1960 or so raise questions about the usual arguments on the
undoubted decline of coffee drinking in the U.S.: that soft drinks began to eclipse coffee,
that heavy admixtures of robusta beans in blends made the brew taste so bad that consumers
forsook coffee, or that a collapse in sociability caused people not to gather around the coffee
pot. While those factors surely contributed to coffee’s declining popularity, they did not figure
on a large scale until consumption of the dark brew had already begun to fall. Maybe soft
drinks were a greater villain in coffee’s story than our figures indicate—the USDA started to
keep statistics on soft drinks only in 1947—since Coca-Cola in particular became ever more
popular after the turn of the twentieth century.2 But as that happened, intake of coffee also
rose, from the 1910 figure to almost double that in 1940, at 13 pounds, and still upward until
the late 1940s.
The curve of milk consumption per capita in America closely parallels the movement of
coffee intake in the twentieth century and to the present:

• 1909: 294.1 pounds

• 1945: 384.2 pounds
• 1960: 291.6 pounds
• 2009: 177.6 pounds3

206

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United States 207

Figure 40.1. Consumption of beverages in the United States, 1950–2000. Source: United
States Department of Agriculture. Economic Research Service. Food Availability: Spreadsheets.
Updated July 13, 2011. http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/foodconsumption/FoodAvailSpreadsheets
.htm#dyfluid. Chart by Lara Thurston. *Note that data on soft drinks have been kept only since 1947.

Today Americans drink only 60 percent as much milk as we consumed in 1909 and 46 percent
as much as in 1946.
A big part of the wartime high for coffee and milk can be explained by the great numbers of
men and women in uniform; many were eating and drinking better than they had for a long
time, as the U.S. did not fully recover from the Depression until we joined the war in earnest
in 1942. People at home had more money in their pockets, while those in the armed forces
received a fairly decent flow of comestibles every day.
But after the war, even in the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, consumption of coffee
and milk both declined more or less steadily. Was booze to blame? Probably not: American
guzzling per person, according to the National Institutes of Health, was slightly higher in
1860 than in 1970, 2.53 gallons to 2.52 gallons, but there was no steep rise in alcohol usage
along the lines of coffee and milk from the early twentieth century to the end of the war. Data
for 1896–1900 are given as an average, 2.06 gallons; to that we can compare

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208 Robert W. Thurston

• 1946: 2.3 gallons

• 1960: 2.07 gallons
• 2007: 2.31 gallons (this is the last year for which we have information)4

Americans may be heavy drinkers, but their alcohol intake per person has not risen much for
150 years.
Considering all this, the primary cause of coffee’s decline per capita in the U.S. after
World War II would seem to be that young people started drinking other beverages; they
thought of coffee as their parents’ drink, not theirs. But the appeal of soft drinks received
a great new boost after the war. Car culture boomed, encouraging young people, who now
had more spendable income than the cohorts who grew up in the 1940s, let alone in the
1930s, to cruise the streets in search of fast food. The “walking city” declined for the middle
class as more and more families moved to the suburbs. There they knew their neighbors less
well than in the city, or not at all, and community did begin to slip. For more on this point,
see “Part III: The History of Coffee and Its Social Life.”
The U.S. has led the world for many years in total imports of coffee. In 2010, 24,378,000
bags, at 60 kilograms each, entered the country. In second place was Germany, at 20,603,000
bags—but much of that quantity was destined for re-export.5 While we import a lot of coffee,
American consumption per capita lags well behind that of other countries. We downed coffee
liquor at the rate of 4.1 kilograms (9.02 pounds) per person in 2009; the Finns remained the
champions at 12.1 kilograms, followed by Denmark at 9.5 and Norway at 9.2.6 Scandinavia
is well caffeinated, as anyone who has attended any sort of meeting there can attest. Coffee
breaks are occasionally interrupted by speeches and other presentations. Adult Finns may
drink 10–12 cups a day, while the heaviest users among Americans who drink coffee, those
aged 40 to 59, average about 4 cups per day. Consumers of coffee aged 18 to 24 are the light-
est imbibers, at 2.5 cups.7 Thus the American coffee industry still faces the challenge that has
confronted it since the end of World War II: how to attract more consumers to drink more
coffee, and especially how to get young adults to use it.
Nor do Americans on the whole drink especially good coffee, by the standards of this book
and of the specialty sector. About 60 percent of all coffee drunk in the U.S. in 2010 was
commercial coffee (not gourmet or specialty coffee).8 The “can package format” dominates
how coffee is purchased, at about 57 percent; that is, most American coffee drinkers buy the
product already ground at grocery stores. Of those who used brewed coffee in 2010, 18 per-
cent drank a flavored liquid. Among the drinkers of instant coffee, about 10 percent used a
flavored type. Espresso-based drinks have lately shown significant gains: in 2010, 8 percent
of people had consumed them on the “past day,” and in 2011 the figure rose to 14 percent.9
Capsules or pods are on the rise and are now used by some 8 percent of consumers.10 On
the other hand, the Specialty Coffee Association of America reports that the percentage of
residents who drank specialty coffee outside the home was 2.7 percent in 1995 and 14 percent
in 2009. The last figure represents a slight drop from the high point of 17 percent in 2008,11
presumably due to the recession.
As we would expect from the data on the form in which coffee is purchased, most coffee is
drunk at home. Some 85 percent of those surveyed consumed coffee there, while 27 percent
had coffee out of the house—and some people used coffee both in and out, making the figures
add to more than 100 percent.12
That canned, ground coffee leads the market points to another basic feature of American
consumption: large corporations dominate sales. But this scene is changing steadily, following

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a sixty-year trend. Independent brands that arose after the Civil War were slowly swallowed
by ever-larger companies; Maxwell House, for example, became part of the Sara Lee family.
Folgers began as a small California company in the 1850s, grew to be an American giant,
and remained independent until Procter and Gamble (P&G) absorbed the brand in 1963.
In 2008 Folgers moved to a company previously best known for jams and syrups, the J. M.
Smucker Corporation.
The Big Four of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kraft (an American company), Nestle
(Swiss), P&G (American), and Sara Lee (American), or Big Five counting Tchibo (German),
controlled some 69 percent of the global market in 1998.13 But this group has shifted and
shrunk. Recently Sara Lee announced plans to sell “a majority of its North American food-
service coffee and tea operations” to Smucker. The two companies have “also entered into a
licensing agreement to cooperatively develop liquid coffee technologies to drive long-term
growth.”14 At a minimum, this cooperation means further consolidation in mass market cof-
fee, not just in the U.S. but around the world. Sara Lee is now busy selling off its various parts,
and the company may disappear as a coffee player or dissolve completely.
The USDA, citing a report by the Hoover Corporation, found that from 2000 to 2004,
Folgers (then with P&G) had a market share of ground coffee sold in the U.S. of 38 percent
by volume. Maxwell House (Kraft) had a market share of 33 percent, and the Sara Lee brands
Hills Brothers, Chock Full O’ Nuts, MJB, and Chase & Sanborn, which were all once in-
dependent labels, together held 10 percent of the market. Private-label brands had a market
share of about 8 percent, by volume, in ground coffee. Folgers’ market share rose from 37
percent in 2000 to 42 percent in 2004; the Sara Lee brands dropped from 11 percent to 7 per-
cent.15 Estimating the total market share of all coffee sold in the U.S. by the Big Four or Five
companies is a game, but probably a safe guess is somewhere around 60 percent. This does
not mean that these corporations have been able to corner the market. A report commissioned
by the Dutch government found in 2002 that, “at the supply chain down to the countries of
origin, there is no evidence of cartel behavior of the roasting industry.”16
The recent story in American coffee that has caught everyone’s attention has of course been
the rise of Starbucks. The company started small in Seattle in the 1970s; Howard Schultz,
who worked for the original owners, bought them out in 1987. Under his leadership, the
company grew by 2012 to run 17,244 stores in 54 countries. Plans are under way to bring
the brand to India and Vietnam and to grow Starbucks’ own coffee in China. The company’s
total revenue for the last quarter of 2011 was $3.44 billion,17 up 16 percent from the previous
quarter. Schultz remarked in his second memoir, published in 2011, that Starbucks annually
sold about $10 billion worth of coffee and milk around the world.18 But at the rate of the
year’s last quarter, the company would take in more like $12–15 billion per annum.
Starbucks has not crushed independent coffeehouses in America. In 1991 an estimated
1,650 stores sold specialty coffee in the U.S. By 2008, 27,715 were in business. Of those,
chain operations, including Starbucks, amounted to 47 percent, or some 13,000 shops.19
At that point, Starbucks ran some 11,000 stores. The number two company in America in
non-franchised coffee stores is Caribou, which has more than 400 stores in 15 states in the
East and Midwest. In conversations with people working in the specialty coffee business as
independents, I have heard repeatedly that Starbucks has been a godsend to the coffee industry
in general. Feelings from the independents toward the mermaid are often a mixture of envy, a
sense of awe at what Schultz has built and at his wealth, criticism of the quality of the coffee
for the reliance on dark roasts, or “Starbucks is in the milk drink business,” and worse. Yet
there is also the feeling that Starbucks introduced Americans to the idea that coffee could be

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210 Robert W. Thurston

much better than the swill they were used to. Throughout the specialty coffee industry, inde-
pendents find that customers often move on from Starbucks in search of even better coffee,
which the small fry are sure they can deliver. As a report from the Specialty Coffee Association
of America puts it, “Overall, we believe that specialty coffee (such as Starbucks) has benefitted
from being viewed as an affordable luxury by value/price conscience [sic] consumers that are
looking for inexpensive ways to treat themselves.”20
In any event, the largest seller of out-of-home coffee in America is not Starbucks but
Dunkin’ Donuts, at nearly 1.5 billion cups of brewed coffee each year. For all that Starbucks
has grabbed the public’s imagination, people still go to Dunkin’ much more often. And now
McDonald’s is moving into direct competition with Starbucks, as McCafés sprout across the
land. The Golden Arches are now upgrading the look of their American stores, at a cost of
more than $1 billion.21 The company’s coffee sales rose 38 percent from the beginning of 2010
through April of that year, on top of 25 percent growth in 2009.22 Is there no limit to the
number of places where Americans will drink coffee?
And yet, as the figures on overall consumption in the U.S. show, the growth in the number
of all stores selling coffee away from home, together with the best efforts of the giant corpora-
tions, have not induced the populace to drink more coffee. Despite the 27,000 shops and the
placement of Starbucks on opposite corners in a number of cities, overall consumption has
remained pretty flat in recent years. As Americans have taken to drinking better coffee, they
have drunk less of it. They moved away from the office coffee pot and three or four coffee
breaks at work each day, while picking up 36 or even 72 ounces of soft drinks at a time, and
they turned less often to coffee.
On the good side for the whole industry, Americans in the age group 18–39 have begun to
drink somewhat more coffee in the past year or two, itself a sign of recovery from the reces-
sion. In a National Coffee Association survey, 40 percent of those 18–24 reported that they
drink coffee daily, up from 31 percent in 2010, and marking a return to the recent high level
of 2009. Some 54 percent of those 25–39 said that they drink coffee each day, a jump up from
44 percent in 2010 and about even with the 53 percent reported in 2009. Overall, more than
three-quarters of Americans say they drank coffee within the past year.23
What kind of coffee do we drink? The best available information covers the U.S. and Can-
ada; see “What Does ‘Organic’ Mean?” Certainly consumption of coffee labeled organic is in-
creasing in North America; from 2004 through 2009, growth was 21 percent, far higher than
the 1.5 percent annual growth in the conventional coffee industry.24 As for certified coffees
of all kinds, see “Coffee Certification Programs.” In 2009, 16 percent of all coffee imported
into the U.S. was certified by at least one organization.25 Attention to certification has spread
to all of the large companies; Caribou, for instance, promises that by the end of 2012 all of
its coffee will be certified by Rainforest Alliance. Starbucks states that it “bought 269 million
pounds of coffee in fiscal 2010. Some 84% of that—226 million pounds worth—[was] from
C.A.F.E. Practices-approved suppliers. We paid an average price of $1.56 per pound for our
premium green (unroasted) coffee in 2010, up from our $1.47 per pound in 2009.”26 Note
that Starbucks’ average price of coffee bought in 2010 was well below the coffee C price in
New York; see “The ‘Price’ of Coffee.”
All of McDonald’s European stores, as well as those in Australia and New Zealand, now
serve only Rainforest Alliance certified coffee; U.S. operations are moving toward “greater
transparency into how . . . coffee is sourced.” For this country, McDonald’s “has begun a dia-
logue with coffee industry organizations to assess their ability to partner with our suppliers to
deliver certified sustainable coffee that meets our U.S. specifications.”27

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As for how the coffee is prepared, in Starbucks, and increasingly in McDonald’s and even
Dunkin’ Donuts, espresso-based drinks rule. Cutting-edge coffee bars and home suppliers
have made great strides in the quality of espresso in recent years, and American aficionados
have widely adopted pour-over devices to make a single portion or carafe of coffee. The
variety, and price, of espresso machines for the home available through upscale catalogs is
mind-numbing.
With a little effort, U.S. consumers can find coffee out of the home, or make coffee them-
selves with the right equipment, that is as good as any beverage around the world. The best
and the worst coexist here. If as a nation we consume less coffee than our grandparents did,
we often drink better-tasting and more socially responsible beverages than they had.

NOTES

1. United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Food Availability: Spread-
sheets, updated July 13, 2011, http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/foodconsumption/FoodAvailSpreadsheets
.htm#dyfluid, accessed February 5, 2012.
2. See Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great Ameri-
can Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
3. USDA Dairy (fluid milk and cream).
4. “Apparent per capita ethanol consumption for the United States, 1850–2007 (gallons of ethanol,
based on population age 15 and older prior to 1970 and on population age 14 and other thereafter),”
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, updated October
2009, http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/Resources/DatabaseResources/QuickFacts/AlcoholSales/consum01.ht,
accessed February 7, 2012.
5. International Coffee Organization (ICO), Statistics: Importing Countries, Imports of all Forms
of Coffee from All Sources, Calendar Years 2010 to 2011, http://www.ico.org/historical/2010-19/PDF/
IMPORTSIMCALYR.pdf, accessed December 9, 2012.
6. International Trade Centre, The Coffee Exporter’s Guide, 3rd ed. (Geneva: ITC, 2011), 21–24.
Available at http://www.intracen.org/The-Coffee-Exporters-Guide—-Third-Edition/.
7. The National Coffee Association USA [NCA USA], “National Coffee Drinking Trends Study,”
Report (New York: NCA USA, 2011), 30; uses a sample across the country of 2,663 people aged 18
years and older.
8. NCA USA, “National Coffee Drinking Trends Study,” 31.
9. NCA USA, “National Coffee Drinking Trends Study,” 13. “Past day” refers to consumption on
the day before a respondent filled out the survey.
10. NCA USA, “National Coffee Drinking Trends Study,” 33, 41.
11. SCAA, Specialty Coffee in the USA 2008–2009 (chart).
12. NCA USA, “National Coffee Drinking Trends Study,” 42.
13. S. Ponte, “The ‘latte revolution’? Regulation, markets and consumption in the global coffee
chain,” World Development 30, no. 7 (2002): 1108.
14. Business Wire News, October 24, 2011. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111024005743/
en/Sara-Lee-Corp.-Announces-Sale-Majority-North, accessed February 14, 2012.
15. “The Coffee Value Chain,” USDA, no date, but probably 2005, http://www.ers.usda.gov/publi
cations/err38/err38b.pdf, accessed February 14, 2012.
16. Quoted in Brian Lewin, Daniele Giovannucci, and Panos Varangis, “New Paradigms in Global
Supply and Demand,” World Bank Agriculture and Rural Development Discussion Paper No. 3, March
2004, 8.
17. The New York Times Business Day, February 15, 2012.

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18. Howard Schultz and Joanne Gordon, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing
Its Soul (New York: Rodale/Macmillan, 2011), 238.
19. SCAA, “Specialty Coffee in the USA 2008–2009” (chart).
20. SCAA, “Themes and Trends within the Specialty Coffeehouse Industry,” Sector Report, January
2011, 19.
21. USA Today, May 9, 2011.
22. Chicago Breaking Business, “McDonald’s to Hold Prices; Coffee Sales up 38 Percent,” June
3, 2010, http://archive.chicagobreakingbusiness.com/2010/06/mcdonalds-to-hold-prices-coffee-sales
-up-38.html, accessed February 15, 2012.
23. NCA USA, “National Coffee Drinking Trends Study,” 2.
24. “The North American Organic Coffee Industry Survey 2010,” by Daniele Giovannucci,
with support from the Specialty Coffee Association of America. The full report may be purchased
at https://ota.com/bookstore.html. A summary of its main points is at http://www.organicnewsroom
.com/2010/06/_organic_coffee_market_tops_14_1.html.
25. Daniele Giovannucci and Jason Potts with B. Killian, C. Wunderlich, G. Soto, S. Schuller,
F. Pinard, K. Schroeder, and I. Vagneron, “Seeking Sustainability: COSA Preliminary Analysis of Sus-
tainability Initiatives in the Coffee Sector,” September 2008, 2. Committee on Sustainable Assessment,
Winnipeg, Canada. COSA is affiliated with the United Nations, the International Coffee Organization,
and government agencies in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.
26. http://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/sourcing/coffee, accessed February 15, 2012.
27. http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/sustainability/library/policies_programs/sustainable
_supply_chain/coffee.html, accessed February 15, 2012.

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Part III
THE HISTORY OF COFFEE
AND ITS SOCIAL LIFE

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41
Coffee, a Condensed History
Jonathan Morris with material from Robert W. Thurston

Studying the history of coffee is a lot like barista training; the more you learn, the more
you realize you don’t know. Coffee involves so many fields and subdisciplines—agricultural,
business, consumption, cultural, diplomatic, development, economic, environmental, food,
gender, geographical, political, religious, rural, social, technology, trade, just to mention those
discussed in the chapters of this section—that any attempt to provide an overall guide to the
subject must be highly selective. The chapters that follow offer a selection of just how diverse
the approaches to coffee history can be.
Coffee has always been a transnational, indeed transcontinental industry, but the focus
of both production and consumption of the bean, naturally intimately linked, have shifted
significantly over the centuries. One of the more surprising features of the history of coffee
is how often the ties between producers and suppliers have been recast. Here we provide a
brief history of the bean’s progress from its first known appearance in the Red Sea region
to today’s global trade

THE WINE OF ISLAM

Ethiopia is commonly considered the birthplace of coffee. Here Coffea arabica still grows wild
in highland forests. As Willem Boot’s contribution notes, many myths have arisen about how
humans discovered the possibilities of coffee as a beverage. What does seem clear is that the
Oromo people, a Muslim tribe from the regions of Sidamo, Kaffa, and Jimmah, began sim-
mering the desiccated cherry husks from the coffee plant in boiling water for around fifteen
minutes, producing a hot infusion known as buno in the local language and qishr in Arabic.
Coffee was not initially farmed for this purpose; the husks were simply scavenged from the
wild. Across the Red Sea on the Arabian peninsula, the Sufi movement, a mystical Muslim
sect, was winning more followers, particularly in what is now Yemen. The Sufis held all-night
vigils known as dhikers, during which they would consume a concoction called qahwa as part
of their devotions. It seems that their drink of choice originally took the form of kafta, an infu-
sion prepared from the leaves of the hallucinogenic plant known as khat (kat, gat) but that at
some point during the fifteenth century, this was superseded by qishr. Several accounts record

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that this change occurred on the suggestion of a mufti known as Muhammad al-Dhabani
(died 1470) who had travelled in Ethiopia and noted that qishr helped overcome feelings of
fatigue (a problem for Sufi worshippers who had to return to their jobs during the day). He
recommended that, during any shortage of khat, qishr could be substituted in qahwa.1
The Sufis spread knowledge of this new form of qahwa up the Arabian peninsula to the
holy cities of Mecca, Jeddah, and Medina and eventually to Cairo, the center of the Mameluk
empire, where it was recorded being used by Yemeni students at the Al-Azhar Islamic univer-
sity during the 1500s.
A key turning point occurred in 1511 when the governor of Mecca, having dispersed a
nighttime gathering of men on the grounds of the mosque drinking qahwa (presumably Sufis
at prayer), subsequently coerced the city’s religious leaders into ruling that consuming qahwa
was un-Islamic because it promoted intoxication. The judgment was referred to the authorities
in Cairo but was overruled, effectively giving the green light to coffee consumption.2
It is likely that the real intention of Mecca’s governor had been to indirectly attack the
taverns that served alcohol to non-Muslims but claimed to provide coffee for the devout.
Instead the coffeehouse was legitimized as a secular meeting place for Muslims, where men
could meet as equals and be entertained by storytellers and musicians, including veiled
female singers.
Following the Ottoman conquest of the Mameluk Sultanate in 1517, qahwa spread around
the eastern regions of the Mediterranean, known as the Levant, with the first coffeehouse
opening in Istanbul, the Ottoman capital in 1554. During this process coffee acquired the
Turkish name kahve.
The preparation process also appears to have changed during this journey. While the origi-
nal qishr involved using the whole of the husk, only beans were used by the time the drink
reached northern Arabia and Egypt. Beans would be lightly toasted in a pan before being
cooled, crushed, and mixed with spices, notably cardamom, and then cooked with water for
some time in a closed pot with a long spout (jamana), before being served as a semi-trans-
lucent light brown liquor. By the time kahve reached Turkey, however, the beans were being
blackened over a fire, then ground into a fine powder using a mill. The results were placed in
an ibrik, a wide-bottomed open pot with a narrowing neck and broader rim, to which water
was added and the liquid boiled and re-boiled several times. This produced the beverage that
a Turkish poet described as “the negro enemy of sleep and love.” The differences between
Arabian and Turkish (or Mediterranean) coffee can be observed side by side in contemporary
Lebanon, where the Muslim population still drink the former, the Christian the latter.3
The demand for coffee was originally met from shipments from the port of Zeila, now on
the border of Somalia and Djibouti. It was added to cargoes of spices from India and offloaded
at ports on the Red Sea where the beverage had been adopted—the first recorded shipment
being to the Sinai peninsula in 1497. This trade came under the control of the Banyans, a
Gujarati merchant caste that dominated shipping throughout the Indian Ocean.4
The Banyans also operated credit networks, and it seems likely that they funded the plant-
ing of coffee by Yemeni peasants among the subsistence crops that they grew on terraces
surrounding the mountain villages of the interior. Established in the 1540s, these remained
the sole source of cultivated coffee for the next 150 years. The beans eventually arrived at
Bayt-al-Faqih on the coastal plain, where they were warehoused prior to dispatch to the ports
of Mocha and Hudaydah in Yemen for shipping. Although it was actually Hudaydah that sup-
plied the internal needs of the Ottoman empire, Mocha became known as the principal port

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Coffee, a Condensed History 217

for coffee, as it supplied the needs of the rest of the Muslim world, especially the settlements
surrounding the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean.
Mocha’s position at the center of the spice trade also made it the logical place for European
traders returning from the East Indies to try to acquire coffee directly, beginning in the early
eighteenth century. However, the volumes available remained low, and it could take months
to purchase sufficient stock to fill a ship’s hold. As consumption in the European continent
increased, it was almost inevitable that alternative sources of supply were established, leaving
Mocha to decline, at the same time that much of the Muslim world shifted its preference from
coffee to tea. Yemeni coffee remains a rarity today with output constrained by both geography
and politics. Ethiopia, however, began cultivating coffee in the late nineteenth century and
remains one of the most popular African origins.

THE EXTRA-EUROPEAN COFFEE CULTURE

Coffee was first noted in non-Ottoman Europe in 1575 when an inquiry into the murder
of a Turkish merchant in Venice recorded the presence of coffee apparatus among his posses-
sions. Although émigrés from the Ottoman empire, frequently Greek or Armenian Christians,
spread coffee to other lands, and it appears to have been prescribed by apothecaries for certain
ailments, no real takeoff in foreign consumption occurred until the 1650s. It was then that
the first coffeehouses began to appear in England.
Coffee arrived in Europe together with two other hot beverages, tea and chocolate, at
roughly the same time. They all had stimulating, not stultifying, characteristics. But each
beverage acquired certain cultural connotations that strongly affected its diffusion.5 Chocolate
entered Spain in 1585, a result of the Spanish conquest of the Mayan peoples of southern
Mexico. It became popular as a breakfast beverage among the Spanish aristocracy and later
spread to Austria and France. It was seen as a medicinal, nourishing beverage due to its high fat
content, one particularly beneficial to women.6 Tea was likewise regarded as more feminine,
particularly in those societies such as England where coffee had become closely associated with
the male environs of the coffeehouse.7 Tea’s triumph within the British Isles was complete
when it was adopted as the beverage of the working classes from the second half of the eigh-
teenth century; as the anthropologist Sidney Mintz has argued, it was the combination of tea
with sugar that fuelled the industrial revolution by delivering energy boosts to the workforce
without interrupting production.8
Yet coffee gradually conquered the continent, coming to be seen as a signifier of respect-
ability among the bourgeois households that adopted it. Breakfast changed from a meal based
around a grain porridge washed down with beer or wine to one centered on a sugared hot
drink plus bread. J. S. Bach’s Coffee Cantata (1732–34) may have been intended to poke fun
at the fad for the drink, but its libretto featured three generations of women falling for the
charms of coffee, which they held to be “lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than
muscatel wine.” These phrases clearly echoed common sentiments. Leading authors mean-
while made extensive use of coffee to spur on their creativity; Voltaire reputedly consumed
some forty cups a day in the Parisian cafés that doubled as artistic salons. By the end of the
eighteenth century, during which Europe’s population grew by around 50 percent, coffee
consumption is estimated to have risen from 2 million to 120 million pounds, significantly
faster than tea (1 to 40 million pounds) and eclipsing chocolate (2 to 13 million pounds).9

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218 Jonathan Morris with material from Robert W. Thurston

The first signs that coffee drinking was acquiring an audience beyond the elite classes came
in the Netherlands, where the proportion of the sales of the Dutch East India Company
(VOC, from its name in Dutch) derived from tea and coffee rose from just over 4 percent at
the end of the seventeenth century to just under 25 percent at the end of the 1730s. In terms
of revenue generated this amounted to a 1,312-fold increase, a figure that does not capture the
full extent in the increase of tea and coffee imported via Amsterdam, given that unit prices fell
significantly over this period. Extensive research into probate records confirms that the habit
of coffee drinking spread deep into Dutch society; many poor households possessed coffee
paraphernalia. A commentator remarked in 1726 that coffee “had broken through so generally
in our land that maids and seamstresses now had to have their coffee in the morning or they
could not put their thread through the eye of their needle.”10
Demand was both met and stimulated by the establishment of commercial coffee cultiva-
tion in Java (see “Indonesia”). Coffee was probably previously planted in the Malabar region
of India, then brought by the Dutch to Java. That island became the first origin to compete
against Mocha in the world market. Once shipments to Amsterdam became regular following
the bumper harvest of 1711, it did not take long for production to surpass Yemen’s. Whereas
in 1721 90 percent of the coffee sold in Amsterdam came from Mocha, by 1726 Java supplied
90 percent of the beans.11
The quality of Javanese coffee was generally held to be lower than Mocha, but then so was
the price the Dutch paid for it. The VOC operated by obliging the lord of a community to
provide the company with a fixed amount of coffee, for which it paid a predetermined price.
The lord in turn required his subjects to produce coffee as part of the tribute they paid to
him. This system provided little incentive to invest in growing better coffee at any point in the
chain, and the trees were often cultivated poorly on land ill-suited for the purpose. The lower
quality of the Java helps explain the appearance of the world’s first coffee blend, Mocha Java,
in which the acidity of the Mocha added flavor to the body of the Java. The cheaper Java also
helped to keep down the price of the blend.
Java’s dominance of world trade did not last long, however. The VOC also planted coffee in
the Dutch Latin American colony of Guiana (today Suriname) in 1712 and started shipping
it back to Amsterdam in 1718. Meanwhile the French East India company introduced coffee
to the island of Bourbon (now Réunion) in 1715. Profits made from coffee were such that the
company granted the French state a monopoly of all production in 1723 and declared that
it would repossess all the concessions it had granted on which coffee was not grown. In both
Guiana and, especially, Bourbon, cultivation was carried out on large plantations that used
African slave labor.12
The French also transplanted coffee plants to their Caribbean territories, notably St.
Domingue (now Haiti) in 1715 and Martinique in 1723. Coffee growing took second place
to sugar production, however, and in St. Domingue was principally cultivated on the remoter
hillsides by people of color, with the island’s settler elite forming the major market for the
beans.13 However, in the latter part of the century, coffee farming became more intensive and
export-oriented, shifting to a slave-based plantation system. In 1767 coffee revenues in St.
Domingue were only a quarter of those of sugar, yet between 1787 and 1789 they were of
roughly equal value, making St. Domingue easily the largest coffee-exporting origin in the
world, with the French colonies as a whole generating over two-thirds of the world supply.
This growth in exports was closely linked to the expansion of domestic consumption
in France. The combination of coffee with warm milk in the form of café au lait created a
beverage sufficiently close to chocolate in its sweetness and calorific value to become the

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Coffee, a Condensed History 219

new breakfast favorite.14 Recipes using coffee frequently appeared in French cookbooks after
the 1730s. By the late eighteenth century, even the lowest classes were drinking a version
of café au lait, doubtless adulterated, to start their day. Indeed, the sans culottes, the urban
radicals of 1789–94, included demands for more access to coffee in their manifestos at the
start of the revolution.15
Inspired by events in France, St. Domingue’s slaves staged their own revolution in 1791,
leading to a civil war that lasted until 1804, when the black-led Haitian Republic was de-
clared. Coffee production was dramatically disrupted during the conflict, and the new state
failed to recapture the markets it had lost. The plantations were mostly broken up and coffee
was either cultivated on small mountainous plots or simply scavenged from the surviving trees.
The demise of St. Domingue’s coffee created opportunities for other producers. Asian produc-
tion revived in Java and also Ceylon (today Sri Lanka), where the Dutch had introduced coffee
as a garden crop to be grown by the Sinhalese people. When the British gained control of the
entire island after 1815, they moved to intensify coffee production on the lines of the plantation
system operating in West Indian sugarcane fields. Although some local entrepreneurs acquired
plantations, ownership remained largely among European settlers, frequently colonial officials
themselves. By the 1860s, Ceylon had become the largest coffee exporter in the world.16
In 1869, however, coffee leaf rust fungus, Hemelia vastatrix, hit the Ceylon plantations.
Over the next forty years it spread to points as far apart as Samoa in the Pacific and Cameroon
in West Africa. Coffee cultivation in the colonial economies of Africa and Asia was devastated,
with their overall share of world output dropping from 33 percent at the time of the outbreak
to just 5 percent in 1914. In Ceylon during the 1870s, planters abandoned coffee cultiva-
tion and switched to tea. Experiments with alternative species of coffee led other producing
regions, notably those in West Africa and contemporary Indonesia, to replant with the hardier
robusta species. For more detail on this upheaval, see “The Ecology of Taste.”
For Europe too, its time at the center of the coffee economy was over. Consumption con-
tinued to rise, not least in regions such as Germany, which had come late to coffee, having
been held back by several factors: the desire of rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia
to protect homegrown products (in this instance beer) and the value to the treasury of state
monopolies on both the importing and later roasting of coffee, policed by agents known as
“coffee sniffers” during the later eighteenth century (see “Germany”).17 However, just as the
Latin American nations were to usurp the position of the colonial producers within the world
markets, North America overtook Europe as the principal importer of coffee, as it developed
into a mass consumer society, embraced by European immigrants in search of a better lifestyle
that might, among many other things, offer them the chance to drink more coffee.

A NEW WORLD OF COFFEE

The old notion that America became a nation of coffee drinkers in the wake of the Boston Tea
Party of 1773 is effectively laid to rest in the chapter “Why Americans Drink Coffee.” Britain’s
colonies were not just the major source of American tea but also, through British possessions
in the Caribbean, the primary origin of American imports of coffee. As Topik and McDonald
explain, the thirteen American colonies adopted an embargo on British tea and coffee from
the Caribbean in 1774. The Revolutionary War further disrupted supply from British hold-
ings. The new United States turned for coffee to St. Domingue, then Cuba, and finally Brazil
in the mid-nineteenth century.

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220 Jonathan Morris with material from Robert W. Thurston

Yet imports did not solely assuage some great American thirst for caffeine. Instead, coffee
had become a key part in America’s re-export trade with Europe, the final destination of well
over half the coffee that entered the U.S. in the 1800s. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea
Company (note that the word coffee is not in the name), founded in New York in 1859,
became the first truly national grocery store chain by the late nineteenth century, yet carried
little coffee. Even in the early 1880s, the number of cups of coffee brewed in the U.S. was
probably roughly equivalent to those of tea. It was only as increasing numbers of immigrants
arrived from Europe, bringing not so much a taste for coffee as the cultural aspiration to be
able to afford it, that consumption really took off (see “United States”).
The vast bulk of the new supply of coffee to the U.S. came from Brazil, as “Why Americans
Drink Coffee” shows. Other Latin American states also expanded their output to fill the gap
left by the ravages of coffee rust in Africa and Asia, but they were unable to compete with
Brazil’s commodity approach based on volume of outputs; they instead relied on quality to
differentiate their offering—none more so than Colombia, whose high-grown Colombian
milds were prized for blending with the Brazilian naturals to add flavor. By acting collectively
to control the stocks in world circulation, Latin American states were able to promote price
stability, enabling them to plan investments more rationally while providing an assured return
to farmers. This approach started with the Brazilian “valorisation” of 1906 and culminated in
the establishment of the International Coffee Organization (ICO) in 1962, which assigned
export quotas to its members.
America meanwhile had evolved into the first mass market for coffee. During the Civil War,
branding and packaging began to develop together, so that American housewives no longer
simply bought green coffee, often from an open barrel in a general store, perhaps placed next
to fragrant fish or pickles. The big American coffee companies, Arbuckles, Folgers, and Hills
Brothers, began as small operations, often in the western states and territories. As the railroads
spread to every town in the land, as printing techniques evolved to permit first color draw-
ings and then photographs, and as the mass market magazines emerged, Americans purchased
more and more packaged coffee, either green or roasted. Advertising in popular magazines
reinforced the notion that the way that American housewives prepared and served coffee was
an important marker of their status and value in and outside the home.18
To all this there was a dark side, sometimes a vicious one. For some three or four decades,
beginning in the early 1930s, coffee advertisements fairly regularly featured violence by males
against women. Such ads were supposed to be funny, but a hot cup of coffee thrown in the
face no longer seems amusing.
Even if ads did not directly promote violence against inept wives, inferior coffee in the
home was depicted as threatening many a postwar marriage, while correct preparation could
guarantee domestic peace or even land a man in the first place. Mrs. Olson came to the res-
cue of clueless—but always white and gorgeous—homemakers in these ads, which ran for
twenty-one years beginning in the early 1960s.19 It’s easy to make good coffee, she would tell
distressed young women. Just use Folgers—“It’s mountain grown!”—as though other coffee
grew in swamps.
Aside from what these ads tell us about gender roles during the first six or seven decades
of the twentieth century, they also point to coffee’s centrality in American life in that pe-
riod, when sales of coffee in the U.S. frequently accounted for over 50 percent of world
trade, with per capita consumption reaching record levels immediately on either side of the
Second World War. The ads also reveal an increasing concentration of coffee into the hands
of a few large roasters, able to contest the mass market within the most popular channels

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Figure 41.1. A Chase and Sanborn comic strip ad, Good Housekeeping, November 1934. By
finally buying good coffee, Mrs. Goof saves the marriage, for what it might be worth.

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222 Jonathan Morris with material from Robert W. Thurston

of communication. By the 1950s the five largest roasters in the U.S. roasted over one-third
of all coffee and controlled 78 percent of all stocks, supplying the remainder as green to
grocery chains to roast for their own store blends.20

THE GLOBAL BEVERAGE

Starting in the 1930s, the American grocery sector changed from shelves accessible only
to clerks, who handed packages and cans to patrons, into self-service supermarkets. The
new alignment came to dominate the distribution channel for coffee and led in turn to a
transformation of the structures of the coffee industry; the major food conglomerates who
supplied the new outlets purchased the leading coffee brands (and associated companies). As
this retail revolution was exported to the rest of the globe, an elite group of multinational
giants came to dominate the world market, buying up the major brands in each region.21
By 1998, the Big Five—Phillip Morris (now part of Kraft), Nestle, Sara Lee, Proctor and
Gamble (which has since sold its coffee business to Smucker’s), and Tchibo—accounted for
69 percent of global coffee sales.22
Their common business formula was based on a combination of high volume and low pric-
ing, designed to attract customers confronted with a wide choice of products. Although some
brands were positioned as premium, they made little reference to origins, not least because in
order to maintain the volumes of output, it was necessary to constantly adjust the blends to
fit with available coffee. As more robusta became available at lower prices, it inevitably found
its way into these blends, with roasters relying on a combination of consumer ignorance and
thrift to shift their products.
A series of innovations in the first half of the twentieth century combined to dramatically
extend product ranges. Ludwig Roselius of Hamburg first perfected a decaffeination process
in 1903. He created the Kaffee Hag brand in 1906 (marketed in France and the United States
under the name Sanka, from the French sans caféine), before the label was sold to General
Foods in the 1920s and subsequently to Kraft. Melitta Bentz, a housewife from Dresden, pat-
ented the filter paper system in 1908 that still bears her name. This technique prevented any
coffee grounds from ending up in the cup, in contrast to a typical outcome when using linen
bag filters in the coffee pot, the principal method of domestic brewing over the previous two
centuries. Not only did this improve the appearance of the coffee and give a sense that it had
been “cleaned” of impurities, it also reduced preparation time.
Such time saving was taken to a new level with the launch of the first soluble (or “instant”)
coffee, Nescafé, produced by the Swiss giant Nestle in 1938. Soluble sales took off in the 1950s
and were further boosted once the original spray-dried techniques were superseded by freeze-
drying as utilized in the premium “Gold Blend” brand launched in the late 1960s, known as
“Taster’s Choice” in the U.S. The costs of production equipment for both decaffeinated and
instant coffee are such that producing it is only undertaken in large-scale specialist plants. Instant
coffee was particularly successful in the UK, where it was adopted as an easier beverage to brew
than tea during the advertising breaks on the newly launched commercial television network.
Even today soluble in the UK still constitutes an estimated 80 percent of the at-home market,
while soluble accounts for around 40 percent of total world coffee consumption.23
The decline in per capita coffee consumption in the U.S. from the 1950s onward has often
been blamed on the “mass marketers.” Trish Rothgeb dubbed these figures the “first wavers,”
who had “made bad coffee commonplace . . . who created low quality instant solubles . . . who

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Coffee, a Condensed History 223

blended away all the nuance . . . who forced prices to an all-time low!”24 As Kenneth Davids
shows in “The Competing Languages of Coffee,” this was in many ways typical of an early
discourse within the specialty coffee movement, which aimed to educate consumers about
coffee and raise their perception of quality, at least to the point that they understood coffee
came from a tree, not a can!
In order to introduce customers to specialty coffee, dedicated entrepreneurs turned to
another innovation intended to speed up the brewing process, albeit in bars, the espresso
machine. As Jonathan Morris recounts in “The Espresso Menu,” the first pressure brewing
machine to enter into production was the 1905 Ideale. However, the espresso rules were ef-
fectively rewritten by Achille Gaggia in 1948, who developed a machine with a spring-loaded
piston that delivered shots under high pressures, topped with crema.
Espresso-based drinks, such as cappuccino and caffè latte, albeit often prepared to very
different recipes than in Italy, were used by the U.S. specialty coffee movement to tempt peo-
ple into their shops. From this start was born the format that spawned Starbucks and its host
of imitators (see “Coffeehouse Formats through the Centuries”). When the Specialty Coffee
Association of America was formed in 1982, only forty people attended its first meeting. By
1998, the SCAA estimates, there were “10,000 operating units” serving specialty coffee in
America. In 2005, the estimate was 20,000, a figure that includes Starbucks and other chains
selling better-than-grocery-store coffee.25
In 1994, Starbucks began to take its formula abroad, starting with Japan, and now has some
15,000 stores in over 50 countries. In Europe another version of the speciality (note the ad-
ditional “i”) coffee movement emerged in Scandinavia, giving birth to what became the World
Barista Championship. The commercial element of these trends was the reproduction of the
coffee shop format; the UK market, for example, has grown from 371 branded coffeehouses
serving premium (that is, espresso-based) beverages in 1997 to 4,907 in 2011.26
This highly visible expression of consumer culture coincided with a crisis in producer coun-
tries, as prices on the world coffee market reached new lows at the turn of the millennium.
The average price of exported coffee in U.S. cents per pound fell from 74 in 1999–2000 to 43
in 2001–2. Within the industry this was widely blamed on the demise of the International
Coffee Agreement (ICA) in 1989, a result of political pressures for market liberalization from
the U.S. in particular. The end of the ICA and its export quotas assisted in creating a glut of
robusta from nontraditional origins such as Vietnam. The oversupply forced the price of all
coffee down to the point that producers claimed it was impossible for them to cover their costs
(see “Vietnam”). Starbucks in particular found itself the target of denunciations of exploita-
tion and unfair practices in the coffee trade, both by demonstrators during the riots that ac-
companied the meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999 and in films such
as Black Gold (2007), whose director freely admitted that he focused upon the chain because
“the average person on the street can’t see Nestle or Kraft—they’re not as in your face.”27 The
crisis also spurred interest in ethical certification programs like Fair Trade USA, Fairtrade
International, and Rainforest Alliance.
In recent years, however, coffee export prices have again started to rise, reaching 125 cents
per pound in 2009–10 and going above 300 in April 2011, a reversal usually ascribed to ris-
ing demand from new markets in which the coffee shop format has taken hold. The potential
for growth in traditional tea-drinking regions such as Russia and China, where the economic
elite have already switched to coffee as a status beverage, may be game-changing within the
industry. However, the trend is most powerful in producer countries that formerly displayed
little interest in the final product. In India, for example, the locally owned company Café

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Coffee Day, which first opened in 1996, expanded to some 1,270 outlets by 2012 and, signifi-
cantly, became part of a vertically integrated holding company that also operates its own coffee
estates.28 Brazil, meanwhile, is no longer merely the world’s biggest coffee producer but has
suddenly become the second largest consumer nation in the world, behind only the U.S., with
growth predicted to continue at an average of 3–5 percent per annum for the coming years,
significantly higher than either Europe or North America.29 The U.S. has virtually stagnated
in consumption, even while the number of coffee shops continues to grow. Does this portend
yet another profound shift in the nature of the world coffee trade? The next few years will tell.

NOTES

1. Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffee Houses. The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near
East (Seattle: University of Washington Press,1985), 11–29.
2. Hattox, Coffee and Coffee Houses, 29–45.
3. Vittorio Castellani aka Chef Kumalé, Coffee Roots (Turin: Lavazza, 2006), gives a good account
of coffee in the Middle East today.
4. Michel Tuchscherer, “Coffee in the Red Sea Area from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century,”
in The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989, ed. William Gervase
Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 50–66, provides the
best account of the organization of the trade.
5. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise. A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants,
trans. David Jacobson (New York: Vintage, 1993), 15–96.
6. Sarah Moss and Alexander Badenoch, Chocolate: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books,
2009).
7. Helen Saberi, Tea: A Global History (London: Reaktion, 2010).
8. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking,
1985), 214.
9. Jordan Goodman, “Excitantia: Or How Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs” in Consum-
ing Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, ed. Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sher-
ratt (London: Routledge, 1995), 126.
10. Anne E. C. McCants, “Poor consumers as global consumers: The diffusion of tea and coffee
drinking in the eighteenth century,” Economic History Review 61 (2008): 177.
11. Steven Topik, “The Integration of the World Coffee Market” in Clarence-Smith and Topik,
Global Coffee Economy, 28.
12. Gwyn Campbell, “The Origins and Development of Coffee Production in Réunion and Mada-
gascar, 1711–1972” in Clarence-Smith and Topik, Global Coffee Economy, 67–71.
13. Steven Topik, “The World Coffee Market in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries from Co-
lonial to National Regimes,” LSE eprint Working Paper 04/04, London, 2004, 16. Available at http://
eprints.lse.ac.uk/22489.
14. Julia Landweber, “Domesticating the ‘queen of beans’: How old regime France learned to love
coffee,” World History Bulletin 26, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 10–12.
15. Colin Jones and Rebecca Spang, “Sans Culottes, sans Café, sans Tabac: Shifting Realms of Neces-
sity and Luxury in Eighteenth Century France,” in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe
1650–1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester: Manchester University Press,1999), 37–62.
16. Rachel Kurian, “Labour, Race and Gender on the Coffee Plantations in Ceylon (Sri Lanka),
1834–1880,” in Clarence-Smith and Topik, Global Coffee Economy, 173–90.
17. Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s
Most Popular Drug (New York: Routledge, 2001), 86–87.

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18. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic
Books, 1994); Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (New York: Berg, 2001);
and Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994).
19. Los Angeles Times, July 25, 1996, http://articles.latimes.com/1996-07-25/news/mn-27699_1
_virginia-christine, accessed July 1, 2011.
20. Topik, “The Integration of the World Coffee Market,” 46.
21. On this process see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. America’s Advance Through 20th-
Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
22. Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, The Coffee Paradox. Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the
Elusive Promise of Development (London: Zed Books, 2005), 92.
23. See Benfield, “United Kingdom,” this volume, and Howard Schultz, Onward: How Starbucks
Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul (New York: Rodale, 2011), 252.
24. Trish R. Skeie (Rothgeb), “Norway and Coffee,” The Flamekeeper, Newsletter of the Roasters Guild,
Spring 2003.
25. https://www.scaa.org/?page=history, accessed May 20, 2012.
26. Allegra Strategies, Project Cafe11 UK (London: Allegra Strategies, 2011).
27. J. Dawson, “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee,” The Sunday Times (London), June 3, 2007, Culture
Section, 1.0.
28. http://cafecoffeeday.com, accessed 24 May 2012.
29. “Brazil: Sara Lee sees consumption growing by 3–5% annually,” Comunicaffè (ejournal), Milan,
May 25, 2012.

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42
Coffeehouse Formats through the Centuries
Third Places or Public Spaces?
Jonathan Morris

What is a coffeehouse? The question is more complicated than it seems at first. Many places
that sell coffee would never be described as coffeehouses. A more nuanced definition is that a
coffeehouse is a business whose principal source of income derives from coffee beverage sales;
yet this notion eliminates many of the places where people have congregated to drink coffee
over the centuries.
Coffeehouses sell beverages and intangible goods. The sociologist Roy Oldenburg makes
the point in his now famous formula: coffeehouses are examples of third places that “host
the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the
realms of home and work.”1 Typically, coffeehouses have indeed acted as third places, but they
have frequently been surrogates for both the home and the workplace.
Coffeehouses, then, sell not just coffee but also time and space. The trick is to identify cus-
tomers with time who need space and to rent a spot to them in the price charged for coffee,
as the various elaborations of the coffeehouse format recorded over the centuries demonstrate.
The first coffeehouses spread up the Arabian peninsula and around the Levant under the
jurisdiction of the Ottoman empire during the sixteenth century.2 Their appeal lay in provid-
ing the first public spaces, apart from the mosque, in which Muslim men could socialize with
each other in the absence of alcohol, which was, of course, forbidden by their religion. Inviting
a companion to one’s home would have necessitated negotiating a myriad of conventions con-
nected to social rank, while meeting at a coffeehouse where patrons were seated and served at
long benches according to the order in which they arrived, reinforced the sense of interacting
with others on an equal footing. Coffeehouses were both the source and beneficiary of a new
attitude within the empire, particularly appreciated by middle-level bureaucrats. Several sul-
tans sought to suppress coffeehouses as sites of sedition, but their orders appear to have been
“overlooked” by many local officials.
The first European coffeehouses were established in England in the 1650s, some two
decades before they appeared in France and modern-day Germany and over thirty years
prior to the opening of coffeehouses in Austria and Italy. This might seem surprising given
the relative proximity of the latter countries to the Ottoman empire’s Balkan territories,
but it is probably best explained by the relative weakness of the monarchy and the guilds

226

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Coffeehouse Formats through the Centuries 227

in England compared with the continent. It was easier in England to start a new business
than it was elsewhere in Europe.
When Pasqua Rosee opened the first coffeehouse in London in 1652, the country had just
concluded a period of nine years of civil war, during which the king had been executed and
a commonwealth proclaimed.3 In a period of intense uncertainty, coffeehouses provided a
public space where individuals of various political persuasions could meet to plan and debate.
It is no accident that London, the stronghold of the parliamentarians, contests the claim for
the earliest coffeehouse in England with Oxford, the royalist city par excellence, in which an
establishment was certainly operating by 1653 but may have been preceded by an operation
founded in 1650.4 After his restoration to the throne in 1660, Charles II twice started to sup-
press coffeehouses as centers of opposition, but each time was dissuaded by his ministers, who
pointed out the use his own supporters made of them. By 1663, there were 82 coffeehouses
reported in the City of London—the autonomously governed square mile at the heart of the
capital’s commercial activities—while in 1739, Henry Maitland recorded 144 in the City and
551 within the entirety of the metropolis—around 1 per 1,000 head of population.5 What
were the reasons for their success?
The first, though for very different reasons than in the Muslim world, was the absence of
alcohol in coffeehouses. “Pure” water was too dangerous to drink, so until this point all bever-
ages had been some form of fermented alcohol, usually the weak ale known as “small beer.”
Coffee, along with tea and chocolate, both of which also made their way onto coffeehouse
menus by the 1660s, offered a fundamentally new form of refreshment. Coffee in particular
was attractive in that it replaced the gradual diminution of brain function associated with the
use of alcohol with an apparent increase in activity caused by the stimulation from caffeine.
Furthermore, as long as they were not trading in alcohol, coffeehouses could not be said to
infringe upon the licenses of the inns and taverns, and consequently their numbers were not
subject to regulation.
Coffeehouses then provided public venues where businessmen might meet and conclude
deals not only in the absence of the distractions caused by the presence of other drinkers in
the taverns but also with a sense that their faculties were heightened as they traded. Rosee’s
premises were located in St Michael’s Alley, right beside the Royal Exchange, while Edward
Lloyd’s coffeehouse, founded in 1688, became a center for maritime insurance; Jonathan’s and
Garraways were used for trading stocks, pre-dating, and subsequently running in parallel to,
the more official exchanges until the end of the eighteenth century. Far from being third places
away from work, these coffeehouses were essentially workplaces in themselves.
Meanwhile, coffeehouses continued to offer an environment in which well-bred gentlemen
of varying ranks could meet without regard to the minutiae of status and engage with each
other in conversation and debate. Such discussions might indeed focus on overtly political is-
sues, nurtured in part by periodicals such as The Tatler (1709–11) and The Spectator (1711–12
and 1714), both written and read principally in the coffeehouse itself. This led Jurgen Haber-
mas to identify the eighteenth-century coffeehouse as one of the first institutions in which
bourgeois “public opinion” was shaped and articulated, independent of the state.6
Equally, however, the coffeehouse provided a rendezvous for a new social grouping of so-
called virtuosi, whose inquiring mindset sought stimulation through exposure to exotic novel-
ties and curiosities, irrespective of whether these were the products of the arts and humanities.
Scientific research also benefited, including the early work of Isaac Newton; he founded what
remains Britain’s premier scientific association, the Royal Society, in a London coffeehouse.7

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228 Jonathan Morris

Figure 42.1. An engraving by H. O. Neal, 1763, caricaturing coffeehouse regulars as wastrels

and swindlers. Satan looks on happily from a perch at upper right, while Britannia swoons help-
lessly at the left. Library of Congress.

One new element added to the coffeehouse formula was the assertion of authenticity as a
form of marketing. Rosee, a Greek Orthodox citizen of the Ottoman-controlled port city of
Smyrna, used his own image to symbolize this, trading under a sign depicting a caricature of
himself known as the Turk’s Head. Later, he and his partner, Christopher Bowman, would dis-
tribute handbills extolling the virtues of coffee, claiming that, “It is observed in Turkey, where
this is generally drunk, that they are not troubled with the Stone, Gout, Dropsie or Scurvey,
and their Skins are exceedingly cleer and white.”8 Bowman appears to have made these adver-
tisements available to other coffeehouse owners to promote the beverage, conferring authority
upon claims that few were in a position to challenge.
Despite this early flourishing, by 1815 only twelve establishments in the whole of London
described themselves as coffeehouses. What went wrong? First, the social inclusiveness of
such establishments was strictly limited. For women, the coffeehouse remained principally a
workplace, whether as proprietors (many were run by widows), members of the serving staff,
or offering other services, such as prostitution in the all-night coffeehouses that doubled as
bordellos. Relatively few women patronized coffeehouses in this early period for social pur-
poses, preferring to utilize the tea gardens whose open-air settings made them more acceptable
places in which to be seen.
Second, the advent of more specialist workplaces and work tools saw businessmen and
traders move out of coffeehouses into offices designed to accommodate the new practices.

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Coffeehouse Formats through the Centuries 229

Meanwhile as the political upheavals of the seventeenth century subsided, to be replaced by a

renewed emphasis on social distinction, social interaction reverted to a more exclusive basis,
with many coffeehouses converting to private clubs.
Finally, but most important, coffee never held much appeal for the common people, or
“plebs” as they were known at the time. The 551 coffeehouses in the London of 1739 pale in
significance besides the more than 8,000 establishments that served alcohol, most famously
gin, to the masses. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was common for “coffeehouses” to serve
mainly alcohol, with coffee as merely a side offering.9
Early American coffeehouses followed much the same trajectory. In 1670 Dorothy Jones
was licensed in Boston to sell “coffee and cuchaletto”—that is, chocolate. The first known
coffeehouses in what became the United States opened in Boston in the late 1680s or early
1690s. Early American coffeehouses, especially the Green Dragon in Boston, were described
as centers of political discussion and even the birthplaces of revolution. But the American
colonists, too, preferred alcoholic beverages. Colonial and early republic records are filled
with laws and court judgments against drunkards and those who served them. The frequency
with which such laws were adopted by colonial and state governments and the multitudinous
known violations of these statutes suggest that alcohol intake in early America was not much
tempered by the use of coffee.10
Attempts by the nineteenth-century temperance movement in Britain and the U.S. to com-
bat alcoholism through the creation of “coffee taverns,” frequently located next to taverns or
pubs, indicated how difficult it was to adapt the coffeehouse format to suit an industrial age.
Although there were over 1,000 coffee taverns in Britain during the 1880s, these were again
dwarfed by the more than 100,000 licensed premises.11 Commercially, these enjoyed little
success, not least because the ambiance was far from relaxed, with the zeal of the proprietors
to promote abstinence less than conducive to an evening of leisure. Ultimately one of the
most significant factors behind the early takeoff of the coffeehouse in England, the absence
of alcohol, also proved to be one of the biggest constraints on the format’s continued success.
Elsewhere in Europe, different formats evolved for coffee service. In France, a wave of
“Turkomania” arose during the sojourn of an emissary from the Ottoman sultan to the French
Sun King, who spent the year the king forced him to wait for an appointment by entertaining
the French aristocracy in a mocked up coffeehouse.12 However, attempts by various Armenian
traders to build on this event in the manner of Pasqua Rosee in London failed, not least because
of battles between the various guilds over who could sell the new beverage, a dispute resolved
only in 1676 when this right was given to a combined guild of distillers, brandy merchants,
and eau de vie sellers.13 An Italian immigrant, Francesco Procopio, established a temporary set
of coffee rooms at the annual St. Germain fair, serving both coffee and alcohol of various kinds,
appealing to a high-class clientele. Ten years later, in 1686, he opened the Café Procope, which
still trades on the same site today, proclaiming itself to be “world’s oldest restaurant.”
It was this café format, in which sales of brewed coffee are combined with those of meals
and alcohol, which dominated the continent for over three centuries. At first, following the
Procope model, such cafés consciously targeted an elite market. These grand venues, with their
splendidly furnished rooms, pristine tablecloths, and immaculately attired waiters, spread
around Europe, providing suitable refreshment and relaxation to those travelers engaged in the
Grand tour. In Italy, for example, Caffè Florian opened on St Mark’s Square in Venice in 1720
and the Caffè Greco in Rome in 1760. There was little sense of these being, even in theory,
open or democratic establishments, although their respectability ensured they were patronized
by women as well as men.

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230 Jonathan Morris

At the other end of the scale were the working men’s cafés, whose numbers increased
dramatically in France after the revolution of 1789, when a fusion between the eighteenth-
century wine merchants and the upper-class café produced a nineteenth-century proletarian
version of the latter.14 Here, customers were not greeted, seated, and served by waiters but
interacted informally with the owner and his family. Between the 1860s and the 1880s, almost
a quarter of Parisian couples who were married in civil ceremonies chose a café owner as their
witness, and it seems that they saw the café as an extension of, rather than separate from, their
home. A frequent defense if one partner was accused of beating another in a café was that they
believed they were in a domestic setting, so that violence between them was a private affair.
Of course, much of that violence was facilitated by alcohol, leading again to the paradox that
the café was the primary location in which coffee was taken outside the home, but coffee was
rarely the principal source of the café’s income.
Similar patterns can be observed across most of Europe, albeit with some local variations.
Vienna was twice at the center of a coffeehouse culture—the first time in the 1680s, when
Franz Georg Kolschitsky, whose ethnic origins appear as opaque as the stories that he assidu-
ously promoted concerning his role in the relief of the Siege of Vienna, opened the Blue Bottle
(Blaue Flasche) Coffeehouse.15 Kolschitsky blended authenticity and adaptability to suit the
desires of his customers. On the one hand, he and his staff dressed in Turkish-style clothing,
clearly intended to communicate their authority in coffee matters, along the lines of many of
his stories. On the other hand, the introduction of milk and cream into the coffee transformed
the entire nature of the beverage, making it much more palatable to Austrian tastes.
Vienna’s second coffeehouse moment came towards the end of the nineteenth century,
when it briefly assumed the mantle of Europe’s cultural capital. Many of the leading pro-
tagonists in this phenomenon were denizens of Vienna’s coffeehouses, where they supposedly
whiled away the hours reading newspapers, playing games, and either writing or discussing
each other’s work. Peter Altenberg (1859–1919), the writer who epitomized this trend, even
had his mail delivered to his favorite haunt, the Cafe Central, whose customers also included
the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
These institutions did sell coffee, time, and space, although in most other respects they were
modeled upon the European grand cafés. Some of their patrons, for instance Altenberg, may
have been indigent, but they were usually subsidized by their companions; the cafés were used
as much for work, or touting for work, as they were for simple socializing. The same could be
said of the so-called flaneurs, who penned literary works in the sidewalk cafés of nineteenth-
century Paris, or the impoverished J. K. Rowling, writing her first Harry Potter book in the
warmth of an Edinburgh café.
A further variation worth noting is the Konditorei, popular in both Austria and Germany.
These are essentially pastry shops that also provide for consumption on the premises, usually
accompanied by a hot beverage. They are the out-of-home setting for gatherings of housewives
known as the Kaffeeklatsch, usually held in mid-afternoon when their husbands are still at
work. Again the absence of alcohol was important in making these socially acceptable venues
for women. Even today, the leading purveyors of coffee outside the home in Germany are
bakery store chains, with over 12,500 outlets in the country.16
The evolution of the espresso bar over the first half of the twentieth century was as much
about a revolution in service as it was about the beverage itself. The advent of what were
known as American bars in Europe, in which drinks were simply passed over the counter with-
out the need for a waiter, was complemented in Italy by the development of coffee machines
that could prepare an individual cup on demand.17 Customers downed their beverages stand-

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Coffeehouse Formats through the Centuries 231

ing up. The format fitted the apparent acceleration in the pace of life and proved particularly
popular in transport termini and in bars serving the urban bourgeoisie.
It was only during the postwar economic transformation of Italy from an agrarian to an
industrial society that this became a mass phenomenon. Small-scale bars opened up to provide
migrants with an alternative venue for socializing to the confines of the home or for watch-
ing television. Coffee formed an important part of the offer, despite the concurrent presence
of alcohol. As one of the cheapest beverages on offer, it constituted the lowest possible price
to pay to enjoy the environment of the bar. The lack of a service component kept the prices
down, while the spread of high-pressure brewing machines meant that the coffee offered a
different sensory experience than the drink made at home did.
Not all of these features survived their transfer abroad. The Eiscafés that became an estab-
lished feature of German high streets in the 1950s combined a coffee offer with an ice-cream
one, attracting a predominantly younger clientele who might have gained some experience
of espresso coffee culture on their family holidays to Italy.18 Similarly, the 1950s coffee bars
in Britain proved particularly popular with teenagers who felt excluded from pubs but could
listen to their music on the café jukebox after the end of the school day. Coffee, though at the
heart of the menu, formed relatively little part of the attraction of the English espresso bar,
and subsequent generations were seduced by the advent of colorfully furnished quick service
chain restaurants and the switch to sweeter lager-style beers at the pub.19
American coffeehouses began a slow revival in the twentieth century, originally under the
guidance of Italian Americans who opened espresso bars in neighborhoods like San Fran-
cisco’s North Beach or New York’s Greenwich Village. Some of these sites became famous
for poetry readings by Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and for musical performances by art-
ists like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Again the coffeehouses suffered once television began to
offer stay-at-home entertainment, and diners became the principal purveyors of the cheap,
bottomless cup of coffee.
The 1980s college coffeehouse program in the U.S. targeting students who had plenty
of time on their hands but who were under the legal drinking age is often cited as having
nurtured the coffee shop customers of today.20 However it was the realignment of the service
format to fit the rhythms of the working day that accounted for much of the specialty indus-
try’s early success in America. The coffee carts that started to appear in Seattle beside queues
for the ferries and on the street outside stores such as Nordstrom essentially catered to com-
muters on their way to work or those who were prepared to pay for a good cup of coffee, as
opposed to that provided free in the office itself. Offering a takeaway service was therefore a
vital component of the formula.
Subsequently, the transformation in the nature of work itself has favored the continued
growth of the coffee shop, not so much as a separate third place but as an extension of the
workplace. The decline of manufacturing and the rise of mobile technology mean that the
main components of most office jobs—working on the computer screen, communicating on
the telephone or via the Internet, and holding face-to-face meetings—can be easily conducted
within the coffee shop. The value of these contemporary coffeehouses lies as much as in en-
hancing, as escaping, productive labor.
Regarding the social roles of coffeehouses, several continuities with previous formats can be
observed. The absence of alcohol in most incarnations has turned them into public spaces that
feel safe and welcoming to those social groups who, whether by law or convention, have been
excluded from drinking establishments. Socializing at the coffee shop avoids the modern-day
versions of status anxieties that can operate around issues such as the tidiness of one’s home.

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232 Jonathan Morris

Meanwhile for travelers, a coffee shop, and in particular a branded coffee shop, offers the
chance for an experience of home away from home: a place where one knows not just how to
order one’s latte but also how it will taste and where one can be confident that certain facili-
ties, notably bathrooms, will be provided to an acceptable standard. This is the “no surprises”
model of American business, as one motel chain used to put it.
So can contemporary coffee shops live up to the requirements of the third place as advo-
cated by Oldenburg or provide the platform for shaping public opinion identified by Haber-
mas? Most contemporary observers suggest not. Bryant Simon, who conducted exhaustive
ethnographic research sitting in branches of Starbucks, found that few conversations between
strangers arose at the coffee shop.21 A project analyzing the behavior of Scottish coffee shop
customers determined that, as one tabloid newspaper scathingly put it, the reason people go
to cafés is to drink coffee.22
Yet, having discovered that coffee shops were not hotbeds of political discourse, the Glasgow
researchers also suggested that social theorists had underplayed the importance of enjoyment
in literally being members of the public.23 While there was little evidence of intentional con-
versation between strangers, they identified how moments of haphazard contact—requests
to share tables or borrow the newspaper—could lead to conversation if warmly received,
while some customers assisted mothers with children in cleaning up spills, making space, and
entertaining their children for short periods. Being present during acts of kindness between
strangers might, in itself, be much of the point of visiting a coffee shop.
Coffeehouse formats have varied significantly in terms of who is served, but ultimately they
have been successful by paying attention to the needs of their clientele in relation to time and
space as much as to coffee.24 That is not to ignore the centrality of coffee in many (though not
all) formats where it is presented in a way that justifies pricing appropriate to the experience
that accompanies it: low in the case of an Italian espresso bar where it is consumed fast with
minimal service, high in a coffee shop where the customer might be planning on working at
a table for a few hours.
Expecting coffeehouses to serve as third places may be loading too much expectation onto
their powers of social integration, yet at the same time misses the point that they can serve as
extensions of, and even substitutes for, the home and the workplace. Ultimately, patronizing a
coffeehouse is about sharing a human experience: as Asaf Bar-Tura has recently put it, people
come to coffee shops “to be around other people, without actually having anything to do with
them.”25 This may not match up to Oldenburg’s ideal, but it constitutes an extremely powerful
business opportunity.

NOTES

1. Roy Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (New York: Marlowe, 1997), 16.
2. Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985).
3. The two best studies of the English coffeehouse are Markman Ellis, The Coffeehouse: A Cultural
History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), and Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emer-
gence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
4. The only evidence to support this claim comes from a memoir written nearly twenty years later;
see Ellis, Coffeehouse, 30.
5. Ellis, Coffeehouse, 172–73.

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Coffeehouse Formats through the Centuries 233

6. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
7. Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 10–13, sets out his conception of the virtuoso mindset.
8. Anon., The Vertue of the Coffee Drink. 1656? The original is in the British Library: available from
Early English Books Online at http://gateway.proquest.com.
9. Antony Clayton, London’s Coffeehouses (London: Historical Publications, 2003), 103–7.
10. See Sharon V. Salinger, Taverns and Drinking in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 2002).
11. Clayton, London’s Coffeehouses, 131.
12. Julia Anne Landweber, “Turkish Delight: The Eighteenth Century Market in Turqueries and the
Commercialization of Identity in France,” in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for
French History 30 (2004): 202–11.
13. Ellis, Coffeehouse, 80–83.
14. See W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Café (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996).
15. On both the first and second Viennese coffee moments, see Harold B Segel, The Vienna Cof-
feehouse Wits 1890–1938, trans. Harold B. Segel (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993).
16. Allegra Study Tour, European Coffee Symposium, Berlin, 2011.
17. Jonathan Morris, “Making Italian espresso, making espresso Italian,” Food and History 8, no. 2
(2010).
18. Patrick Bernhard, “La Pizza sul Reno: Per una storia della cucina e della gastronomia italiane in
Germania nel XX secolo.” Memoria e Ricerca 23 (2006): 66.
19. Clayton, London’s Coffeehouses, 145–67, provides an account of this era.
20. Telephone interview with Ted Lingle, then executive director of the SCAA, December 20, 2004.
21. Bryant Simon, Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2009), 94–118.
22. Tony Bonnici, “£140k on Why We Go to Café,” The Sun, November 19, 2005.
23. Eric Laurier and Chris Philo, “The Cappuccino Community: Cafés and Civic Life in the Con-
temporary City,” Final Report: ESRC Research Project, R000239797, 2005, 17. Download from http://
web2.ges.gla.ac.uk/~elaurier/cafesite/texts/final_cappuccino.pdf.
24. See Robert W. Thurston, “Reflections on Coffee’s Social Life: New and Old Ideas on Coffee Bars,
Social Interaction and the ‘Third Place,’” Roast Magazine, May/June 2012.
25. Asaf Bar-Tura, “The Coffeehouse as a Public Sphere: Brewing Social Change,” in Coffee: Philoso-
phy for Everyone: Grounds for Debate, ed. Scott F. Parker and Michael W. Austin (Chichester, UK: Wiley
Blackwell, 2011), 96.

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43
Why Americans Drink Coffee
The Boston Tea Party or Brazilian Slavery?
Steven Topik and Michelle Craig McDonald

On the evening of December 16, 1773, a group of longshoremen, smugglers, and other
Sons of Liberty poorly disguised as Narragansett Indians marched down Griffin’s Wharf in
Boston Harbor. There they smashed open 342 casks on the British ships Dartmouth, Beaver,
and Eleanour and dumped 45 tons of tea into the bay. Remembered as the Boston Tea Party,
this act was a catalyst of the American independence movement. It is also remembered in a
somewhat less heroic light as the event that converted North Americans from tea sippers to
coffee drinkers.
Coffee has played an important role in the creation of American national identity, sym-
bolizing independence from British authority and culture. But as with many stories key to
national identity, myth making is also involved.1 After Boston, the narrative continues, demo-
cratic pioneers spread the habit westward as the new nation stretched to meet its destiny. In
the nineteenth century, coffee was viewed as quintessentially American, just as tea was British
or Chinese, beer German, and wine French. The United States became the world’s largest con-
sumer of coffee by the middle of the nineteenth century and went on to master and reshape
the industry.2 So runs the triumphalist version.
This chapter argues that the real story is not so pretty or inspiring. Coffee’s success in the
United States derived more from slavery and the end of European colonialism in the Carib-
bean and in Brazil than it did from patriotic fervor or a sense of new nationhood. In other
words, coffee, the symbol of democratic culture, bourgeois sociability, and capitalist energy in
the U.S., succeeded because of faraway events: the Haitian Revolution and, more important,
the unprecedented expansion of Brazil’s slave-driven agriculture.
The United States certainly played a crucial role in the transformation of coffee from luxury
beverage in the seventeenth century to mass consumer drink by the mid-nineteenth century.
This metamorphosis reinforced coffee’s egalitarian and democratic symbolic significance to
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pamphleteers and chroniclers such as Thomas Paine, Do-
mingo Faustino Sarmiento, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other purveyors of the North American
story of equality.3 But political tracts and travelers’ accounts are only one way to gauge coffee’s
increasing importance in American life. Merchant account books also document coffee sales
to mariners, brewers, laborers, and widows by the 1760s, though this trade was not especially
large before independence. Afterward, however, elite Boston and Philadelphia women like

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Why Americans Drink Coffee 235

Abigail Adams and Elizabeth Drinker described its popularity among the well-to-do in the
1780s and 1790s, and even slaves received coffee as payment for overwork in Virginia iron
works.4 So common did it become to find coffee pots and cups on American tables that
within years of independence, European visitors considered the commodity an indelible part
of the new nation’s identity. “Our supper was rather scanty,” wrote François Jean Chastellux,
a French traveler to Virginia in 1787, “but our breakfast the next morning was better . . . we
are perfectly reconciled to this American custom of drinking coffee.”5
By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States led global coffee importation, although
the commodity’s overseas pedigree was usually erased. Domestic coffee roasters chose Ameri-
can landscapes or the familiar face of Uncle Sam over exotic or foreign imagery for their
trade cards once branding began after the Civil War.6 On the rare occasions advertisements
divulged provenance or origin, they mentioned Java or Mocha as sites of export, which held
historical appeal and were more highly prized in the global market. Indeed, on the western
frontier, coffee was known as “jamoca,” a combination of “java” (Indonesia) and “mocha”
(Yemen), although nearly all of it in fact came from Latin America.7 Overall, however, coffee
became divorced from its origins in the nineteenth-century U.S.—geographically sanitized—
in the campaign to supplant tea and cider as the all-American drinks.
War also boosted coffee’s assimilation into American daily life. During the Civil War,
Union troops considered coffee necessary for victory. General William Sherman called it
“the essential element of the ration,” ordering that coffee and sugar “be carried along, even
at the expense of bread, for which there are many substitutes.”8 By the early twentieth
century, coffee was renamed “cup of Joe.” Why exactly is disputed, but the likely reason
was to honor coffee’s close identification with “G.I. Joe” in World Wars I and II and in
recognition of its contributions to America’s overseas efforts. The nickname also underscores
coffee’s common touch, since “Joe” in the U.S. often signifies the ordinary fellow.9 Coffee
became an American custom, for civilians and the military, elite and proletarian, male and
female alike. Today, people around the globe drink coffee partly as a sign of Americanism
and modernism. Yet coffee drinking was hardly predestined in the British North American
colonies, and its unexpected, centuries-long path to dominance says much about both U.S.
national identity and Brazil’s key part in the story.

COFFEE AND THE BOSTON TEA PARTY

America’s interest in coffee began almost as early as colonization itself. John Smith, one
of England’s earliest settlers in Virginia, was among the first people to describe “coffa” or
“coava” in English. He wrote of it in his travel accounts from Turkey fourteen years before he
helped found Jamestown in 1607 and almost twenty years before England’s first coffeehouse
opened.10 But it is doubtful that Smith brought coffee across the Atlantic. Whenever it arrived,
interest grew slowly, and at the end of the seventeenth century coffeehouses still clustered in
port cities, limiting opportunities of rural Americans to participate in public consumption,
and the high cost curbed its incursion into private homes. William Penn complained in 1683
that British taxing and transport policies had raised the price of coffee to a stunning 18 shil-
lings and 9 pence per pound, well beyond the means of most colonial families. Although the
price of coffee dropped over the next several decades, coffee consumption remained low, at
about one-eighteenth of a pound per capita by 1783. That was just enough to brew a few cups
of coffee per person annually.11

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236 Steven Topik and Michelle Craig McDonald

Both popular and scholarly histories point to the Boston Tea Party as the watershed event
that forever changed America’s relationship to coffee. “It is sufficient here to refer to the climax
of agitation against the fateful tea tax,” observed William Ukers, longtime editor of The Tea
and Coffee Journal, “because it is undoubtedly responsible for our becoming a nation of coffee
drinkers instead of tea drinkers, like the English.” The Boston Tea Party of 1773, he argued,
left Americans “with a prenatal disinclination for tea” and “caused coffee to be crowned ‘king
of the American breakfast table’ and the sovereign drink of the American people.”12 Recent
popular coffee studies agree.13 One account even proposes that “European colonialism seemed
to dictate where coffee was cultivated and drunk,” but, “in the case of the United States, it
was the end of colonialism, dramatically reflected in the Boston Tea Party [italics added by au-
thors], that marked its rise to prominence.”14 Finally, gender historians link coffee drinking to
grassroots tea boycotts to demonstrate women’s participation in both consumer culture and in
U.S. politics; these women created “Republican Motherhood” in the 1780s, an ideology that
saw women as pivotal vehicles for the transmission of social norms and democratic ideas to
the next generation of American citizens.15
Other sources seem at first to support these interpretations. Certainly revolutionary leaders
such as Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, and John Adams and patriotic groups like the Sons of
Liberty used the Green Dragon coffeehouse (also called a tavern) in Boston and New York’s
Merchants’ Coffee House to protest the Stamp and Townsend Acts.16 And coffee’s patriotic po-
tential was not limited to cities. During the summer of 1774, John Adams wrote that when he
asked an innkeeper, “Is it lawful . . . for a weary Traveller to refresh himself with a Dish of Tea,
providing it has been honestly smuggled, or paid no Duties?” the proprietress replied, “No sir
. . . we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I can’t make tea . . . but [can] make you Coffee.”17
Adams’ recollection demonstrates that some Americans, in this case a rural innkeeper and a
representative of the Continental Congress, identified coffee with national ideas of freedom.
But the association was short-lived. The 1765 and 1769 embargoes of British goods shipped
to America focused on England, America’s source of tea, and Ireland. But a third intercolonial
boycott in 1774, beginning just months after Adams’s Massachusetts excursion, included the
British Caribbean, America’s chief coffee supplier. Coffee, in other words, became as politically
charged as tea. Some colonial representatives pleaded that banning West Indian trade “must
produce a national Bankruptcy,” but their arguments received short shrift from those who
considered Caribbean commodities like coffee “intoxicating poisons and needless luxuries”
that should be sunk at sea “rather than [brought] ashore.”18 By 1777, even Adams changed
his mind about coffee, writing to his wife, Abigail: “I hope the females will leave off their at-
tachment to coffee. I assure you, the best families in this place have left off in a great measure
the use of West India goods. We must bring ourselves to live upon the produce of our own
country.”19 Coffee, in other words, was still considered an international drink that competed
with beverages made from domestically grown trees, for example apple cider. So how did cof-
fee again become nativized?

COFFEE AS THE DRINK OF DIPLOMATS

Before the 1774 boycott, most North Americans’ coffee came from Britain’s colonies in Ja-
maica, Grenada, Saint Vincent, and Dominica. But in 1783 Parliament banned shipments
of British colonial produce in U.S. vessels, precisely when North American interest in the
commodity was booming.20 Prerevolutionary coffee imports peaked at just over $1 million in

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Why Americans Drink Coffee 237

1774, but British West Indian coffee alone entering the U.S. was worth $1,480,000 per an-
num 1802–04, while coffee imports from the rest of the world topped $8 million.21
It turns out that those imports were not just to slake North American thirst. Over half of
America’s coffee imports left shortly after they arrived. Commerce had moved between Brit-
ain’s mainland American colonies during the colonial period, but America’s re-export trade
by 1800 was international. Initially, much of these re-exports went to Amsterdam, Paris, and
London, but after 1790 U.S. traders made new inroads into Germany, Italy, and even Russia,
beginning the association of America and coffee in the minds of some European consumers.
Because tropical goods generally, and coffee especially, were important to American interests,
U.S. access to the West Indies was a serious concern.
Merchants and farmers bitterly debated the pros and cons of tariffs for goods that competed
with American manufactures, but more often they agreed on trade concessions for com-
modities America did not produce. Tea and coffee figured prominently in these discussions
since congressional delegates recognized that both “enter largely into the consumption of the
country, and have become articles of necessity to all classes.”22 In 1774 they created a three-
man European Commission—John Jay, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin—to oversee
negotiations and authorize treaties with several European nations and the Barbary Coast.23
The “plan of treaties” would have been ambitious for any nation. With only a small army and
no formal navy, the U.S. could not achieve its objectives militarily. Instead, Congress equipped
its European commissioners with the strongest weapon at its disposal, American purchasing
power, and declared that nations refusing trade treaties with the United States would face dis-
criminatory tariffs and market restrictions. During the commission’s first two years, however,
only Prussia agreed to a treaty based on the model of free trade.24
Frustrated as 1785 drew to a close, America’s European commissioners found themselves
haggling with countries like Austria that offered no prospects of tropical goods profits. This
situation prompted Jefferson and his colleagues to promote a preferential treaty with France
early in 1786, a move that aligned the United States with the only military force able to chal-
lenge Britain.25 “It will be a strong link of connection,” Jefferson wrote, “the more [so] with
the only nation on earth on whom we can solidly rely for assistance till we stand on our own
legs.”26 Moreover, it gave U.S. importers access to the French Caribbean colonies, especially
Saint Domingue (later Haiti), the leading producer of sugars and coffee in the Caribbean since
the early eighteenth century.
American merchants rallied behind Jefferson’s plan. In October 1786, the French agreed
to a series of trade concessions, including use of American ships and lowered tariffs in both
France and the French Antilles.27 The shift to French coffee suppliers was obvious, provid-
ing more than three-quarters of North America’s coffee by 1791.28 The realignment of trade
partners was reinforced because Britain continued to officially exclude American ships from
its Caribbean colonies. But the British discovered that intentions alone were insufficient:
war in Europe undermined the Royal Navy’s ability to patrol the region.29 U.S. ships thereby
gained much greater freedom of movement. American neutrality was more than a diplomatic
objective; it had been essential to the nation’s future commercial prosperity ever since the first
overtures of the European Commission.30 The newfound maritime opportunity led to greater
investment in specific commodities: “The consumption of coffee, sugar, and other West In-
dia productions increases fast in the north of Europe,” far-sighted Silas Deane correctly told
Congress in August 1776.31
But without trade agreements, Americans could not continue or expand their budding
business with the lucrative Caribbean colonies; and without neutral shipping they would be

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238 Steven Topik and Michelle Craig McDonald

unable to bring tropical produce to their consumers—at a time when war between Britain
and France provided prime opportunities for Americans to enter European markets for goods
whose prices were skyrocketing.32 With neutrality and the trade agreements, on the other
hand, the former thirteen colonies’ future was much rosier. As one savvy trader noted in a
precocious definition of what came to be known as neocolonialism, America would accrue “all
of the benefits of colonization without the administration and expense.”33 So while the nascent
nation expanded its continental territory westward, it also extended its commercial influence
southward. The re-export trade, with coffee as its flagship product, became essential to the
national economy. Political advocates of free trade portrayed re-export merchants as “patriots”
whose trade was “a necessary link in the chain of our society and of our place in the world.”34
Re-exportation of foreign-grown coffee, like coffee drinking in the 1770s, became a patriotic
act that inspired national and international attention.

COFFEE AND SLAVERY

Patriotic Americans tended to conflate independence and freedom just as they confused com-
mercial and civil liberties. Slavery, however, posed the biggest challenge to coffee’s association
with American freedom. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Caribbean and
Latin American slaves produced most of the coffee Americans drank. Even East Indian coffee
laborers, while not technically enslaved, could hardly be called free.35 At times, the relationship
was even more direct—some coffee importers traded in slaves as well and some coffeehouses
doubled as slave markets. Both British and American emancipationists recognized the power-
ful cultural connections between commodities and the labor that produced them in their boy-
cotts of slave-produced sugar; but coffee, like tobacco and cotton, faced far less resistance. 36
By 1800, the cost of a coffee embargo would have been too high for America. The new nation
made more from the re-export of coffee overseas than from re-exports of tea, sugar, and mo-
lasses combined; coffee represented 10 percent of all U.S. trade income and 25 percent of its
re-export income, high figures for a commodity that North America did not produce itself.37
Were everyday North Americans aware of how their coffee was produced? Travel narratives,
a popular eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary genre, included several accounts
of coffee plantation slavery. This literature suggests that Americans knew where and how their
coffee was produced, but little public backlash occurred.38 A few writers noted with irony the
duplicity of abolitionists’ boycotts of slave-produced sugar while consumption of other slave
products continued apace. “Oh, they say, do not use the polluted thing; beware of sweetening
your coffee with slave-grown sugar,” wrote Reverend Robert Burns, a member of Glasgow
Young Man’s Free Trade Association. But how could “slave-grown tobacco, cotton, and coffee”
be acceptable, he reasoned, “while slave-grown sugar must be productive of moral disease?”39
Most writers, however, remained silent. In fact, public reaction to the incongruity of coffee’s
connotations of freedom and its origins in slavery remained largely unexplored in public de-
bate before 1848, when protests came not from socially conscientious American consumers
but from disgruntled British planters. These men, forced to use nonslave labor after Britain
abolished slavery in 1838, protested the prospect of competing for the American market with
slave-produced coffee from Brazil.40 American reactions, however, remained tepid; an 1859
New York Times article noted only that coffee, along with some other tropical goods, were
“necessaries of life” for the “northern latitudes which embrace the largest civilized portions of
the human race;” its unfree origins, however, were a necessity of the trade.41

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Why Americans Drink Coffee 239

In reality, French, rather than British, Caribbean colonies had supplied most of America’s
coffee needs for decades by the 1860s. In French Saint Domingue, the principal exporter of
coffee to the U.S. until 1803, “gens de couleur” (free people of color) played a large role in
the colony’s coffee industry, owning one-third of the plantation property and one-quarter
of the slaves in Saint Domingue in 1789.42 Saint Domingue’s place in American commerce
dramatically declined, however, after Toussaint l’Ouverture, himself a former slave and
a failed coffee grove owner, led revolutionary forces against French colonial troops.43 St.
Domingue, renamed Haiti, became the second European colony in the Americas to gain
independence and the first to abolish slavery. Rather than applaud this double freedom, the
United States government refused to recognize Haiti’s independence or to send an ambas-
sador to the new nation until 1862.44 America’s domestic north-south sectional conflict
shaped its international commercial and diplomatic policy toward the former colony, lead-
ing the federal government to encourage coffee importation from slave-rich Brazil rather
than from emancipated and free Haiti.
Brazil did not win its preferred position easily. The most obvious substitute for Haiti was
Cuba. Hundreds of French planters fled Haiti for Cuba, bringing with them their slaves and
coffee-planting knowledge. Spanish colonial masters loosened their control of foreign trade
and slave imports as coffee prices shot up in response to Haiti’s conflagration. Indeed, in the
first decades of the nineteenth century coffee was a more attractive investment than sugar, and
Cuba’s coffee exports went primarily to the United States rather than to the distant Spanish
motherland.45 Americans, who coveted the rich, fertile Cuban soil, even began investing in
coffee plantations on the island. However, nature, in the form of violent hurricanes in 1842,
1844, and 1846, destructive civil wars in 1868, 1878, and 1880, and the astounding success
of sugar in the burgeoning U.S. market reduced Cuban coffee to such a minor role that by
the end of the century the island was importing coffee from Puerto Rico.46 In Cuba, land
and slaves formerly used for coffee cultivation were turned to sugar.47 In Brazil the opposite
occurred as sugar lands, capital, and slaves were channeled into coffee production. With as-
sistance from nature and war, the swelling U.S. market for coffee and sugar had opposite
consequences for Brazil and Cuba.

COFFEE BECOMES AMERICANIZED

Eighteenth-century tea boycotts whet North Americans’ appetite for coffee, but did not guar-
antee that the U.S. would become known as a nation of coffee drinkers. Although colonists
briefly abandoned tea drinking, they soon returned to importing it from China. In 1859,
the U.S. imported more than 29 million pounds of tea; by 1870 the figure was 47 million
pounds and by 1881 more than 81 million pounds. That was more than a pound per capita.
True, Americans imported 455 million pounds of coffee in 1881, but tea imports had been
growing, not shrinking. Moreover, some traders estimated that four times as much ground
coffee as tea leaves was needed to produce the same amount of beverage.48 Since the volume
of coffee imports was 5.5 times that of tea imports, actual consumption of coffee and of tea
was probably quite similar in 1881. Independent Americans drank far more tea than colonial
Americans had. Indeed, most coffee roasters, such as Chase & Sanborn and Folgers, advertised
tea as much as coffee. Only in 1890 did nationalists regularly begin to proclaim coffee “the
national beverage” of the United States, arguing that the U.S. had set aside tea definitively and
become a “coffee loving country.”49

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240 Steven Topik and Michelle Craig McDonald

For international merchants, the issue had been how much coffee and tea Americans
imported, not how much they drank; here coffee towered over tea. The U.S. imported one-
third of the world’s coffee in the 1880s as annual per capita consumption ballooned from
under one pound at independence to nine pounds by 1882. Since the population surged
from under 4 million to 50 million during that century, total coffee consumption increased
over one hundred fold. Coffee’s supremacy over tea would greatly widen as the twentieth
century progressed.
If the true divide in the hot beverage war came well after independence, however, the Bos-
ton Tea Party disappears as the critical event giving birth to Americans’ coffee addiction. What
then explains coffee’s triumph in the largest coffee-consuming country in the world? The
answer is, as Frank Sinatra would sing a half century later, they had an awful lot of coffee in
Brazil. But that abundance was not natural or inevitable. Brazilians stepped up coffee produc-
tion in large measure in response to growing U.S. consumption. Despite the staggering burst
of demand in the U.S., its import price in the U.S. during the nineteenth century averaged
about one-half of what it had been at Brazil’s independence in 1821. By 1906, when Brazil
exported almost 90 percent of the world’s coffee by volume, the price had fallen to one-third
of the 1821 price.50 Brazilians used their near-monopoly position to vertiginously expand
foreign consumption abroad rather than to extort monopoly rents from foreign consumers.
Supply-driven demand meant that per capita consumption in the U.S. continued to grow, by
over 50 percent between 1870 and 1900, then reaching 13.3 pounds in 1902.51 The primary
reason for coffee’s growth was Brazil’s ability to increase production without increasing price.
The “forest rent” of vast, fertile little-cultivated lands; the sweat of Africans, Afro-Brazilians,
and then southern European immigrants; and Brazilian entrepreneurs, all contributed to the
historic coffee crops once the countryside was cleared and trees planted.
In 1900 America was the world’s greatest coffee market, and coffee the third most impor-
tant internationally traded commodity. Caribbean trading had created the necessary precondi-
tions to spread and deepen the coffee drinking habit, but the monumental and unprecedented
expansion of American coffee drinking in the nineteenth century depended on two additional
developments: the drink had to be Americanized, and it had to become a mass beverage.
Coffee’s Americanization became blatant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. Arbuckles Coffee included pictorial histories of Britain’s thirteen North American
colonies on the back of their coffee brewing instructions. Schnull-Krag & Co. tacitly pro-
moted American coffee by denigrating non-American coffees, damning with faint praise,
for example, “fine” but “expensive” Java coffee. Thomas Wood & Co. went further still,
graphically demonstrating the seller’s support of American expansionism and simultaneous
de-exoticization of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Manila. According to the Wood advertisements,
these sites now fell under the umbrella of Uncle Sam as “his own possessions.”52

THEY HAVE AN AWFUL LOT OF COFFEE IN BRAZIL

Coffee’s development as a Brazilian export was not inevitable and not divinely foreordained
simply because “Deus é Brasileiro,” God is Brazilian. Rather, by the second half of the nine-
teenth century, the fortuitous combination of political independence of ex-colonies Brazil and
the United States, the disastrous results of Haiti’s struggles for freedom, mounting Brazilian
coffee production, and swelling consumption at home impelled North Americans to drink
more coffee than anyone else in the world.

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Why Americans Drink Coffee 241

Coffee was treated differently than sugar and rubber in the nineteenth-century age of em-
pire because its low technological demands meant that an independent former colony, Brazil,
could begin producing on an unprecedented scale. Cheap fertile virgin land and abundant
and relatively inexpensive slave labor, owing to the proximity of Africa, allowed Brazil to cause
world coffee prices to plummet after 1820 and remain low until the last quarter of the century.
This trend in turn created supply-induced demand.
Brazilian production not only largely satisfied growing world demand but Brazilians
stimulated and transformed the place of coffee on overseas tables. The dependency view of
agricultural producers as providers of brute labor power, willingly serving up their produce to
the thirsty metropolitan buyers, the masters of the trade, misrepresents the relationship. Bra-
zilians, either native born or immigrants from Africa or Portugal, developed new production
techniques, discovered productive cultivars, constructed an elaborate transportation network
in a geographically unpromising setting, and developed market standards and effective finan-
cial instruments. Brazilians were able to out-produce all European colonial growers. Brazil,
which produced over half the world’s coffee in 1850, accounted for about 80 percent of the
subsequent global expansion.53 By 1906, Brazilians produced almost five times as much as the
rest of the world combined.
To give the proponents of dependence theory their due, Brazilians were also successful in
the nineteenth century because of British dominance in the form of inexpensive and reliable
shipping and insurance, loans, infrastructure investments, and protection of sea routes.54 So
while the tea-drinking British did not export or import much coffee from their own colonies
by the mid-nineteenth century, they exported and re-exported a lot of coffee from Brazil.
Much of it went to their former North American colonies. Thus the British were partially
responsible for North Americans’ coffee habit, not because of the stamp tax on tea but because
of their role in commerce, finance, and transport of the Brazil-U.S. trade.
The explosion of coffee in the nineteenth century was not brought about by new produc-
tion methods.55 Until the last quarter of the century, cultivating, harvesting, and processing
continued to be done manually by slave labor, of the sort previously used for sugar, by French
coffee planters on the African island of Reunion, and on a greater scale for coffee in Haiti.
Indeed, these practices were known at the time as the “West Indian” cultivation system. But
the enormity of some Brazilian plantations and industrial-scale picking, which lowered both
the cost and the quality of coffee, were new.
Improvements in the late nineteenth-century industry, such as a growing demand for
knowledge and industrial capital, were more evident in transportation than in cultivation.
While railroads did not dramatically reduce cargo costs, they did help improve the quality of
coffee at port. More important, cheaper, more fertile lands became accessible in the interior,
and ever larger amounts of the harvest could be brought to market faster, reducing interest
charges on working capital. In other words, the railroads, some of which pioneered impres-
sive engineering feats to climb the steep escarpments, allowed Brazilians to take advantage
of their country’s vastness. They thereby escaped the geographic trap that prevented earlier,
smaller producers, for instance Yemen and Martinique, from qualitatively transforming the
world market and taking advantage of economies of scale. The tremendous volume of low-
priced Brazilian coffee making its way to international ports on railroad tracks expanded and
reconfigured the world market. The effect was particularly noticeable in the United States.
Relations between the U.S. and Brazil grew stronger once American merchants and shippers
came to dominate the Atlantic slave trade after His Majesty’s government outlawed British in-
volvement in 1807. American slavers integrated Brazil and Africa into a U.S.-based triangular

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242 Steven Topik and Michelle Craig McDonald

Figure 43.1. Illustration from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 24, 1875.

trade after Brazilian independence in 1822. A spurt in commercial relations between newly
“free” Brazil and the recently “freed” United States was based mostly on the flourishing slave
trade. Kenneth Maxwell wrote of this apparent paradox that, “Those who were the strongest
supporters of laissez faire when it meant the removal of the regulatory functions of the state
[particularly free trade] were also most committed to the slave trade and slavery.”56 This is re-
ally not so strange. Southern planters in the U.S. held the same position until the Civil War
forced them to relinquish it and their slaves. Brazil had long been the world’s leading importer
of African slaves, first via the Portuguese, then Dutch, Angolan, Brazilian, and British slavers.
American slave traders, forbidden from importing into the United States after 1808, benefited
from anti-slavery campaigns that hindered British competition in the chattel trade. The slave
trade was an exception to the otherwise warm commercial relations between the U.S. and the
UK. Brazilian customs laws awarded British shippers of non-human goods preferential treat-
ment, to the extent that Brazil was considered a central part of the UK’s “informal empire”
or “a virtual British protectorate.”57 Still, North American merchantmen carried some of the
greatest annual slave importations into Brazil until the British navy terminated the Atlantic
slave trade in 1850.58 Until then, ships brought trade goods to Africa, where slaves bound for
Brazil filled the holds. In Rio the vessels replaced the Africans with coffee for the U.S. market.
Slaves were transmuted into coffee in this trans-Atlantic sleight-of-hand.
The role of the U.S. merchant marine in the Brazil trade, and in the Atlantic in general,
declined with the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade. American investors turned to the
home market and developed the West as railroads reached ever further towards the Pacific.
But Americans’ reorientation from the Atlantic to the western frontier did not thwart their
budding romance with coffee. Brazil’s coffee exports jumped 75-fold by volume between

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Why Americans Drink Coffee 243

independence in 1822 and 1899 as Brazilians responded to—and stimulated—new opportu-

nities and as British bottoms took the place of Yankee ships. British moralists who subdued
the lucrative transoceanic commerce in humans in the first part of the 1800s were not able
to convince their countrymen to forgo profiting from a slave-grown crop, an industry much
larger after 1850 than before. Given Britain’s new reliance on Indian tea grown under dubious
circumstances, the lack of protest in the UK about slave labor in coffee is not surprising. Bra-
zilian coffee exports, three-quarters of which went to the United States, eclipsed sugar. They
always constituted over 40 percent of Brazil’s exports after 1830, reaching 50 to 70 percent
by the 1870s.59 Thus the growing capitalist economy of the United States enabled the rise of
scores of slave baronies in Brazil.

CONCLUSION

National identity through consumption has long been closely related to international trade
networks, and coffee was clearly an important commodity in America’s economy. But its
historical and social development reveals larger cultural connotations that need to be recon-
sidered. Coffee was a democratic drink in the U.S. insofar as working people had it regularly
at meals. But its ties to liberty and equality are tenuous if not disingenuous when we take
into account its provenance. The patriotic American drink became widely available because
slaves in the Caribbean colonies and then in Brazil sweated in the hot fields. Although coffee
contributed to the consolidation of Brazilian independence, it also perpetuated that society’s
dependence on slavery until it became the last country in the hemisphere to emancipate
slaves, in 1888. American purveyors had figuratively ended slavery earlier through the magic
of publicity and labeling. They erased coffee’s Janus face by recasting the commodity as an
all-American consumable; American importers, consumers, and government policy paid little
attention to the labor form or U.S. imperialist policies that brought them their morning wake-
up call. The average Joe performed his (and her) Americanness daily as consumer but rarely
looked beyond the label and the border to appreciate coffee’s international drama. By the late
nineteenth century, the “literary men about town, and strangers of distinction,” wrote one
society columnist, “discuss the latest topics of the world and day” over “the fumes of coffee,
and a slice of French rolls.” The news and food still had international cachet, but coffee had
become thoroughly domesticated.60 The United States’ direct contributions to the world of
coffee were democratic: the coffee break, the cafeteria, instant coffee. But coffee in America
long depended on unfree institutions.
Brazil’s role in making the United States the world’s coffee capital has been obscured in both
countries. The South American giant has received neither credit nor blame for converting
Americans to the coffee habit and American roasters to a dominant world position. Although
the price of Rio Number 7 and then of Santos Number 4 were the industry standard by the
late nineteenth century, coffee packaged in the U.S. rarely bore Brazil’s name. In 1877 Brazil’s
consul general to the United States, Salvador de Mendonça, complained that “it is a gener-
ally recognized fact that the classification of Brazilian coffees in this market is done to the
detriment of the Brazilian product, which is sold in the spot market according to how it is
imported, but changes its denomination when it enters retail where it soon takes on the clas-
sification of Java or Mocha.”61 Upon occasion Brazil’s role drew more attention, for example
during the valorizations (export price fixing) of coffee between 1906 and 1929. In 1908
Senator George Norris protested that “Other monopolies levy their tribute but this monster

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244 Steven Topik and Michelle Craig McDonald

[Brazilian valorization coffee] is a daily uninvited guest at every breakfast table in the land.”62
The role of Brazilian coffee was also acknowledged during the world wars when coffee was
deemed a national strategic necessity and Frank Sinatra sang his caffeinated samba. But Brazil-
ian growers failed to create a brand for Brazilian coffee or a logo like Colombia’s Juan Valdez.
Today, wandering through the coffee aisle of a supermarket, you will see a United Nations
of producers: Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Peru, Java, Ethiopia, even Bolivia and New
Guinea. But Brazil will be almost invisible, even though it still is by far the world’s largest
producer of coffee.
It is time that Brazil and the United States took their rightful place in shaping world history.
Coffee provides a macro lens for understanding both nations’ international connections across
the globe and over time as well as coffee’s own duplicitous past. Coffee is more than just a
drink or a commodity. It is a contested story about origins whose narrative is deeply entwined
with its lore and with consumer identities.

NOTES

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Boston Area Latin American History Workshop
and the Harvard Brazil Studies Workshop at Harvard, February 6, 2008. Part of it was previously pub-
lished as “Culture and Consumption: National Drinks and National Identity in the Atlantic World,” in
Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World, ed. F. Trentmann and
A. Neutzenadel (New York: Berg, 2008), 109–27.

1. See, for example, E. Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions” in The Invention of Tradi-
tion, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
2. The United States is still today the world’s largest total consumer of coffee, and three of the world’s
largest global coffee corporations are American: Philip Morris, Smucker’s, and Sara Lee, as Starbucks
spreads the coffeehouse habit to ever more parts of the world.
3. J. H. St. John de Crévecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1793; D. F. Sarmiento, Estados
Unidos, 1849–51; A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840; T. Paine, The American Crisis, 1776.
4. B. Mifflin and S. Massey, Ledger, 1760–1763, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1 volume, Amb.
#9112; A. Adams to J. Adams, July 5, 1775, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society;
E. Forman Crane et al. (eds.), The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 3 vols. (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1991), 3: 1081, 1081n, and 2016; C. B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge
(New York: Norton, 1994), 114.
5. Marquis de François Jean Chastellux, Travels in North America, 2 vols., 1787, 2:52.
6. See the Warshaw Collection and Hills Brothers archives in the Museum of American History at
the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, for examples of nineteenth-century trade cards. Also see F. Fulgate,
Arbuckles: The Coffee That Won the West (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1994), 117–37.
7. Fulgate, Arbuckles, 68; J. Rischbieter, “Globalizing Consumption: Coffee Trade and Consump-
tion in Imperial Germany,” delivered at the conference Food and Globalization: Markets, Migration,
and Politics in Transnational Perspective, Leipzig, Germany, September 2005. For U.S. ads, see The Tea
and Coffee Journal and The Spice Mill. For the appearance of foreign coffee workers in commercials see
M. Seigel, Uneven Encounters. Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2009), 13–66; P. Munoz, “Juan Valdez: The Story of 100% Colombian Coffee,”
unpublished paper, University of California Irvine (Winter 2006); and M. C. McDonald, “The Real
Juan Valdez: Opportunities and Impoverishment in Global Coffee,” Harvard Business School Working
Paper Series, No. 9-806-041 (November 2005): 1–23.
8. W. T. Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Rpt. 1990, 882. We thank Madeleine Foote
for this quote.

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Why Americans Drink Coffee 245

9. Oxford English Dictionary Online, “Joe” 5a.; BBC (British Broadcasting Company),online
“h2g2” “A Cup of Joe,” www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1300410.
10. Smith’s iconic status in U.S. history continues as can be seen in D. Hoobler and T. Hoobler,
Captain John Smith: Jamestown and the Birth of the American Dream (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006).
11. F. B. Thurber, Coffee, From Plantation to Cup (1881), 212. By contrast, tea imports at the time
were only one-twelfth a pound per capita.
12. W. Ukers, All About Coffee, reprint (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2012),102–3; W. Ukers, All About
Tea, vol.1 (New York: The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1935), 65. Ukers did not recognize
the implicit contradiction in coffee being a “king” and the “American people” having a “sovereign drink.”
13. M. Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed the World
(New York: Basic Books, 1999), 15; J. Beilenson, The Book of Coffee (White Plains, NY: Peter Pauper
Press, 1995), 24; G. Dicum and N. Luttinger, The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the
Last Drop (New York: New Press, 1999), 34.
14. Dicum and Luttinger, Coffee Book, 35.
15. L. Kerber first coined the phrase “Republican Motherhood” in Women of the Republic: Intellect
and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture by
the University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
16. Ukers, All About Coffee, 106, 116.
17. J. Adams to A. Adams, July 6, 1774, Adams Family Papers.
18. J. Adams, Autobiography, “Travels and Negotiations,” 20 (entry dated May 6, 1778).
19. J. Adams to A. Adams, July 6, 1775, and August 11, 1777, Adams Family Papers, and Adams
Family Correspondence, 2: 295–96.
20. American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, 38
vols. (Washington, DC, 1832–61). Hereafter ASPCN (Commerce and Navigation) or ASPFR (Foreign
Relations), with volume and page numbers. The above reference is from ASPCN, V: 640.
21. ASPCN, V: 640–42.
22. U.S. Congress, Journal of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: 1829). 21st Cong., 1st
sess., 8 December, 18.
23. These included France, the United Netherlands, and Sweden with whom the U.S. already had
treaties of commerce, as well as England, Hamburg and Saxony, Prussia, Denmark, Russia, Austria,
Venice, Rome, Naples, Tuscany, Sardinia, Genoa, Spain, Portugal, and the Barbary States of the Porte,
Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis and Morocco. Nations listed in T. Jefferson, Diaries, entry for Jan. 4, 1784 (part
of the online collection of congressional papers at the Library of Congress); M. D. Peterson, “Thomas
Jefferson and Commercial Policy, 1783–1793,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 22, no. 4 (October
1965): 590–91.
24. J. Adams to R. Livingston, August 13, 1783, Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the
United States, 6 vol., 1889, 6:649–50 (hereafter RDC).
25. T. Jefferson to J. Jay, January 27, 1786, in Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. J. P. Boyd, vol. 9
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, multiple years), 235.
26. T. Jefferson to R. Izard, November 18, 1796, in Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 10, 541–42.
27. C. Alexandre de Calonne to T. Jefferson, October 22, 1796, Thomas Jefferson Papers [TJP],
Series 1, General Correspondence, 1651–1827; T. Jefferson, Observations on Charles Alexandre de
Calonne’s Letter of October 22, 1786, on Trade between the United States and France (October 22,
1796), TJP, Series 1, General Correspondence, 1651–1827. See also Peterson, “Thomas Jefferson
and Commercial Policy,” 599; and J. F. Stover, “French-American trade during the Confederation,
1781–1789,” North Carolina Historical Review 35 (1958): 399–414.
28. ASPFR, 1:195.
29. Mayo, “Instructions to the British Ministers,” 35.
30. Deane to the Committee of Secret Correspondence, undated, RDC, 2:118.
31. Deane to the Committee of Secret Correspondence, undated, RDC, 2:118.

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246 Steven Topik and Michelle Craig McDonald

32. A. Clauder, American Commerce as Affected by the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon,
1793–1812, reprint (Clifton, NJ: Kelley, 1972), and W. Coatsworth, “American trade with European
colonies in the Caribbean and South America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 42, no. 2 (April
1967): 243–66.
33. Pennsylvania Gazette, June 26, 1789.
34. B. Schoen, “Calculating the price of union: Republican economic nationalism and the origins of
southern sectionalism, 1790–1828,” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 184.
35. See M. J. Fernando, “Coffee Cultivation in Java, 1830–1917,” and R. Kurian, “Labor, Race,
and Gender on the Coffee Plantations in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 1834–1880,” both in The Global Coffee
Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America 1500–1989, ed. W. G. Clarence-Smith and S. Topik (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 157–90.
36. A. Hochschild, Bury the Chains. Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 192–96.
37. “U.S. Revenue from Commodity Re-Exports, 1802–1804,” ASPCN, V: 642.
38. R. Bisset’s two-volume history of the slave trade confirms Laborie’s account of coffee slaves’ isola-
tion. R. Bisset, The history of the Negro slave trade, in its connection with the commerce and prosperity of the
West Indies, and the wealth and power of the British Empire, 2 vols., 1805, 1:392.
39. R. Burns, Restrictive Laws on Food and Trade tried by the Test of Christianity: A Lecture Delivered
. . . December 6, 1843, 1843, 8–9.
40. See, for example, R. Paterson, Remarks on the Depressed State of Cultivation in the West India
Colonies, 1848, 15.
41. New York Times, November 10, 1858.
42. M. Rolph-Trouillot, “Motion in the system: Coffee, color, and slavery in eighteenth-century
Saint Domingue,” Review 3 (Winter 1982): 349–54; C. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue
Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 19.
43. L. Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 171.
44. See, for example, Dubois, Avengers of the New World; L. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens (Omo-
hundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North
Carolina Press, 2004); M. R. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1995).
45. Thurber, Coffee, 138, L. A. Perez, Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1990), 7–19; J. Opatrny, U.S. Expansionism and Cuban Annexationism in
the 1850s (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1993), 39–40. R. Guerra y Sánchez, Sugar and Society in the Carib-
bean: An Economic History of Cuban Agriculture, trans. M. M. Urquidi (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1964), 47–53.
46. O. V. Reimer, US Consul’s 1887 Consular Report in Bureau of American Republics, Coffee in
America: Methods of Production and Facilities for Success, Cultivation, 1893.
47. L. A. Pérez, Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 93, 94.
48. Thurber, Coffee, from Plantation to Cup, 205–6. The Spice Mill Convention Supplement, No-
vember 1911, 989.
49. The American Grocer cited in the leading coffee trade journal, The Spice Mill, July 1891: 172 and
February 1890: 37. We thank Sarah Gingles, who pointed out tea’s continuing popularity in her excel-
lent unpublished essay, “Social Beverages: Ale’s Condemnation Creates Coffee’s Public Glory,” University
of California Irvine, May 2006.
50. E. Bacha and R. Greenhill, 150 Anos de Café (Rio de Janeiro: Salamandra Consultoria Editorial,
1992), 335.
51. Calculated from Ukers, All about Coffee, 521.
52. Arbuckles Coffee Co., “Illustrated Atlas,” Donaldson Bros. Lithographers (1889); Schnull-Krag
Coffee Co., “It Is the Best Coffee Ever Sold,” Indianapolis, IN (undated); “Washington’s Coffee,”

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Why Americans Drink Coffee 247

New York Tribune, June 22, 1919. Library of Congress, Serial and Government Publications Division;
Thomas Wood & Co., “Uncle Sam’s High Grade Roast Coffee” (1880).
53. Calculated from Bacha and Greenhill, 150 Anos de Café, 307; J. A. Ocampo, Colombia y la
economía mundial 1830–1910 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1984), 303, Brazil, I.G.B.E.,
Séries Estatísticas Retrospectivas, vol. 1 (Rio: IBGE, 1986), 84.
54. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism. Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 (Lon-
don: Longman, 1993), 298–306; R. Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1968); D. C. M. Platt, Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based
on British Experience in Latin America (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977); R. Miller, Britain and Latin America
in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Longman, 1993).
55. V. D Wickizer, Coffee, Teas and Cocoa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951), 36.
56. K. Maxwell, Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues (New York: Routledge, 2003), 130.
57. Miller, Britain and Latin America, 53–54; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 298; P. R. de Al-
meida, Formação da diplomacia econômica no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora SENAC, 2001), 69–70, 368, 369.
58. J. F. Rippy, Rivalry of the United States and Great Britain over Latin America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1928); A. K. Manchester, British Preeminence in Brazil: Its Rise and Decline
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 266; L. Bethel, A Abolição do trafico de escravos
no Brasil (1976), 272, 273.
59. Bacha and Greenhill, 150 anos de café, 355.
60. Philadelphia Gazette, October 18, 1844.
61. Consular letter reproduced in J. A. Mendonça Azevedo, Visa e Obra de Salvador de Mendonça
(1971), 349.
62. United States Congressional Record, 66th Congress, April 25, 1911, 638.

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44
The Ecology of Taste
Robusta Coffee and the Limits
of the Specialty Revolution
Stuart McCook

The dominant story in coffee over the past generation has been the specialty coffee revolu-
tion. In the 1980s and 1990s, a new segment of the coffee market emerged (at least in the
United States), sometimes called “yuppie coffees.” An important subset of specialty coffees
were the “ethical coffees”—fair trade, certified organic, Bird Friendly, and so forth. These
ethical coffees blended consumers’ desire for good coffee with their wish to consume in ethi-
cal ways.1 Among other things, the specialty revolution offered the promise of a new model
of sustainable development for peasant coffee producers, in a period of historic low prices.
There is, it seems, an implicit narrative, a story line, in recent popular and academic stud-
ies of the coffee industry. Books such as Mark Pendergrast’s Uncommon Grounds and Gregory
Dicum and Nina Luttinger’s The Coffee Book end their overviews of the global coffee industry
with studies of the specialty revolution and ethical coffees.2 Much recent scholarly literature on
coffee and development, similarly, focuses heavily on this sector of the global coffee industry.
The implicit narrative in these studies suggests that specialty and ethical coffees might some-
day become the norm in the global coffee industry. All coffee will be ethical, be sustainable,
and taste good.
While all this would be ideal, the broader history of coffee over the twentieth century
suggests that it is unlikely. For all the attention that specialty coffees have received, by most
estimates they account for about 20 percent of the global coffee market—with ethical coffees
constituting an even smaller subset of that. Most of the coffee produced and traded around
the world is not specialty coffee. While some mass-market coffee has been influenced by the
specialty revolution’s emphasis on quality and taste, most of it has not. And, more important,
ecological constraints on coffee cultivation mean that most of the world’s coffee producers
cannot emulate the current specialty model. Only a handful of coffee environments, mostly in
northern Latin America and eastern Africa, can produce the high-quality arabica beans that
are the essential starting point for any specialty coffee. Coffee farms in Brazil, central and
western Africa, and Asia continue to produce large quantities of middling and low-quality
mass-market coffee. These coffees nonetheless provide a living, such as it may be, for millions
of small farmers around the world, and as such deserve attention.
The global coffee market divides arabica coffee into three broad categories, roughly from
highest to lowest quality: (1) Colombian milds; (2) other milds; and (3) Brazilian naturals.

248

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Botanically, virtually all specialty coffee is arabica coffee (Coffea arabica), although not all
arabica is specialty coffee. Much of coffee’s quality depends on the specific variety grown, the
ecology of the landscape where it is grown, and the way it is processed. Specialty arabicas are
from the first two categories. In the 2009–10 harvest year, Colombian milds and other milds
together accounted for just under a third of global production (32.35 percent).3 In this same
period, Brazilian naturals accounted for roughly another third (32.16 percent) of global coffee
production. This is the low- to middling-quality arabica coffee found in many grocery store
and mass-market blends.
Today, the largest single segment of the global coffee trade belongs to a fourth (and arguably
lowest-quality) category—robusta. Botanically, robusta belongs to the same genus as arabica
coffee, but is a distinct species (Coffea canephora, var Robusta). Robustas currently have a
larger share of the global coffee industry than do all specialty and ethical coffee combined (35
percent by the latest figures). This is particularly surprising given that robusta coffee was not
globally cultivated or traded before the early twentieth century and that most of its growth
has happened in the last half-century. The spread of robusta contributed to the resurrection of
African and Asian producers as major players in the global coffee economy, after their almost
total collapse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Robusta’s expansion has
taken place in the face of several significant challenges. Beyond the issue of taste, significant in
itself, simple economics would suggest that robusta would not have been viable. For much of
the twentieth century, the global coffee market has been dealing with an oversupply of arabica
coffee, suggesting that there would not be much room for even more low-quality coffee. And
from the planters’ perspective, robusta coffee usually fetched a lower price than did arabica.
Nonetheless, robusta did prove to be economically and ecologically viable. Robusta cultiva-
tion and consumption spread in three major waves. The first took place in the Dutch East
Indies and Africa between 1910 and 1930, as part of imperial schemes to promote colonial
development. A second wave, largely in West Africa, took place in the decades after World
War II. The third wave saw the (re)emergence of producers in Africa and Asia and the opening
of significant robusta pioneer fronts in the Americas for the first time. In the last half of the
twentieth century, Uganda, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, Brazil, and above all Vietnam have
emerged as major players in the global coffee industry, on the strength of their production and
export of robusta coffee. Vietnam has now supplanted Colombia as the world’s second-largest
producer of coffee.
In spite of these trends, robusta has been almost invisible in the scholarly and popular
literature on coffee. Why has robusta received so little attention, given its significant place in
global coffee production? Part of the answer is that the robusta commodity chain is difficult
to follow. Robusta has historically been purchased in bulk by large roasters. Given robusta’s
reputation for low or mediocre quality, roasters have not usually highlighted its use in their
blends. Most specialty coffee roasters are actively prejudiced against robusta coffee, which
they see as the antithesis of everything that specialty coffee stands for. This outlook has, in
turn, infused much of the academic and popular literature. A commonplace observation, for
example, is that the rapid expansion of robusta cultivation in Vietnam during the 1990s trig-
gered the global coffee crisis of the early 2000s.5 In short, robusta coffee plays the role of the
villain in the global story of coffee.
In spite of all this, robusta coffee has succeeded in the marketplace, as a result of colonial,
national, and multilateral development schemes over the long twentieth century. The his-
tory of robusta thus sheds light on a hidden history of development during that period. The
several robusta booms were the products of intertwined biological and political processes, an

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250 Stuart McCook

interplay between landscapes and institutions. In the producing countries, growers, often
encouraged by national or international institutions, adopted robusta because ecological con-
ditions prevented them from cultivating arabica. Growers and scientists, often supported by
empires, states, or multilateral organizations, carefully selected and manipulated the robusta
plant and its environments. In the consuming countries, robusta found a niche in the mar-
ket segment primarily driven by price rather than by taste. Over the twentieth century, then,
robusta production and consumption co-evolved. New robusta fronts emerged in Africa, Asia,
and ultimately the Americas. At the same time, new forms of robusta consumption emerged,
in roasted and ground blends, and later in instant coffees. In most instances, colonial and na-
tional states expanded robusta cultivation to promote some version of “development,” usually
directed at peasant producers rather than at estates.6 In short, the “bad” robusta coffee sector
is itself the product of several generations of development projects.

THE FIRST WAVE: ROBUSTA, RUST, AND THE ECOLOGICAL

REVOLUTION IN THE OLD WORLD COFFEE INDUSTRY, 1900–1940

Before the mid-1800s, arabica was the world’s only cultivated coffee. During the nineteenth
century, demand for coffee in Europe and North America surged. Planters across the trop-
ics moved to feed this growing demand, and for much of the century the demand for coffee
far exceeded the supply. New arabica fronts opened in northern Latin America, in Java and
Sumatra, the Philippines, India, Ceylon, Madagascar, and many other places. Many of these
coffee landscapes—especially the mountainous highlands of northern Latin America—mim-
icked the native home of arabica coffee on the hillsides of southwestern Ethiopia. Others,
however, did not. Planters pushed arabica into areas that were at the extreme ecological limits
for the species: into the humid coastal lowlands of the Indian Ocean Basin and the Pacific or
into comparatively dry or cool subtropical parts of Brazil, some of which were susceptible to
killing frosts. Arabica coffee grown at lower altitudes often had a poorer cupping quality than
mountain-grown arabica, but the thirsty markets of the north could still absorb this produce.7
Then in the late nineteenth century, an epidemic disease swept through the coffee farms of
the Indian Ocean Basin and the Pacific. The coffee leaf rust (caused by the fungus Hemileia
vastatrix) was first detected on the coffee farms of Ceylon in 1869. Within two decades, the
epidemic caused losses of more than £1,000,000 on the island; by the mid-1880s the island’s
coffee industry had almost completely collapsed as planters abandoned coffee for tea. Between
1870 and 1920, the coffee leaf rust spread to virtually all of the Old World’s coffee zones. It
left “arabica graveyards” scattered throughout the region. The rich coffee zones of southern
India, Java, Sumatra, Madagascar, and the Philippines were almost completely wiped out. The
epidemic was particularly severe in hot and humid lowlands, which favored the fungus’s rapid
reproduction and spread. Only a few small enclaves of arabica survived in the highlands of
southern India, the highlands of Java and Sumatra, and a handful of other places. In these high
and comparatively dry sites, the levels of infection were low enough to allow for the continued
production of arabica coffee. Meanwhile, the coffee farms of the Americas remained free of the
epidemic, protected by oceans, vigilant inspectors, and a hefty dose of luck.8
Not all arabica planters, however, abandoned coffee cultivation. As the coffee leaf rust epi-
demic spread, Europeans exploring equatorial Africa discovered new species of coffee. Plant-
ers hoped that some of these new species might be resistant to the leaf rust and thus a viable
substitute for arabica coffee. Most discoveries were not. But in the 1870s, Ceylonese coffee

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The Ecology of Taste 251

planters adopted one species that looked promising. This was liberian coffee (C. liberica) that
grew wild in West Africa. Unlike arabica coffee, liberia grew best in the humid lowlands—the
very landscapes more seriously devastated by the coffee leaf rust epidemic. The plants had
broad, thick leaves, which seemed to be rust-resistant. But coffee from liberia beans tasted
different and worse than liquor made from arabica. In any case, after some initially successful
crops, liberia coffee also succumbed to the rust epidemic, and planters abandoned it as well.9
Although this experiment failed, coffee researchers and planters kept looking for other kinds
of coffee that might substitute for arabica. Planters and researchers in the Dutch East Indies
imported new varieties and species of wild and domesticated coffee, hoping to find something
that might work. Most of the coffees they imported proved to be just as susceptible to the
coffee leaf rust as arabica and liberia had. But eventually, Dutch coffee growers imported one
species of coffee from central Africa via Brussels that seemed to resist the rust’s onslaught. This
variety was known commercially as robusta coffee. After much debate, the plant was classified
botanically as C. canephora, var. robusta. Like liberia, robusta grew wild in the humid lowlands
of Africa. Robusta coffee trees were tall and produced many beans with a comparatively high
caffeine content. But also like liberia, robusta beans were of indifferent quality.10
In the early 1900s, scientists in the Dutch East Indies began a program to systematically
select and improve the imported robusta coffees. Their main goal was to create a coffee with
a neutral flavor, which could be blended with arabica coffee. By 1910, the Dutch colonial
government began a systematic program of propagating robusta coffee across the Dutch East
Indies. Robusta coffee was planted as a monoculture and also intercropped with other cash
crops. In particular, it was used as a catch crop for rubber, to provide rubber growers with
some temporary income while they waited for the rubber trees to reach maturity. According
to coffee expert William Ukers, by 1935 robusta coffee accounted for 94 percent of the coffee
lands under cultivation in Java and 93 percent of the coffee acreage in neighboring Sumatra.11
Robusta cultivation seemed promising, and other growers in the Indian Ocean Basin and
the Pacific soon followed suit. Farmers in Malaya (now Malaysia), parts of southern India,
and Madagascar adopted robusta on a large scale. Robusta did not, however, replace arabica
everywhere. In Ceylon, most coffee growers had switched to tea, and they never looked back.
In fact, an ethnic/racial divide appeared to emerge along with the growth of robusta coffee.
Arabica coffee was predominantly (although not exclusively) farmed on European-owned
estates, while robusta coffee grew primarily on smaller farms run by locals.
Much of the robusta produced in the Dutch East Indies was exported to the vast U.S.
market. The American government and the coffee industry were, however, ambivalent about
robusta coffee. The USDA had defined “coffee” as being the seeds of C. arabica or C. liberica.
In 1912, the New York Coffee Exchange refused to trade robusta coffee. The adulteration
and mislabeling of coffee were rampant throughout the industry. In spite of regulations, the
adulteration of arabica coffee remained commonplace in the United States in the 1920s.
The botanist Ralph Holt Cheney found that wholesale merchants “in both the producing
and consuming countries add small African and Indian beans and considerable quantities of
Liberian and Robusta coffees to Arabian coffee.”12 Apparently, some of the robusta produced
on the island of Java was marketed in the United States as “Java” coffee, to give buyers the
impression that it was the higher-quality arabica coffee for which the island was famous. In
1921, wrote William Ukers, the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, part of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, ruled that “Coffea robusta could not be sold as Java coffee or under any form of
labeling which tended either directly or indirectly to create the impression that it was Coffea
Arabica.” Still, that same year scientists at the Bureau of Chemistry also noted that “Coffea

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robusta has obtained great economic significance, and is grown in increasing amounts. While
it has . . . not as yet been possible to obtain a strain that would be as desirable in flavor as the
old ‘standard’ Coffea Arabica . . . its merits have been established.”13 In 1925, the New York
Coffee Exchange began trading robusta coffee once again, and in 1929 the USDA expanded
its definition of “coffee” to include robusta.14
In spite of robusta’s growing role in the U.S. coffee industry, it remained largely invisible to
consumers. Besides the clandestine adulteration described above, coffee roasters began to use
robusta in blended coffees. During the 1920s, blended coffees became more commonplace in
the United States, carefully packaged and sold on the shelves of supermarkets. These blended
coffees were generally marketed by brand name, not by the origins of the beans. They often
included coffees from several different origins, combined to achieve a specific taste. Cost was
also an issue; roasters looking to economize would blend some higher-quality arabicas to add
flavor, with lower-quality coffees to add bulk. “Robusta coffees are principally used as a ‘price’
proposition in the United Sates or as a filler to reduce the costs of other growths of coffee,”
wrote Ukers. “They are rather neutral in the cup and therefore useful in blending.”15 Coffee
roasters had first used low-grade Brazilian arabicas as filler for their roasts, but increasingly
they turned to robustas. It is hard to trace exactly how robusta was used, since roasters often
kept their recipes for coffee blends a secret. In any case, these blends often changed over time.
After World War I, several European colonies in Africa began producing robusta coffee
on a large scale. Unlike the situation in Asia and the Pacific, the coffee groves in large parts
of Africa consisted of robusta coffee from the start. European colonial powers had carved
up continental Africa starting with the “scramble for Africa” in 1885. The continent’s new
colonial rulers were anxious to make the colonies pay for themselves, and they promoted the
cultivation of tropical crops. In the early twentieth century, European missionaries, govern-
ments, and individuals imported arabica coffee to their colonies. Arabica enjoyed limited
yet spectacular success in a few places, especially Kenya and Tanganyika. In Kenya, the
colonial government restricted arabica coffee cultivation to European settlers. Elsewhere in
Africa, two main ecological checks limited arabica cultivation. The first was climate: many
early experiments in arabica cultivation failed because the climate was too hot, too humid,
or too dry. The second obstacle was diseases and pests. Africa was home to the genus Cof-
fea and to all of its pests. In the Great Lakes region, coffee rust fungus spread rapidly from
wild and semi-cultivated coffee plants to the cultivated arabica plants. Only a few choice
mountain environments, especially along the slopes of Kilimanjaro in Tanganyika and in
the highlands of Kenya, could produce arabica coffee.16
Uganda emerged as one of the global powerhouses in robusta production. Planters there
experimented with both arabica and robusta. Arabica enjoyed limited success in a few areas,
but elsewhere could not withstand the onslaught of rust and pests. A government agricultural
officer at Kampala began experimenting with robusta in 1915; after World War I, he devel-
oped a reliable improved strain of robusta well adapted to Uganda’s conditions. With encour-
agement from the government, African peasants began to adopt robusta cultivation on a large
scale. Even some European planters began to cultivate robusta. In 1914 there were only 367
acres under robusta cultivation in Uganda; by 1934, there were 6,946 acres. In the late 1930s,
60 percent of Uganda’s coffee lands were under robusta cultivation. Uganda was exporting
a greater volume of coffee than Kenya, although Uganda’s robustas never achieved the same
fame as did Kenya’s prized arabicas. Accordingly, the value of Kenyan coffee exports was much
greater.17 Similarly, after 1925 France and Belgium began promoting robusta cultivation in
their African colonies, in places where arabica cultivation was not viable. For example, in 1920

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the former German colony of Cameroon exported virtually no coffee; by the late 1930s there
were 26,000 hectares of coffee under cultivation, three-quarters of which was robusta. In the
French colony of Ivory Coast, coffee exports expanded from 51 tons in 1925 to 15,605 tons
in 1939, almost entirely of robusta coffee.18 The area under coffee cultivation in the Belgian
Congo expanded eightfold between 1925 and 1940, 94 percent of which was robusta.19 The
figures for robusta consumption remain unclear, but at least one statistic suggests that in 1938,
robusta coffees (mostly from France’s overseas territories) accounted for more than a third of
the coffee consumed in France.20

THE SECOND WAVE: ROBUSTA BOOM IN AFRICA, 1950–1970

After World War II, robusta cultivation spread into the forests and plains of Africa. This boom
far outpaced the relatively modest experimentation with robusta cultivation in the 1920s and
1930s. Arabica coffee had never played a significant role in most of Africa owing to ecological
conditions. Meanwhile, global supplies of robusta were falling in the immediate postwar years.
Robusta farms in the Dutch East Indies had been devastated by World War II and the wars of
independence (1945–49) that led to the formation of Indonesia.
In Africa itself, colonial powers and new nations alike hoped that coffee production would
be the engine of economic development. “If you don’t want to vegetate in bamboo huts,”
said Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the future president of Ivory Coast in 1953, “concentrate your
efforts on growing good cocoa and coffee. They will fetch a good price and you will become
rich.”21 In the Ivory Coast, coffee production, most of it robusta, expanded from 36,000 tons
in 1945 to 112,500 tons in 1958. Angola, still a Portuguese colony, expanded coffee produc-
tion from 44,000 tons in 1948 to 90,000 tons in 1956. Almost 60 percent of Angola’s robusta
exports were destined for the United States. Robusta production in the Belgian Congo almost
tripled, from 16,000 tons to 47,000 tons, between 1948 and 1959.22 Although the main new
pioneer fronts for coffee were in west Africa, the older producers of robusta were also buoyed
by the high prices of the 1950s. For example, between 1951 and 1962, Uganda’s robusta pro-
duction expanded from 34,000 tons per year to an average of 120,000 tons per year.23 Driven
largely by robusta cultivation, Africa captured a major share of global coffee production in
the 1950s and 1960s. On the eve of World War I, Africa accounted for less than 2 percent
of global coffee production; by 1965 it accounted for 23 percent. Three-quarters of this was
robusta coffee, accounting for some 17 percent of global coffee production.24
A revolution in consumption accompanied the rise of robusta production. In the 1950s and
1960s, consumption of instant coffee, of which robusta was a key component, expanded rap-
idly across Europe and North America. During World War II, the Allied militaries, especially
the American, included instant coffee in soldiers’ rations, and the troops brought a taste for
instant coffee home. Instant coffee accounted for almost 18 percent of the coffee consumed
in the United States in 1956; just three years later it accounted for 30 percent.25 Robustas also
continued to be used in standard blends of roasted and ground coffee found on supermarket
shelves. In Europe, especially in France and Italy, robusta was used in the ubiquitous espresso
coffees. Some espresso aficionados argue that a good cup of espresso requires some robusta to
produce a good crema.
Robusta consumption was not evenly distributed across all countries. For example, in 1960
robustas accounted for three-quarters of the coffee consumed in France, half the coffee con-
sumed in the United Kingdom, 40 percent of the coffee consumed in Italy, and 30 percent of

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the coffee consumed in Belgium and the Netherlands. In the United States, African robusta
coffee accounted for roughly 9 percent of coffee consumption. Although this share was small
in relative terms, it was large in absolute terms; the United States consumed 4.5 times more
robusta than the UK did.26
Producers of Brazilian coffee were not happy with the success of African robustas. One
French writer noted that robusta’s success on the global markets had been “resented by the
Brazilians, who were too confident in their ‘Santos’ and their ‘Rio’ coffees, judged by them
not to be replaceable by the so-called ‘African’ (robusta) coffees, whose aroma and taste they
judged harshly.”27 The high coffee prices during these years, coupled with the climatic condi-
tions under which robusta was cultivated, gave African smallholders little incentive to produce
high-quality robusta. In Uganda, for example, the heavy and year-long rainfalls produced a
mixed blessing. On the one hand, they helped stimulate the yields of robusta plants. On the
other hand, the rains made it difficult to process the harvested beans properly. “Artificial dry-
ing is out of the question for the peasant producer,” wrote J. W. F. Rowe, “and there is no dry
period of any appreciable length.” The beans could not be dried on patios in the sunshine
for long periods, and the beans produced by the traditional drying process had a marked
“musty” or “grassy” flavor. Climate, then, contributed to Uganda’s production of low-quality
arabicas during the 1950s and early 1960s. The comparatively high prices robusta fetched
during these years also meant that African farmers had little reason to try to improve their
cultivation practices.28 Many of the robustas shipped to the world’s markets, then, were of
low quality. This has helped give the bean a bad reputation among some coffee experts. But it
also highlights the point that quality is determined by many factors, whose importance varies
from time to time and place to place. The poor quality of Ugandan robustas in this period,
for example, owed as much to the conditions of climate, labor, and economy as it did to any
inherent quality in the bean itself.
In some instances, African and estate producers did produce high-quality robusta coffees.
They processed it using wet processing, commonly used for arabica. The wet process “suits
Uganda with its continuous rainfall better than sun-drying, and avoids any possible mustiness,”
noted Rowe in 1963, “and there is a definite demand for these washed Robustas from the blend-
ing trade because they are more ‘neutral’ in flavour than standard [sun-dried] Robustas.”29
Standardization was also a much larger problem for robusta coffee than for arabica. Arabica
coffee was self-fertilizing, and cultivated arabica had a narrow genetic base, so the trees (and
beans) remained stable from one generation to the next. Robusta coffee, however, was highly
variable. Farmers in Africa compounded this natural variability by cultivating many varieties
of robusta, both wild and domesticated. The resulting green coffee, therefore, had a wide
range of tastes.30 Governments tried to encourage farmers to cultivate only a limited range of
carefully selected varieties. The French government established the Institut français du café et
cacao (IFCC) in 1950, to try to promote just such standardization. Some African producers
developed national institutions and national standards to promote and grade high-quality
robusta coffee, such as the Congo’s “Office du café robusta” (OCR). This agency promoted
washed robustas. The OCR’s own literature drew a sharp distinction between the Washed
Congo Robusta, which had a mild taste, and the Natural Congo Robusta, whose taste was bit-
ter. In fact, low-quality naturals had a taste that was described as “sour,” “earthy,” or “woody.”31
Only one African producer, Angola, produced robusta primarily on estates. According to one
survey, Angola was “considered to produce one of the best robustas on the market with regard
to the size of beans and cup quality.”32

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By the late 1950s, the global supply of coffee had begun to catch up with demand, and the
prices for all grades of coffee declined once again. In the early 1960s, the world’s producers
and consumers of coffee entered into a series of trade agreements aimed at stabilizing world
coffee prices. These culminated in the International Coffee Agreement (ICA), signed in
1962. A major goal of this agreement, signed in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, was to
prevent a collapse of global coffee prices, which in turn might lead to rural discontent and
revolution. It was at this point that the ICA divided global coffee production into the four
categories described earlier: Colombian milds, other milds, Brazilian naturals, and robustas. In
creating the category of robustas, the ICA acknowledged that this sector of the industry had
become a major part of the global coffee industry.33 In 1958, a coffee exchange dedicated to
robusta futures had opened in London.34 After the ICA agreement was signed, robusta pro-
duction stabilized through much of Africa, with many producing countries exploring means
of diversifying their agriculture and eliminating marginal coffee cultivation.35
In the late 1960s, African robustas briefly faced renewed competition from Brazilian ara-
bicas. Brazilian producers developed a soluble arabica, which tasted better than the robustas,
and this attracted the attention of some buyers in the U.S. However, this move also put the
Brazilian manufacturers of soluble coffee in direct competition with U.S. corporations. Ul-
timately, the Brazilian initiative foundered, and African robustas retained their niche in the
global coffee market. Demand for soluble coffee in the U.S. and other countries increased
through the 1970s, so that by 1981 it accounted for 28 percent of the coffee consumed in
America. This demand helped boost robusta’s share of the global coffee market. During the
1970s, robustas reached about a quarter of global coffee production, a share that remained
steady into the 1990s.36 Other producers, encouraged by the high prices, began to expand
robusta production and exports. In the early 1980s, Indonesia regained its prewar position as
the world’s largest robusta producer and exporter, averaging some 6,000,000 bags per year.
Not everyone welcomed this resurgence. One coffee roaster in the United States commented
that the “EK-1 and 20/25 grades of INDO robustas became almost synonymous with the
poor worldwide reputation of the American cup in the 1960s and 1970s.”37

THE THIRD WAVE: ROBUSTA PIONEER FRONTS

IN ASIA AND LATIN AMERICA, SINCE 1970

During the 1980s and 1990s, new robusta pioneer fronts emerged in Asia and—more
surprisingly—in the Americas. Robusta cultivation remained a niche activity in much of
Latin America, generally in countries that were minor exporters. In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, coffee growers in Costa Rica experimented with growing liberica
and robusta coffees, although both efforts were ultimately abandoned because the coffees
were deemed inferior. In the early 1960s, the American coffee expert Frederick Wellman had
found “good sized commercial plantings” of robusta in the Dominican Republic and also
noted that it could even be found in “restricted field corners in Costa Rica and Nicaragua,”
and in “rather large fields in Guatemala”—three countries that had historically exported
high-quality mild arabicas.38 But coffee producers in the Americas had historically been
reluctant to cultivate robusta on a large scale. In the mid-1950s, Ecuadorean coffee planters
had started planting some robusta, mixed in with arabica. Ecuadorean trade associations
protested, fearing that the mixed cultivation of arabica and robusta there would “discredit

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256 Stuart McCook

the quality of Ecuadorean coffee.”39 In Brazil, some coffee planters began lobbying to plant
robusta, after a major frost and the coffee rust struck the coffee plantations. Planters were
especially interested, according to one source, in planting robusta in rust-affected areas in
Espirito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais and also in areas with “poor soils and
warm temperatures.” Brazil began cultivating robusta on a large scale during the late 1980s,
with a particularly large push between 1985 and 1990, when cultivation expanded from 1.8
million bags to almost 5.3 million bags. The Brazilians actually cultivated a variety of C.
canephora known as conilon (or kouillou in Africa). Roughly 1.5 million bags of this coffee
went to Brazil’s vast domestic market; the rest was exported.40
Robusta coffee also made its way into new parts of Asia. The largest of these pioneer fronts
was in Vietnam. Historically, Vietnam had produced little coffee. In the 1980s, Vietnam’s
coffee industry received development support from its partners in the Soviet Bloc. It exported
much of its coffee to Soviet Bloc countries, although France and Singapore were also ma-
jor consumers. This initial expansion was driven primarily by the Vietnamese government
through its policies of creating New Economic Zones and developing the Fixed Cultivation
and Sedentarization Program. These policies focused on coffee production on large-scale col-
lective farms. After the mid-1980s, however, the government switched to promoting peasant
coffee cultivation under its new Economic Renovation Policy, which emphasized market-ori-
ented economic reforms. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc did not halt the expansion of robusta
production in Vietnam. It is frequently asserted that the World Bank financed this expansion,
although bilateral development initiatives likely played a more important role. Some observers
questioned the wisdom of this rapid expansion: “We can ask whether it is a good idea to sup-
port the appearance of a new producer,” mused one French coffee expert in 1992, “in a zone
where this product is not widely consumed and if much of this new Vietnamese production
will increase global coffee supplies.”41 Still, rising prices for robusta between the mid-1980s
and mid-1990s attracted a flood of migrants to the central highlands of Vietnam. Between
1975 and 1997, the area under coffee cultivation in Vietnam grew from 6,000 hectares to
130,000 hectares. Vietnamese robusta succeeded in the global markets because low domestic
prices for land and labor made it comparatively inexpensive. Much of this coffee was, however,
of poor quality. As in other robusta-producing areas, buyers did not pay much of a premium
for quality beans, so farmers had little incentive to produce them. Still, even the poor-quality
Vietnamese beans found a market, and by the early twenty-first century Vietnam was the
world’s second-largest coffee producer.42

ROBUSTA COFFEE, SPECIALTY COFFEE,

AND THE COFFEE CRISIS SINCE 1989

The declining quality of coffee in the United States led to a backlash in the 1980s and 1990s.
Increasingly, consumers and roasters became interested in quality coffees. Dicum and Lut-
tinger note that “the specialty industry tapped into an unfulfilled desire for diversity and qual-
ity among affluent coffee drinkers.” The spectacular growth of Starbucks coffee was one of the
most visible manifestations of the specialty revolution.43 In the United States, the revolution
was founded upon 100-percent arabica coffee. To the advocates of specialty coffee industry,
robusta coffee symbolized everything that was wrong with the mainstream coffee industry.
Even mentioning robusta coffee at meetings of the Specialty Coffee Association of
America could provoke a strong reaction. Donald Schoenholt, a specialty coffee roaster and

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The Ecology of Taste 257

specialties editor for the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, wrote a tirade against robustas that is
worth quoting at length:

I have discouraged the acceptance of C. canephora because . . . to my mind the species is incompat-
ible with the spirit of virtue that our coffee should represent to the world. The gospel according
to David Weinstein . . . calls for uncompromisable coffees. Coffea canephora is a compromise. No
coffee man adds canephora to a blend based on the taste qualities it brings to the table. On histori-
cal principles, the American trade should abstain from the use of the coffee as an atonement for the
C. canephora excesses of the last generation. It would be best to scrupulously avoid its use except
in the very narrowest drawn circumstances and applications. This is prudent. It is sometimes not
unwise to be overly cautious, even to err on the side of caution. We in the United States should un-
derstand, though, that “Gourmet” blends containing C. canephora are accepted in polite European
coffee society. Indeed many Americans prefer blends which include these coffees.44

In spite of his disdain for robusta coffees, however, Schoenholt proceeded to write a four-part
history of robusta coffee for the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal.
While the specialty market gained visibility and popularity through the 1980s and 1990s,
conventional coffee, and robusta producers, continued to hold on to their share of the global
coffee markets. The emergence of the specialty revolution had helped change the taste of con-
sumers in the United States. Coffee companies, even large roasters, began to feel commercial
pressure to use only “100% arabica coffee.” On their North American packaging, industrial
coffee roasters have also sometimes used creative (but true) descriptions like “100% coffee” or
“100% Brazilian beans,” which likely hide the fact that the blends contain robusta. In spite of
the pressures from the specialty coffee industry, however, robustas still occupied a large share
of the instant and blended coffees.
The collapse of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989 meant that the global coffee
economy returned to a virtually free market, and through the 1990s it began a new cycle of
booms and busts. On the whole, coffee prices declined, and by the late 1990s and early 2000s
the global coffee industry had entered a sustained period of overproduction and low prices.
Many observers blamed the situation on the rapid expansion of Vietnam’s robusta industry.
For many coffee producers, arabica and robusta alike, the price of coffee fell so low that they
could not even cover their production costs. Nonetheless, the fall in global coffee prices struck
robusta producers much harder than arabica producers. “In spite of increased production,”
wrote Pierre Leblanche in 2005, “market share of Robustas has decreased 10% in volume at
40% in net worth.”45 The price differential between average arabica and robusta prices also
increased. Competition between robusta-exporting countries became fierce in the early 1990s.
The volume of Indonesia’s robusta exports dropped 40 percent between 1989 and 1992; the
Ivory Coast’s exports dropped by about ten percent. At the same time, Vietnam and Brazil
gained market share.46
Robusta producers around the world have been developing a range of responses to the cof-
fee crisis. One is to promote domestic consumption. Some robusta-producing countries, in-
cluding Brazil, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, have significant domestic markets for
robusta. Brazil and Indonesia in particular have domestic consumption of more than 1 million
bags. Half of India’s robusta production is directed towards the domestic market. Recently, the
Mexican government, in conjunction with Nestlé, announced plans to expand robusta coffee
production from 150,000 sacks per year to 500,000 sacks per year by 2012 and to increase
the processing capacity of Nestlé’s soluble coffee plant. This expansion is likely aimed both at
the markets of Mexico’s NAFTA partners and at Mexican domestic demand.47

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Since the nineteenth century, observers have noted that many consumers in Africa and
Asia actually prefer the taste of robusta and liberica coffees to that of arabica. There is also an
element of national pride among some robusta producers. Tins of instant coffee produced in
the Ivory Coast, for example, clearly proclaim that the coffee is made of robusta from that
country. Robusta does not carry the same stigma there as it does in the Americas. Even so,
efforts to increase domestic robusta consumption in recent years have met with little success.48
Some robusta producers and traders are trying to find a place for their product in the spe-
cialty coffee market. Pierre Leblanche, a vocal advocate for “gourmet robustas,” was a driving
force behind the creation of the World Alliance of Gourmet Robustas (WAGRO) founded in
2002. Leblanche and others argue that robustas are not inherently bad coffees; it is just that
most of them are poorly processed using dry processing. If properly processed or washed us-
ing the same wet process as high-quality arabica coffees, Leblanche and others argue that ro-
bustas could find a niche in the specialty coffee market. One common refrain among robusta
advocates is that a carefully washed robusta will always taste better than a poorly processed
arabica. Leblanche identified small initiatives to produce gourmet robustas in such diverse
places as India, Ecuador, Madagascar, Brazil, Uganda, Cameroon, and Guatemala. Some
observers present the problem of robusta quality simply as one of know-how. According to a
recent issue of Roast magazine, “as Robusta producers become more informed about growing
and processing procedures, but also about the specialty market, they are likely to begin pro-
ducing Robustas that meet the specialty industry’s quality standards.” Leblanche argues that
“Robustas have potential if properly washed and marketed. . . . on the consumer side, we must
make people aware that Robustas could be good.”49
It seems unlikely, however, that specialty production will do much to help the robusta
industry as a whole navigate the coffee crisis. Even optimists like Leblanche recognize that
the robusta industry faces deep structural problems. Political chaos has plagued some of the
largest robusta producers, such as the Ivory Coast. The coffee crisis itself makes it difficult for
robusta growers to invest in the equipment and labor necessary to improve the quality of their
coffee. In Vietnam, for example, many small farmers have responded to the crisis by reduc-
ing or abandoning the use of fertilizers altogether and by limiting or abandoning irrigation.
It is difficult to see how they would be willing or able to invest in any kind of infrastructure
to improve their quality without significant assistance.50 “On the consuming side,” notes
Leblanche, “[the market for robustas] is still mostly driven by price, not quality. Big volume
importers have rushed to take advantage of the very low prices ushered in by the new major
origin [Vietnam], and restrict the role of [robustas] to solubles and fillers. They feel no incen-
tive to change this.”51
Still, some French researchers suggest that there may be a way to develop a differentiated
robusta industry, by creating robusta terroirs that emphasize origins and qualities, albeit on
different terms than arabica coffee is differentiated. “For example,” they write, “a terroir pro-
ducing a coffee with a strong potential for extraction would get the attention of makers of
soluble coffee. . . . In this context, the terroir or the origin would not necessarily be an attribute
of robusta listed on the package with the aim of attracting the . . . consumer. Rather, it could
introduce a market segmentation at the level of roasters, without this being visible to the end
consumer.”52 Recently some movement in this direction has occurred. The Rainforest Alliance
has certified some coffee production in Vietnam, working in conjunction with the coffee ex-
porters Dakman Vietnam and ECOM group, which in turn sell to large roasters like Kraft.53
While this strategy has had important ecological benefits for the Vietnamese coffee planters
in the scheme, it is not yet clear if this will lead to any significant market segmentation. Still,

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approaches like this seem to offer the most long-term promise for robustas and other mass-
market coffees. Rather than trying to emulate the solutions embraced by the specialty and
alternative trade coffees, they must look for solutions that reflect the distinct characters of
their own market segment.

CONCLUSION: ROBUSTA AND THE ECOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT

The livelihoods of millions of farmers depend, at least in part, on the production of robusta
coffee for the mass market. They have felt the impact of the coffee crisis just as severely, if
not more so, than the producers of high-quality arabicas. Some of the producers who live in
favored landscapes may be able to improve their situation by planting arabica and adopting
more sophisticated processing techniques. But for many, if not most coffee farmers, producing
specialty coffee is out of the question. Their landscapes do not allow the cultivation of arabica,
or they lack the means to process their coffee adequately. Strong institutional factors, in par-
ticular the large industrial coffee roasters, are not primarily interested in quality and will resist
attempts to increase the producer prices of coffee. Most cultivators of robustas and naturals,
then, will likely continue to produce coffee for the mass market, although they may seek to
improve their position within this segment. As this study of robusta has shown, mass-market
industrial coffees have become, and are likely to remain, the dominant sector in the global
coffee industry. Promoting environmental and social sustainability in this sector of the coffee
industry, where neither roasters nor consumers are likely to pay premiums for sustainable pro-
duction, will require different solutions than in the specialty sector. These solutions will need
to recognize and address the social and ecological contexts in which these coffees are produced.

NOTES

1. William Roseberry, “The rise of yuppie coffees and the reimagination of class in the United States,”
American Anthropologist 98, no. 4 (December 1996): 762–55; Robert A. Rice, “Noble goals and chal-
lenging terrain: Organic and fair trade coffee movements in the global marketplace,” Journal of Agricul-
tural and Environmental Ethics 14, no. 1 (2001): 39–66.
2. Nina Luttinger and Gregory Dicum, The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last
Drop. rev. and updated (New York: New Press, 2006); Mark Pendegrast, Uncommon Grounds: The His-
tory of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
3. Gordon Wrigley, Coffee (Harlow, UK: Longman Scientific and Technical, 1988), 565. Coffee sta-
tistics taken from the International Coffee Organization website, http://www.ico.org/prices/m1.htm. Of
the aggregate total for milds, Colombian milds accounted for 8.94 percent of global coffee production
in this period, and “other” milds accounted for 23.41 percent.
4. This essay can be taken as a sequel to William Clarence-Smith’s “The Coffee Crisis in Asia, Africa,
and the Pacific, 1870–1914,” in The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–
1989, ed. W. Clarence-Smith and S. Topik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 100–119.
5. The point here is that the relative lack of scholarly and popular attention to robusta coffee is not
random but rather the product of historically specific processes. For a pioneering study on the cultural
production of ignorance, see L. Schiebinger, “Agnotology and exotic abortifacients: The cultural produc-
tion of ignorance in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 149, no. 3 (2005): 316–43.
6. The industry calls instant “soluble coffee,” but here I use the term more familiar to consumers. On
the interconnection between biological and cultural processes in tropical agriculture, see John Soluri’s

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260 Stuart McCook

Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).
7. Stuart McCook, “Global rust belt: Hemileia vastatrix and the ecological integration of world cof-
fee production since 1850,” Journal of Global History 1, no. 2 (2006): 177–95.
8. McCook, “Global rust belt,” 180–87.
9. Francis Thurber, Coffee: From Plantation to Cup, 14th ed. (1887), 107–116; Frederick L. Well-
man, Coffee: Botany, Cultivation, and Utilization (London: Hill, 1961), 76–79.
10. P. J. S. Cramer, A Review of Literature of Coffee Research in Indonesia (Turrialba, Costa Rica: SIC
Editorial, 1957), chapters 18–21.
11. W. H. Ukers, All about Coffee (New York, The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1922),
188–89.
12. Ralph Holt Cheney, Coffee: A Monograph of the Economic Species of the Genus Coffea L. (New
York: New York University Press, 1925), 130.
13. Ukers, All about Coffee, 282, 370.
14. Wrigley, Coffee, 57.
15. Ukers, All about Coffee, 210.
16. For a recent overview of coffee’s main diseases and pests, see J. M. Waller, M. Bigger, and R. J.
Hillocks, Coffee Pests, Diseases, and Their Management (Wallingford, UK: CABI, 2007).
17. A. E. Haarer, Modern Coffee Production, 356–58.
18. On the French policies and incentives to promote Ivorean coffee cultivation in the 1930s, see
C. A. Krug and R. A. de Poerck, World Coffee Survey (Rome: FAO, 1968), 36.
19. Figures drawn from Rene Coste, Cafés et Caféiers, 1989, 408 (Cameroon), 428 (Ivory Coast),
466–67 (Belgian Congo).
20. Coste, Cafés et Caféiers, 702.
21. Quotation from Pendegrast, Uncommon Grounds, 259; John M. Talbot, Grounds for Agreement:
The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004),
55–56.
22. Coste, Cafés et Caféiers, 422, 455, 462, 467.
23. J. W. F. Rowe, The World’s Coffee: A Study of the Economics and Politics of the Coffee Industries of
Certain Countries and of the International Problem (London: H. M. Stationery Off, 1963), 146.
24. Krug and De Poerck, World Coffee Survey, 7.
25. Coste, Cafés et caféiers, 693–94.
26. Coste, Cafés et Caféiers, 398. Statistics for the United States derived from tables CCXXXVIII
and CCXXXIX of Coste, Cafés et caféiers, 690. Statistics for the United Kingdom derived from tables
CCLIX and CCLX of Coste, Cafés et caféiers, 712. Statistics for France derived from table CCXLVII
Coste, Cafés et caféiers, 702.
27. Coste, Cafés et caféiers, 387. In short, the Americans had become “clients of Africa” when buying
inexpensive coffees (704).
28. Rowe, The World’s Coffee, 146, 148–49.
29. Rowe, The World’s Coffee, 159.
30. See Krug and de Poerck, World Coffee Survey, 43. On the many varieties of robusta cultivated
in the Ivory Coast, see Roland Porteres, “Valeur agronomique des caféiers des types kouilou et robusta
cultivés en Côte d’Ivoire,” Café, Cacao, Thé 3, no. 1 (January–April 1959): 3–13.
31. Coste, Cafés et caféiers, 474–76, 479.
32. Krug and De Poerck, World Coffee Survey, 112.
33. “L’évolution des cours des cafés Robusta,” Café, Cacao, Thé 7, no. 4 (October–December 1963):
440-44.
34. Wrigley, Coffee, 557–59; “Réouverture du marché à terme des cafés de Londres,” Café, Cacao, Thé
2, no. 2 (May–August 1958): 100.
35. Krug and De Poerck, World Coffee Survey, 37.

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36. Wrigley, Coffee, 512–13; Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 135–61; Guy Delaporte, “Robusta qual-
ity for top-of-the-line products,” Tea & Coffee Trade Journal 163, no. 1 (January 1991): 38. On soluble
coffee consumption in the early 1980s, see Wrigley, Coffee, 550, table 13.5.
37. Wrigley, Coffee, 57; Donald N. Schoenholt, “Coffea canephora: The ‘R’ word,” Tea & Coffee
Trade Journal 164, no. 3 (March 1992): 43.
38. Mario Samper K, “The Historical Construction of Quality and Competitiveness: A Prelimi-
nary Discussion of Coffee Commodity Chains,” in Clarence-Smith and Topik, Global Coffee Economy,
146–47; Wellman, Coffee, 84.
39. “Opposition à la culture du caféier Robusta en Equateur,” Café, Cacao, Thé.
40. “Bilan du plan d’éradication des caféiers au Brésil,” Café, Cacao, Thé 15, no. 2 (April–June 1971):
149; “Production et commercialization mondiales du Robusta,” Café, Cacao, Thé 37, no. 2 (April–June
1993): 162.
41. Frédéric Fortunel, Le café au Viêt Nam: de la colonisation à l’essor d’un grand producteur mundial
(2000), 56, 121–29.
42. “Avenir de la production caféière au Viêt Nam,” Café, Cacao, Thé 35, no. 1 (January–March
1991): 66. Quotation from “Le café du Vietnam,” Café, Cacao, Thé 36, no. 2 (April–June 1992):
156–57. Sylvie Doutriaux and Charles Geisler, “Competing for coffee space: Development-induced
displacement in the central highlands of Vietnam,” Rural Sociology 73, no. 4 (2008): 528–54; Dang
Thanh Ha and Gerald Shively, “Coffee boom, coffee bust, and smallholder response in Vietnam’s
central highlands,” Review of Development Economics 12, no. 2 (2008): 312–26; Gerard Greenfield,
“Vietnam and the world coffee crisis: Local coffee riots in a global context,” March 1, 2004, http://www
.probeinternational.org/coffee/vietnam-and-world-coffee-crisis-local-coffee-riots-global-context.
43. Quoted in Dicum and Luttinger, The Coffee Book, 172.
44. Donald N. Schoenholt, “Coffea canephora: The ‘R’ word,” Tea & Coffee Trade Journal 164, no.
3 (March 1992): 40.
45. Pierre Leblanche, “Gourmet robustas: The quest goes on,” Tea & Coffee Trade Journal 177, no.
12 (December 2005): 32.
46. “Production et commercialization mondiale du Robusta,” Café, Cacao, Thé 37, no. 2 (April–June
1993): 162.
47. Mica Rosenberg, “Mexico eyes instant coffee market with robusta push,” n.d., http://blogs.reuters
.com/mica-rosenberg/2010/04/26/mexico-eyes-instant-coffee-market-with-robusta-push/; Emilio Godoy,
“Bitter Taste in Mexican Coffee Farmers’ Mouths,” Inter Press Service, April 26, 2010, http://ipsnews.net/
print.asp?idnews=51202.
48. Wellman, Coffee, 77; “Production et commercialization mondiale du Robusta,” Café, Cacao, Thé
37, no. 2 (April–June 1993): 162.
49. Shanna Germain, “Ready for Robustas? What Robustas Have to Offer the Specialty Coffee In-
dustry” Roast Magazine, March/April 2006, http://www.roastmagazine.com/backissues/marchapril2006/
readyforrobustas.html; Pierre Leblanche, “Gourmet robustas: The awakening of specialty coffees,” Tea &
Coffee Trade Journal 176, no. 12 (December 2004): 26–30; Pierre Leblanche, “Gourmet Robustas: The
Quest Goes On,” 32–35.
50. Dang Thanh Ha and Gerald Shiveley, “Coffee boom, coffee bust, 312–26.
51. Leblanche, “Gourmet robustas: The quest goes on,” 34.
52. Christophe Montagnon, Thierry Leroy, Ronald Onzima, and Magali Dufour, “Porquoi pas les
terroirs Robusta?” in Cafés: terroirs et qualités, ed. Christophe Montagnon (2003), 145.
53. Rainforest Alliance, “A Healthier Future Is Percolating for Vietnam: More than a Thousand
Coffee Farms Have Earned the Rainforest Alliance Certified Seal,” n.d., http://www.rainforest
-alliance.org/profiles/documents/vietnam_coffee_profile.pdf; “Rainforest Alliance Certifies Coffee in
Vietnam: Coffee and Conservation,” n.d., http://www.coffeehabitat.com/2010/04/rainforest-alliance
-certifies-coffee-in-vietnam.html.

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45
The Espresso Menu
An International History
Jonathan Morris

The specialty coffee revolution of the last thirty years has been driven by espresso-based
drinks. Whether it is the pure espresso itself—whose devotees are forever discussing how
to achieve the “God shot”—or the cappuccino and latte that coffee shop customers have
adopted around the globe, espresso beverages have both fuelled and financed the current
wave of interest in coffee. The success of what I have termed the “cappuccino conquests” has
been so great that the same espresso beverages are now found in coffee shops from Pakistan
to Panama.1
This chapter explores the history of the main items on the international coffeehouse
menu—first “black,” then “white”—to demonstrate the complexity of appropriation and
reconfiguration of traditional Italian beverages. Charting shifts in the characteristics of these
coffee drinks provides insight into the changing structures of the coffee and café trades,
technological innovations within the industry, and the appeal of beverages to different sets of
consumers. It reveals many different forms of interactions between espresso-drinking cultures
around the globe, with transfers not just from, but also to, Italy, while others involve no Ital-
ian mediation at all.
The most fundamental beverage transfers have not crossed international boundaries, but
rather the division between domestic and out-of-home coffee beverages. Espressos, cappuc-
cinos, and lattes command premium prices because they cannot be reproduced in the average
home: however, over the history of the beverages this barrier has been crossed both ways.

PART ONE: BLACK

Espresso is best understood as the product of a preparation process rather than as a type of cof-
fee or coffee beverage. Espresso coffee is made using pressure to force (“express”) water through
the coffee. The Italian description of this process relies on the four “M”s: macchina, macin-
azione, miscela, and mano (machine, grind, blend, and the hand of the barista). The barista
selects a suitable blend of coffee beans and grinds these to fineness such that their resistance
to the hot water being forced through the coffee cake by the machine enables delivery of the
beverage within desired parameters of time, volume, and temperature.

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In 1998, a group of organoleptic analysts set up the Italian National Espresso Institute
(INEI). After evaluating the sensory profile of an “Italian espresso” (espresso italiano), they
defined parameters for its preparation and gained state recognition for a quality certification
based upon this standard. Their parameters are specified in table 45.1.
Table 45.1. Italian National Espresso Institute (INEI)
Parameters for the Preparation of Italian Espresso
Portion of ground coffee 7 grams ± 0.5
Water pressure 9 bar ± 1
Temperature in brew chamber 88°C ± 2°C
Delivery time 25 seconds ± 5
Volume in cup (with crema) 25 ml ± 2.5
Beverage temperature 67°C ± 3°C
Caffeine <100 mg

The sensory description highlights that

Espresso Italiano has a hazel-brown to dark-brown foam—characterised by tawny reflexes—with a

very fine texture. . . . The nose reveals an intense scent with notes of flowers, fruits, toasted bread
and chocolate. Its taste is rounded, substantial and velvet-like. Sour and bitter tastes are well bal-
anced and neither one prevails over the other.2

Although INEI’s parameters supposedly captured the qualities of “traditional” Italian espresso,
none of the beverages described as espresso possessed these characteristics until the 1960s.3

“Original” Espresso
Espresso evolved in response to the quickening pace of life toward the end of the nineteenth
century. The time required to prepare and brew a pot of coffee, as well as the waste involved
in making a single cup, induced café owners to adopt the partial solution of using a one-cup
drip filter to produce caffè express. Inventors across Europe began experimenting with vari-
ous forms of pressure brewing in order to reduce the contact time needed between the water
and the coffee. Angelo Moriondo, a Turin hotelier, deposited patents in Italy and France for
machines to brew coffee using steam pressure in 1884 and 1885, but despite his invitation to
visitors to “Come to the Hotel Ligure, we’ll make you a coffee in a minute,” he never brought
these to market.4
The Milanese entrepreneur Desiderio Pavoni began producing the Ideale, the first commer-
cial espresso machine in 1905, using a patent purchased from the engineer Luigi Bezzera.5
A vertical boiler generated the steam used to force hot water down a tube and through the
cake of ground coffee. This was contained in a portafilter, clamped to the machine at the
so-called group heads. Whereas Moriondo’s machines brewed coffee in bulk for later delivery,
the Ideale made a fresh cup “expressly” for the individual customer within an “express” time,
by “expressing” the water through the coffee.
The resultant beverage was very different from the traditional espresso described by INEI.
The pressure generated was only around 1.5 bars, meaning that no crema formed on top of
the coffee liquor. And the high temperatures in the groups and the almost inevitable contact
with the steam scalded the coffee cake, so the eventual espresso was black in color, smelled
burnt, and tasted bitter. It was delivered in around forty-five seconds and served in a signifi-
cantly larger volume than today. The taste was like a somewhat concentrated filter coffee.

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264 Jonathan Morris

Espresso machines began appearing in the smart cafés, upmarket hotels, cocktail bars, and
transport terminals across much of Western Europe during the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury. As well as Pavoni and Arduino, constructors included non-Italian manufacturers such
as the French Reneka.6 Although the quality issues caused by the use of steam were widely
recognized, the apparatus remained much the same until the postwar era.7

Crema Caffè, Crème Café, Cafè Crème

In 1948 Achille Gaggia began manufacturing coffee machines, declaring they produced
a new beverage, crema caffè. The barista operated a geared, lever spring piston to draw hot
water directly from the boiler and drive it through the coffee puck. This method eliminated
the steam and generated much higher pressures, ranging from 3 to 12 bars during delivery.
Consequently, the essential oils and colloids in the coffee created a mousse on the top of the
beverage that we know today as crema.
The first semi-automatic machine—relieving operators of the need to supply the manual
power for delivery, while retaining control of the brewing process—arrived in 1961. This was
the Faema E61, which incorporated an electrical pump that provided a consistent nine bars of
pressure, operated by a simple on-off switch.8 Water was drawn directly from the café’s main
supply, then pressurized and passed through a heat exchanger in the boiler, before reaching the
group head. This allowed “continuous erogation,” the delivery of cup after cup without wait-
ing for the boiler to refill and reheat the water. With relatively stable temperatures at the group
head, rapid delivery of consistent cups of coffee became possible—a truly “express” service.
The E61 defined the current conception of espresso: it was the first machine capable of real-
izing the parameters later specified by INEI. By the mid-1970s semi-automatic machines had
become standard equipment in Italian coffee bars, and the public reverted to simply ordering
a caffè (never an espresso).
Crema remained the critical visual clue to the distinctiveness of the new form of espresso,
conveying with it connotations of smoothness and luxury.9 As customers in neighboring
European markets preferred larger beverages, operators employed a coarser grind, allowing a
greater volume of water to be passed through the group head using the same time and pres-
sure parameters as for espresso. In German-speaking regions this was described as crème café, a
larger, less intense beverage but, critically, still topped by a mousse of crema. In France it was
served as café crème, usually finished with steamed milk. Roasters started producing bespoke
lighter roasted blends for use as crème café.

Ristretto, Single-Origin, Romano, Double, Lungo

Ironically the best coffees at producing a highly visible, thick crema are robustas. Further-
more, because the espresso process intensifies the organoleptic qualities of the beans, high-
quality arabicas can produce imbalanced flavors, whereas commodity coffees, notably Brazil-
ian naturals, with their low acidity and relatively bland profiles, are well suited for espresso.
One reason for the evolution of espresso in Italy was that the process was suited to the poor
quality portfolio of coffees that the country imported due to its relative economic weakness.
A critical skill for Italian roasters is to blend their coffees to produce a rounded cup com-
bining substantial body with a balance between sour and bitter tastes. In general, the farther
south one travels in Italy, the greater the proportion of robusta in the blend, with a consequent
darkening of the roast in an attempt to mitigate the bitterness of robusta beans. This probably

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The Espresso Menu 265

accounts for the habit of adding sugar as standard practice, to the point that baristas often
spoon it in automatically—and to serving espresso as a ristretto, at around 15 ml, thereby
reducing the caffeine content.10 Nonetheless the resultant beverage still packs a notable punch!
INEI maintains that authentic Italian espresso can only be achieved with blends. The Insti-
tute characterizes the difference between espresso prepared from single-origin coffee and that
derived from a blend as similar to the contrast between listening to a solo instrument and to
a symphony orchestra. To capture the diversity of Italian practice from region to region, any
blend is allowed, be the beans arabica or robusta, provided that the sensory outcome satisfies
INEI’s requirements.11
When espresso became a flagship beverage for the U.S. specialty coffee movement, what
had evolved as a relatively cheap way of preparing individual cups of coffee using low-quality
blends was now presented as the incarnation of the highest expression of coffee itself. This was
encouraged by Italian roasters such as Dr. Ernesto Illy, the keynote speaker at the 1992 SCAA
conference, who realized that his company’s upmarket all-arabica blend was perfectly suited
to the specialty community’s emphasis on quality.12
In recent years, third wave artisans from the specialty sector have posed uncomfortable
questions about the assumptions behind the parameters for “traditional” Italian espresso, call-
ing for a scientific approach to espresso rooted in measurement and calculation. The specialty
movement has begun preparing single-origin coffees as espresso, preferring to highlight their
characteristics through intensification, rather than balancing them through blending.13 The
parameters for dosing are also under attack, as the realization took hold that these sprang as
much from economics as from a taste profile. Changing the dosage, tamping pressure, and
flow time produces very different sensory results; instead of the 14 grams of coffee convention-
ally used for two shots, today 19–21 grams may be tamped into the basket.
The strict adherence to 9 bars of pressure has similarly been challenged, on the grounds
that the figure was merely the standard of the semi-automatic machines. Today’s top profes-
sional machines allow baristas to vary pre-infusion times, temperature, and pressure during
a shot and between shots and, having established the profile that best suits the coffee being
served, to use digital technology to record and reproduce a shot. Microchips can not only
maintain temperature stability, but can set minor variations in group head temperature that
can significantly affect quality in the cup. Perhaps the most devastating observation is that
crema may not be the source of espresso’s unique flavor, as so often maintained, but may
actually impair the taste.14
Together, these criticisms present a trenchant challenge to conventional thinking about
espresso. The Australian commentator Instaurator has criticized the Italian industry for creat-
ing a series of shibboleths about espresso that were “data free observations.”15 Yet it should be
remembered that for most of the twentieth century, technology left Italian baristas little choice
other than to guesstimate these answers using the evidence of their own senses, while accepting
the logic of a market that (unlike specialty) was conditioned, above all, by price.
Such challenges to Italian espresso practices are not reflected in mainstream coffee shops,
where the principal problem is an overemphasis on the notion of express service, to the detri-
ment of the coffee itself.16 Keen to serve coffee quickly, baristas deliver espresso using short
run times—not least because in the Anglo-American markets, additional time must be spent
on foaming the milk mounted on the vast majority of shots. The result is usually an underex-
tracted espresso that tastes sour and bitter when drunk on its own.17
During the first fad for Italian style coffee, in the 1950s, it was common in the U.S. to add
a twist of lemon peel—no doubt mimicking the practices of cocktail bars—and to call the

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266 Jonathan Morris

resulting beverage an espresso romano.18 This is unknown in Italy where such a combination is
normally only used as a purgative, although it is possible lemon was used as a flavor enhancer
for coffee on the Amalfi coast—which is where American troops landed during World War
II.19 More likely lemon was added in the U.S. to try and mask the fact that the shots were
overextracted in order to generate larger volumes in the cup, usually resulting in dull-tasting
beverages. The double-espresso similarly appears to have been developed as a value proposi-
tion for foreign markets. It is rarely seen in Italy, where the more usual variation is a lungo, a
thinner single shot of around 40 ml.

Americano
The most well-known adaptation of espresso to suit foreign tastes is the Americano, a term
originally used for cocktail beverages to which soda was added.20 When the term first came
to be applied to coffee is unclear: a journalist observing opera impresarios in Milan in 1931
noted that “Every afternoon between three and four o’clock . . . most of the world’s important
contracts are agreed upon . . . at one of the caffès over an ‘Americano’ or a caffè espresso.”21
The context suggests that this “Americano” was an early espresso beverage for foreigners.
Caffè americano was certainly prepared for U.S. servicemen during the Second World War
and tourists thereafter as a way of offering them a coffee beverage closer to that they were
used to at home. Baristas added hot water onto a shot of espresso, dissipating the crema, and
reproducing the body and appearance of a drip-brewed, black coffee.
The Americano played a key role in the transfer of the contemporary specialty coffee shop
formula into the UK during the 1990s. Serving purely espresso-based beverages meant that all
the coffee drinks offered could be prepared using one machine and a single blend—saving on
capital, running costs, and staff training. However, that left the question of what to do when
customers requested an “ordinary” black coffee? Answer: prepare an Americano by filling a
cappuccino cup with hot water and dropping an espresso shot on top of it. This preserves
some sense of the novelty of the beverage in that the crema remains on top, and can be recast
as a specialty beverage even though the overall body is closer to drip coffee.
Within the UK market, Americano is the premier black coffee drink consumed out of the
home. A survey of the last beverage that customers had consumed in a UK coffee shop in
2011 recorded that 15 percent had ordered an Americano, 4 percent a filter coffee, and just
2 percent an espresso.22

Domestic Espresso: Moka, Machines, Pods, and Capsules

The evolution of espresso created a fundamental dichotomy between the styles of coffee
consumed in bars and in the home. This helps explain the historically high market share
enjoyed by coffee bars in Italy and other Mediterranean countries, where consumers are
rewarded for leaving the house. Recently this distinction has begun to erode, leading to a
significant transformation in out-of-home coffee culture.
The most common domestic brewer in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century
was the napoletana, a flip-over brewer usually made from tin. The device had two sections
separated by a filter. Once the water boiled in the bottom part, the user turned the appara-
tus over so that the water filtered back down into what was now the lower serving chamber,
complete with handle and spout.23 In the 1930s, Alfonso Bialetti started producing the moka
pot, made of aluminum, again consisting of two chambers separated by a funnel in which a

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The Espresso Menu 267

coffee filter was mounted.24 Steam pressure built up in the sealed lower chamber once it was
placed on the stove top, forcing the remaining hot water up through the funnel into the upper
chamber—effectively brewing coffee at 1.5 atmospheres.
The austerity economy imposed by the Fascist regime of the 1930s and by wartime de-
mands held back the development of the domestic coffee market, so it took the economic
miracle of the late 1950s to allow the moka or machinetta (little machine) to replace the na-
poletana in Italian households. Bialetti began promoting his device as a branded product, the
Moka Express pot, with which domestic users could supposedly produce “at home, an espresso
like that at the bar.”25
The irony was that while this was probably true in the 1930s, the Gaggia revolution meant
it was no longer plausible. One look at coffee prepared with a moka, which lacks any crema,
made this clear. Nonetheless, the assertion suited producers like Bialetti and Alessi and roasters
like Lavazza, who transformed themselves into national operators by exploiting the growth of
the domestic market. Currently around three-quarters of all coffee consumed in the Italian
household is prepared with a moka, with household penetration widely estimated at near 100
percent.26 Yet the continued high proportion of consumption outside the home suggests that
Italians understand the contrast between home and bar beverages.
The principal market for espresso machines as domestic appliance has always been found
outside Italy. Models such as the Pavoni “Europiccola Professional” of 1974 and the “Baby”
Gaggia launched in 1977 traded on the heritage of the two companies, by selling into a luxury
market, but were followed by foreign manufacturers such as the German giant Krups and the
Portuguese firm Briel, who both started producing entry point machines as part of their range
of domestic appliances in the early 1980s.27
Such machines use a vibrating pump that can produce high pressure (typically 15 bars)
but only with small flows of water. Correctly configured, they can brew a standard espresso
shot at around 9 bars, but it is difficult to maintain a stable temperature and pressure
to achieve consistent results over a number of shots. The length of time required for the
machines to reach their operating temperature and the lack of a direct water supply mean
that, far from continuous erogation, substantial time has to pass between shots. Steaming
milk adds even more time while the boiler heats up again, usually making domestic espresso
brewing anything but “express.”
Another difficulty of home operations is controlling flow through the coffee cake. Short of
adding a grinder to their setup, domestic users have little option but to use pre-ground blends
which, even if sold as espresso, might be better suited for a moka. It is also difficult to dose
and tamp this coffee to suit home machines. A potential solution came in the form of the
ESE (Easy Serving Espresso) pod option, a pre-ground and tamped dose in a paper filter to be
placed directly into the portafilter. Pioneered by several roasters and machine manufacturers,
notably Illy, the ESE was introduced in the late 1980s as a form of “open-source” standard
that any producer could adopt.28
Despite its advantages, the ESE system remains a one-size-fits-all approach whose outcomes
can be disappointing. Nor does ESE address the long waiting times experienced at home. Its
greatest success has been in the out-of-home commercial market, either in nonspecialist out-
lets such as restaurants whose volume of usage does not merit using fresh coffee or employing
trained baristas, or to provide a quick way of serving decaffeinated espresso in coffee bars
without separate grinders devoted to decaffeinated beans.
Conversely, single-portion capsule machines can deliver both the “express” and “expressly
for you” elements of the original espresso proposition to the home or office, as the machines

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are much quicker to reach operating mode and avoid wasting coffee in producing a single
cup. Furthermore, little cleaning and maintenance is required compared with a traditional
domestic espresso machine.
Capsule systems had been around for decades, but it was only after consumers became
used to espresso beverages in specialty coffee shops in the 1990s that these machines began to
experience exponential growth in sales. The Nespresso format was launched as a stand-alone
business by Nestle in 1986. Originally built around selling “grand cru” coffees from identified
origins on subscription, Nespresso counted 600,000 members in 2000 and had just opened its
first boutique. By 2010, the club numbered 10 million, with 215 boutiques worldwide. Total
sales of the capsules reached CHF 3.2 billion (US$3.425 billion) as the division maintained
an annual growth rate of over 20 percent.29
Nespresso’s success again raises the issue of increasing divergence between the notions of
“espresso” and “Italian espresso.” Nespresso’s own communications materials are keen to por-
tray the beverages produced by the system as corresponding to the classic Italian recipes. The
capsules contain doses of around 5 grams and are delivered into an espresso cup of 40 ml or a
lungo of 110 ml. Capsule machines are equipped with a vibrating pump that operates at high
pressures (up to 19 bars), and delivers the shots much more quickly than a standard espresso
machine.30 Far from being an Italian espresso, the resulting beverages resemble the thinner-
tasting Swiss-French versions of espresso and café crème. The fear (from an Italian perspective)
is that this will become the standard European conception of espresso.
Italian firms now produce capsule systems for domestic and office use, as well as vending
systems that benefit from the latest innovations. These trends have reconfigured the out-of-
home market, as the customary stroll to the bar has been replaced by a few steps to the office
coffee machine. Italian bars have lost nearly a third of their market share to single-serve ma-
chines in the last two decades.31 Ironically the Italian preference for pure espresso has com-
pounded this problem—capsule systems may be tolerable for shots of espresso, but they have
great difficulty reproducing the “white” beverages that dominate most international markets.

PART TWO: WHITE

The key to the evolution of the international espresso beverage menu lies in the addition of
a fifth “M,” milk. Industry sources claim that Italians take over 80 percent of their coffee as
pure espresso, whereas in the Anglo-American coffee shop, over 80 percent of espresso bever-
ages are taken “white.” The milk, rather than crema, acts as a visual marker of “authenticity”
and quality. In the 1950s, cappuccino was more accessible than espresso to consumers used
to drinking white coffee. During the 1980s the foaming of the milk and its pouring as latte
art reinforced the American specialty movement’s claim that these were artisan, handcrafted
beverages., Since the 1990s international coffee shop chains have exploited the opportunity
offered by milk to adapt to local preferences, notably by sweetening the beverages.

Macchiato
Italians regard milk as a substance that sits heavily in the stomach and requires digestion: it
is a food rather than a beverage. Coffee is considered a digestive, helping to cleanse the stom-
ach rather than fill it. It is therefore natural to take it after the meal or as a way of preparing
oneself to eat later. In the 1890s, the leading Italian food writer, Pellegrino Artusi, advised

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limiting oneself to a cup of black coffee upon awakening. People should eat only a light meal,
perhaps of toast and milky coffee, and only after they were convinced that the stomach was
empty and ready to receive food, while still leaving time and space to consume the day’s main
meal at lunchtime.32 Today, this view translates into a preference for beginning the day with
a black coffee brewed in a moka, accompanied at most by a dry biscuit, before perhaps taking
a cappuccino and croissant an hour or two later in the bar either on the way to or during the
first break from work. Coffee might follow lunch or dinner to aid digestion, but Italians never
drink a milky beverage after meals that would sit on the stomach. At most, postprandial coffee
might be macchiato, “marked” with a splash of milk.

Kapuziner, Cappuccino, Caffèlatte, Latte Macchiato

It seems probable that the term cappuccino entered the Italian language during the period
of Austrian domination over much of Northern Italy, as a derivative of the Austrian kapuziner.
So named because its color matched that of the robes worn by Capuchin friars, the kapuziner
bore little resemblance to the beverage we know today. An Englishman caught up in the Vien-
nese popular insurrection of 1848 recorded how:

The coffee-house was my only resource: there was at least some comfort in sipping a kapuziner.
This word means in English a Cappuchin [sic] monk, but it signifies in Austrian parlance a glass
of coffee with milk. The Austrians take their coffee in glasses, like the Russians, but they do not
sweeten it with honey as that civilized nation are wont to do.33

Travel guides to Austria in the early 1900s confirm that capsuziner or kapuziner was a beverage
“with more coffee than milk” in contrast to melange for which the reverse was true.34
By this time the term cappuccino was already in use in Italy. Baedeker’s 1904 guide provides
an introduction to the coffee menu and café culture:

Cafes are frequented mostly in the late afternoon and evening. The tobacco-smoke is frequently
objectionable. Caffè nero, or coffee without milk, is usually drunk. Caffè latte (served only in the
morning) is coffee mixed with milk; cappuccino, or small cup, cheaper; or caffè e latte i.e. with the
milk served separately, may be preferred.35

Both cappuccino and caffè latte were combinations of coffee and milk that could as easily
be prepared at home as in the café, while the difference between the two was the relative pro-
portions of coffee and milk in the cup. In the first edition of his dictionary of new words in
Italian in 1905, Alfredo Panzini confirms that the smaller quantity of milk in the cappuccino
spawned its name. He defined cappuccino as “Black coffee ‘corrected’ with milk. A colloquial
term probably derived from the similar color to the habit of the capuchin friars.”36
Panzini suggested that the word cappuccino had a regional origin, linking it to northern
Italy during the period of direct Austrian rule that lasted until the 1860s, and in the case of
Trieste, the Habsburgs’ principal port on the Adriatic, to 1918. There is little demand for
cappuccino in those southern regions of Italy that never came under Austrian control, while
a cappuccino in Trieste is served much shorter than elsewhere, usually in an espresso cup,
perhaps reflecting its likely original serving style in a demitasse.
Analyzing subsequent editions of Panzini’s dictionary, it becomes clear that the use of “cap-
puccino” in relation to coffee preceded that of “espresso.” In the 1918 edition, for example,
cappuccino is defined as above, but “espresso” is only mentioned to denote fast trains and

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postal deliveries, perhaps because the first espresso machines claimed to make “instantaneous”
coffee. Even in 1931, when Panzini stated that it was commonplace to use “espresso” to de-
scribe a coffee made “using a pressure machine or a filter,” the fact that he links both forms of
preparation placed the emphasis on express service rather than on the coffee itself. His defini-
tion of cappuccino remained essentially unchanged: “black coffee mixed with a little milk.”37
This suggests that it was some time before Italians came to expect that a cappuccino could
only be prepared using an espresso from a pressure machine or that the milk to be mounted
on it should be foamed, or even heated, prior to serving. Individual barmen probably experi-
mented with using the steam wands attached to the early, vertical machines to warm milk,
but these were primarily used for warming the ingredients for the “hot toddies” served in the
upmarket cocktail bars, where most machines were installed.38
This appears to have changed during the 1930s. In 1933, Harper’s Bazaar wrote of how
Rome’s “eyeopener is an express strong coffee diluted with milk and called cappuccino,” which
it recommended drinking on a café terrace at breakfast while watching the Fascist black shirts
go by.39 By 1938 a slang term cappuccio was already being used “somewhat jokily instead of
cappuccino, almost as if to recommend to the barista not to give one too little” (-ino is an
Italian suffix meaning rather small).40 Barista itself was a new term whose origins likely lie in
the Fascist insistence on replacing foreign words (in this case barman) with Italianate terms. Its
inclusion in the definition suggests that cappuccino was by now principally a beverage taken
in the bar and made with espresso.
Caffèlatte (one word) made its first appearance in the 1935 edition of Panzini’s dictionary,
defined simply as “coffee and milk.”41 Mussolini supposedly started the day with caffèlatte, as
did many ordinary peasants and workers, for whom caffèlatte was seen as a breakfast in itself,
often served combined with some bread in an almost broth-like concoction. This was likely
to have been prepared using branded coffee surrogates such as Caffeol, made from chicory
and chickpeas, which became popular during the 1930s. A 1953 survey found that 42 percent
of the population consumed caffèlatte first thing in the morning.42 However when the same
survey attempted to calculate average daily coffee intake, it deliberately excluded caffèlatte
from its calculations due to its lack of coffee content. Caffèlatte then was understood to be a
domestic beverage that did not necessarily contain coffee, let alone espresso. Indeed, we know
that even Mussolini’s caffèlatte was no more than warmed milk.43
The revolution in espresso preparation in the postwar era also changed the nature of cap-
puccino, given the new taste profile at the base of the beverage. Into the 1980s, however, a
sense persisted that drinking cappuccino was somewhat feminine, and to this day the latte
macchiato (prepared by dropping an espresso shot into a glass of steamed milk) remains a
rare sight in the Italian bar—ordered only by children, convalescents, and those (usually
ladies of a certain age) with fragile stomachs.44 Caffèlatte remains strictly a domestic drink,
and if requested in a hotel arrives as a pot of coffee and jug of steamed milk to be mixed to
suit one’s personal tastes.
INEI devised parameters for certified Italian cappuccino that were approved by parliament
in 2007. The guidelines are 100 ml of cold milk expanded to a volume of 125 ml by foam-
ing to a temperature of around 55°C and poured over a certified Italian espresso of 25 ml in
a 150–160 ml cup.45 Note here the overall proportions of the beverage and the relatively low
temperature of the milk, meaning that the cappuccino can be drunk straight away. Both of
these would have to be adjusted to facilitate the transfer of cappuccino beyond Italy.

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The Cappuccino Conquests

Domenico Parisi, a former barber, who opened the Cafe Reggio in New York’s Greenwich
Village in 1927, invested his savings into importing the first espresso machine into the United
States. An article published about the café in 1935 noted that it served “Cappucino [sic] (a
marvellous blend of strong coffee, steamed milk and cinnamon).” According to the New
Yorker, which caught up with Parisi, still using his machine some twenty years later in 1955,
“he releases a valve which allows steam to whip milk into a froth and emit an appalling, rip-
ping sound, like a barrage of rockets fired from a dive bomber.”46
Cappuccino, rather than espresso, was the main feature of the coffee menu. Parisi appears
to have prepared it topped with frothed, not just steamed milk, if we assume his technique
was essentially the same over the twenty-year period; and he appears responsible for the use of
cinnamon as a topping—an innovation widely copied across the U.S. but for which there was
no clear precedent in Italy. The benefit was to further sweeten the milky beverages that, Parisi
was the first to realize, were more easily adapted to local tastes.
The Gaggia revolution sparked a new interest in espresso machines outside Italy during
the 1950s. These were largely distributed through agents, so that it was left to local import-
ers and entrepreneurs—by no means all Italian immigrants—to transfer and adapt espresso
culture. In the UK, the first Gaggia machine was installed in the Moka Bar in London’s
Soho in 1952; by 1960, there were supposedly some 2,000 coffee bars in the country, of
which over 500 were in London itself.47
This boom was fuelled by cappuccino rather than espresso. The beverage offered many
advantages to both caterers and customers. The appearance of the frothed milk on top of
the coffee and the theatricality of its preparation, notably the sound of the steam, served
to highlight the novelty of the beverage to a public shaking off the austerity of the postwar
years. Yet it was also more accessible to British customers who had long been in the habit
of adding milk to their hot beverages and were already acquainted with the American milk-
shake. It was served dusted with cocoa powder, again adding to both the visual appeal and
the sweetness of the drink.
Cappuccino’s greatest advantage was that it fit closely into the sociocultural expectations
of what the British wanted in beverages away from home. Cappuccino took longer than
espresso to consume, providing the appearance of greater value for money. The longer time
frame also created a social context that could allow conversation to develop, an important
consideration to the significant proportion of customers who were teenagers on dates.
Serving the cappuccino “hot” extended the time further and also met the expectations of
consumers used to beverages prepared with boiling water. These features resulted in one of
the iconic images of the period after an Italian client at a Soho coffee bar commented that
he could shave in the time it took for his cappuccino to reach a drinkable temperature and
was invited back to be photographed doing so!48
Many British cafés developed more ersatz versions of the beverage, simply heating milk
with a steam wand and mounting it on top of conventionally brewed or even instant coffee.
This was usually described as “frothy” coffee. The Anglo-Italian proprietors who dominated
the “working-man’s café” sector were as complicit as anyone else in this development.49 The
consequent devaluation of cappuccino was captured in a sketch from “Not the Nine O’clock
News,” a British TV comedy show of the 1980s, in which an Italianate café proprietor is
shown cowering behind a Gaggia and making steaming noises while pouring boiling water

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onto instant coffee, mixing in ingredients such as cigarette ash and dish detergent, and finally
blowing bubbles into his creation through a straw.50
That joke contrasts with the fetishization of cappuccino in the Café Nervosa, the fictional
Seattle coffeehouse frequented by the Crane brothers in the U.S. television hit Frasier a decade
or so later. By this juncture, Italian-style coffee beverages had been recruited to do the hard
work for the U.S. specialty coffee movement by persuading the public that coffee could be a
premium artisan food product, with the foamed milk reinforcing the claim that these were
handcrafted beverages. In 1994, gourmet retailers reported that in-store sales of espresso-based
beverages were outstripping those of traditional drip brewed coffee.51

Caffè Latte
The most successful beverage of the new age, however, was caffè latte. Its popularity was
such that by 1991 it accounted for 75 percent of all sales from the coffee carts that brought
espresso to the streets of Seattle.52 It was marketed as an Italian version of the better known
French combination of brewed coffee and warmed milk, café au lait, but with a more discern-
ible coffee taste as a result of using espresso. That said, its primary attraction was that the
steamed milk used in the latte made it taste significantly sweeter than cappuccino.
This was the moment that caffè latte (two words) became codified as an espresso-based bever-
age served at the coffee cart, bar, or shop as opposed to the Italian caffèlatte (one word) that was
prepared with a home-brewed moka. At first it was served as, in effect, a latte macchiato, with
the espresso shot poured into a transparent glass already containing the steamed milk, but now
topped with a small head of foam. This produced a spectacular theatrical effect as the espresso
blended into the steamed milk, gradually changing the beverage’s color, while leaving a white
head on top. This is still highly popular in the German market. A quicker method of preparation
for Anglo-American operators, however, was to reverse the process by beginning by delivering an
espresso shot into a wide-brimmed cup that could be placed directly under the portafilter and
then adding the steamed milk topped with foam. Some theatrical “value added” and sense of
artisanship could be produced by training baristas to pour “latte art” onto the beverage.
The difference between cappuccino and caffè latte at this point revolved around the prepa-
ration and proportion of the milk used. Steaming milk is simple: the wand is placed deep into
the pitcher and the steam is turned on. The milk is warmed but does not expand. Frothing
milk requires the introduction of air alongside the steam by putting the tip of the wand in
close to the surface of the milk so that air is sucked in, filling the milk with bubbles. When
poured, the steamed milk in the body of the jug will emerge first, followed by the foam from
the top. The standard food service definition was that cappuccino consisted of equal propor-
tions of espresso, steamed milk, and frothed milk, so the difference between this and the caffè
latte lay simply in the proportions of the two types of milk poured into the cup. This meant,
as Nick Jurich argued in his highly influential 1991 guide Espresso from Bean to Cup, that “the
line between a latte and a cappuccino becomes quite vague.”53
Some operators have attempted to redifferentiate the two beverages by increasing the
frothed proportion of the cappuccino, benchmarking their baristas’ success to the height,
rather than the quality, of the foam.54 This has resulted in a shift from the “wet” version of
cappuccino, comprising equal portions of steamed and frothed milk, to the “dry” version
composed largely, if not entirely of an airy “macrofoam” that comes from intensive frothing.
The high end of the specialty industry, however, has increasingly sought to “texture” milk
by creating a vortex on the surface that helps to “spin and stretch” the milk and results in the

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entirety being transformed into a creamy, smooth, microfoam. David Schomer, a specialist
in “espresso preparation as a culinary art” who founded Seattle’s Espresso Vivace in 1988,
argues that because “ultra-fine texture is the only desirable foam consistency for espresso-
making,” the main distinction between the two beverages is that cappuccino is served in
a ratio of 5 parts milk to 1 part espresso in a 6- or 7-ounce cup, whereas latte needs a
12-ounce cup and a 6:1 ratio.55

Tall, Grande, Venti, Skinny, Soy, Syrup, Breve

In his 1996 book Espresso Coffee: Professional Techniques, Schomer predicted that, “We
[Americans] are a health-conscious people, and soon we will reject the drinking of 12–16
ounces of milk a day with our tall latte. . . . I believe that the culture will evolve into custom-
ers ordering less milk.”56
Precisely the reverse has occurred. The 16-ounce cup has become standard, while the
20-ounce “venti” is now firmly entrenched in popular culture. Increasing the volume of
the beverage not only created a sense of greater value for money (particularly useful for the
takeaway trade) but also increasing the proportion of milk to coffee further sweetened the
beverage. Today, the three standard Starbucks’ sizes are the tall at 260 ml, the grande, 340 ml,
and the venti, 450 ml (compared with INEI’s recommended 160 ml).57 In the U.S., the tall is
still brewed with just a single shot of espresso, in contrast to Schomer’s recipe, which calls for
two. This alters the taste while offering the opportunity to charge customers for an extra shot.
The commodification of caffè latte within the coffee shop format has gone much further.
The nature of the milk used in the coffee can be used to present a supposedly healthier propo-
sition: Starbucks customers can choose whole milk, 2 percent, nonfat, and soy. Certainly this
choice has some impact—according to figures provided by Starbucks in 2004, the 260 calories
in a grande latte made with whole milk fell to 210 when prepared with soy and to 160 if made
with nonfat milk. Conferring Italianate names on other concoctions helped to camouflage
their properties—the “breve,” for example, made with “half and half,” half milk, half cream,
yields 550 calories as a grande latte and a whopping 770 for a venti (around a third of the
recommended adult daily caloric intake).58
Intriguingly the figures given on the Starbucks website of 2012 are significantly lower,
with a whole fat grande latte now listed at 220 calories, while a latte made from 2 percent
milk—the default option in the U.S. since 2007—rings in at 190 calories. The much higher
foam content of a cappuccino in Starbucks’ interpretation of the beverage is captured in the
fact that the whole milk grande cappuccino contains only 140 calories, dropping to 80 in the
nonfat version.59
The latte can also incorporate additional flavorings, usually added through syrups. The first
man to spot this potential is widely believed to be “Brandy” Brandenburger, a veteran member
of the San Francisco coffee scene. After making various experiments in the legendary North
Beach Italian-American coffee house Caffè Trieste, Brandenburger recommended that Torani,
a syrup manufacturer, develop a line for use in coffee shops.60 The most popular flavors are the
classics, almond, caramel, and vanilla; but a big advantage of syrups is that they can easily be
used to create “new” or “seasonal” beverages such as the Starbucks Gingerbread Latte.
Syrups, alongside milk type, cup size, the extra shot, and the foaming style (dry or wet),
provide customers with a set of choices to customize their beverages. The ability of cappuc-
cino and caffè latte to accommodate these is a further reason for their centrality within the
international coffeehouse menu.

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Mocha, Marocchino, Babyccino, Flat White

Although cappuccino and caffè latte are clearly connected to Italy, the origins of other bev-
erages that are rapidly becoming standard items within the coffee shop offer are more obscure.
The most well-known is mocha, now standardized as latte with chocolate and served in most
international coffee shops.
The closest beverages to mocha to be found in the 1960s U.S. coffeehouse manuals were
caffè chocolaccino (“it is really frothy cappuccino, but is served in a tall cup and topped with
whipped cream and a mound of shaved French chocolate”) and caffè Borgia (in which grated
orange peel replaces the chocolate shavings).61 These coffees were partly designed to satisfy
consumer desires for a beverage that could be ordered as a substitute for dessert.
Mocha continued in this role during the specialty era. Jurich castigated all who failed to
realize that “cherries, chocolate sprinkles, and whipped cream have no place in cappuccino,”
but then offered a recipe for caffè mocha in which a shot of espresso was added to chocolate
syrup, steamed milk and whipped cream were mounted on top, and then dusted with grated
chocolate, powdered cocoa, chocolate chips, adding sugar or vanilla sugar to taste, and with an
option of brewing with cloves.62 In 1993, Kenneth Davids reported that “American caffès [sic]
simply add chocolate fountain syrup to a caffè latte and call it a mocha,” although he noted
that Starbucks termed this a moccaccino, a now abandoned term that was consistent with the
chain’s policy of giving quasi-Italian names to non-Italian concoctions.63
The success of the mocha has had repercussions in Italy itself. In the late 1980s, coffee bars
began serving the marocchino, an espresso dusted with sweet chocolate powder, then topped
with textured milk, and re-dusted with chocolate powder, thus giving it a darker appearance
than a cappuccino or indeed espresso macchiato.64 In effect this was an Italianized version
of the mocha, enabling the reappearance of the chocolate/coffee combination on the Italian
espresso menu. It is sometimes claimed to be a modernization of the bicerin, a pre-espresso
mixed beverage of chocolate and coffee served at a coffeehouse of the same name founded in
Turin in 1763. Less convincingly the name is said to refer to the color of Moroccan leather-
bound books; maybe, but the term marocchino (“Moroccan”) came into vogue as a generic
slang term for African immigrants before the beverage surfaced in coffee bars.
Another beverage that has moved from improvisation to standardization is the Baby-
c(c)ino. This seems to have originated in Australasia in the late 1990s, providing children with
a caffeine-free imitation beverage to sip while their mothers enjoyed their lattes.65 It consists
of foamed milk, usually served in an espresso cup, at times with the addition of chocolate
sprinkles. It crossed into the UK and found its way onto the menus of the chains, including
Costa and Starbucks, and has also subsequently been recorded in Italy and the U.S. (though
not on Starbucks’ menu).66
The Australasian beverage that has had most impact on the international menu is the
flat white. It initially took the form of a long black (an Australian version of Americano)
to which either cold or warmed milk had been added, prepared for those who did not ap-
preciate the frothy cappuccinos that appeared in Australia from the mid-1950s.67 The flat
white first mutated into a mini-latte, but by the 2000s had developed into a more refined
beverage, consisting of a strong double espresso brewed with around 21 grams in the porta-
filter, served in an 8-ounce cup topped with milk that had been microfoamed into a creamy
velvet-like consistency. There was no doming of the milk at the surface (unlike cappuccino),
so some latte art could be poured on, typically in a fern-like design resembling the national
symbol of New Zealand.68

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This version of the beverage arrived in London at the end of 2005, when barista owners
from New Zealand and Australia opened the Flat White café in Soho. The café’s success
led to a quasi-chain migration of other antipodean baristas to the British capital, playing a
prominent role in the establishment of a high-end independent café culture. The beverage
itself showcased all the advances made within the artisan sector: a much stronger espresso
than the traditional Italian version, milk-foaming skills necessary to produce the requisite
smoothness, and latte art.
The chains responded by adopting and adapting the flat white, with Starbucks UK rolling
it out in December 2009 and Costa in January 2010, the latter describing it as “richer than
a Latte, creamier than a Cappuccino . . . a true coffee lovers’ coffee,” despite serving it in a
standard 12-ounce cup .69 The managing director of another Italian-branded chain claimed
that what they were launching was actually “the antipodean Flat White with a genuine Ital-
ian taste.”70 About 14 percent of UK coffee shop customers now regularly order a flat white,
despite paying more for it than for cappuccino or latte.71

Of Milk and Machines

While the Italian coffee industry has benefited enormously from the global boom in the
consumption of Italian-style coffee beverages, it has had to adjust to this being driven by the
milk beverages. Early suppliers of machines to the American specialty operators, such as Kent
Bakke of Espresso Specialists in Seattle, had to seek out machines that were best suited to
preparing cappuccinos and lattes. Bakke chose to work with La Marzocco, a small artisanal
machine manufacturer from Florence, essentially because its dual boiler system, in which one
boiler is used purely for steaming, made it much easier to prepare milk beverages than the
equipment produced by the bigger, better-known Italian companies.72 In 1994 Bakke headed
an American consortium that took a 90 percent stake in the company and opened a U.S.-
based subsidiary, principally to satisfy the demands of his leading client, Starbucks.
In 2000, however, Starbucks turned to the Swiss manufacturer Thermoplan to provide the
push-button Verisimo machine. This “super-automatic” device grinds the beans and brews
the espresso shots automatically, leaving the barista with responsibility only for frothing the
milk and assembling the beverage.73 Starbucks’ change of supplier symbolized a much broader
trend. Espresso beverages shifted from specialty beverages to mass-market commodities, de-
manded as part of the standard menu in most retail outlets. Nonspecialist operators needed
equipment that enabled them to deliver the drinks to a consistent recipe without investing in
barista training. Non-Italian manufacturers, most notably Swiss firms such as Egro, Franke,
Jura, and Schearer, had long been interested in automating the entire process, producing su-
perautomatic bean-to-cup machines that even assemble the beverage on the push of a button.
These are highly sophisticated machines, but their essential function is deskilling the barista.
At the same time, the traditional Italian semi-automatic and automatic machines have had
to be redesigned, if only to create sufficiently large clearance heights for the outsized cups
used abroad under the group heads, while much investment has gone into the refining of the
steam wand, creating injection systems that deliver both steam and air into the beverage and
automatically heat the milk to a predetermined temperature, thus again reducing the time and
technique demanded from the barista.
Home machine manufacturers too, starting with Krups, have developed “frothing sleeves”
that fit over the normal steam wand on the machine and supposedly assist in sucking more
air into the milk to assist in foaming. Yet the small boiler capacity of most such machines

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276 Jonathan Morris

makes foaming difficult to achieve, particularly at the lower end of the home market. With
the advent of capsule machines brewing espresso-style coffee, it will be the white half of the
menu that continues to protect coffee shops by enabling them to deliver beverages that cannot
easily be reproduced in the home.

CONCLUSION

It is now over a century since Pavoni began manufacturing the first commercial pressure brew-
ing machine, introducing the world to the concept of espresso and setting in course the chain
of events by which domestic beverages such as cappuccino and caffè latte would come to be
redefined as part of the espresso menu. The versions that we currently consume are merely
the latest expressions of an ongoing process of international experimentation and exchange.
Both Italy and America have played leading roles in these transfers, but increasingly they are
responding to, as much as driving, the continuing evolution of global espresso culture.

NOTES

1. The Cappuccino Conquests research project was funded by a grant from the AHRC/ESRC Cul-
tures of Consumption research programme (RES-154-25-0015). See Jonathan Morris, “La globalizzazi-
one dell’espresso italiano,” Memoria e Ricerca XIV, no. 23 (2006): 27–46; “The Cappuccino Conquests”
(pdf ), 2007, http://herts.academia.edu/JonathanMorris.
2. Centro Studi e Formazione Assagiatori, “L’Espresso Italiano Certificato,” supplement to L’Assaggio
no. 6, September 1999, 7.
3. Jonathan Morris, “Making Italian espresso, making espresso Italian,” Food and History 8, no. 2
(2010): 143–68.
4. Franco Capponi, La Victoria Arduino (2005), 4–7.
5. Bezzera also continued making machines under his own name. See Elena Locatelli, La Pavoni
1905–2005 (2005); Franco Capponi, “Espresso coffee machines and their history,” in Nuovo Simonelli
and Its Roots, ed. Maurizio Giuli (2011), 253.
6. “The History of Reneka” (pdf ), 2007, http://www.reneka.com/expresso-brand.phtml.
7. On the evolution of espresso machines see Ian Bersten, Coffee Floats, Tea Sinks (Roseville, Aus-
tralia: Helian Books, 1993); Enrico Maltoni, Espresso Made in Italy (Collezione Enrico Maltoni, 2001),
www.espressomadeinitaly.com.
8. Enrico Maltoni, ed., Faema Espresso (Faenza, Italy: Faenza Industrie Grafiche, 2009).
9. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Cape, 1972), 37.
10. Carlo Grenci, “The other Italian coffee tradition,” Café Europa 15 (2003): 3.
11. Luigi Odello, Espresso Italiano Specialist (Brescia, Italy: Istituto Nazionale Espresso Italiano,
2003), 72–78.
12. Ernesto Illy, “Espresso Trends,” keynote address to SCAA, Seattle, 1992 (audio copy in SCAA
library).
13. Kenneth Davids, “Better than ever: Boutique espressos,” Coffee Review, May 2006, http://www
.coffeereview.com/article.cfm?ID=184.
14. See James Hoffman’s 2009 video blog and subsequent comments at http://www.jimseven
.com/2009/07/06/video-1-crema/.
15. Instaurator, The Espresso Quest (Loowedge, Australia: Copacabana Publishing, 2008), 21–28.
16. Paul Meikle-Janney, “Back to Basics,” presentation to UK Coffee Leader Summit, London,
March 29, 2012.

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The Espresso Menu 277

17. Jim Schulman, “Some Aspects of Espresso Extraction,” 2007, available at http://coffeecuppers
.com/Espresso.htm.
18. Pan-American Coffee Bureau, Fun with Coffee (New York: Pan-American Coffee Bureau, 1956),
7–8.
19. My thanks to Claudia Galetta and her colleagues at Lavazza for this information.
20. Alfredo Panzini, Supplemento ai dizionari italiani, 3rd ed. (1918), 37.
21. Myra Davis, “The Song Market,” Manchester Guardian, February 20, 1931, p. 6.
22. Allegra Strategies, Project Café11 UK (London: Allegra Strategies, 2011).
23. Adelaide Del Sant, Coffee Makers (1995), 31–33.
24. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “The romance of caffeine and aluminum,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn
2001): 249–69.
25. Schnapp, “Romance,” 265.
26. Maurizio Cociancich, 100% Espresso Italiano (2008), 140.
27. http://www.krups.com/Focus/History; www.briel.pt/the company, accessed April 5, 2012.
28. Corby Kummer, The Joy of Coffee, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 110.
29. Maarten Decker, “The Nespresso Story,” presentation to Allegra European Coffee Symposium,
Berlin, November 24, 2011.
30. “Nespresso: Parla Marco Zancolò direttore generale della filiale italiana,” Comunicaffè 23 (Sep-
tember 2010).
31. Vincenzo Sandalj, “Mediterranean markets,” Café Europa 45 (2011): 18.
32. Pellegrino Artusi, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, trans. Murtha Baca and Ste-
phen Sartarelli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 560.
33. “Vienna during the siege and after it,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 39 (1849): 457.
34. Baedeker’s Guide to Austria including Hungary, Transylvania, Dalmatia and Bosnia (1900), 2; John
Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in South Germany and Austria (1903), 32.
35. K. Baedeker, Italy from the Alps to Naples (1904), xxii.
36. Panzini, Supplemento ai dizionari italiani, 3rd ed. (1918), 93; probably a straight reprint from
the first edition of 1905.
37. Panzini, Supplemento, 6th ed. (1931), 229, 108.
38. The patent for Arduino’s original Victoria machine presented in December 1906 described it as
an instantaneous warmer for all liquids. Capponi, La Victoria Arduino, 15–17.
39. This reference can be seen at Google Books: http://books.google.co.uk/books?sourceid=navclient
&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGHP_en-GBGB461GB461&q=harpers+bazaar+cappuccino+1933.
40. Alfredo Panzini and Bruno Migliorini, Dizionario moderno delle parole che non si trovano nei
dizionari comuni (1950), 801.
41. Reprinted in Panzini and Migliorini, Dizionario moderno, 97.
42. Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz, Il volto sconosciuto dell’Italia (1956), 123–31.
43. Carol Helstosky, Garlic and Oil (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 99.
44. Interview with Sergio Guarnieri, LaCimbali, Binasco, January 27, 2005.
45. “Cappuccino Italiano Certificato” (pdf ), www.espressoitaliano.org.
46. Both articles are on the Caffe Reggio website, http://www.cafereggio.com/press (accessed May
8, 2012).
47. Edward Bramah, Tea and Coffee (London: Hutchinson,1972), 67–75.
48. “Guerra e pace a Soho attorno al caffè espresso,” La Voce degli Italiani, December 1954, 5.
49. Jonathan Morris, “Imprenditoria italiana in Gran Bretagna,” Italia Contemporanea, 241 (Decem-
ber 2005): 540–52.
50. The Best of Not the 9 O’Clock News (DVD), vol. 2 (2004).
51. Gallup, Study of Awareness and Use of Gourmet and Specialty Coffees (1994).
52. Himanee Gupta, “Espresso to Go,” Seattle Times, September 24, 1990, B.1.
53. Nick Jurich, Espresso from Bean to Cup (Missing Link Press,1991), 112.
54. Meikle-Janney, “Back to Basics.”

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278 Jonathan Morris

55. David C. Schomer, Espresso Coffee: Professional Techniques (Seattle: Peanut Butter Publ.,1996),
131, 155.
56. Schomer, Espresso Coffee, 152.
57. Starbucks Order Guide, Point of Sale Literature, UK, 2002.
58. You, Starbucks and Nutrition, Point of Sale Literature, USA, 2004.
59. http://www.starbucks.com/menu/catalog/nutrition?drink=all#view_control=nutrition, accessed
May 6, 2012.
60. Interview with Sonia Giotta, Caffè Trieste, San Francisco, August 2, 2010.
61. The Coffee Brewing Institution, Today’s Coffeehouse (A Handbook) (1964), 10.
62. Jurich, Espresso, 113.
63. Kenneth Davids, Espresso: Ultimate Coffee, 2nd ed (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001, original
1993), 43.
64. Touring Club Italiano, L’Italia del caffè (2004), 9.
65. Sue Butler et al., Australian Phrasebook (1994), 91.
66. See http://reversecultureshock.com/2010/03/09/the-starbucks-babyccino/, accessed May 6, 2012;
Eli Rosenberg, “Coffee . . . for kids!” The Brooklyn Paper, February 15, 2012.
67. Greg Dixon, “The Birth of the Cool,” New Zealand Herald, July 22, 2008.
68. “How Cafes Make the ‘Flattie,’” Boughton’s Coffee House, July/August 2009, 6.
69. “Flat White,” Costa Coffee Point of Sale Brochure, 2010.
70. Boughton’s newsflash, March 16, 2010.
71. My thanks to Anya Marco of Allegra Strategies for her advice on this section.
72. Interview with Kent Bakke, Seattle, January 7, 2005.
73. Howard Schultz with Joanne Gordon, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing
Its Soul (New York: Rodale, 2011), 121–22.

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46
The Competing Languages of Coffee
Signs, Narratives, and Symbols of American
Specialty Coffee
Kenneth Davids

The initiating act of the American specialty coffee movement is generally assumed to be the
opening by Alfred Peet of his Peet’s Coffee & Tea store on Vine Street in Berkeley in 1966.
Small, roaster-in-the-back-of-the-store coffee companies surviving from the early part of the
twentieth century doubtless helped provide Peet his model, but the dark-stained pine counters
and glass-fronted coffee bins of the Vine Street store, the coffee bags on the walls, a sprinkling
of antique coffee gear and tribal knick-knacks, all redolent of a kind of fusion of the Euro-
pean and the exotic, proved to be particularly inspiring to a generation of entrepreneurs and
provided the American specialty industry’s founding imagery.
From its inception, specialty coffee’s self-representation was propelled by an assumed
moral or aesthetic superiority. In way of justification for this stance, the industry developed
a range of metanarratives and symbolic representations that express sometimes overlapping,
sometimes conflicting aspirations and appeals.
What follows is a rapid, irreverent run, as I interpret messages about coffee, through these
histories and imageries, roughly chronological, but focused as well on their ongoing interde-
pendency and implicit dialogue.

METAHISTORY 1: THE SPECIALTY COFFEE INDUSTRY’S

FOUNDING MYTH, AUTHENTICITY REVIVED
(OR COFFEE GROWS ON TREES, NOT IN CANS)

The specialty coffee industry arrived to save the consumer from the manipulations of an
increasingly hegemonic commodity system that gradually reduced coffee, a living, natural
product rooted in diverse histories and cultures, to a bland, brown, heavily processed sub-
stance sold in branded cans and bottles. This salvation is achieved through a product fresh-
roasted by hand, sold in bulk, and expressing the authentic source of the product by telling
us which exotic tropical places it comes from.

“This salvation is achieved through a product fresh-roasted by hand, sold in bulk . . .” The appeal
to artisan authenticity and product freshness originally was expressed most vividly through

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sensory spectacle rather than secondary representation in signs and labels. In Alfred Peet’s Vine
Street store the antique roaster and its slightly crooked pipe rising to the high ceiling were
situated immediately in back of the sales counter in plain view of customers. Even when single
stores expanded to modest chains with a centralized roasting facility, the freshly roasted beans
still glistened in glass-fronted bins and the smell of roasted coffee permeated the premises.
However, as the specialty industry expanded and consolidated, the freshness spectacle be-
came increasingly marginalized as a means of invoking the authenticity narrative. Today, Star-
bucks and other large specialty companies roast and package their coffees hundreds or even
thousands of miles from where they are ultimately sold, the main difference being the coffee
is often whole bean rather than pre-ground, and the packaging is marginally more technically
sophisticated than the familiar metal can. The best Starbucks could do with its back-to-our-
roots Pike Street Market blend launched in 2008 was print a “Scooped on” date on the bag
(that is, scooped out of a five-pound bulk bag, a rather odd reference to the considerably more
meaningful “Roasted on” dates that appear on the bags of coffees offered by more traditional
specialty companies). Nevertheless, the original freshness spectacle lives on, deployed by a
contingent of new, small-scale regional roasting companies started by entrepreneurs who pas-
sionately re-embody variations on the original Alfred Peet model.
“Expressing the authentic source of the product by telling us which exotic tropical place it came
from.” In Alfred Peet’s Vine Street store the brown-toned menu listed coffees for sale identified
by names both mysterious and exotic: Guatemala Antigua, Kenya AA, Sumatra Mandheling.
The “exotic origins” element of the founding metanarrative of specialty coffee has turned out
to be particularly productive in generating continued refinements of representation, since it
does not require the physical reinforcement of sensory spectacle. It can be conveyed in second-
ary representations on signs, labels, brochures, and brands. It has contributed to two of the
most ubiquitous and conflicting symbol sets of specialty coffee, taken up later in this analysis
under the headings Safari in a Cup and Save the World One Cup at a Time.

METAHISTORY 2: COFFEE, THE WINE OF DEMOCRACY

From its inception specialty coffee incorporated a second stream of commerce and myth: The
café or coffee house. This element of the specialty coffee industry required a justifying myth
of European origins, a myth most thoroughly expressed by William Ukers’s encyclopedic book
All About Coffee (1935) and carried forward by many popularizers:

Before the advent of coffee, Europe was run by morose aristocrats in impractical clothing, sitting
around drafty castles wasting their mental energy digesting breakfasts consisting of warm beer,
bread, and other weighty, thought-inhibiting substances. Then came coffee and coffeehouses, and
fueled by caffeine and light breakfasts, Europe was energized. In due course democracy, individu-
alism, modern culture and the specialty coffee industry were born, and castles were turned into
museums with attached cafés.

In the 1950s and 1960s neighborhood coffeehouses were opened in American cities by Italian
immigrants, initially for a clientele of other Italian immigrants. In many of these neighborhoods
the Italians were soon joined by artists and other bourgeois bohemians of miscellaneous heritage.
Howard Schultz’s great innovation with Starbucks was fusing the Italian-style café (properly,
caffè) and the specialty coffee store à la Alfred Peet into a single, Americanized package, accessible
and largely free of intimidating insiders slouching at marble-topped tables dressed in the hip uni-

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The Competing Languages of Coffee 281

form of the day. With the café or caffè, the symbolic referencing was not to tropical origins, but
rather to European antecedents. The emphasis was on what the roasting machine and espresso
machine did to the coffee, not on where the green, unroasted coffee beans came from. Rather
than Kenya AA or Guatemala Antigua one chose from either (1) a nameless espresso blend or
(2) various blends of coffee named with reference to the degree or darkness of the roast rather to
the origin of the green coffee: French Roast, Italian Roast, Viennese Roast. The iconography of
the Wine of Democracy metamyth originally ran to marbletop tables together with either wood
engravings of eighteenth-century cafés and coffeehouses or art deco posters from the early days
of espresso in Italy, but variations include the thrift store furniture mode of many college caffès
together with various Starbucks-inspired postmodern pastiches.

METAHISTORY 3: COFFEE THE OPPRESSOR OF THE

TROPICAL POOR AND AGENT OF CAPITALIST ADDICTION

Both the authenticity myth and the wine of democracy history were soon challenged by a
third narrative, crystallized in the late 1990s:

Coffee is just another addictive drug that early mercantile capitalists jumped on to supplement
sugar and tobacco in the development of global capitalism. Louis XV or Voltaire, Eisenhower or
Ginsburg, it doesn’t matter, they’re all just addicts supporting the exploitation of slave labor and the
ruination of nature. Baristas are nothing but parasites with cool tattoos unwittingly collaborating
with a system in which slaves have been replaced by free workers whose freedom consists largely
of choosing between starving on the land or migrating to a slum and selling Chiclets. The only
answer is fair trade certification, which has the added advantage of clearly dividing the coffee-
drinking population between those addicts who are virtuous and those irritating, trivial snobs who
rationalize their addiction by yammering on about floral notes and crema on their espresso shots.

This metanarrative, invoked in part by Gregory Dicum’s and Nina Luttinger’s The Coffee
Book (1999), gained traction in particular around a successful media campaign mounted by
TransFair USA (now Fair Trade USA) on behalf of fair trade certification, a campaign that
coincided with a period of extreme low green coffee prices that devastated producers (2000
through about 2003). In industry gatherings like the annual conference of the Specialty Cof-
fee Association of America (SCAA), implicit and explicit debate intensified between adher-
ents of the previous myths and a (usually) younger generation busy invoking this newest coffee
narrative as a basis for promoting (and often commercially exploiting) a variety of third-party
certifications attesting to the positive socioeconomic and environmental credentials of the
certified green coffees: organic (the original coffee certification), fair trade (the favorite), bird
friendly, plus more comprehensive certifications for sustainability like Rainforest Alliance
and the still mainly European-centered Utz Kapeh (now called Utz Certified Good Inside).

METAHISTORY 4: SPECIALTY COFFEE AS WIN-WIN SOLUTION,

OR QUALITY OF LIFE AND QUALITY OF COFFEE COINCIDE

This metanarrative gradually evolved as a synthesis of specialty coffee’s founding focus on

artisanry combined with a less institutionalized, more ad hoc approach to social and envi-
ronmental amelioration. It increasingly has been invoked not only by the latest generation

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282 Kenneth Davids

of artisan specialty coffee sellers but by development agencies and their allies who support
this vision for its potential to fuel market-oriented solutions to rural poverty driven by
specialty products like coffee:

Coffee snobs will demand a better, more distinctive coffee and will be willing to pay for it, while
consumers who have lead palates will be intimidated into paying more for coffees because they
too want to be cool. Coffee growers, assisted by air travel, the Internet, and partnerships with
roasters greedy to prey on coffee snobs and impressionable consumers, will catch onto the game
and together with their roaster partners and abetted by development agencies, will take advantage
of snobs and their followers by getting higher prices for their coffee, making more money, and in
some cases becoming as rich and famous as wine producers. Meanwhile, while the best cooperatives
and farms in the best regions for growing coffee are flourishing, commodity coffee production will
be taken over entirely by progressive industrialized farms in Brazil with good child labor practices
and reassuring forest reserves. Lower elevation producers elsewhere will convert out of coffee and
make lots of money growing cacao for the specialty chocolate industry.

The last two sentences of the preceding are not, of course, part of the narrative as it is
advanced by its adherents. The practical weakness of this approach as a comprehensive tool
for alleviating coffee-region poverty is the fact that many poor coffee farmers are not located
in areas conducive to growing top-quality coffee. Nevertheless, at this writing this narrative
is being deployed with persistence, skill, and increasing success by those who are updating
Alfred Peet’s artisan vision with programs with titles like relationship coffee and direct trade,
programs that personalize coffee producers rather than marketing their coffee under generic
origin and grade descriptions. In other words, a certain coffee may be sold as “Colombia
Micro-lot Wilmer Delgado” (name of the farmer) rather than “Colombia Supremo” (name of
a coffee origin and grade). Proponents of the win-win narrative typically pay farmers impres-
sive premiums for coffee the buyers consider superior in quality and distinction. Extending
the premiums paid for the product itself are roaster-supported programs that fund modest
community infrastructure projects like improved schools. Development agencies typically
deploy both certification strategies and the win-win narrative with its buyer network in their
efforts to transform coffee-growing regions dominated by disorganized and demoralized small
producers into disciplined producers of fine coffees that command top market prices. Rwanda
is currently a successful showcase for such efforts.

PACKAGE IMAGERY AND NARRATIVE APPEALS:

FIFTY YEARS OF SELLING THE SPECIALTY IDEA

Now to the symbolic strands of representation that in various ways reference the dominant
metanarratives. I omit espresso and its Euro-American oriented set of symbols and allusions. The
symbol sets I describe often overlap and are not mutually exclusive. Starbucks, for example, has
deployed almost all of them. Again, these strands of representation are presented here in very
rough chronological order, but all are currently in play in the American specialty coffee industry.

Good Cuppa Joe 1.0 (Original, Traditional Edition)

Before the onset of the specialty coffee movement, dominant American mythology repre-
sented coffee as everyman’s luxury, affordable and democratic. Rather than the vicarious coffee

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The Competing Languages of Coffee 283

safaris to multiple exotic coffee destinations proposed by specialty coffee’s founding authentic-
ity myth, traditional coffee imagery focused on the singular “perfect cup.” Founders of the
specialty coffee movement contended that the perfect cup, an everyday luxury accessible to
all, had been degraded by intensifying cost-cutting in the years following World War II and
needed to be taken back to its roots and diversified. Nevertheless, the general set of associa-
tions around coffee as an inexpensive beverage of comfort and accessibility remains deeply
resonant in American culture and appears to be making a comeback, apparently driven by
several factors, including the recession beginning in 2008.

Good Cuppa Joe 2.0 (Dark Roast Coffeehouse Edition)

In what can be seen as an extension of the traditional Good Cuppa Joe iconography into
specialty coffee, a symbolic cluster of associations around dark roast “strong” coffee, college
coffeehouses, and left-leaning populism updated the original Good Cuppa Joe 1.0 for the new
world of specialty coffee starting in the 1970s. Today the typical roasting company drawing on
this symbolism fuses an often rural-oriented populism with collegiate irreverence in a defiantly
local, brown-paper-bag style.
Company names like Rusty Car, Muddy Dog, Industrial Joe’s, and Island Joe’s emphasize
the style’s plainness and irreverence. With Good Cuppa Joe 2, coffee was typically roasted
dark to emphasize its bitter pungency and intensity, thus its “strength” or “realness.” Rhetoric
around Fair Trade USA and other third-party certifications made a natural fit with Good
Cuppa Joe 2.0’s populist tendencies, and starting in the 1990s the fair trade narrative in par-
ticular was built into its general communication set.

Safari in a Cup 1.0 (Coffee Adventurer Edition)

Until recently one of the most prevalent representation sets of specialty coffee, this iconog-
raphy associates romantic images of exotic places with the coffee grown in those places, and
it associates the coffee drinker with a tropical adventurer. To some degree, this iconography,
usually awash with imagery of volcanoes, giraffes, samba dancers, and the like, constitutes a

Figure 46.1. An example of the irreverent

populist imagery and naming prevailing
among many smaller independent roasting
companies in the 1990s. At the time, these
companies tended to fill bags labeled like
these with hearty, dark-roasted coffees, the
bitter pungency of which signified outsider
machismo or “realness.” Courtesy of Rusty
Car Coffee.

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284 Kenneth Davids

coffee equivalent of the imagery of manor houses and vineyards deployed in the early promo-
tion of wine in America.
However, the coffee-centered Safari in a Cup imagery suggests penetration by the paler-
skinned known into the darker-complected unknown rather than a return to a site of superior
knowing and prestige implied by imagery associated with European wine-growing regions.

Figure 46.2. Early representations of specialty coffee made use of the names of
countries where the coffees originated to signify the new movement’s authentic-
ity and sensory diversity. These origin-country “brands” tended to be represented
by generic, travel-poster imagery rather than imagery or information specific to
the actual coffee in the bag. Here, as it often was, Kenya coffee is represented
by an elephant. Common alternatives were Mt. Kilimanjaro or a giraffe. Such im-
agery suggested specialty coffee offered vicarious adventuring in exotic tropical
places, a kind of sensory safari. Courtesy of Green Mountain Coffee.

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The Competing Languages of Coffee 285

SAFARI IN A CUP 2.0 (SAVE THE WORLD

ONE CUP AT A TIME EDITION)

This symbol set implies helping impoverished subsistence coffee farmers through buying
coffee that supports socioeconomic and environmental causes. Although it would appear to
starkly oppose the Safari in a Cup symbolism, it also can be seen as simply another side of the
same arguably patronizing coin: the North continues to embody knowledge and power, the
tropical South passivity. The original romantic Safari in a Cup symbolism can even be seen as
less patronizing than the messaging around Save the World One Cup at a Time, given that the
Safari in a Cup assigns a vibrant if unself-conscious vitality to the South, something mysteri-
ous yet of great value because it is more closely connected to nature and tradition.
However, by the 2010s coffee-oriented development programs became sensitive to such pa-
tronizing symbolic tendencies and consequently increasingly employed imagery that attempts
to foreground the contributions of individual growers and their cultures, presenting them as
co-creators of a complex product.

The Wine Analogy 1.0 (Estate Edition)

The estate coffee movement and attendant representations grew up in the early 1980s driven
by the persistent drive in specialty coffee to create value through product differentiation. It was
a way of breaking free of the old Safari in a Cup generic language of country and grade by per-
sonalizing the production of coffee, while simultaneously associating it with the growing prestige
of wine. Rather than Costa Rica Strictly Hard Bean, or even Costa Rica Tarrazu, one could buy
Hacienda La Minita Tarrazu, a special selection of coffee associated with a specific farm, a ter-
roir, a preparation, and even a coffee guru (in this case grower William McAlpin).
Today genuine coffee estates, family-owned farms managed by passionate and knowledge-
able coffee producers, continue to produce exceptional coffee, often while pursuing impressive
social and environmental responsibility. However, these farms market their branded green
coffee to roasters directly; they typically do not retail their coffee themselves or create image
systems to sell it. Their green coffee estate brands and their narratives are subordinated to the
roaster’s brand, effectively complicating communication and discouraging the most simplistic
style of myth making.
The “estate” imagery has hung on in the retail arena, but most often as a branding strategy
by mid-market coffee sellers. In these cases, entrepreneurs often sell ordinary specialty coffee
under a fictional estate name. It is only a small exaggeration to say that in these cases the estate
name on the bag may have as much direct relationship to the coffee in the bag as Marie Cal-
lender does to her namesake pies.

The Wine Analogy 2.0 (Micro-Lot and Direct Trade Edition)

Starting in the early 2000s the leading edge of specialty coffee began to replace the imagery
of coffee estates with communication focused on specific small lots of coffee defined by crop
year, botanical variety of coffee tree, and terroir. Accompanying the more specific referencing
of the coffee source and the details of its terroir, botany, and production is an emphasis on
direct relationships between roaster buyers and producers. Many small roasting companies
have built their business around such direct relationships with growers, promoting them under
program names like “direct trade,” “relationship coffee,” and “micro-lot coffee.”

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286 Kenneth Davids

Rather than recycling cumbersome wine-world languages, micro-lot and similar communi-
cation sets accept and even celebrate the technical limitations of coffee and its time-sensitive
fragility. Roasted coffee, unlike wine, cannot be bottled and cellared, and even green coffee
ages relatively quickly. By emphasizing the seasonal nature of the product (enjoy it now or it’s
gone) and the complex synergy of coffee grower and coffee roaster, such programs advance
a relatively realistic model of coffee that establishes it on a prestigious cultural track parallel
to wine while honoring its tropical origins and the technical peculiarities of its production.

Figure 46.3. By the mid-2000s closer relationships between coffee

producers and coffee roasters encouraged developments in coffee pre-
sentation based on an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the
technical issues and processes that create sensory character in coffee, an
understanding that in turn promoted the use of more objectively detailed
text in coffee labeling and specific coffee information in place of repur-
posed travel imagery. Images, if they were used at all, tended to be subor-
dinate to text and more specific and less generic than the older imagery
of elephants, volcanoes, and so on. Courtesy of Counter Culture Coffee.

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The Competing Languages of Coffee 287

Figure 46.4. This label from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters suggests the complexity of com-
munication developing around coffee in the 2010s. Pictured here are three panels of a four-panel
sleeve that entirely wraps around the bag. Courtesy of Green Mountain Coffee.

However, the imagery and communication set around The Wine Analogy 2.0 is complex
and difficult for consumers to absorb. Injecting a mythic, soundbite version into contempo-
rary consciousness is slow going. Furthermore, the growing success of wine analogy at the
top end of the specialty coffee market may do little to help those producers whose farms are
located in regions less conducive to the production of fine coffee owing to lower growing
altitudes, the prevalence of certain pests or diseases, and similar challenges. Nevertheless,
development agencies have chosen to support the direct trade and micro-lot movement in
regions where the potential for producing fine coffee is proven and production is dominated
by smallholders. They have recognized that its potential for amelioration of poverty in these
regions is profound, given the possibility of a lift-all-boats wave of cultural change around
coffee that repositions it as a beverage worthy of connoisseurship and high prices, elevating
communities of smallholding producers along with it into a position of greater prestige and
(hopefully) affluence.

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Part IV
THE QUALITIES OF COFFEE

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47
Coffee Quality
Geoff Watts

There are a lot of moving parts in the coffee supply chain. Coffee quality is very fragile, very
delicate. There’s really no end to how much attention and consideration you can give to each
of the individual parts of the production process. It really is an endless pursuit; there’s not any
point where you’ve figured it out and you can say “all right we’ve got the formula, we know
where to buy coffee, we know how to roast it, let’s sit back and watch it work.” You’re dealing
with an agricultural product that is dynamic, that is constantly changing; you’re dealing with
a pretty complex chemical transformation in the roaster, and then you’re dealing with trying
to preserve whatever quality is there and make sure that it somehow translates into a great cup
when somebody ends up drinking it. If somebody screws it up at that last second, then every-
thing else we’ve done has been lost. It’s something that requires a constant sort of mindfulness.

PROMOTING EXCELLENT COFFEE

There are a lot of ways of going about trying to capture somebody’s interest or get them
excited about coffee. I’ve found that if you start in a very simple way and you begin by talk-
ing about things that people are already very familiar with, like sweetness, it can begin an
exploratory process on the right foot. The idea that coffee can be and should be sweet, and
that it doesn’t require sugar to make it sweet, is a foreign idea to a lot of people. They’re used
to, without even thinking about it, reaching for the sugar and putting it in there, and there’s
a perception of coffee that coffee is by nature a bitter beverage. So that’s one place you can
start: explaining that it doesn’t have to be bitter. There are coffees that are extremely sweet and
have a lot of natural sugars so they don’t require you to add anything to get a nice, sweet cup.
Then we start to build from there. Once you’ve got a sweet cup, what are the flavor char-
acteristics that are going to make this Kenyan coffee different than this Colombian coffee? I
like using a fruit analogy. So you can ask, “Do you like oranges that are really tart and tangy
and have a pleasing citric bite, or do you like oranges that are just really juicy and sweet and
don’t have any kind of sharpness? Do you prefer lemons, or do you prefer tangerines? Would
you rather have a glass of lemonade or pulped mandarins or fresh peaches?” By making these
kinds of comparisons, we can start to steer people into different categories of coffees, and they

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292 Geoff Watts

begin to see those relationships, and see that, for example, this Kenyan coffee has a red cur-
rant or blackberry taste, or this other coffee has a floral aspect that’s interesting. You may be
someone who prefers coffees that are more caramel-like and have kind of a stone fruit quality
with very soft acids and a brown sugar type of sweetness to them as opposed to this bright
citric character. And that takes people into a place where they’re now beginning to differentiate
between types of coffees from different origins.
Then you introduce them to the reality that there are dozens of variables that impact coffee
quality on the production side and that there are entire countries whose economies depend
on the production of this stuff to thrive. The fact that there are individual producers who,
through their own efforts and activities on the farms, are impacting the way the coffees taste
is not common knowledge among coffee drinkers. At that point you can start to talk not just
about the difference between a Kenyan and a Colombian coffee but about the differences
between these three specific Colombian coffees that were produced by three different farmers,
each of whom has their own way of doing things. Then you start to talk about the soil and
the impact that very specific environmental growing conditions have, and all of a sudden it
becomes this big world. Coffee has moved from being just a hot black liquid with caffeine to
something that’s got so many different shades of taste so you can approach it with curiosity
from a culinary perspective. You’ve got this big world of agronomy and terroir and the influ-
ence of biological processes leading to specific tastes in the coffee.
Once people start to peel back the curtain a little bit and see that there is a lot of complexity
behind the cup they begin to ask the questions, and that’s the start of somebody beginning to
transform from a habitual coffee chugger to somebody who is appreciating the drink for all of
its intrinsic merit and seeking out coffees of high quality. You can draw on well-known wine
terms too. That’s a good place to start because people accept the idea that this wine is different
than that wine, that there’s a large range of qualities and prices. They accept it as a basic truth,
and they also acknowledge that there’s this whole group of people worldwide that obsesses
about the flavor of wine. If you explain that coffee is just like wine—it’s a fruit that grows in
tropical areas, it requires fermentation, it involves processing to taste the way it does—people
make that connection pretty easily. Their perceptions and beliefs about what coffee is are
completely transformed. Then it’s a matter of digging in further and starting to understand
the details. We as a coffee industry look a lot to the wine industry and what they’ve done over
the last few decades. We borrow ideas from them because we can see all of the aspects in which
wine and coffee are analogous. People today think about wine a lot differently than they did
twenty years ago and we can achieve that in coffee too.

ON ESPRESSO

We accept that coffee is dynamic and that you’re not going to have just one consistent, un-
changing, and unwavering taste profile. So rather than try to fight a losing battle for consis-
tency in taste, we try to create something that meets a certain level of expectation in terms
of quality, and again we focus on the sweetness as one of the things that’s critical. Without
sweetness all else is lost, so that’s the first litmus test. Beyond that we want a certain amount
of dimension and character in the cup. We don’t want something flat or boring. We want
layers of flavor and a substantial mouth-feel and a pleasurable texture on your tongue. We
want the sweetness, a dimension of flavor, a finish that’s not dry or astringent, and we have a

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Coffee Quality 293

very low threshold for any sort of bitterness. That’s the primary target. If we can achieve that,
we’ll accept a little bit of variability in the type of nuance and the type of flavor as long as it’s
adhering to these core criteria.
I personally believe that the idea of crema is a little overblown in terms of its relative impor-
tance to the quality of an espresso. There are many better indicators. Not to say that crema is
not nice, because it does provide a textural element; having no crema is not something I’d aim
for. But many people look at crema as the main indicator of whether they’ve achieved their
intended result, and that perspective is very flawed. We should instead focus on the flavor,
the sweetness, the balance, the aftertaste, the mouthfeel. Those are the things that define a
quality espresso and equate directly to a positive, pleasurable taste experience. You could have
a mountain of crema, but if the coffee is flat or leaves an extremely sour or bitter taste in your
mouth, can you really say that you find the drink enjoyable?
If you compare drip/filtered coffee with espresso you could perhaps say that drip is like
a dog—consistent and predictable—whereas espresso is more like a cat in that it can be
somewhat whimsical and moody. Its very preparation is dependent on so many tiny vari-
ables that can dramatically alter the profile of the coffee that it will always be somewhat
more volatile than drip. In some ways that’s what makes it so fascinating. We’ve got a whole
team (the Black Cat Team) that is responsible for daily quality control because we accept
that we need to be tinkering with this thing every single day in order to keep it performing
the way we want it to.
We’re working with this particular group of farmers in Brazil that we’ve been buying from
for many years now. Our buyer for Brazil goes down there several times each year and works
with them on trying to define the types of coffees we’re looking for and to set up protocols for
quality control and lot separation (as opposed to random bulking). Then when harvest time
comes, we’ll go through the process of getting samples, selecting individual coffees, putting
them together in specific combinations, and then having the coffees milled together so that
they form a lot. Once they are ready the farmers put the Black Cat logo on there and send
them up for us; each lot will become one of the components that we’re using for the next
couple of months in our espresso blend. After we receive the coffees there is another stage of
evaluation and blending where we combine different lots to achieve a specific taste profile that
adheres to the established profile for the blend.
The farmers are paid very well to produce this coffee, and they’re excited that their coffee
is gaining some recognition on the world stage because it’s being sold with the name attached
and not just in an anonymous way. Farmers love that—to be able to go on a website, or show
up in Miami and go to a coffeehouse, and see that their farm is being promoted very specifi-
cally, that it’s not faceless, that it is not anonymous anymore.

ON POUR-OVER

The art of pour-over is that the people making the coffee are manipulating the extraction
using the turbulence that they’re creating by maybe holding the pot a little higher or lower.
You’ll see some people dripping just small drops of water onto the various points in the cof-
fee, and then using a particular pattern when they’re pouring or a certain flow rate. They have
competitions, extraction competitions essentially, to see who can get the best result out of this
little dripper just by manipulating the water. It’s amazing.

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294 Geoff Watts

ON SHIPPING COFFEE

Our green coffee is vacuum packed in a thick foil bag and arrives here in Chicago in es-
sentially the same state that it left Kenya. You’ll open this bag and the coffee smells very
fresh, has a lot of vibrancy and vitality to it, and it’ll cup just about identically to the way
it cupped when I was in Kenya back when I bought the coffee. When you send coffee in
a traditional jute bag, what you receive is invariably a little bit different than what you
shipped because the coffee has been through a pretty high impact and somewhat difficult
journey from origin to where we are now.
Another shipping option are GrainPro® bags. These are jute bags with a liner inside, a bag
technology that’s been used for other grains for a long time, for things like rice and wheat.
The bags have two layers of this synthetic material, and inside, between the two layers, is
a small gas barrier. So these bags are not vacuum-sealed, but you tie them up and it creates
a closed hermetic environment for the coffee and protects it. They’ve got extremely low
permeability, so big molecules can’t get in and out. They protect the coffee from moisture
damage, and they protect and insulate the coffee from the conditions they go through dur-
ing shipping. GrainPro bags have the advantage of not creating the environmental impact
that vacuum bags do. Vacuum-sealed bags use a lot of extra material. The GrainPro bags are
much better because you can actually reuse these bags. We get the bags, and once we dump
the coffee out we can store the bags and send them back to origin to use the next season.
So you’re achieving more or less the same effect in terms of preservation but you’re doing it
at a much smaller environmental cost.
Compostable bags would be the next step. We’ve had some success reusing the GrainPro
bags, but I think after about three or four uses, they begin to wear out. So we are looking at
compostable bags or even just shipping the coffee in larger quantities so we get more coffee
per bag and use less material overall.

NOTE

This chapter is excerpted and edited from an interview of Geoff Watts conducted by Robert Thurston
at Intelligentsia Coffee’s roastery, Chicago, December 2009.

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48
Why Does Coffee Taste That Way?
Notes from the Field
Shawn Steiman

As people discover the wide diversity of the coffee taste experience and delve deeper into the
world of coffee, they inevitably ask the question, “why does coffee taste this way?” They want
to know what happened in the coffee’s past that caused it to taste as it does. This is a fair ques-
tion and one that everybody wants the answer to. But the reality is that nobody knows why
coffee tastes the way it tastes. This chapter examines why the taste is such a complex problem
and why we don’t really have many pieces of the answer. What pieces are known that relate to
coffee production will be discussed in the second half.
The question of why coffee tastes as it does is really a subject for scientists. They use a
methodology to approach and answer the question that is designed to be fairly objective and
reproducible. Thus, their instrumentation and procedures are, whenever possible, designed to
be objective, not just precise. The information they generate isn’t flawless nor is it guaranteed.
In fact, scientists never speak in assurances, only in probabilities; there is always a chance they
got something wrong (this is one reason science can seem flawed; the understanding of a topic
can, over time, be viewed from very different positions).
Coffee is a complex object, both in its chemical composition and the number of steps it
must go through to get to a mug. There are over 1,000 unique volatiles (chemicals in the
brew aroma)1 and several hundred are estimated to be in the brew solution.2 Green coffee is
not quite as chemically complex, but a few hundred unique compounds in its makeup is a
reasonable guess. Having such a large number of chemicals means there are many things to
be influenced by external or internal factors. Many of those factors appear in the steps that
coffee goes through during growing, harvesting, and processing, and each one of those steps
can usually be divided into several components. Considering all the combinations of steps and
chemicals, coffee’s journey to the cup has many pathways and many destinations. That’s a lot
of different things to understand, scientifically.
It is relevant to mention all the chemicals in coffee because they are integral to the sense of
taste. While the importance of the human factor (psychology, history, culture, emotions) on
the taste experience cannot be understated, ultimately, what produces any physical stimulation
is some combination of those chemicals. So understanding what influences the taste of coffee
requires both an understanding of the chemistry of coffee and the taste.

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296 Shawn Steiman

Scientists use both of those tools to address the question. They often use chemical mark-
ers to show that if something “x” happens to coffee, then chemical marker “y” can be seen to
change. However, just because “y” changes, there is no guarantee that the taste changes, too
(not everything in coffee matters to our sense of taste). Using taste, then, is the most useful
way to figure out what is changing that is important to people. Unfortunately, using coffee
taste as a response in the scientific arena is tricky for many reasons, many of them related to
the human factor in taste. Consequently, there’s considerable desire in the industry to figure
out what chemicals make what tastes. This has proven difficult to enumerate. To date, we have
almost no knowledge of what, chemically, makes coffee taste like coffee.
Not only is coffee a complex object to study, but the best means to study it (people) aren’t
all that reliable. Still more reasons play into our poor understanding of coffee quality. Fore-
most, the current idea and passions of specialty coffee quality are relatively new; there has
been no longstanding reason for scientists to study it. In the past, scientists focused their atten-
tion on different areas of research, mostly unrelated to cup quality, as there was little demand
for it. When those areas did involve quality, they rarely addressed the question of what was
creating a taste. Even today, few scientists approach the idea of coffee quality as a coffee geek
does, so most current research is not looking at the problem as specialty coffee geeks want it to.
Even when scientists do ask the “right” questions in the research, they rarely use the
correct tools to answer them. Many of the scientists who have added to this small body of
research were agronomists and chemists, not sensory scientists. This in and of itself is not
necessarily a problem. The real difficulty is that the agronomists and chemists don’t have the
knowledge to design, execute, and analyze the sensory aspect properly—understandably, as
few of them have trained in it. Only a handful of studies use an appropriate sensory experi-
mental design and statistical method to properly answer the questions. What little research
is available sometimes must be regarded as highly tentative. To complicate matters, proper
sensory experiments are time and labor intensive. The panelists must be trained in sensory
perception and all of the quality assessment must be replicated (in addition to the other
replications already in place in the experiment). This has led, unintentionally, to shortcuts
that weaken the quality of the data.
To complicate matters even further, well-practiced sensory science has limitations to the
amount and type of data that can be generated at any single cupping session. Often, this
information doesn’t explain the differences in taste that people may want to know about.
In a cupping session, accurate data can only be generated for five to eight terms. For coffee,
researchers tend to use the characteristics like body and acidity. However, changes in those
characteristics won’t capture important ways the coffee may change, for instance in its “floral”
component. Moreover, the conclusion people most want to draw from this research is whether
a coffee becomes better or worse from a treatment. This desire, along with measuring the
judges’ preference, is entirely inappropriate to ask in most experiments because they are not
designed to measure or even describe that outcome.
Despite all these challenges, scientists have explored the question of why coffee tastes as it
does, and some data have been generated. The results of most experiments are interesting and
useful, but they must be interpreted carefully and not just because of some of the problems
arising from the topics just discussed. For one thing, it is difficult to isolate every single vari-
able in an agricultural setting to ensure that that variable is the only one being manipulated.
To take one example, if you explore the effect of altitude on cup quality, you’ll find it very
different to control all the differences in soils, rainfall, light exposure, temperature, humidity,

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Why Does Coffee Taste That Way? 297

and cultural practices while altering the altitude where the coffee is planted. This isn’t to say it
can’t be done, but that to do so requires a great deal of time, expense, and ingenuity.
An extension of this problem is the interaction that can occur amongst variables. It is diffi-
cult to account for and understand everything. Will ‘Typica’ respond the same way to a change
in temperature or processing method as ‘Caturra’? If trees are harvested in the beginning of
a picking season in Honduras, will the data generated be similar to that if it were repeated
in Uganda? That one experiment yielded a certain result is no guarantee that, for whatever
reason, a similar experiment won’t yield a different one.
Another issue in looking at experiments is the importance of a statistical difference versus
a practical difference. A researcher, using the mathematics underlying statistics, may make a
statement about the change in acidity among plots growing at different elevations. While that
difference may exist in the numbers, it may not be a big enough difference that, out in the
real world, consumers, or even experts, will notice the difference. After all, a controlled re-
search setting usually isn’t quite like reality. These complications don’t invalidate the scientific
method or data that are presently available. However, it does mean the interpretation of the
results should be made with great care.
The following section reviews available research on production factors (through green bean
storage) that correlate with, but not necessarily determine, aspects of organoleptic quality. It
is not a comprehensive review, particularly because of the absence of the plethora of research
that is not published in English or is buried in obscure journals. Also, nearly all of the research
cited is strictly from peer-reviewed journals; it neglects often valuable data found within con-
ference proceedings and books. Finally, only research that directly measured organoleptic qual-
ity is included. Unless otherwise stated, the scientists used Coffea arabica in the experiment.

GENETICS

Among the 124 species currently counted in the genus Coffea (6 more, as yet unpublished, will
be added soon),3 it is generally accepted that they taste different from each other, though no
published data exist. For most people, that difference is only relevant to Coffea arabica and
Coffea canephora (robusta), the two most important economic species. The difference in taste
highlights the importance of genetic makeup to cup quality, and it is frequently discussed in
breeding programs.4 However, varieties within a species, even without interspecific heritage,
are known to have different cup qualities.5 The greatest challenge of this research is that unless
the two species or varieties are grown in the exact same location, the environmental impact is
difficult to separate from the genetic.

ENVIRONMENT

Plants, no matter what their genetic makeup, do not live in isolation. They, like humans,
are subject to the nature vs. nurture conversation. Plants are so highly integrated into their
environment that it is difficult to tease apart the influences of various components of “envi-
ronment.” This is especially true for coffee cup quality. Nonetheless, experiments sometimes
produce data that demonstrate that the environment is playing a role, even if the experiment
wasn’t designed to produce specific cup quality responses.6

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298 Shawn Steiman

ELEVATION

While it is a tenet of specialty coffee that higher elevations produce better tasting coffees, the
available data do not and cannot make such sweeping claims. In fact, in what must have been
very surprising results to Guyot et al., they saw no change in cup quality due to elevation for
‘Catuai’ or ‘Bourbon’ varieties.7 Using composite scores that correspond to grades of quality,
Cerqueira et al. also found no correlation between altitude and quality.8 Bertrand et al., studying
‘Caturra,’ found that higher elevations produced coffee that was less bitter, was more acidy, and
had more intense aroma. However, this relationship was not linear, as a middle elevation had
higher ratings than some higher elevations.9 Some increases in acidity and body were found by
Avelino et al., though acidity was also influenced by slope exposure.10 Unfortunately, while the
researchers mentioned using ‘Caturra’ and ‘Catuai,’ they did not clarify which cupping data cor-
responded to which varieties, making drawing any conclusions difficult for the reader.

TEMPERATURE

As mentioned by Bittenbender (this volume), elevation is really a proxy for temperature. Cof-
fee likely doesn’t respond to air pressure. However, no research, as far as this author knows, has
examined the effects of just temperature or just air pressure on cup quality.

LIGHT

The backlash against sun-grown coffee spurred research that attempted to explain why
growing coffee as part of an agroforestry system was a good idea. That corpus contains a
small collection of studies that explore whether light/shade has any influence on cup quality.
Unfortunately, the conflicting results from the research make it difficult to draw conclusions
about light and coffee quality.
Muschler was the first to design an experiment to explore light and quality. He found no
effect on ‘Caturra’ but an increase in body and aroma with ‘Catimor 5175.’11 In the work by
Avelino et al., observers found that coffee growing on the east-facing slopes had higher acidity,
hypothesizing that the coffee responded to the extra morning light it was receiving.12 With
shade cover and the variety ‘Costa Rica 95,’ Vaast et al. observed increased acidity, lower body,
less bitterness, and, in one year, lower astringency.13 Contrary to other data, shade was found
to decrease fragrance, acidity, body, and sweetness in ‘Caturra KMC’ by Bosselmann et al.14
Steiman et al., working with ‘Typica’ and mostly artificial shade (as opposed to shade trees,
like the other researchers), found practically no difference in taste due to shade, though shade
did decrease body in one year of the study in one study region.15 Bote and Struik found no
effect of shade on cup quality (variety not given).16 Measuring the natural solar radiation hit-
ting various farms, Cerqueira et al. found no correlation between incident light and quality.17

CULTURE

Once a farm is planted, its location cannot be changed, nor can the genetics of the trees. The
coffee does, though, require tending; it must have access to food, water, and light (which can

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be manipulated with the addition or removal of shade trees). There is a dearth of research
exploring the role basic cultural practices may have on coffee quality. This is probably a result
of the assumption that a healthy coffee plant is most likely to reach its quality potential than
an unhealthy plant. Consequently, agricultural research has often focused on optimizing plant
health (and yield), not cup quality.
Muschler postulated that shade does not affect cup quality at all. Rather, shade trees, with
their ability to reduce incident light, temperature, and wind, are able to ameliorate less-than-
ideal growing conditions, permitting the trees to fulfill their taste potential. Thus, shade, like
many other cultural practices, may only indirectly play a role in cup quality.
If the assumption is correct, then suboptimal amounts of water, nutrition, and light will
have a relatively negative influence on cup quality. Testing this assumption is extremely diffi-
cult. For example, if a researcher could manage to control water input (but if it rains, it rains),
it would still be difficult to decide if any response was due to lack of water or lack of nutrition;
water is necessary for plants to take up nutrients from the soil.

NUTRITION SOURCE AND SOIL TYPE

A question related to nutritional need is whether the source of nutrients influences cup
quality. At the most basic level, this is a question about the use of organic or synthetic fer-
tilizers. Plant roots are limited in what they can absorb. In the case of nitrogen, they can
only absorb it as part of the molecular ions ammonium (NH4+) or nitrate (NO3−). Whether
those molecules are derived from leaf litter, manure, or a manufactured chemical, the plant
cannot tell the difference.
The question then becomes whether there are other molecules that plant roots absorb,
depending on whether the amendment is organic or synthetic, that influence the seeds. If
the answer is yes, then the source of fertilizer may have a chance of influencing cup quality.
If the answer is no, then they probably have no impact. This same reasoning can be applied
to considering the effect of soil type on cup quality. If roots are affected by the environment
created by different soil types in a way that causes a change in the seeds, then cup quality may
be impacted. If any such data exist that explore the influence of roots on cup quality, they are
unknown to the author.
Malta et al. experimented with a variety of organic fertilizer sources and compared their
influence with that of conventional fertilizer in the first two years of the transition to organic
production.18 They found no differences in cup quality the first year. In the second year, some
of the organic treatments showed greater intensities for some characteristics. However, there
was no discernible pattern to the increases nor conclusions about why some organic treat-
ments influenced cup quality while others did not.
Looking at soil physical attributes (soil/silt/sand composition), concentrations of some soil
nutrients (phosphorus, potassium, zinc, copper, and boron), and soil organic matter content,
no correlation was found between any of these and cup quality.19

PESTS AND DISEASE

Quantifying the influence of pest and diseases on cup quality has not figured much in the
scientific literature. Presumably, investigators assumed in only a few instances that a pest or

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disease was directly causing a flavor taint. Generally, pests and diseases weaken the plant or
inhibit its ability to grow properly, thus serving as indirect causes to a change in cup quality.
Most people who pay attention to field-derived defects in coffee, such as discolorations and
partially eaten seeds (by pests), attest to their negative impact on quality. Franca et al. support
this claim, as they were able to correlate grades of Brazilian coffees with defect count. They
did not attempt to correlate specific defects to specific organoleptic traits.20
Kenny et al., comparing levels of anthracnose (Colletotrichum spp.) infestation to cup quality,
found no correlation.21 A more direct quality response seems to come from microorganisms via
insects. In specialty coffee, the most well-known case of this is the connection with the potato
taste defect, the variegated coffee bug, and a bacterium. The insect bores into the seed causing
physical damage as well as leaving behind the bacterium. The bacterium, then, is assumed to
cause the defect taste. Although no direct link between the bacterium and the taste defect has
been demonstrated, control of the insect typically diminishes the presence of the defect.22

HARVESTING

There is perhaps no more common assumption in the coffee industry than the notion that un-
derripe and sometimes overripe coffee cherries lead to coffee that tastes different than coffee
from ripe cherries. Perhaps this is the explanation as to why so little scientific research has been
executed to quantify it. While Montavon et al., studying robusta, declared that ripe cherries
produced the best cup quality, they did not attempt to correlate specific tastes with ripeness.23

PLANT AGE

Due to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of testing the effect of plant age on cup quality,
no research was found on this topic. This research would be particularly difficult to conduct
because it would hardly be possible to control for all the other variables that may influence
cup quality. Not only variables in production but in processing and quality assessment as well
would need to be controlled over many years.

AGROCHEMICALS

Effects of agrochemicals (any chemical used in an agricultural setting) to control pests, dis-
eases, and weeds tend to be discussed in relation to human and environmental health. Only
infrequently do those discussions involve an impact on cup quality. No research was found
on this topic.

PROCESSING

After coffee is harvested, the layers surrounding the seed must be removed and the seed dried
and stored before roasting. While it is well accepted by all members of the coffee industry,
including scientists, that processing and storage play a role in cup quality, there is little infor-
mation published in English on the subject.

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Why Does Coffee Taste That Way? 301

Cherry Processing
Fruit removal and drying of the seed can be done in a number of different ways in a number
of different orders. Each of these variations is often credited with influencing cup quality. The
most commonly used variations are as follows.
Farmers with sufficient access to water commonly remove the outer fruit layer from the
cherries and then soak the remaining seeds and layers in water until the mucilage is removed
(washed process/wet fermentation). Alternatively, instead of soaking the seeds in water, the
seeds can be left to sit without water (dry fermentation) or a machine can be used to mechani-
cally remove the mucilage immediately after removing the pulp (demucilation). Another
method is to dry the entire cherry, including the seed, before any layers are removed (dry
processing/natural processing). A variation of this is to leave the cherry to dry completely
on the tree before harvesting (natural process, but cherries are then called raisins). Last, the
fruit can be removed but the mucilage is kept on the seed during the drying process (pulped
natural/honey processing).
While comparing wet fermentation to demucilaged coffee, Quintero found almost no
difference in cup quality, except for slightly more bitterness in the demucilaged coffee.24
Gonzales-Rios et al., measuring aroma differences, found that wet fermentation differed
from dry fermentation and that wet fermentation differed from demucilaged coffee. The
researchers did not attempt direct correlation of process to cup quality and the statistical
method used makes interpretation difficult as there appeared to be an interaction with
roasting.25 In a study designed to explore the temperature of drying coffee, Coradi et al.
showed that wet fermentation tasted different than natural processed coffee and that cof-
fees dried in the sun or in a dryer set to 40 or 60°C tasted different (quality scores were
composites of several characteristics).26

Storage
Coffee is dried to 9–12 percent moisture content to stabilize it across time and to reduce the
chances for pests and diseases to influence it. If the moisture content is too high and ambient
temperature too warm, green beans may have higher concentrations of volatile compounds
that are recognized as being smoky, spicy, sweaty, and fruity, but lower concentrations of
compounds recognized as grassy and peasy (no statistical analyses were reported on the data).27
Coffee samples that were wet fermented or natural processed, when stored at 23°C and 60
percent relative humidity, showed no difference in cup quality when stored 180 days.28 Under
good storage conditions, Ribeiro et al. also found no significant difference in cup quality for
coffees that were stored in large, hermetically sealed bags.29 Flushing the bags with CO2 also
made no difference in quality.

Given all the cups of coffee consumed daily, it is surprising that so little information can be
found in the scientific literature about why it tastes the way it does. It is worth noting that cup
quality information can be accurate even if it hasn’t been tested using the scientific method
and published in a peer-reviewed article. For example, ripe cherries do produce different tast-
ing coffee than unripe cherries. Informally, that experiment has been done many, many times.
It is unlikely that any person would dispute this. Considering the cost and effort required to
perform such an experiment in a lab, it is not surprising that hard data on this point either do
not exist or are featured in obscure publications.

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302 Shawn Steiman

Moreover, a lot of informal data hasn’t been peer reviewed or published. This does not in-
validate the information. Many research teams conduct experiments without any intention or
need to share that information with others. The data may exist; they just may not be publicly
available or known about by others.
There is a long journey ahead for researchers interested in teasing apart the details of cof-
fee’s organoleptic quality. Fortunately, there is a small body of information to build upon and
a growing population of coffee drinkers interested in knowing more. With the effort and
innovation of organizations like the newly created World Coffee Research, an organization
designed and dedicated to funding and exploring coffee quality research (among other topics),
the body of knowledge on coffee cup quality is about to get a whole lot bigger.

NOTES

1. D. Ryan, R. Shellie, P. Tranchida, A. Casilli, L. Mondello, and P. Marriott, “Analysis of roasted

coffee bean volatiles by using comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography–time-of-flight mass
spectrometry,” Journal of Chromatography A 1054 (2004): 57–65.
2. I. Flament, Coffee Flavor Chemistry (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2002).
3. A. P. Davis, J. Tosh, N. Ruch, and M. F. Fay, “Growing coffee: Psilanthus (Rubiaceae) subsumed
on the basis of molecular and morphological data; implications for the size, morphology, distribution
and evolutionary history of Coffea,” Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 167, no. 4 (2011): 357–77.
4. B. Bertrand, B. Guyot, F. Anthony, and P. Lashermes, “Impact of the Coffea canephora gene intro-
gression on beverage quality of C. arabica,” Theoretical and Applied Genetics 107 (2003): 387–94; Thierry
Leroy, Fabienne Ribeyre, Benóit Bertrand, Pierre Charmetant, Magali Dufour, Christophe Montagnon,
Pierre Marraccini, and David Pot, “Genetics of coffee quality,” Brazilian Journal of Plant Physiology 18,
no. 1 (2006): 229–42.
5. Benoit Bertrand, Philippe Vaast, Edgardo Alpizar, Hervé Etienne, Fabrice Davrieux, and Pierre
Charmetant, “Comparison of bean biochemical composition and beverage quality of Arabica hybrids
involving Sudanese-Ethiopian origins with traditional varieties at various elevations in Central Amer-
ica,” Tree Physiology 26 (2006): 1239–48; Olika Kitila, Sentayehu Alamerew, Taye Kufa, and Weyessa
Garedew, “Organoleptic characterization of some Limu coffee (Coffea arabica L.) germplasm at Agaro,
Southwestern Ethiopia,” International Journal of Agricultural Research 6 (2011): 537–49; Abeyot Tes-
sema, Sentayehu Alamerew, Taye Kufa, and Weyessa Garedew, “Variability and association of quality
and biochemical attributes in some promising Coffea arabica germplasm collections in Southwestern
Ethiopia,” International Journal of Plant Breeding and Genetics 5 (2011): 302–16; C. W. Kathurima,
B. M. Gichimu, G. M. Kenji, S. M. Muhoho, and R. Boulanger, “Evaluation of beverage quality and
green bean physical characteristics of selected Arabica coffee genotypes in Kenya,” African Journal of
Food Science 3, no. 1 (2009): 365–71; and Marcelo Cláudio Pereira, Sara Maria Chalfoun, Gladyston
Rodrigues de Carvalho, and Taciana Villela Savian, “Multivariate analysis of sensory characteristics of
coffee grains (Coffea arabica L.) in the region of upper Paranaíba,” Acta Scientiarum Agronomy 32, no.
4 (2010): 635–41.
6. F. Decazy, J. Avelino, B. Guyot, J. Perriot, C. Pineda, and C. Cilas, “Quality of different Honduran
coffees in relation to several environments,” Journal of Food Science 68, no. 7 (2003): 2356–361.
7. B. Guyot, D. Gueule, J. Manez, J. Perriot, J. Giron, and L. Villain, “Influence de l‘altitude et de
l’ombrage sur la qualité des cafés Arabica,” Plantations, recherche, développement July–August (1996).
8. Elder S. A. Cerqueira, Daniel M. de Queiroz, Francisco C. de A. Pinto, Nerilson T. Santos, and
Sonia M. L. R. do Vale, “Analysis of the variability in productivity and quality of mountain family coffee
farms,” Revista Brasileira de Armazenamento 36, no. 2 (2011): 119–32.
9. Leroy et al., “Genetics of coffee quality,” 229–42.

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Why Does Coffee Taste That Way? 303

10. Jacques Avelino, Bernardo Barboza, Juan Carlos Araya, Carlos Fonseca, Fabrice Davrieux,
Bernard Guyot, and Christian Cilas, “Effects of slope exposure, altitude and yield on coffee quality in
two altitude terroirs of Costa Rica, Orosi and Santa María de Dota,” Journal of the Science of Food and
Agriculture 85 (2005): 1869–76.
11. Reinhold Muschler, “Shade improves coffee quality in a sub-optimal coffee-zone of Costa Rica,”
Agroforestry Systems 85 (2001): 131–39.
12. Avelino et al., “Effects of slope exposure, altitude and yield on coffee quality in two altitude ter-
roirs of Costa Rica, Orosi and Santa María de Dota,” 1869–1876.
13. Philippe Vaast, Benoit Bertrand, Jean-Jacques Perriot, Bernard Guyot, and Michel Génard, “Fruit
thinning and shade improve bean characteristics and beverage quality of coffee (Coffea arabica L.) under
optimal conditions,” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 86 (2006): 197–204.
14. Aske Skovmand Bosselmann, Klaus Dons, Thomas Oberthur, Carsten Smith Olsen, Anders
Ræbild, and Herman Usma, “The influence of shade trees on coffee quality in small holder coffee agro-
forestry systems in Southern Colombia,” Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 129 (2009): 253–60.
15. Shawn Steiman, Travis Idol, Harry Bittenbender, and Loren Gautz, “Shade coffee in Hawai’i:
Exploring some aspects of quality, growth, yield, and nutrition,” Scientia Horticulturae 128 (2011):
152–58.
16. Adugna D. Bote and Paul C. Struik, “Effects of shade on growth, production and quality of coffee
(Coffea arabica) in Ethiopia,” Journal of Horticulture and Forestry 3, no. 11 (2011): 336–41.
17. Cerqueira et al., “Analysis of the variability in productivity and quality of mountain family coffee
farms,” 119–32.
18. Marcelo Malta, Rosemary Pereira, Silvio Chagas, and Daniel Ferreira, “Cup quality of traditional
crop coffee converted to organic system,” Bragantia 67, no. 3 (2008): 775–83.
19. Cerqueira et al., “Analysis of the variability in productivity and quality of mountain family coffee
farms,” 119–32.
20. Adriana Franca, Juliana Mendonc, and Sami Oliveira, “Composition of green and roasted coffees
of different cup qualities,” Food Science and Technology 38 (2005): 709–15.
21. M. K. Kenny, V. J. Galea, P. T. Scott, and T. V. Price, “Investigations on the causes of coffee berry
antracnose in Papua New Guinea and its effect on coffee quality,” PNG Coffee Journal 14, nos. 1 and 2
(2010): 37–46.
22. B. Bouyjou, B. Decazy, and G. Fourny, “Removing the ‘potato taste’ from Burundian Arabica,”
Plantations, recherche, développement 6 (1999): 113–16.
23. Philippe Montavon, Eliane Duruz, Gilbert Rumo, and Gudrun Pratz, “Evolution of green coffee
protein profiles with maturation and relationship to coffee cup quality,” Journal of Agricultural and Food
Chemistry 51 (2003): 2328–334.
24. Gloria Quintero, “Influencia del proceso de beneficio en la calidad del café,” Cenicafé 50, no. 1
(1999): 78–88.
25. Oscar Gonzalez-Rios, Mirna Suarez-Quiroz, Renaud Boulanger, Michel Barel, Bernard Guyot,
Joseph-Pierre Guiraud, and Sabine Schorr-Galindo, “Impact of ‘ecological’ post-harvest processing on
coffee aroma: II. Roasted coffee,” International Journal of Food Microbiology 103, no. 3 (2005): 339–45.
26. Paulo Coradi, Flávio Borém, Reni Saath, and Elizabeth Marques, “Effect of drying and storage
conditions on the quality of natural and washed coffee,” Coffee Science 2, no. 1 (2007): 38–47.
27. Claudia Scheidig, Michael Czerny, and Peter Schieberle, “Changes in key odorants of raw coffee
beans during storage under defined conditions,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 55 (2007):
5768−75.
28. Quintero, “Influencia del proceso de beneficio en la calidad del café,” 78–88.
29. Fabiana Carmanini Ribeiro, Flávio Meira Borém, Gerson Silva Giomo, Renato Ribeiro De Lima,
Marcelo Ribeiro Malta, and Luisa Pereira Figueiredo, “Storage of green coffee in hermetic packaging
injected with CO2,” Journal of Stored Products Research 47 (2011): 341–48.

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49
Coffee Quality and Assessment
Shawn Steiman

Coffee quality means different things to different people. To a farmer, coffee quality may
mean the size of the cherries or the resulting seeds. To a retailer, it may be related to cus-
tomer satisfaction. To a consumer, it might be about price or availability. For many people,
though, coffee quality relates simply to its taste. A formal but more accurate way of saying
“taste of the coffee” is organoleptic quality. “Organoleptic” refers to the experience of the
senses, particularly the senses of taste and smell (because so much of what we experience as
taste is actually smell).
A common term in the coffee industry is “cup quality.” Understanding this phrase is no
simple task. It involves understanding who might be interested in the coffee, what is impor-
tant to them, and how they measure what is important. This chapter discusses these various
components and offers a framework with which to think about cup quality. It then discusses
how that quality is assessed. Many approaches to understanding coffee cup quality are pos-
sible, and each contributes valuable insight into the sensory evaluation of coffee.

QUALITY

A discussion of coffee quality must begin with the word “quality.” Its most appropriate defini-
tion here is “degree of excellence.” Quality is the relationship of an item to an accepted stan-
dard of excellence. The standard is a construct based on previously defined criteria, such as
rarity, size, color, or taste. The measurements of those criteria then serve to assess how well a
specific item compares to the standard and, consequently, to determine its quality.
The measurements can be done using objective and/or subjective metrics. Objective metrics
are true for everyone. For example, the length of a meter is always the same; it is independent
of anyone’s perception. If the quality of a building depended on how close it was to four me-
ters in height, anyone could measure its quality by seeing how close its height matched the
four-meter standard. On the other hand, subjective metrics depend on the individual and are
expressed as how one feels or thinks. A subjective measure might indicate how pleasing that
building’s height feels to the measurer.

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Coffee Quality and Assessment 305

Quality depends upon predefined criteria and different situations or needs may rely on
different criteria. In defining a standard for shirts, long sleeves might be most important in
some areas, but not in hot, humid zones. People value different criteria depending on their
perception of what properties are important. The same object, then, may have several different
definitions of quality, dependent entirely upon who is doing the defining.

COFFEE QUALITY CRITERIA

Throughout this book, numerous groups of people have been discussed in relation to coffee.
Among them are producers, manufacturers, roasters, baristas, consumers, and trade organiza-
tions from many different countries and cultures. Each group has a unique relationship to
coffee and each has its own needs, desires, and expectations for coffee. All of these categories
of people are entitled to approach and experience coffee however it pleases them, using criteria
and a definition of quality that suits them best.
Over time, the coffee industry has accepted some common criteria used in defining coffee
quality. Here are some current criteria employed globally to discuss coffee, divided into two
groups based on the regularity of their occurrence within any given cup of coffee.

CHARACTERISTICS

These are sensory criteria used to describe or measure any cup of coffee. They are the skeleton
upon which the quality evaluation is built.

• Fragrance and aroma: The smell of coffee before (fragrance) and after (aroma) brewing.
• Acidity: The bright, lively, tingly taste created by acids, commonly tasted as citrus fruits
and vinegars.
• Body: A tactile experience, not a taste. It describes how viscous or thick the coffee feels
in the mouth. Consider milk; skim milk feels much thinner than whole milk. Body is
also called “mouthfeel.”
• Flavor: The essence of the cup, the coffeeness. This is what people think of when they
think of the coffee taste experience.
• Sweetness: A subtle taste reminiscent of sugar or honey.
• Aftertaste: The echo of the taste that remains after the coffee has left the mouth. It is
also called finish.
• Balance: The harmony or discordance the other characteristics have as they interact with
each other. For example, if a coffee is very acidic, it may be hard to taste any sweetness.

DESCRIPTORS

Descriptors are tastes and smells that do not occur in every cup of coffee. They tend to be
subtle or nuanced and add complexity and uniqueness to any particular cup. They can be
considered positive or negative experiences. Some cups have none of them while others have
several. There’s no limit to descriptive terms for coffee tastes. A few examples are floral, lem-
ony, berry, caramel, chocolate, smoky, nutty, spicy, moldy, sour, and bitter.

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MEASURING COFFEE QUALITY

Characteristics and descriptors simply indicate what aspects of coffee are generally present
and, therefore, useful to talk about. However, being on the list says nothing about how a
characteristic relates to the standard of excellence for a particular group of evaluators, only
that those criteria are part of that standard. Knowing what instruments measure those criteria
and how they are measured facilitates defining excellence.
No machine can experience a cup of coffee and craft a nuanced statement about its qual-
ity; only humans can do that. Thus, people are the only instruments available to evaluate the
quality of an extremely complicated drink. While machines can only use objective metrics,
humans also use subjective metrics. For example, machines can measure the amount of light
present in a room but can’t determine if there’s enough light to read by (because readers, sub-
jectively, disagree about how much light is necessary).
Human thoughts and feelings interfere with their ability to measure experiences objectively
without inserting commentary about how much they like those experiences, a phenomenon
well known to scientists.1 Coffee is no exception. When humans measure coffee quality, they
often include a subjective component that indicates whether or not they prefer that coffee.
Consequently, coffee quality is often measured on a gradient of “like” to “don’t like.” Each
of the criteria can be measured in this way. Balance can only be measured this way as it requires
cuppers to decide on its level based on their internal interpretation of it. Two people who taste
the same coffee may have different ratings of that coffee’s balance if they differ on how much
they like the presence of a particular characteristic or descriptor, such as fruitiness.
While humans may never be able to measure coffee completely objectively, they can
incorporate much objectivity into their ratings. To do so requires a metric that is human-
independent: intensity. Each of the characteristics and descriptors mentioned above, except
balance, can be scaled on a gradient of “not present” to “no coffee can have a greater amount
than this one has.” The upper limit of intensity is arbitrary, as nobody can experience every
coffee in the world in order to discover the upper limit for a particular characteristic. However,
an upper limit can be approximated by finding an available taste or sensation that users can
be taught about and calibrated to. For example, coffees can be compared side by side to see
which ones have more intense taste characteristics. If a particular coffee in that lineup is spiked
with citric acid, creating an acidity that approaches the upper limit of acid intensity, the other
coffees’ acidities can be evaluated in terms of how much less intense they are than the spiked
coffee. Using this type of metric and with a great deal of training and practice, the amount
of subjectivity incorporated into a measurement can be minimized, though never eliminated.

DEFINING COFFEE QUALITY

Using any set of criteria and knowing how each will be measured, a particular standard of
excellence can be created to define coffee quality. For example, a coffee with a lot of acidity
and some body with a lingering aftertaste could be defined as the standard of excellence. Then,
any coffee could be compared with that standard and classified as of high or low quality.

THE ABSOLUTENESS OF GOOD COFFEE?

Some experts in the specialty coffee industry believe that there are inherently, that is, objectively,
higher-quality coffees among all those available. The assumption is that anyone tasting these

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Coffee Quality and Assessment 307

coffees would find them to be of high quality. These coffees tend to have high intensities of the
characteristics, complex flavors, and no negative descriptors. Often, though, non-experts do not
like those coffees! This preferential divide suggests there is no absolute “good” coffee.
As people begin exploring a product with a large variation of organoleptic experiences, they
typically enjoy broad, simple experiences of that product, being quite comfortable with fairly
nondescript tastes. They tend to seek out tastes they already expect to find. These tastes might
be thought of as generic; coffee should taste like coffee, rather than like blueberries.
When people gain more experience and a deeper understanding of the variety of the prod-
uct, they tend to enjoy the generic less. Eventually, the most pleasing examples of the product
are ones that are the most organoleptically complex and stimulating. Consequently, they begin
to develop a narrow definition of what a “good” experience of that product is. This change
in perspective may lead them to believe that certain tastes or smells are inherently better than
others and that, within the diversity of that product, some characteristics are intrinsically
“good,” some intrinsically “poor.”
If a standard of excellence rests on a definition of quality, no particular coffee is intrinsically
better than another. Rather, any particular cup of coffee could be simultaneously of high or
low quality. However, it is still important to acknowledge that experts, with their extensive
experience and breadth of knowledge, offer valuable insights in defining a standard of excel-
lence. Ultimately, however, it is the coffee drinkers, expert or not, who are the arbiters of the
quality they prefer.

ASSESSING COFFEE QUALITY

Assessing coffee quality is about more than drinking and enjoying the beverage. Being critical
and analytical about the beverage itself and trying to describe what the coffee tastes like allows
drinkers to recognize organoleptic differences among coffees, typically leading to a deeper
understanding and, consequently, enjoyment of coffee. Also, proper assessment allows people
who are trying to understand a given coffee to talk about it productively because they have
common analytical tools and descriptive language.
Consumers benefit from assessing coffee because it adds an extra dimension to their ex-
perience. However, assessment mostly benefits industry members who gain from knowing
specific details about the coffee. That gain takes several forms. First, assessment is used for
quality control. Farmers, coffee traders, roasters, and baristas need to know what they taste
to ensure it meets their quality benchmark and is consistent with the standards of their
brand. Second, with the information acquired from assessing quality, buyers and sellers of
coffee can agree on a fair price.
Coffee quality is assessed using two general methods: tasting and cupping.

TASTING

Coffee tasting is the simplest form of assessment, as it involves nothing more than sipping
brewed coffee and evaluating its characteristics and descriptors. The coffee can be brewed us-
ing any method, though it is rare to use a pressure-based method like espresso. Because the
time and equipment required to brew many different coffees simultaneously are limiting, a
small sample of coffees is usually assessed at any one time. Roasters, restaurants, and cafés use
tasting to evaluate the guest experience, typically only evaluating a few coffees at one time.

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308 Shawn Steiman

Tasting coffee tends to be informal; the quality, appropriately, is usually measured subjec-
tively (though objective metrics can be used). As most people drink coffee out of a cup for
enjoyment, their ability to be objective while tasting is affected by their emotional response to
the experience. Memories they associate with coffee can be influential, for example, of cups
they had while vacationing in Hawaii.

CUPPING

Cupping is the formal way of assessing coffee quality based on rigidly consistent meth-
odologies. Except for a small number of consumers interested in the experience, it is only
used by coffee professionals. Cupping is an old practice, though exactly when and where
it appeared is unknown. Nearly all coffee bought and sold in the U.S. prior to 1900 was
chosen based on appearance,2 which lends support to the idea that the importer Clarence
Bickford may have invented it in the 1880s3 or at least introduced it to the United States.
The coffee historian William Ukers notes Bickford’s role in the San Francisco coffee trade
but doesn’t mention his cupping coffee, only that he realized that the color and size of the
seeds say nothing about the taste.4
Cupping is a methodology that facilitates greater objectivity in rating coffee. This is an
important achievement, as cupping was developed long before the birth of modern sensory
science in the 1940s.5 Cupping methodology likely developed as a way to taste many cof-
fees in a short period of time, although the ability to do so with simple equipment while
standardizing how the brews were made had probably also been noticed as nice perks of the
process. Analytically, the greatest advantage of cupping over tasting is how much it removes
tasters from the emotional experience of drinking coffee and puts them in a situation used
solely for evaluation.
No one precise protocol determines cupping. Rather, there is a basic methodology, and
individuals and groups practice what they were taught or tweak it to suit their specific
needs. The most important factor in cupping is consistency in methodology within and
between sessions. Small variations in the methodology, particularly within a single cupping
session, can significantly influence the experience of the cup being measured. The highest
level of precision can be reached only by limiting as many sources of variation as possible.
That is why the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) has defined a stan-
dard cupping methodology; the organization hopes it will become the industry standard,
minimizing variation within and between cuppings. Below is a description of the general
cupping method, which includes the physical act of tasting the coffee and recording the
information and the analytical act of measuring quality.

CUPPING EQUIPMENT

1. A deep, rounded spoon. Used for ingesting the coffee, preferably one made of stainless steel
or silver to help dissipate the heat and prevent any chance of the material chemically reacting
with the brew.
2. 3–5 wide-rimmed cups or bowls that hold 150–180 milliliters (5–6 ounces) of water.
Multiple cups of each coffee are steeped to capture any possible variation in the taste or smell,
as a single cup of coffee may not be representative of the whole lot.

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Coffee Quality and Assessment 309

3. 8.25 grams (.29 ounces) of whole bean coffee dosed for each cup/bowl. The coffee is
weighed as whole bean to promote uniformity and consistency between the multiple cups.
If only a single bean causes a defective flavor, it will show up in just one cup. If the coffee
were ground first, then weighed out, that single defective bean would be spread across all
cups and potentially left undetected. To maximize freshness, the coffee should be ground
(medium-coarse) just prior to beginning the cupping.
4. 150 milliliters (5 ounces) of 90–96°C (195–205°F) water for each cup/bowl. The
amount of water and coffee is not absolute. Any ratio will work as long as it is defined and
used consistently. These numbers are based on the SCAA’s recommended brew strength of 55
grams/liter (7.3 ounces of coffee/1 gallon) of water.
5. A cup of water for rinsing the spoon. To prevent contamination of brews when moving to
taste the next cup/bowl, the spoon is rinsed between each bowl. The cup is best filled with
the same hot water used to steep the coffee so that any change in the spoon’s temperature does
not risk affecting the evaluation.
6. A spittoon. After tasting the coffee, it is common to spit it out.
7. A score sheet to record data. Without recording the data, few cuppers can remember all
the details even minutes later, never mind months or years later.
8. An understanding of the characteristics and descriptors as described above. These are
the specific experiences to be measured.
9. A clock that measures seconds. Different cupping steps occur at different times. Having a
stopwatch helps keep track of the time.
10. A cup of water or neutral food (plain bread or crackers) for clearing the palate between
samples (optional).

PROCESS

Once everything is prepared and the coffee ground, the cupping can begin. The first step is to
sniff the dry grounds and assess the fragrance of each cup. Many cuppers agitate the grounds to
assist with this. Add the water and start the timer. Allow the coffee to brew for two to five min-
utes; the exact time is arbitrary. When the time has been reached, the crust (the floating coffee
particles) should be broken with the spoon and the aroma assessed. Some cuppers simply smell
the aroma released from the crust while others ritually stir away the crust three times or smell the
grounds on the back of the spoon. Note that agitation of the grounds will influence the extrac-
tion and change the cup; thus, if done, it must be applied identically to every cup.
Any floating grounds need to be removed, as they impede the comfort of ingesting the cof-
fee. Using one or two spoons, the floating grounds are scraped off without removing much
liquid. For convenience, they can be tossed into the spittoon. When moving between cups,
the spoons should be rinsed in hot water to avoid contamination. Cuppers who strive for the
greatest precision will tap the rinsed spoon on the rinse cup’s edge or the table to remove even
a drop of water.
Once the coffee has cooled somewhat, it is ready to ingest. The brew is collected in the
spoon and slurped vigorously into the mouth. While slurping helps coat the entire mouth at
once and, as some cuppers contend, aerates the coffee, the most critical reason to slurp from
the spoon is that coffee is not drunk this way; this is an analytical process of assessing qual-
ity and it promotes objectivity. Once in the mouth, some cuppers swish the coffee around
while others spit it into the spittoon immediately. As the amount of time the coffee is in the

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310 Shawn Steiman

mouth and the agitation in the mouth will change how the coffee is perceived, maintaining a
consistent practice is important.
When tasting many coffees, spitting out the coffee helps limit the amount of caffeine taken
into the body. Spitting also helps improve the precision of the assessment because, again, it is an
atypical practice reserved for assessment. Moreover, when coffee (or any food) is swallowed, the
mouth and throat are coated with remnants until they are washed with another sip or saliva. If the
coating isn’t cleared away, residual tastes and smells may contaminate the experience of the next
sample as they move through the retronasal passage in the skull to the olfactory bulb in the brain.
It is usually necessary to taste each coffee several times to appreciate its complexity. As the
coffee cools, its taste will change; some taste buds interact with temperature, altering the per-
ception of taste of many foods at different temperatures.
As each coffee is tasted and each characteristic and descriptor assessed, the cupper should
record experiences on the score sheet using the objective or subjective metrics discussed above,
or a combination of the two.

IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE METRICS

Within the limits of a human’s ability to be an objective instrument, an objective measuring

system is largely descriptive. As a result, the information generated about each coffee can be
efficiently transferred between people because there is no subjective encoding to the informa-
tion. Users’ views do not need to be adjusted to one another or to a specific definition of qual-
ity; coffees do not need to be measured within the context of other coffees, for example, by
cherry processing technique, roast level, or growing region. Any coffee can be measured and
described objectively, allowing any other drinker to get a good idea of what the coffee tastes
like, independent of any historical, cultural, emotional, or personal bias. An objective system
precludes any given coffee to be deemed inherently as “good” or “bad”; those are opinions
generated by a drinker.
Subjective measuring systems are more difficult to translate between users as no person
completely understands another’s feelings and experiences. For subjective systems to be effec-
tive, cuppers must be close to each other in understanding, rather than to an external standard.
The greatest advantage to a subjective measuring scheme is that a number scale can be used
for describing quality: characteristics are scored, tallied, and measured against a standard of
excellence represented as 100 points. The scale provides a quick and simple way of communi-
cating and comparing coffees’ quality—a useful tool for coffee reviewers and competitions—
although it requires a thorough understanding of the definition of quality used for it to be
effective in discussions with others who do not share the same preferences.6
Most of the coffee industry uses a combination of objective and subjective measurements.
For example, the characteristic acidity is often measured on its relative intensity and how the
cupper feels the level of acidity fits within the context of that particular cup and, often, the
coffee’s origin (where origin is a proxy for a definition of quality).

RECORDING INFORMATION

There are many ways of recording assessment data. The design of the score sheet depends
largely upon how the characteristics are measured and what the user feels is important to re-

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Coffee Quality and Assessment 311

member. While many different sheets exist, the score sheet designed by the SCAA has become
common throughout the specialty industry.
Most sheets use a numbering system to quantify the cupper’s experience. Lower numbers
correspond to low intensities or preferences whereas high numbers correspond to high inten-
sities or preferences. Occasionally, score sheets have an anchored line on which the cupper
marks the intensity of the experience where the anchors act as the extreme points on that
gradient. Almost all sheets have specific listings for the characteristics. For the descriptors, it
is most common to just list their presence as they not only appear irregularly but they tend to
be of such low intensity that mentioning their occurrence is enough.
The roast date of the coffee should also be recorded. Coffee can change dramatically within
even a few days after roasting. Knowing the time from roasting (freshness) is a valuable piece
of information about organoleptic quality.

CONCLUSION

Coffee is a complex organoleptic experience that anyone can simply enjoy. However, assess-
ing quality in a standardized way can add depth to the emotional and intellectual experience
of drinking it. Deciding how to assess quality is a joint effort between different stakeholders
in the industry as they seek to define the standards of excellence that guide their work. As
the specialty coffee industry grows, its members will continue to negotiate the definition
of high-quality coffee, incorporating a dynamic approach involving objective and subjec-
tive evaluations. Using standardized evaluation methods such as cupping ensures that these
measures of quality are reasonably reproducible, while more simple tastings allow consumers
and retailers to compare the holistic experience of drinking different coffees. In the long
run, it may be appropriate to consider separate or overlapping standards of excellence in
coffee quality as the specialty market expands its global presence and addresses the diverse
demands of the coffee-drinking world.

NOTES

1. Morten Meilgaard, Gail Civille, and B. Carr, Sensory Evaluation Techniques (Boca Raton, FL: CRC
Press, 1991), 33–37.
2. William H. Ukers, All About Coffee (New York: The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company,
1922), 356.
3. Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World,
rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 117.
4. Ukers, All About Coffee, 487.
5. Herbert Stone and Joel Sidel, Sensory Evaluation Practices (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985),
3–6.
6. For a more thorough discussion of measuring systems and the 100 point system used in coffee,
see Shawn Steiman and Ken Davids, “The Points Principle,” Roast Magazine, July/August 2010, 20–34.

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50
Distinctive Drinking
Specialty Coffee and Class in the United States
Jonathan D. Baker

This chapter considers the connections between specialty coffee and class or social status in
the U.S. To understand the link between consumption and status, it is useful to think of spe-
cialty coffee as part of the larger category of gourmet food. However, coffee has both gourmet
and mainstream forms, a characteristic it shares with many other foods. Further, there is a
tension between the more elaborate, high-status forms and manners of consumption, and the
more generic, mainstream ways in which it is made and drunk. Coffee has flirted with the
gourmet food world for a long time;1 the current wave of specialty coffee exemplifies many
traits that appeal to people who regularly consume gourmet food, the foodies.
Consumption is at least partly public and expressive. People make public statements about
themselves and their values through what they consume and how they consume it, and others
are able to perceive these expressions to some degree. And, because people are aware of the
public aspect of consumption, they can to a certain extent manage how they are perceived by
modifying their consumption.2 Yet eating and drinking do not take place in a neutral field
where all tastes and preferences enjoy equal social value: some preferences are associated with
higher status than are others. And to a large extent, anyone’s basic aesthetic tastes are relatively
inflexible and determined early in life through social position, education, and upbringing.
To some degree, people can emulate higher-status preferences. The desire by the lower class
to do this reflects the social influence of the elite class on what is perceived to be good and
valued. In regard to food, and specifically coffee, one means of publicly emulating high-status
values is by consciously choosing foods and crafting attitudes toward them. Advertisers can
appeal to consumer desires, emotions, and values by associating their products with certain
ideals. Examples abound of advertising that links consumption and identity; for coffee, see
the following discussion and Davids, this volume, as well as William Roseberry’s discussion of
imagery used to market coffee.3 Martha Kaplan shows the way Pacific Island natural imagery,
used to market Fiji bottled water, is linked to consumer values regarding nature and health.4
Raymond Williams provides a more general discussion of the apparently magical manner in
which commodities are imbued with life-affirming characteristics via advertising.5 How does
this kind of association take place within the realm of U.S. coffee consumption?
Here the analysis draws on work by sociologists on consumption and social status, an
intellectual lineage that largely descends from Pierre Bourdieu’s examination several decades

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Distinctive Drinking 313

ago of the relationship between social class and taste in France.6 For a discussion of specialty
coffee, the key to Bourdieu’s work is his argument that the process by which some tastes and
preferences become associated with “good taste” is a reflection of the power and influence the
dominant class has over social matters. Bourdieu further argues that, for those who are not a
part of this dominant class, there are cultural and economic barriers that make it difficult to
develop the good taste favored by the elite. Consumption, as a visible and public expression of
taste, can therefore serve to distinguish people from each other or to mark inclusion or exclu-
sion in certain social classes or groups. Cultural and economic capital, acquired from birth in
and outside the family, is expressed in taste. Good taste, which depends on possessing a high
level of cultural capital, effectively excludes those without it from participating in or influenc-
ing the dominant social class and its preferences.
Because class-based tastes and preferences are learned early in life, they are difficult to
overcome or change. It is more than just a matter of which forms of art or music or which
foods are preferred. Taste also encompasses the manner in which people consume things. With
respect to food, this includes standards of etiquette as well as notions of how meals should be
apportioned, the types and amounts of foods that should be consumed, how they should be
prepared, when, where, and with whom they should be eaten, and so on. These larger sets of
class-based attitudes and mannerisms shape how individuals approach coffee.
Other sociologists analyze the discourses—the particular usage of words and symbols—
surrounding food and foodies in the U.S.7 The trends seen in specialty coffee can be better
understood if they are placed in this wider context of foodie discourse and narratives. Josée
Johnston and Shyon Baumann identify authenticity and exoticism as the two key frames
through which foodies assess and appreciate what they ingest. These writers see these frames
as being supplemented by discourses of democracy and distinction. Because democratic inclu-
siveness is an important ideal in the U.S., there is a shift away from past forms of overt snob-
bishness in how things are consumed and a move toward a more open, omnivorous pattern
of consumption.8 Johnston and Baumann describe such consumption as an appreciation of a
wide variety of forms within any given genre (for instance, music, literature, food). Because
this way of consuming allows a broader view of what is considered good, it fits well with ideals
of democracy and inclusiveness. Yet it still functions as a means of displaying refinement and
good taste; despite democratic appearances, not everyone will have equal opportunities to de-
velop an omnivorous consumption pattern, and not every form of food (or music, literature,
etc.) will be viewed as good by any particular social group.
Sociologists have described omnivorous consumption in many different genres besides
food, including music and reading.9 Display of good taste is marked by eclectic, yet discern-
ing, consumption across a wide range of high and low status forms within these different
genres. The discernment that forms the basis of social distinction is not based on preferring
the “right” high-status commodities –for example, “highbrow” classical and opera music,
French cuisine, and Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee— but rather on the attitude with which
these commodities are assessed and selected.10 This approach to consumption can be ex-
pressed through diverse preferences: for example, through preferring a specific local coffee
roaster, by knowing of a hole-in-the-wall ramen shop with exceptional fresh-made noodles,
and by appreciation of vintage outlaw country music from the 1970s (e.g., Johnny Cash,
Merle Haggard). With coffee, appreciation of diversity of origin, roast, and brewing tech-
nique reflects the omnivorous approach: there are many good coffees out there, and differ-
ent roasts and preparations have their merits depending on the properties of the coffee itself
and the desired end taste. This conscious development of sophisticated attitudes toward

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314 Jonathan D. Baker

consumption contrasts sharply with the more overt class-based distinctions of high/low
culture that Bourdieu analyzed in France.11
Johnston and Baumann observe that foodies seek out “authentic” food. Food is perceived to
be authentic “when it has geographic specificity,” is “simple,” has a personal connection, can be
linked to a historical tradition, or has “ethnic” connections.”12 Authenticity acts as a standard
by which foods can be assessed. And because the characteristics that mark authenticity seem
objective (when compared with past distinctions made on the basis of high/low class or cul-
ture), they do not directly contradict the norm of democratic inclusiveness. But authenticity
itself is a socially constructed attribute of foods, not something inherent in a food’s substance
or properties. For example, “Italian” cuisine developed only in the late nineteenth century,
partly in response to calls from the elite to create a new national culture. It is how the food
is perceived in a social context that determines its level of authenticity.13 Likewise, the value
placed on authenticity of this sort is socially constructed to be a positive attribute of a food.
Exoticism, the other dimension identified by Johnston and Baumann, is a feature of the
discourse about coffee that has already been acknowledged; see, for example, Roseberry’s
discussion of coffee and the re-imagination of class in the U.S. The desire to consume the
exotic Other—meaning here some group that has been identified as distinctly different from
the observer’s people—and the use of exotic imagery and themes to make food compelling to
consumers strike an uncomfortable balance between romanticizing colonial exploration and
plantation agriculture and expressing a more culturally sensitive and politically aware interest
in social and cultural difference.14 Ultimately, this line of analysis traces back to the work of
Edward Said, who examined Western culture and its connection to the exotic Other.15 Stereo-
types about cultural difference are widely deployed in Western life, in marketing, the media,
entertainment, and so on. Coffee advertising featuring exotic places and cultures is part of this
much larger way that Westerners think about other places and cultures.
Johnston and Baumann identify two dimensions of exoticism: social distance and norm-
breaking. For both aspects, the assumed context for comparison is well-off, white, cosmo-
politan Americans. Social distance can be marked by geographic or cultural distance and
is primarily a function of accessibility and rarity. Those goods that are less easily available
are more exotic. Likewise, foods that break norms, for example, foods made from animals
or animal parts not frequently eaten in mainstream American cuisine, are considered more
exotic. While both these dimensions play a role in how coffee is perceived (kopi luwak is
an example of norm-breaking), social distance, marked as well by geographic distance and
rarity, is the most prevalent.
Some of the features that make specialty coffee attractive to foodies are relatively obvious:
geographic specificity, which contributes both authenticity and exoticism; personal con-
nections to specific regions, farms, and farmers; relatively small-scale production, reflecting
“simple” (e.g., handpicked, not mechanized), personal aspects while also contributing to rar-
ity; and historical and ethnic traditions, somewhat problematically connected to the colonial
past but also balanced by more modern concern about farmer well-being. These themes, in
various forms, have long been a staple of the U.S. specialty coffee market.
Coffee authenticity is linked to exotic peoples and locales but through direct and hope-
fully beneficial connections to specific farmers and co-ops: fair trade certification, micro-lot
production, single origin, relationship coffees, and so on.16 These factors all serve to mark
specialty coffees as authentic and exotic in various ways, which make them appealing to food-
ies because they can be employed as indicators of cultural capital and good taste.

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Distinctive Drinking 315

The methods of evaluating specialty coffee currently in vogue also allow for this not overtly
exclusionary form of social distinction. These techniques allow for social boundaries and
statuses to be enforced without directly challenging the democratic inclusiveness favored in
the U.S. One of these methods of assessing coffee, cupping, appears to be gaining popularity
beyond just coffee professionals. Coffee bars increasingly offer cupping nights to consum-
ers as a way of exposing them to a diversity of coffees while also helping them cultivate the
techniques needed to distinguish the coffees from each other. These cuppings are analogous
to wine tastings.
Mastery of cupping techniques requires a relatively high degree of social and economic
capital. To be skilled at tasting the nuances and differences in specialty coffees requires access
to a wide diversity of coffees to sample. It likely also requires training and socialization—we
typically learn to cup coffee from experts. To be able to cup properly, using the vocabulary and
techniques of the specialty coffee industry, requires several things: a drinker needs to be social-
ized, via education and experience, to conceive of coffee as a substance worthy of evaluation
akin to ranking other high status foods, especially wine; there must be physical and economic
access to a sufficient variety of coffees to taste; and a drinker must learn to discern the dif-
ferences and must develop the language to describe them. To become good at distinguishing
the nuances of coffee tastes also requires practice over time. The would-be cupper must have
access to all these resources for a period of time, rather than just once, to master the technique.
Despite the fact that anyone with normally functioning senses of taste and smell is physi-
cally able to learn to do this, relatively few have the time and money to do so. The seemingly
objective nature of cupping techniques—anyone can do it!—masks the role they play in dis-
tinguishing those with expert or good taste from those without it. The social and economic
barriers restricting access to specialty coffees allow them to continue to play a role in social
class distinction. The most obvious barrier is cost: though many Americans drink coffee,
relatively few can afford specialty coffee prices. Fewer still will see the price as justified. And
of those who do try high-end specialty coffee, few will have the food-tasting experience (or,
in Bourdieu’s terms, the embodied class-based tastes and abilities) to be able to ascertain the
relatively subtle differences in specialty coffee tastes.
Yet most advocates of specialty coffee generally do not see it this way. In fact, much like the
foodies Johnston and Baumann interviewed, the dominant theme I have encountered, both
in popular articles on specialty coffee and among people I have interviewed, is one of populist
inclusion. The focus is on the quality of the coffee and on introducing people to it because
the brew is exciting and tastes good. There is of course a promotional aspect to emphasiz-
ing quality, as specialty coffee advocates are also often involved in selling it. But rather than
positioning specialty coffee as an elite product, the retail industry concentrates on technique,
expertise, and quality by means of technology and precision, more objective criteria not neces-
sarily associated with class judgments.
Coffee is a beverage that straddles multiple class identities. In some contexts, it is a daily
accompaniment to meals—as in diner coffee or something made in a Mr. Coffee pot. Those
brews are anything but elite. Rather, they are more working class and democratic, consumed
by people at the lower end of the socioeconomic structure to help fuel their productivity and
keep them going longer (an attribute that led anthropologist Sydney Mintz to refer to coffee,
along with tea and sugar, as “proletarian hunger killers”17). In this context, there is less concern
with origins of coffee or nuances in flavor. Coffee should just taste like coffee; it should be
“strong.” This manner of consuming coffee still dominates in America, alongside the relatively

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Figure 50.1. An ad by John Lagatta in The American Magazine, May 1933.

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Distinctive Drinking 317

newer, more specialized segments of the coffee market. And populist imagery, focusing on
coffee’s affordability, accessibility, and comforting properties continue to be a part of how it
is advertised. The persistence of the view that coffee is a democratic, non-elite, working-class
beverage is also used by savvy advertisers as a means of product differentiation and further
market segmentation.
In the ostensibly democratic U.S., tension has appeared between consuming coffee in a
manner that marks high cultural capital and status and consuming it in a more common
manner. Different images of coffee compete in marketing (elite, exotic, authentic, specialized
vs. common, comforting, accessible worker fuel), and I have found them in my own research.
At this point, it is difficult to pinpoint the degree to which American coffee consumers sense
these differences, and more ethnographic research is needed to clarify matters. At any rate,
coffee marketers already play up these different attitudes to further define and target different
segments of the coffee market. On the one hand, aspects of authenticity and exoticism are
drawn out of the highest echelons of the specialty coffee world into the more popular realms
of specialty coffee, such as Starbucks. On the other hand, new means of separating the highest
status coffee and its consumption from the rest continue to evolve. A pattern is developing:
elements that used to define the most elite patterns of consumption are popularized, while
new exclusionary aspects emerge to maintain the boundary between elite and common.
Reaction against exclusionary and elitist elements of coffee appears in advertising campaigns
that specifically make fun of these aspects. Backlash against perceived snobbery has been used
as a means of marketing—see, for example, Dunkin’ Donuts’ 2006 coining of the term
“Fritalian” to describe the language of drink sizes and names at coffee establishments such as
Starbucks: “Is it French, or is it Italian? Maybe Fritalian?”18 Both Dunkin’ Donuts and Mc-
Donald’s now sell versions of coffee drinks formerly associated with high status (for example,
cappuccinos), a sign that these beverages have moved even further into mass consumption.
In a 2008 commercial, upon learning that McDonald’s now sells cappuccinos, one character
says, “That’s awesome! I can shave this thing [a goatee] off my face.” The other character notes
that they no longer have to call movies “films” and that they can now sit around watching
and talking about football.19 The ironic aspect of these anti-elitist marketing campaigns is that
they represent appeals carefully tailored to segments of the U.S. coffee market, and the coffee
products sold are more expensive than black coffee. They are specializations cloaked in the
guise of being less specialized. This trend is seen in grocery store sales of coffee, too. Bags of
Dunkin’ Donuts coffee (typically marketed as not elite) sell for the same price as Starbucks
(often associated with higher status, despite actually being somewhat mainstream). So, while
these coffee products may in part reflect a reaction against elitist aspects of coffee, there is an
effort underway to get more American coffee drinkers to buy more expensive coffee products,
while using populist, democratic, anti-elitist themes to promote this trend.
These are some of the ways coffee and its consumption are connected to ideas of class and
status in the U.S. Coffee straddles class lines and has a diverse history with both populist and
exclusionary dimensions. In some contexts, appreciation of the most elite aspects of specialty
coffee can function as a means of social distinction, marking refinement and good taste. Yet,
there appears to be reaction against the exclusivity and snobbishness of specialty coffee, even
while this resistance appears to be functioning primarily as a means of further defining and
segmenting the U.S. coffee market. The push and pull between these different images of cof-
fee will likely continue to appear in various guises throughout the American, if not the global,
coffee market and will continue to be incorporated into our narratives about status and class.

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318 Jonathan D. Baker

NOTES

1. William Roseberry, “The rise of yuppie coffees and the reimagination of class in the United
States,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 4 (1996): 762–75.
2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984); Gary Alan Fine,
Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996); and Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann, Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gour-
met Foodscape (New York: Routledge, 2010).
3. Roseberry, “Rise of yuppie coffees.”
4. Martha Kaplan, “Fijian Water in Fiji and New York: Local politics and a global commodity,”
Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 4 (2007): 685–706.
5. Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The magic system,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture:
Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), 170–95.
6. Bourdieu, Distinction.
7. Johnston and Baumann, Foodies.
8. Richard Peterson and Roger Kern, “Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore,” American
Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 900–907.
9. Peterson and Kern, “Changing highbrow taste”; Jane Zavisca, “The status of cultural omnivorism:
A case study of reading in Russia,” Social Forces 84, no. 2 (2005): 1233–55.
10. Johnston and Baumann, Foodies.
11. Bourdieu, Distinction.
12. Johnston and Baumann, Foodies.
13. Research on the socially constructed nature of the authenticity of national cuisines is very rich.
For example, on whether an authentic American cuisine exists: Sydney Mintz, “Eating American,” in
Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996),
106–24; on efforts to “reauthenticate” regional food traditions in the UK: Craig Wight, “Reengineering
‘Authenticity’: Tourism Encounters with Cuisine in Rural Great Britain,” in Food for Thought: Essays on
Eating and Culture, ed. L. C. Rubin (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 153–65; on the role of cook-
books in defining authentic Indian national cuisine: Arjun Appadurai, “How to make a national cuisine:
Cookbooks in contemporary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (1988): 3–24.
For a more general discussion of the taste of authenticity and culinary travel, see Lisa Heldke, “But is it
authentic? Culinary travel and the search for the ‘genuine article,’” in The Taste Culture Reader: Experienc-
ing Food and Drink, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 385–94.
14. Roseberry, “Rise of yuppie coffees”; Johnston and Baumann, Foodies, 100–107.
15. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).
16. For example, see M. Doane, “Relationship coffees: Structure and agency in the fair trade system,”
in Fair Trade and Social Justice: Global Ethnographies, ed. S. Lyon and M. Moberg (New York: New York
University Press, 2010), 229–57
17. Sydney Mintz, “Time, sugar, and sweetness,” Marxist Perspectives 2 (1979): 56–73.
18. Dunkin’ Donuts (2006), “Perhaps Fritalian” (commercial), http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=r2y_GwKzxck, accessed March 25, 2012.
19. McDonald’s, “Now Selling Cappuccinos,” (commercial), 2008, http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Cg87E1tjTOE, accessed March 25, 2012.

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Brewing
Dissolving the Puzzle
Andrew Hetzel

Add hot water to ground coffee, filter out the wet grounds, and drink the remaining liquid.
Brewing coffee is simple, right? Well . . . yes, technically the task of brewing coffee is easy, but
consistently achieving good flavor from brewing requires some knowledge of the underlying
science at work. What happens when water meets coffee makes all the difference for those who
purposefully control flavor in the cup. Everybody else is simply going through the motions
and hoping to get it right.

WHAT IS COFFEE BREWING?

Brewing coffee is about creating a beverage that we enjoy. It is pretty easy to know what we
like and don’t like, but unfortunately we don’t know what chemicals in the beverage create our
perception of the taste. What we do know is that manipulating how coffee is brewed changes
our perception of it.
Even though we can taste every cup of brewed coffee to know whether or not we got it
right, it is cumbersome and often too late to use only taste as a tool for measuring success.
To aid us in understanding brewing and how to become more consistent with it, we have
discovered a few metrics (objectively measurable responses) that can help guide us towards
understanding whether we’ve likely brewed the coffee in a way that we will like or not: extrac-
tion yield and brew strength. These metrics, though imperfect proxies for taste, are quick,
useful tools in exploring coffee brewing.
Coffee brewing uses water to extract chemical compounds found in roasted coffee. As water
comes into contact with coffee grounds, it dissolves some of those chemicals, most of which
eventually pass into the cup. Once those chemicals are in the water and away from the cof-
fee grounds, they are called solutes. The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA)
advises an extraction yield of 18–22 percent, meaning this percentage of coffee should be
dissolved out of the original coffee mass to optimize the flavor of a brewed cup. The range is
slightly wider for espresso due to its smaller liquid volume. Interestingly, the vast majority of
each batch of roasted coffee is never meant to be consumed and is destined to become used
coffee grounds—sad to envision, but the waste is necessary to attain good flavor in the cup.

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Extraction yield merely describes how much coffee should be extracted. It doesn’t describe
what should be extracted. There are usually several ways to attain the desired extraction yield,
any of which will produce an acceptable, yet different, cup of coffee.
More than 1,500 distinct chemical compounds can be extracted, some of which create the
complex flavor and aroma that we know as coffee. Those coffee solubles include lightweight,
fast-dissolving compounds like the citric acid that gives Kenyan coffee its lemony flavor, mid-
range dissolving compounds like sugars that make good coffees naturally sweet, and some
heavy, slower-dissolving bitter compounds that are necessary to add complexity and balance.
Lipids (oils) are also present in brewed coffee. Lipids in the coffee beans liquefy at normal
extraction temperatures, and while they never completely dissolve in the water, they do make
it into the cup, contributing along with soluble bean fiber to the texture/viscosity of coffee,
perceived as thickness or mouthfeel. Slightly bitter caffeine, coffee’s most famous soluble, dis-
solves easily in coffee, as it is equally soluble in both water and oil—which is the reason for its
rapid permeation of the stomach lining, permitting direct entry into the bloodstream, similar
to absorption of alcohol.
Take out too few soluble elements during an extraction (<18 percent) and the results are
an underextracted cup of coffee that is sour and weak; take too many (>22 percent) and the
cup will be overextracted, burnt, and bitter tasting. Ideally, all of the right compounds should
be extracted and combined in one harmoniously balanced beverage—which is the challenge
of brewing good coffee.

BREWING PARAMETERS

Many different brewing methods can create such a harmonious beverage. Each method ma-
nipulates a set of parameters that influence the extraction, therefore determining how many
solubles are dissolved to become liquid coffee and how many stay behind as used coffee
grounds. These parameters all work in concert to produce a desirable beverage. When they are
adjusted individually, they tend to throw a harmonious beverage out of alignment, potentially
missing the ideal extraction yield. Thus, different brewing methods tend to tweak multiple
parameters to achieve the harmony.

GRIND PARTICLE SIZE AND SHAPE

The purpose of grinding coffee is to increase and control the surface area that will come into
contact with water. The exponential increase in surface area created by breaking the coffee into
smaller particles (grounds) speeds up the rate of dissolution. Larger coffee particles have less
total surface area available for contact and subsequently have a slower process. Bigger particles
have the opposite effect on the rate at which water flows through coffee grounds, since smaller
pieces leave smaller gaps through which water may travel.
The goal in grinding is to obtain particle uniformity, since large and small particles
combined in the same brewer extract at different rates, leading to unpredictable results.
Substantial emphasis should be placed on the reduction of extremely small particles, “fines,”
that break off from coffee beans during the grinding process and almost always fully dis-
solve, with bitter consequences.

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WATER TEMPERATURE

Because heat increases molecular activity, water temperature strongly influences how much of
a substance dissolves and the rate of dissolution. Essentially, raising the temperature speeds
up the movement of molecules and therefore increases the opportunities for water molecules
to come into contact with coffee grounds. For purposes of illustration, pour sugar in glasses
of increasingly hot water; the sugar dissolves more quickly in each successively warmer glass.
Lower temperatures have the opposite effect.
Cold water, when a short contact time is used, dissolves only the quickly soluble elements
in coffee, most notably sour-tasting acids, but leaves others behind. Some compounds are not
greatly impacted by increases or decreases in temperature. Repeat the same experiment with
table salt and you will notice little difference in dissolution time from cup to cup.

WATER PRESSURE

High-pressure systems increase the solubility of gases into any solution, allowing more gas to
be squeezed into the liquid. In espresso, volatile compounds created by roasting are captured
by the pressurized water stream. When the pressure is released, the gas leaves the solution
(just like opening a can of soda). In espresso, the gas gets trapped by lipids and becomes part
of the crema.
The more important effect of the high pressure is to increase the efficiency of extraction.
To some degree, this works like increasing the temperature: water comes into contact with
the coffee more often. However, the bigger effect is probably from the sheer force of move-
ment from the water. Imagine a person standing in a narrow hallway. If other people meander
through the hall, that lone person may or may not get bumped and pushed down the hall. If
those other people burst through the hallway as one large mass, that lone person is more likely
to be dragged along with the group. With espresso, the lone person is the coffee solute and the
rush of people is the high-pressure water.

AGITATION

For extraction to occur, water molecules must come into contact with coffee grounds. The
more frequently the molecules bump into the coffee, the quicker the extraction. So, as with in-
creasing the temperature, agitation during brewing will increase the extraction rate. Agitation
occurs naturally in filter brewing methods because the percolation of water due to gravity,
through the coffee bed, counts as movement. In other methods and sometimes in conjunction
with filter brewing, manual agitation in the form of stirring speeds up the extraction.

WATER-TO-COFFEE RATIO

The term “strong” is overused by marketers to describe the flavor of coffee, almost always
incorrectly, typically referring to roast degree, bitterness, caffeine content, or, more sadly, a
high defect count that creates wildly imbalanced and unpleasant sensations in the cup. The

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only true measure of brew strength is soluble concentration, the percentage of dissolved coffee
solids in the water, also known as total dissolved solids (TDS).
The SCAA recommended strength of brewed coffee lies in the range of 1.0–1.5 percent
TDS, which can be produced from a coffee to water ratio of about 1:18 by weight. Histori-
cally, that value was originally set at between 1.15 and 1.35 percent, but in recent years it has
drifted closer to 1.5 percent and, in some cases, beyond, as consumer preferences gradually
trend toward lighter roasted coffees brewed to higher concentrations.
The reason for the shift, I believe, is that darker roasted coffees exhibit dry distillate flavors
(spicy, smoky, resinous) that are perceived as being far more intense than delicate enzymatic
flavors (floral, citrus, berry) more often found in lighter roasted ones; so light roasted coffees
tend to be brewed at higher concentrations than their dark roasted cousins in order to achieve
the same perceived brew strength. This phenomenon accounts for the notion that light roasts
contain more caffeine, which in reality is not greatly affected by roast degree at all.

CONTACT TIME

The ideal time for water to stay in contact with coffee for a proper extraction depends largely
on the particle size, water temperature, and pressure variables mentioned above, with one ad-
ditional condition: water quality. In general, the longer coffee and water are in contact, the
greater amount of material will be extracted from the coffee.
A mantra of the specialty coffee community, “coffee is 98.5 percent water,” is worth repeat-
ing (we discussed the other 1.5 percent above). Small variations in mineral content, alkalinity,
and chemical additives like chlorine dramatically change the coffee extraction. While chlorine
and other compounds negatively impact cup quality, the mineral content determines water’s
bonding capacity with coffee solubles and can subsequently trump all other extraction vari-
ables. Brewing water must contain some amount of dissolved mineral solids like magnesium
and calcium to extract what seems to be a good balance of coffee solids.
The SCAA guideline for water quality is to use water at or near neutral pH, containing
75–250 ppm total dissolved solids and 20–85 mg/liter calcium hardness with little or no other
elements and compounds like chlorine, sulfur, or silicates.

FILTER TYPE

Filter type influences coffee brewing in two ways: it can affect the rate of brewing and influ-
ences what ultimately passes through the cup. Filters vary in their porosity and material com-
position. The most common types of filters are made from paper, cloth, and metal.
Heavy paper, cloth, and metal filters with very small holes slow down the rate of brewing,
which can translate to an increase in extraction yield. Paper and cloth filters also trap some
of the chemicals extracted from the beans, most notably some oils. Consequently, the actual
composition of a cup of coffee will be different depending on whether a paper or cloth filter
is used rather than a metal one.

IN APPLICATION

Every brewing technology applies the variables above to obtain a beverage the user enjoys.
Each technique tries to balance water of a certain temperature and quality that is put into

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contact with a specific ratio of coffee grounds that have been ground to a certain particle size
at a given pressure for a specific amount of time.
As a baseline in the United States, drip brewing applies approximately 1 liter (about 34
ounces) of clean water, heated to 92–95°C or 198–203°F, to 55 grams or 1.94 ounces of cof-
fee, ground to ~750–1,000 μm particle size using gravity (1 atmosphere, or ATM) slowed by
a filter for approximately three minutes.
In espresso, coffee is ground smaller to increase surface area, the mass of coffee to water
is increased significantly, pressure is increased to 8–10 ATM, and contact time is reduced to
20–30 seconds. The dissolved solids are close to 5 percent. In the end, it is the taste of the
beverage that matters, not achieving a one-size-fits-all brew strength.
In cold-brewed coffee, the particle size is increased dramatically and water temperature is
lowered to room temperature, but the contact time increased to as much as twenty-four hours
to allow even extraction. By contrast, the Turkish brewing or Arabic style of coffee prepara-
tion pushes extraction yields beyond the edge of commonly accepted specialty coffee standards
by using an extraordinarily fine coffee grind, boiling water, but no filter in the extraction. This
is another case where the metrics don’t apply; they are trumped by user preference.
Whether preparing cold brew coffee, filter coffee, pressed coffee, or espresso, the core
process of extraction remains the same. It is a matter of extracting chemicals from coffee
grounds while manipulating a few basic parameters. Innovation in the use of these param-
eters will continue to increase the types of coffee beverages available as well as variations on
ones we currently enjoy. Quite recently, espresso machines have been designed to permit
the adjustment of the water pressure and temperature to the demand of their operators
during the brew cycle or as a prerecorded profile. Experimentation will certainly continue
to introduce new catalysts and to manipulate factors that are today accepted as constants in
order to improve extraction quality.
Which method of brewing makes the best cup of coffee? All of them can make a good cup;
the best may be different for any roasted coffee and any drinker, but the preparer needs to
apply knowledge of the brewing process to coax out the best qualities in each.

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52
Roasting
Developing Flavor in the Bean
Colin Smith

After it has been processed from cherry to green bean, coffee still resembles a green, hard
stone, lacking any discernible taste or aroma. It is the work of a skilled roaster to develop a
flavor in the coffee that makes it desirable to drink. Every origin has different flavor charac-
teristics, and careful roasting will bring out these flavors. Subsequently the aroma of the coffee
pervades the roastery. Many have said that they prefer the smell of roasting coffee to the actual
taste in the cup! Such comments are typical of people who have not experienced coffees cor-
rectly roasted to bring out the differentiation of taste present in origins and blends.
Beans, when roasted in the traditional manner at anywhere from 190–250°C (374–482°F)
for 10–15 minutes, change color to shades of brown (the roast temperature is chosen by the
roaster who is influenced by practical and cultural circumstances). The chemical processes that
occur during roasting are diverse and usually affect each other as they develop. For example,
Maillard reactions occur when sugars and amino acids combine, resulting in complex mol-
ecules that are largely responsible for the brown color of coffee. Pyrolysis, a generic term for
the decomposition of substances with heat, generates many products not found in green cof-
fee. The myriad of reactions is responsible for oils, acids, polysaccharides, volatile compounds,
and many more substances.
The roasting process first evaporates most of the water content in the coffee (usually 9–13
percent before roasting), which contributes to a total reduction in weight of some 15–20
percent. The increased pressure from the water vapor violently breaks the cells, the coffee au-
dibly “cracks,” and the bean expands. At this point, the coffee has a light brown color. Further
roasting will cause a second crack, this time from carbon dioxide breaking through cells. As
roasting progresses, the brown color darkens (it is usually stopped well before it blackens) and
oils start to exude, first from the ends of the beans, then all over the surface.
During roasting, coffee beans expand, increasing their volume by about 60 percent as they
lose their water content, while at the same time, any silverskin still on the beans flakes off as
chaff. Larger machines have attachments to suck out the chaff, which can be used as compost,
or can be burnt off in the roaster or in an afterburner.
The challenge for the roaster—here I mean the operator of the machine—is to extract the
maximum flavor from each lot of beans. Certain coffees, due to their chemical makeup, are
better roasted to certain colors. For example, the high acid content in Kenya coffee becomes

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quite bitter if the coffee is overroasted, whereas Sumatran coffee, which has a low acidity and
a full body, develops a more pleasant flavor when roasted longer. Darker roasting produces
more bitterness in the flavor. This can have an advantage in respect to cultural tastes. Some
countries or regions like their coffee very bitter, perhaps while using an espresso machine,
so that the roast and the preparation should enhance this characteristic. Light roasted coffees,
on the other hand, will taste more acidic than they would at a darker roast. Certain origins—
those of Central America, for example—will perform well as a lighter roast as the acidity factor
balances other flavor components within the bean.
Coffee roast level terms are relative to the color, so in the UK we have light, medium, and
dark roasts and then a range of terms in between such as full medium, continental, and light
continental, which in the U.S. is full city roast. The trend at the moment is to roast darker,
at least in many UK coffeehouse chains. The roasting entry in the glossary lists old-style U.S.
terms for darkness.
In specialty coffee, lighter roasts have come to predominate. The roaster’s responsibility is
now phrased as revealing the character of the beans. While lighter roasts are trendy in specialty
coffee, roasting too light, underroasting, produces a thin, grassy flavor. Coffee assessment
is usually undertaken when the bean is just past this stage but still fairly light. The bean is
cooked through and all the potential details of the coffee are apparent.
The traditional method of roasting is to judge the end of the roast by the coffee color
against a sample color (sometimes a previous batch of the same beans, thus when a previous
batch is used it is important to renew it regularly as the coffee fades with age). The color can
also be checked and regulated with the use of a spectrometer (a.k.a. spectrophotometer), a
necessity for quality control of batch roasts. However, this must be done after the roast is
complete, not during the roasting process.
When the desired color is reached and the roasting is complete, the coffee is emptied onto
a cooling tray where cold air is drawn through the coffee. Large batches may use misted water
in the roasting drum to cool the coffee first before dumping it (called water quenching). This
will reduce the coffee temperature to room temperature and stop the roasting almost instan-
taneously. All of the water is evaporated from the beans before they leave the roasting drum.

ROASTING MACHINES

Coffee was originally “roasted” using frying pans, Arabian style. The beans would be cooked
over open fires and tossed to try to gain uniformity of doneness, though this happened in-
frequently. This method is still used during the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Into
the early twentieth century, Western housewives, and some home aficionados to this day, also
roasted green beans in their ovens (this also includes lovers of very smoky kitchens!). Later, the
open pans were covered and paddles inserted to agitate the beans to prevent burning. Drum
roasting developed in the nineteenth century with an external heat source, originally wood or
coal but latterly gas fired. External heat application was the norm, but later gas burners were
fitted inside the drum to give direct heat to the coffee beans. A new development is to heat
the air externally and pass it through the rotating drum. This gives a more uniform roast and
stops the beans coming in direct contact with the heat source.
The next development was the fluid bed coffee roaster, in which air is heated and pumped
at high temperatures through the bed of coffee, in a small chamber, creating a cyclone effect
among the beans. This method can roast coffee very quickly, 60 kilograms in five minutes, if

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326 Colin Smith

so desired. The coffee is then moved to another chamber for cooling with cold air. For large
quantities, managed under computer control, this is an efficient way of continuous roasting.
In small roasting operations, the bags of unroasted coffee are piled against the wall or on
shelves. In a large roasting operation, coffee is stored in large silos, each containing a dif-
ferent origin. On request, coffees are dispatched, with computer control, straight into the
roaster. This system can also control blend proportions of the green bean. The blend will
be roasted as a unit before automatic equipment moves the roasted coffee from the roaster
to the packing department. In some smaller specialty roasters, the components are roasted
separately and blended later. This enables blends with two or more colors of roast to be
blended for specific flavors.
Many roasters, especially on the specialty side, roast and offer coffees from single locations
and, if possible, from single farms. Nearly all roasters also offer blends of coffees. These blends
can be composed of coffees from different origins, farms, cherry processes, or roast levels. They
are blended to create specific flavor profiles, to cater to specific brewing methods, or to offer
products at a certain price.
All methods of roasting can be adapted to profile roasting. Profile roasting occurs when the
amount of heat used during roasting is manipulated throughout the roast. This will lead to
different events (like the bean cracking) occurring at different times as well as different end
roasting times. In smaller roasting operations, the variation of heat can be done manually. In
larger operations, sensors within the roaster can take measures and, with the aid of computer
programming, adjust the heat input during the process to achieve the desired roasted color.
In many countries, the smoke and smell created by commercial coffee roasting is regulated
by law. Large machines will have built in afterburning systems that eliminate particulate emis-
sions and dispel any waste still in the roaster before it enters the atmosphere. To prevent fires
and ensure the quality of the roast, these devices must be kept clean. Often, a roasting plant
will have a cleaning system for the green beans before roasting begins, to extract foreign bod-
ies. Some plants, however, clean the coffee after roasting. Magnets and de-stoners can be used
to assure the removal of all unwanted materials.
Roasting machines are produced in various sizes to suit the capacities required, from 2.5
kilograms upward. Very small machines, which handle around 125 grams at a time, are
produced to roast samples of coffees, to test them for flavor, and determine the roast color
required for optimum flavor.

KEEPING COFFEE FRESH

Roasted coffee exposed to air will lose some flavor through oxidation. Carbon dioxide, along
with many other volatile compounds, is released from the beans directly after roasting. Some
of these volatiles contribute to the coffee’s flavor. The loss occurs more readily when the coffee
is ground, as its surface area has increased, providing more sites for oxygen to “attack” and
more sites for volatiles to leave. Packaging has therefore been developed to help retain the gases
and hold the flavor in the bean.
Vacuum packaging creates a fairly stable environment within the sealed bag as it prevents
fresh oxygen from affecting the coffee. Thus, on opening, the coffee should taste really fresh,
but the introduction of air causes quick deterioration of the remaining contents. Flushing
the packaging with inert gases, for example nitrogen, will keep the coffee in an oxygen-free
environment for some time. The offending gases are expelled during the packing process to

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be replaced by the inert gas. The majority of retail bags that are sold also contain a one-way
valve. This allows gasses, generated by the roasted coffee, to exit the bag while preventing
oxygen from entering.
These methods aim to preserve the coffee’s flavors for up to a year. It is still recommended that
the coffee should be consumed as soon as possible after roasting to achieve the best flavors. This
applies even more so after opening the pack, at which point oxygen is available to react with the
coffee. Locally roasted coffee will exceed all imported options for freshness and taste.

HOW SHOULD I BUY MY COFFEE?

Always consider how you make your coffee. Coffee tastes fresher in the cup if you use a burr
grinder and prepare each cup from whole beans.
The coffee should be ground according to the way you make it. Coffee-making methods are
dealt with elsewhere in the book in the sections on espresso, “Brewing,” and “How to Make a
Great Cup of Coffee,” but each technique is capable of producing a fine cup if used properly.
Commercially, coffee is ground in large roller mills. Two or three pairs of rollers, at progressively
smaller settings, assure uniformity of grind. These machines are usually water cooled to stop
excess heat from affecting the coffee. On a smaller scale, in both shops where coffee is ground to
order and in homes that take extra care with brewing, corrugated plate (burr) grinders are used.
Small domestic burr grinders are efficient, but the use of a spinning blade is quite common in
small electric grinders. These machines are not very accurate for defining specific grinds.
Once opened, the coffee rapidly loses freshness. The coffee should be sequestered from air
as well as possible. If it came in a bag, the pack can be rolled down and fastened closed. Put-
ting the coffee in an airtight container will work well, too. Buying small quantities of coffee,
as required, from a local roaster or a trustworthy Internet purveyor will help ensure a fresh
coffee experience.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The preparation of coffee from the time the tree flowers to liquor in the cup usually takes
more than a year. Much of the taste depends on how the coffee is roasted and prepared. A
year’s work can be ruined quickly, sometimes within seconds, if roasting isn’t done well.
A good roaster will be able to offer the right coffee for the customer. Unfortunately, these
days, price rules, and commercial coffees (those roasted by large operations) are not always
as good as they can be. Blends are often developed according to the price of the coffee, not
the taste. You don’t have to pay a lot of money to get a really good coffee, although as in all
things, you get what you pay for.
Talk to your roaster to learn about the coffees and the flavors and try different origins and
blends to find out what you really like. Many people ask me, “what is the best coffee?” The
range is huge; the answer lies with the beholder.

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53
Roasting Culture
Connie Blumhardt and Jim Fadden

Every year hundreds of coffee roasters set their daily production quotas, green coffee orders, and
equipment maintenance schedules aside for a long weekend to gather with other like-minded
professionals to impart the very information that gives them an advantage in their commercial
pursuits. Others gather in smaller, regional groups across the country, giving up their weekends,
volunteering to share knowledge in the simple pursuit of roasting better coffee.
These gatherings exemplify a unique culture that has evolved around the profession of
roasting specialty coffee. This is a culture of sharing, competition, and education, not with
the goal of winning professional accolades or an improved bottom line, but to advance the
understanding of how the science of coffee roasting yields the art of a perfect beverage. Put
another way, bragging rights around the bonfire after winning a roasting competition come
in a distant second to seeing the look on their peers’ faces when the winning roast is sampled,
when their peers recognize the perfect match of coffee to roast level that brings out the unique
qualities inherent in each coffee based on its origin, variety, processing, and other variables.
There is no playbook to describe the typical background of a successful coffee roaster.
Some approach roasting as a second career, some as an evolution from roasting at home, and
some from having worked many years in the coffee business as baristas. Although there is
no typical career path for becoming a roaster, there are common personality traits of those
that do turn roasting into a profession. Perhaps the words “passionate geek” best describe the
collective personalities of this group. They are passionate not just about the final quality of
their product, but about the proper sourcing of their product, how their product is prepared,
how it is labeled and marketed, even how to evaluate their own work. The excitement and
dedication that is brought to coffee roasting is similar to a master brewer or vintner and has
much in common with artists and musicians. Like conductors unifying the individual sounds
within a symphony, roasters aim for an aesthetic that melds the story of the coffee, the taste
of the coffee, and the look of the coffee together to create not just a taste, but an experience.
In fact, many roasters have an artistic background.
The best coffee roasters exhibit the qualities of the best stereotypically geeky engineers
and designers. Like a designer, a coffee roaster has the responsibility to create a product
for a specific purpose, for example, a blend of a sweet Sumatran coffee with a less acidic
Costa Rican coffee to achieve a particular flavor profile that complements a specific dessert

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Figure 53.1. Roasting at Intelligentsia Coffee, Chicago, 2010. The machine is a heavily refur-
bished Gothot, built originally in the 1930s. Photo by Robert Thurston.

in a restaurant. Like an engineer, they also have the responsibility to efficiently source and
repeatedly manufacture a consistent product. In fact, many coffee roasters also come from
a technical background.
An obsessive focus on the improvement of the methods of roasting coffee is intrinsic in the
culture of the coffee roaster. Roasting coffee involves physics and chemistry to understand and
manipulate variables that transform the hard, dense, green, and relatively tasteless bean into
a light, airy, brown, consumable product. It requires hands-on adjustments of the machinery
and a commitment to record keeping and data analysis. These are the topics that dominate
conversations between roasters, whether at professional gatherings, on public message boards,
or in private conversations and they are discussed passionately. The relative merits of theory
and practice are often openly discussed without regard to business competition but rather with
the focus on raising the bar for all, driving forward improvements in quality.
The evolution of today’s unique culture in specialty coffee is largely a function of the history
of the industry in the twentieth century, of the nature of the job, and of the process required
to become skilled in the field.
The middle of the twentieth century saw the rise of convenience as the prime goal in all
areas of American life. Be it the invention and marketing of time-saving devices like the
dishwasher, the microwave, and the electric can opener or the invention and marketing
of time-saving consumables and services, like the quickie mart, TV dinners, and drive-
through restaurants, consumers were taught that convenience trumped quality. Coffee was
not immune to these trends and the rise of nationally commercialized, roasted and ground
supermarket coffee resulted in the fall of most craft, local, specialty coffee companies. Most,
but not all. A few companies and the roasters that they employed kept the thin thread of
specialty coffee intact during these years. Alfred Peet of Peet’s Coffee, Ted Lingle of Lingle

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330 Connie Blumhardt and Jim Fadden

Bros. Coffee, Paul Katzeff of Thanksgiving Coffee on the West Coast, and Don Shoenholt,
of Gillies Coffee on the East Coast are a few of the individuals that were able to continue
with thriving businesses based on the small lot production of specialty coffee. To succeed,
these individuals had to rely on their own passion and dedication to their craft and on any
help and advice they could glean from each other. A spirit of cooperation developed out of
the necessity to survive against the supermarket giants. Techniques, processes, and sources
of green coffee had to be shared, or risk being lost to history. These influential leaders,
through their openness and their passion, set the foundation of the spirit of cooperation
that continues to be a hallmark of the roasting culture today. They also had the vision to
understand that this knowledge had to continue to be developed and disseminated, leading
to their founding of the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA).
The coffee roaster, by nature of the job, has one foot in the world of the modern consumer
and one in the world of the developing world of the coffee farmer. The way of life for a coffee
roaster requires that the needs of both worlds are well understood and balanced. As a group,
specialty coffee businesses must source their raw materials (green coffee beans) in a manner
that ensures there will be a supply of quality crops well into the future. This extends beyond
the pure economics of balancing the price paid for green coffee beans with the price consum-
ers are willing to pay for the finished product. Roasters carry their culture of education and
passion for quality back to the farmers who cultivate the beans. Many well-traveled roasters
join together to establish cupping labs or give processing advice (gathered from their travels
around the world) to teach farmers to identify both the traits that make high-quality (and
higher-priced) coffee and the defects that render coffee unusable in the specialty market. For
example, the revival of coffee cultivation in Rwanda owes much to the spirit of cooperation
between roasters and farmers. Following the terrible genocide of the 1990s, the Rwandan
coffee farms and markets were in shambles. With the great loss of lives also came the loss of
agricultural tradition and knowledge. A country with all of the key physical attributes to grow
great coffee— the proper soil, elevation, and ideal climate—had no knowledge of the qualities
that constitute specialty coffee and how to grow and process the beans to meet those exacting
qualities. Through working closely with government and academic aid agencies, roasters coop-
eratively engaged with the Rwandan farmers and processors to improve the quality and, conse-
quently, the sales volume and price of a key component in the Rwandan economic model. The
roasters benefited from a new, exceptional flavor profile that became popular with consumers,
allowing the roasters to command a higher market value as well. This would not be possible if
it weren’t for the culture of cooperation and the desire to enhance the understanding of coffee
among the roaster community.
The obsession of the roasting community for increasing their understanding of coffee and
the desire to communicate to others this understanding owes itself in large part to the pro-
cess by which one becomes a coffee roaster. Coffee roasting is an experience-based skill. It is
not something that can be mastered through book study; all the senses must be trained and
engaged. Beyond the obvious mastery of the palate, coffee is produced through use of sight
to identify the proper roast level, through the use of hearing to interpret the story told by the
cracking of the beans as they near completion, and certainly by the use of the scent in both
identifying the different stages of the roasting process and in sampling the finished product.
Coffee roasting is learned through apprenticeship, through the tutelage of a more experienced
roaster, through hands-on experience (trial and error), and through the roaster community at
large. As shown earlier, today’s coffee roasters stand on the shoulders of those that kept the
flame burning during the commercial coffee years. The traits of those roasters, mainly their

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openness, cooperation, appreciation of the craft, and pursuit of quality, attracted people with
the same qualities to become coffee roasters. Building on the model of the SCAA, a variety of
guilds, regional groups, conferences, and educational resources have been developed to aug-
ment the traditional mentor-apprentice model.
The identity of the coffee roasting community is dynamic. There are numerous changes in
the business of coffee that will challenge today’s version of the roaster’s culture. How will the
increasing use of automation in the roasting process affect the community? Will increasing
competition for the specialty coffee segment lead to a more closed culture, one that is less
willing to cooperate? Will traditionally underrepresented subcultures of coffee roasters, for
example women roasters, raise the bar for the next generation? How these questions play out
will undoubtedly impact the next generation of coffee roasters. But if the next generation is
drawn by the same core characteristics of quality, passion, and curiosity, then the culture and
identity of the specialty coffee roaster will remain intact.

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54
Barista Culture
Sarah Allen

When Danish barista Fritz Storm breezed into the opening cocktail reception of the Specialty
Coffee Association of America’s annual conference in Boston in 2003, there was an air about
him—something special. A handful of young people looked up, recognition registering in
their expressions, and they hustled after him, catching up to Storm as he sipped from a glass
of wine. “You’re Fritz Storm, right? You’re the World Barista Champion?”
Nearby, crowds turned toward the commotion—World what? they wondered. The concept,
in 2003, of a barista being a champion of anything was completely foreign to 95 percent of
those gathered in Boston for this, the world’s largest gathering of specialty coffee professionals.
Just across the ocean in Scandinavia, however, while it wasn’t exactly commonplace, the
professional barista was a known commodity. Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Storm’s home
country of Denmark were known in the early 2000s as breeding grounds for the best and
brightest coffee craftspeople. While the word barista is Italian in origin, it was in Scandinavia
that specialty coffee artisans were breaking ground for an international industry. It would take
less than a decade for the concept to sweep the world.
The original and, to this day, most well-respected barista competition is the World Barista
Championship (WBC), of which Fritz was the second titleholder. Developed by Norwegians
Alf Kramer and Tone Liavaag, the WBC was intended to provide specialty coffee with a seri-
ous stage upon which coffee excellence could be brought to the public. While most coffee
lovers are familiar with the concept of the barista as the serviceperson from whom they buy
daily lattes, few—especially in 2003—understood the complexity of the work, including
many of the baristas themselves.
The growth of the WBC was undeniably aided by the introduction of two other establish-
ments designed to reach the masses of undereducated coffee professionals, who up until this
point had very few options for professional development: the Barista Guild of America, which
was formed in late 2002, and the trade publication Barista Magazine, which launched in 2005.
While the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) along with sister associations
in Europe, Japan, and other parts of the world were by their very nature charged with the
education of this specific industry, those organizations have, until recently, focused the bulk
of their efforts on the professional development of the people recognized as leaders and future
principals of the industry: coffee roasting companies primarily. In the first few years of 2000,

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Figure 54.1. Pete Licata of the Honolulu Coffee Company winning the United States Barista
Championship in 2011. Photo by Ralph Gaston.

baristas were still considered temporary blips on the specialty coffee radar—kids who worked
with coffee as a college job, who weren’t going to stick around to develop a career in the in-
dustry. So why provide them with costly training seminars and materials?
Those early organizers of the WBC—which bore the necessary national barista competi-
tions to generate champions to perform at the international level—along with the Barista
Guild of America (BGA) and Barista Magazine, however, recognized something profound
in this young community of baristas: potential. And truly, the mere existence of a guild, a
structured competition, and a targeted journal lent confidence to this young faction of coffee
obsessives, who thought to themselves, if all these people and organizations are providing us with
professional resources, perhaps we can truly become professionals.
Over the next five years, this confidence only grew: baristas outside of Scandinavia were
beginning to identify themselves as craftspeople, to dedicate their time and money to grow-
ing their passion, and to set their sights on careers as professional baristas. This occurred
particularly in the United States, and the mindset grew fast. By 2008, a mutual respect could
be observed between the leading baristas from both sides of the Atlantic. When questioned
about their line of work, countless people were starting the answer with “I’m a barista,” add-
ing almost as an afterthought, “oh, and I also own my own café.” Pockets of the U.S. were
identified as the leading areas for barista excellence, among them Chicago, San Francisco,
Milwaukee, Austin, and most of all, Portland, Oregon. And many readers might be wonder-
ing at this point, What about Seattle? Isn’t that where this all started? True, the green mermaid’s
hometown changed specialty coffee forever when it debuted in the early 1990s. In fact, every
independent, artisan café owes a debt of gratitude to Starbucks for introducing the espresso
lexicon to the American public; before Starbucks, only a handful of people knew what a latte
was, and virtually no one ordered one by name. But Starbucks was, as they say in the coffee

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334 Sarah Allen

industry, second wave coffee culture. People knew that coffee that was better than the freeze-
dried stuff their parents drank was available; it was out there for the taking. But they not only
were clueless about the story behind the coffee, they didn’t care to learn it.
Café owners who define the present-day third wave took a cue from Starbucks by designing
specialized café menus and firmly planting the barista in front of the clientele as the important
point-person in the transaction of coffee buying. But third wavers went a step further—make
that many steps further. Pulitzer Prize–winning food critic Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly
says it like this: “The first wave of America coffee culture was probably the nineteenth-century
surge that put Folgers on every table, and the second wave was the proliferation, starting in
the 1960s at Peets and moving smartly through the Starbucks grande decaf latte, of espresso
drinks and regionally labeled coffee. We are now in the third wave of coffee connoisseurship,
where beans are sourced from farms instead of countries, roasting is about bringing out rather
than incinerating the unique characteristics of each bean, and the flavor is hard and true.”1
Further, the third wave defines the barista as a studied educator. Rather than the button-
pusher service people they were in the second wave, baristas at quality cafés are expected to
complete rigorous, sometimes months-long training on not only coffee and espresso prepara-
tion, but coffee history, in-depth discussions of particular farms and regions, extensive cup-
pings, and palate development.
A great example of third wave coffee at work is the Stumptown Annex, located in Portland.
Stumptown has long been considered one of the most persnickety, quality-driven coffee roast-
ing and café companies in the world. Its baristas not only train initially and repeatedly, but
they are offered superb health care and dental benefits in addition to excellent salaries. Stump-
town pours its resources into its people not only because, as owner Duane Sorenson says, “it’s
just the right thing to do,” but also because such benefits and treatment build loyalty; more
than 50 percent of Stumptown’s baristas have been with the company for more than five years.
Sorenson opened the Stumptown Annex in 2005, just two doors down from one of its
most popular cafés. The Annex, as it’s referred to, isn’t a café, however—it’s more of a tast-
ing room in the same vein as tasting rooms one would find at top wineries. The small space
contains between ten and twenty glass jars of whole coffee beans at any time, showcasing
the best of the best of what Stumptown currently has on offer. Educated baristas are eager
to talk about coffee flavors and nuances, discuss geographical details about specific coffee
farms, and guide customers through cupping sessions. Free public cuppings are offered
twice a day, every day of the week.
The thinking behind the uber-educated barista is simple: engage the customer in the
experience of coffee, and he or she becomes empowered; therefore the customer himself
becomes an ambassador for the specialty coffee craft. The theory goes hand in hand with
the slow food movement: if people are engaged in and connected to their consumables,
they’ll be loyal to them.
Of course, the average café rarely has the resources to provide this level of education to its
staff of baristas. But a motivated barista can still build his or her resume, while developing
passion for coffee, through a multitude of other channels.
The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) offers classes in education and train-
ing to any barista worldwide who signs up for one of the organization’s classes. Workshops are
taught in various locations, around the United States primarily, and sometimes in conjunc-
tion with a trade show or coffee-related event. The only downside to the SCAA’s classes and
workshops is that they often come with hefty price tags, though some discounts are available.

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There are still many other options for the enthusiastic barista to further his or her educa-
tion—and do it without spending big bucks. Independent trade shows, for example Coffee
Fest, which takes place three times a year in different parts of the United States, offer great
classes and workshops, a full trade show floor with a bent toward the independent café owner,
and fun events such as a latte art competition, all for less than $50 for a weekend.
The SCAA-run Barista Guild of America debuted a wonderful retreat concept in 2011 called
Camp Pull-A-Shot, where around 150 baristas gathered in a woodsy camp setting in Southern
California for three days of nonstop barista education and activities. The no-frills camp was
plenty comfortable for the baristas, who were pleased with the low cost (around $550 for room,
board, and all educational classes) that the BGA could offer for such rustic accommodations.
The success was so great that a second West Coast Camp took place a year later, and the BGA is
now working on an East Coast Camp, to take place in the summer of 2012.
Still more resources exist for baristas, and there are plenty that baristas can study from the
comfort of their own home, such as the online social network Barista Exchange, which is
essentially Facebook for coffee people. All are welcome to set up an account for free, cruise
forums on coffee trends, and ask for advice from the more than 10,000 registered users.
There’s a reason camaraderie comes so easily when a group of coffee people come together:
baristas often share personality traits such as a curiosity for mechanics, a social nature, and the
kind of character that becomes passionate. The barista community can be likened to musi-
cians: there is a common ground they have right away, they tend to be artistic and intelligent,
and they like to socialize and have fun.
Another commonality is that they often make a low wage. While there has been maturation
of the concept of the barista as a professional in the United States in years past, most coffee
professionals still make a fairly low wage (except in some pockets of the country like Portland,
San Francisco, and New York). While employers understand the need to take care of their
baristas by paying them enough money that the baristas take their jobs seriously as well as stick
around for several years to make the investment into training time worth it, independent café
owners have a hard enough time paying themselves a livable wage. It’s the nature of coffee,
just like any other facet of the service industry.
Barista competitions and the proliferation of educated baristas who can share the amazing
story of coffee with customers are leading the way in bringing the professional barista the
esteem he or she deserves. But while the growth of the barista community and the barista as a
craftsperson has grown enormously in the last decade, really, it’s only the beginning.

NOTE

1. Jonathan Gold, “La Mill: The Latest Buzz,” http://www.laweekly.com/2008-03-13/eat-drink/the

-latest-buzz, accessed August 22, 2013.

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55
Brewing Culture
Alf Kramer

If you promise not to tell the geeks, brewing is both fairly simple, regardless of method, and
universal. With the use of water, you extract some soluble substances from the bean, around
1.5 percent in the final solution, the liquor. Then you get coffee and drink it. Easy as that.
Now, if you want a fine coffee, the process becomes more difficult. If you want superb coffee,
some science has to be introduced into brewing. Some will claim that at this level, the task
is more advanced than rocket science, but that may be going too far. Any number of myths,
fairy tales, and beliefs clutter the picture. But luckily for those who believe in science, quality
brewing is measurable. It has been for a while, but now it is even easy. That said, one thing
is not measurable, human coffee taste preferences. These most certainly change from time to
time, place to place, from fashion to fashion, or what we might call culture to culture. That’s
what this article is all about.

HOW IT ALL STARTED

Some of the oldest cultures of extraction from the coffee tree may date back 2,000 years. Are
those ancient techniques actually still around today? No; they concerned extraction from the
leaves of the coffee tree, not the fruit or the seeds. In western Ethiopia, on the border with
Sudan, tribes still collect leaves from the wild coffee trees. People ferment the leaves, dry them,
and infuse them the way we use the leaves of Camellia sinencis, the original tea bush. They
sweeten the brew with honey, add some spices, and drink it. Whether we should call it coffee
or tea is optional. Let us say it tastes different than just about any of today’s coffee liquor. In
recent years, a coffee leaf beverage has actually been recycled in El Salvador and presented as
“breaking news.” Time flies.

THE IDEA OF BREWING

Brewing concerns the extraction from the roasted bean. And while brewing tea in its present
form is some 5,000 years old, brewing coffee in its present form is more like 500 years old,

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depending on who writes the history. The original Ethiopian coffee ceremony is in principle
the same as brewing tea, but with finely ground beans. The Ottoman Turks really set the ball
rolling. A quick look back in history shows that there were advanced coffeehouses not only
in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul but also in other parts of the Ottoman empire including
North Africa, the Balkans, and Greece, where the Turks were uninvited guests for some 400
years. They left a lot behind wherever they went, including coffee-brewing culture, that is still
very much alive and kicking.

INDIGENOUS COFFEE CULTURE

The Turks’ brewing method was, and is based on the cezve, or in Greek the ibrik or brikki.
This is by far the most dominant brewing culture in the areas known as the old Ottoman
empire. In the home it still dominates, in the rural coffeehouses it is equally important, but
in the more urban areas espresso culture is gaining a foothold. No statistics are available, but
there are good reasons to believe that until very recently, more coffee was brewed around the
world using a cezve/ibrik than an espresso machine. There are after all more than 150 mil-
lion consumers in Turkey and Egypt alone, and there are 5 million coffee-drinking Turks in
various European countries.

EARLY BREWING

The cezve/ibrik method is really the mother of all brewing cultures. In order to speed up the
extraction process, the surface area of the coffee is enlarged through grinding. The grind is very
fine, although there are huge cultural differences in roasting colors; then water is added and
heated to a boil. That may be repeated with or without sugar, depending on the culture. The
principles are the same more or less in the Ethiopian coffee brewing ceremony.
The concept caught on. More and more people enjoyed the beverage. The advantages with
this brewing culture were obvious. The equipment was minimal and inexpensive, heating was
simple. Turkish coffee—or “Greek,” “Mediterranean,” and so on, depending on where it was
served—became both fashionable and an affordable luxury. The disadvantages were several:
volumes in the cezve were limited; the very fine coffee grounds could blend with the beverage in
an unpleasant way, even though most of the grounds sank to the bottom of the cezve/ibrik; and
the procedure was time consuming. For a few hundred years, brewing principles remained the
same, and nothing new really happened. Then came three major developments and inventions.

BREWING IN A COFFEE KETTLE

Volumes were increased by introducing a large cezve, or rather a kettle, as seen over the
campfire and on stoves in thousands of homes throughout the world. Now called the steeping
method, this technique was dominant in most of the world until well after the World War II.
Under this brewing heading we must include the percolator, which re-extracted the coffee
again and again. It became the same kiss of death to fine coffee culture that tomato ketchup
became to fine gastronomy. But volume certainly increased. This kind of coffee is still around,
but mainly as a part of hiking in the wilderness.

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FILTER BREWING

A second invention was even more successful. In the early twentieth century, Madame Mel-
lita Benz came up with the idea to put the grounds in a filter, thus keeping them out of the
extracted coffee. Her idea prevented, to some extent, overextraction, and a particle-free coffee
was certainly more pleasant to drink. It proved an extremely good idea; today roughly 70–80
percent of coffee worldwide now passes through a filter, not through the original fabric but
through paper or metal.

AT LAST, ITALIAN BREWING CULTURE

One disadvantage to the old techniques was that they were time consuming. In earlier times
that was not really an issue. We had time, and, as in the Japanese tea ceremony, the process
was often as important as the end result. But then came the industrial revolution with its de-
mands for efficiency and the development of machines that, by adding pressure, could speed
up brewing time to an express rate (see “The Espresso Menu”). By the 1950s a new brewing
culture had arisen, 500 years after the original idea of brewing coffee beans by extraction. Let
us call it a native Italian coffee culture that gradually is conquering the world.
With the exception of soluble, there have been no other major innovations in brewing
cultures. Recent developments are really variations of the above, or recycling or reinventions
of half-forgotten brewing ideas, like the Chemex.
Painting with a broad brush and without hard evidence, we may make the educated guess
that filter coffee amounts for some 70–80 percent of all coffee drunk, espresso 5–10 percent,
soluble around 10 percent, cezve/ibrik 5 percent plus, and other means, like extracts, syrups,
pods, and so forth about 5 percent. Of course, vast differences exist from country to country.
Italy altogether, in and out of home, comes in at about 90 percent espresso, Norway 1 percent.
The UK drinks 70 percent soluble, others no more than 5 to 10 percent.

MEASURABLE QUALITY

While brewing methods slowly improved, the idea of measuring quality made a huge leap
forward from the 1950s onwards. At that time the Pan American Coffee Bureau in New York
made studies that lifted brewing quality to science by introducing measurable results for ex-
traction related to brew strength.
The Bureau realized that brew strength can only be measured by the relation between water
and coffee in the extracted solution. The amount of soluble solids extracted is another variable.
Combining the two parameters allows measurement of the ideal extraction in a brew within
the given brew strength. This is based on the theory that the ideal extraction is between 18
and 22 percent and that this extraction arrives at a combination of particle size in the grind,
brewing time, and water temperature, regardless of coffee quality.
By measuring the weight of the ground coffee before and after extraction, the exact ex-
traction rate can be concluded. A hydrometer can also be used, just as in measuring alcohol
strength in wine. The same parameters of time and temperature can then be used to assess the
quality of filter brewers. This is all time consuming, but with recent development of electronic
refractometers, the horizon is broadened and measuring made easy.

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The Pan American Coffee Bureau unfortunately closed in the early 1970s, but the tech-
nology, the literature, and the equipment were transferred to Norwegian coffee-brewing
companies and adapted there. The trade wholeheartedly adapted it all. At the time, per capita
consumption in the U.S. and in Norway were the same, some six kilos per year. But when the
Norwegian trade adapted the Pan American system, per capita consumption nearly doubled.
With a few exceptions, this scientific brewing culture was elsewhere ignored or forgotten. It
was replaced by the ideology that if you use commodity coffee you can get more out of each
bean and save money. Consequently the total market did not increase with growing wealth
and population. Many variables influence the total market in coffee, but as 80 percent of con-
sumption was filter, coffee brew strength would necessarily have a major influence.
The dreadful ideology of more from the beans and the business concept of saving money
at home were based on the fact that a great number of consumers did not taste the difference
between bitter, overextracted, and strong coffee; they could not sense the ratio between water
and coffee. It therefore became tempting to roast darker, grind finer, and overextract in the
brewing process. The brew became measurably more bitter, but consumers could mask this
taste by adding sugar and milk. That said, both sugar and milk are, deserved or undeserved,
getting negative reputations in the specialty market, and an increasing number of consumers
are trying to avoid them.
The market is thus mainly divided between the industrial and the specialty coffee lines.
If the brew is overextracted, all coffees basically taste the same, so why bother with a quality
coffee? Or the other way around: if you buy a quality coffee, you need proper brewing or the
extra money is wasted.
For the specialty coffee community, it is vitally important that coffee is brewed properly.
The market segment of quality coffee is small, and it can only expand through quality brew-
ing. The parameters for quality brewing became known in the 1950s. They were practiced
with huge success in Norway for four decades, contributing to a stable market for all coffees.

WHAT NEXT?

A lot of differences in coffee have appeared since the 1950s. Coffee beans and their processing
methods, roasting, brewing technology, and above all, consumer habits and preferences have
changed. There is a polarization of qualities in the marketplace. The Speciality Coffee Asso-
ciation of Europe has therefore launched a long-term scientific program to look deeper into
the parameters for coffee quality as seen by consumers. The SCAE has in mind not consumers
in general but those who drink fine specialty coffees. What exactly their taste preferences are
depend on time, place, habits, and perception of quality. In short, preferences depend on cof-
fee culture. The first findings of these studies will be presented in the near future; more will
follow in time to come. Worldwide brewing cultures and preferences are a complex science.
Whether it is universal remains to be seen.

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COFFEE AND HEALTH

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56
The Long Debate over Coffee and Health
Robert W. Thurston

In his chapter in this volume, Lawrence Jones discusses recent scientific findings on coffee and
health. This section provides a brief treatment of the periodic public debate about the drink’s
effect on the mind and the body. Since its initial appearance in England, coffee has been the
subject of grand claims for its health benefits and vigorous counterthrusts alleging that it causes
substantial harm. These exchanges form another chapter in the social history of the beverage.
Just like traveling to a foreign country, the expectations anyone has about a food or a drink
often go far to condition the experience of trying it. We have all heard stories, for example, of
the guy who claimed to be really drunk on beer, only to find out that he had been drinking a
non-alcoholic brew. Sweet substances appeal immediately to people who have never had them
before. But for most other food or beverages, a process of education, formal or informal, has
to be under way to make any item appealing. This is especially so for liquids that are either not
sweet, like beer, or whose natural sweetness may not be evident, for example mediocre coffee.
As the anthropologist Sidney Mintz wrote, “What constitutes ‘good food,’ like what consti-
tutes good weather, a good spouse, or a fulfilling life, is a social, not a biological, matter. Good
food, as [the French anthropologist Claude] Levi-Strauss suggested long ago, must be good
to think about before it becomes good to eat.”1 The expectation that coffee would be good to
drink, or at least good for the body, appeared early in the story of coffee in the Western world.

DEBATING COFFEE AND HEALTH

The first known coffee advertisement in the West, a broadside posted on London walls and
poles, dates from 1652. It emphasized the health benefits, not the taste or pleasure, that the
drink supposedly conferred. All spelling and emphases are in the original for this and other
documents mentioned below. The 1652 broadside announced that coffee “closes the Orifice
of the Stomack, and fortifies the heat within.” Coffee is “very good to help digestion . . .
[it] quickens the Spirits, and makes the Heart Lightsome. It is good against sore Eys. . . . It
suppresseth Fumes exceedingly, and therefore good against the Head-ach. . . . It will prevent
Drowsiness, and make one fit for busines.” In a final promotional touch, the ad claimed that,
“It is observed that in Turkey, where this is generally drunk, that they are not trobled with the

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344 Robert W. Thurston

Stone, Gout, Dropsie, or Scurvey, and that their Skins are exceeding cleer and white.”2 Although
the Turks were Christian Europe’s grave enemy at this point, they were considered a fierce and
worthy opponent, not the “Sick Man” that perplexed the continent in later years. Thus their
favorite drink was something that commanded respect in 1652.
The first known newspaper ad, in London in 1657, follows the same lines in regard to cof-
fee and health, but without reference to the Turks. To the points made in the earlier broadside,
this announcement adds the notion that coffee is useful in warding off gout and the “King’s
Evil,” scrofula, a disfiguring skin disease.3
But a counterattack soon arose, claiming that coffee undid men who drank it. The infa-
mous and oft-quoted “Women’s Petition against Coffee” of 1674, with the author given as
Well-Willer, blasted coffee as
that drying, enfeebling liquor. . . . [coffee has led to] Decay of that true Old English Vigor; our Gal-
lants being every way so Frenchified, that they are become meer Cock-sparrows, fluttering things
that come on Sa sa, with a world of Fury, but are not able to stand to it, and in the very first
Charge fall down flat before us. Never did Men wear greater Breeches, or carry less in them of any
Mettle whatsoever. . . . Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called
COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture,
has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Im-
potent as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.
[Coffee induces men] to run a Whoreing after such distructive variety of Foraign liquors, to trifle
away their time, scald their Chops, and spend their Money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty,
bitter, stinking, nauseous Puddle-water. . . .
[Men] run the hazard of being Cuckol’d by Dildo’s. . . . We Humbly Pray [that] Drinking COF-
FEE may on severe penalties be forbidden to all Persons under the Age of Threescore; and that
instead thereof, Lusty nappy Beer, Cock-Ale, Cordial Canaries, Restoring Malago’s, and Back-recruiting
Chochole be Recommended to General Use.4

The Petition makes for good reading. But it would be unwise to take it too seriously, or
as a general statement of what women thought of coffee. First, we have no idea who actually
wrote it, or even if women had any role in its composition. Second, it is not addressed to
any particular authority, but “To the Right Honorable the Keepers of the Liberties of Venus;
The Worshipful Court of Female-Assistants, &c.” Third, if women wrote it, they may have
been protesting their exclusion from early English coffeehouses more than registering their
loathing for the drink itself. Fourth, the pamphlet is as much a nationalistic tract as anything
else; the disparaging references to the French demonstrate that point. Fifth, the Petition was
only one of many pamphlets scorning, or appearing to scorn, the use of coffee, other drinks,
and tobacco in the same period.5 Finally, the Petition was of no avail against the rising tide
of coffee in England. Both the number of coffeehouses and the consumption of the brew in
the country continued to increase into the eighteenth century. Later tea displaced coffee in
Britain; but that is another story.
Somewhat more serious in the debate about coffee and health were attacks from the French
side of the channel. There, too, the question may have been largely about national tastes and
identity: “We note with horror,” wrote a doctor from Marseilles in 1679, “that this beverage
. . . has tended almost completely to disaccustom people from the enjoyment of wine.” An-
other physician asserted several years later that coffee “dried up the cerebrospinal fluid and the
convolutions . . . the upshot being general exhaustion, paralysis, and impotence.”6
On the other hand, another Marseilles figure, the apothecary Philippe Sylvester Dufour,
published an enthusiastic work on coffee in 1671, De l’usage du caphé, du thé, et du chocolate
(On the usage of coffee, tea, and chocolate).7 This book “was generally regarded as propaganda

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The Long Debate over Coffee and Health 345

for the beverage; and indeed, it proved an excellent advertisement, being translated into Eng-
lish in 1685.”8 The translation was entitled The Manner of Making of Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate
as it is used In most parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. With their Vertues.9 In that same
year, Dufour published Traitez nouveaux & curieux du café, du thé et du chocolate: ouvrage égale-
ment nécessaire aux médecins, & à tous ceux qui aiment leur santé (literally A new and curious
treatment of coffee, tea, and chocolate: a work equally necessary for doctors and all who love
their health).10 This book quickly appeared in German, Dutch, and Latin; an English version
came out within months of the French original as Treatise new and interesting on coffee, tea, and
chocolate: a work equally necessary to doctors and to all those who like their health.11 Dufour now
made extensive claims for coffee, as well as tea and chocolate—then known only as a bever-
age—as “three of the Drugs whereof Heaven has shewed itself liberal to Men. These have re-
quired so great a vogue or credit, and so particular an esteem through all Europe by the signal
effects which they are daily found to produce in an infinite number of People, who make use
thereof with good success that I have thought it a thing of great importance to communicate
to the publique some Discourses and Treatises made on this Subject.”12
The wide acceptance of the Treatise overrode most objections to coffee. Especially in
France, where Dufour’s countrymen discovered in the eighteenth century that they could
make large profits by importing beans from the colony of St. Domingue (now Haiti), criti-
cisms of coffee subsided.
Yet doubts about the drink and health continued. It was not until 1819 that the German
Friedlieb Runge isolated the most active ingredient in coffee. For lack of a better name, he
called it caffeine. It was already clear that something in coffee quickened the pulse—blood
pressure had not yet been discovered—and had, as the first ad suggested in 1652, a certain
“drying” effect. That is, drinking coffee increased the rate of urination. Beyond those points,
little could be said with certainty about coffee’s effect on the body for some time to come.
Lack of precise knowledge did not deter new critics. By the late nineteenth century, a fresh
battleground opened over coffee, this time in America. In the great age of advertising, hype,
and concern about emotional disorders, an assault on coffee and the touting of substitute
beverages supposedly much better for health was probably inevitable. Now the critics focused
on coffee’s purported effect on “nerves.” The most fashionable ailment of the period was the
newly coined “neurasthenia,” a syndrome that rendered middle- and upper-class Americans
unable to do much more than lie in bed and worry.
In a broad but unscientific campaign to improve Americans’ minds and bodies, the new
competing drinks were grain beverages. The first acclaimed inventor of a grain brew was
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the breakfast cereal king and creator of quack diets and cures for
nervous diseases. In the 1890s he assigned much of the blame for those problems and many
others on coffee and argued that “Tea and coffee are baneful drugs and their sale and use ought
to be prohibited by law.”13 Instead he served “Caramel Coffee,” a grain product.
But a stay at Kellogg’s Michigan sanatorium failed to soothe the nerves of C. W. Post, the
second cereal mogul of the period. Striking out on his own, Post more or less copied Kellogg’s
drink with one of his own, the much more successful Postum. An ad of 1907 instructed
readers on “How to Lie Awake—DRINK COFFEE. Then after a while you can have a round
with Nervous Prostration. Plain old Common Sense suggests leave off the irritating, delusive
drug and use POSTUM.”14 In the next year, another Postum ad featured a testimonial from a
young man “Nearly wrecked by coffee.”15
Meanwhile, in 1883 Harvey M. Wiley, M.D., became the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s
first chief chemist. He soon began to campaign for a pure food and drug act, modeled after a
British law of 1875. Congress finally passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, largely written by

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346 Robert W. Thurston

Wiley, in 1906.16 Unfortunately, he also became an anti-coffee crusader. In 1910 he maintained

in a speech that “coffee drunkenness is a commoner failing than the whiskey habit . . . This
country is full of tea and coffee drunkards. The most common drug in this country is caffeine.”17
Needless to say, the coffee industry fought back hard, albeit in a confused manner at first.
Some roasters claimed that they had eliminated the harmful ingredients in coffee, for example
the “tannin-bearing chaff.”18 The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, established in 1901 as Ameri-
can industry’s voice for both beverages, mounted a more concerted campaign of pro-coffee
advertising and information. After its founding in 1911, the National Coffee Roasters Associa-
tion, now the National Coffee Association of USA, promoted two “national coffee weeks, one
in 1914 and another in 1915, wherein an excellent foundation was laid for the big joint coffee-
trade propaganda that followed.”19 In 1920 the Association published a series of pamphlets
for doctors, explaining none too subtly that coffee was not harmful in reasonable amounts.20
Between the coffee men, the force of habit, and the tremendous boost that World War I gave
to the consumption of coffee, at least by American soldiers overseas, the puddle water won.
Another wave of attacks on coffee appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, warning against irrita-
tion or even violence among couples allegedly caused by “stale” coffee, as Chase and Sanborn
claimed. Postum comic-strip-style ads in the 1930s featured an evil ghost, Mr. Coffee Nerves,
who tried to keep nervous insomniacs on coffee, only to be chased away by the grain drink.21
Sanka—a word drawn from the French “sans caffeine”—continued to target regular coffee as
the cause of anxiety and sleeplessness into the 1970s. Kraft Foods, which had acquired Pos-
tum, discontinued the drink in 2007 but plans to reoffer it starting in June 2012. Other grain
beverages are available. A few rearguard actions damning coffee are still going on,22 but they
appear to have little or no impact on the public.
A report published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, too late for Law-
rence Jones to discuss in his article, describes the effects of coffee among more than 400,000
Americans tracked from 1995 to 2008. The investigators adjusted for tobacco use, which
muddied many previous surveys. The results show that coffee drinking is “inversely associated
with most major causes of death in both men and women, including heart disease, respiratory
disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections.”23 That is, people who drink
coffee are significantly less likely to suffer from those problems. These findings match other
recent conclusions. Presumably coffee users have fewer accidents and injuries because they are
on average more alert.
Even though coffee drinkers eat more red meat, exercise less, and use more alcohol than
nondrinkers do, the coffee crowd lives longer. Men who drank four or five cups a day through
2008 registered 88 percent of the mortality of non-users. For women, drinking four or five
cups reduced mortality to 84 percent of the nondrinkers’ figure. No difference appeared be-
tween those who drank decaf and those who drank regular coffee. People who never smoked
or who had stopped at the time the survey began, but did drink coffee, had the lowest mortal-
ity rate of all.24 Since a cup of coffee contains more than 1,000 chemical compounds, some-
thing besides caffeine is at work. Scientists don’t know which compounds help, but clearly
coffee benefits most people.
New uses for coffee, for instance as a key ingredient in soap, have appeared in recent years.
There is still more good news, if only for brunettes. Instead of paying extra for potions to color
their hair between visits to the beautician, they “should rinse with 2 cups of cool black coffee
over damp hair in the shower; leave on for 10 minutes, then shampoo.” This keeps highlights
from fading until the pros can take over again.25

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The Long Debate over Coffee and Health 347

Harvey Wiley was correct in saying that caffeine was the country’s favorite drug, and that
is still true today, as it is around the world. But now it seems clear, for most people who use
coffee moderately, that the beverage is much more beneficial than harmful. Drink it down or
pour it on: coffee is good for you either way.

NOTES

1. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking,
1985), 8.
2. In William H. Ukers, All about Coffee, 2nd ed. (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino, 2006 [originally
published 1935]), 50.
3. Ukers, All about Coffee, 470.
4. A Well-Willer, To the Right Honorable the Keepers of the Liberties of Venus; The Worshipful Court
of Female-Assistants, &c. The Humble Petition and Address of several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women,
Languishing in Extremity of Want, 1674, available in the collection Early English Books on Line.
5. Ukers, All about Coffee, 65–68.
6. Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
(New York: Basic Books, 1999), 8–9.
7. I have not yet been able to locate this work; it is mentioned on WorldCat under its title as pub-
lished in Lyon by J. Girin et B. Rivière, 1671. By 1685 an English version of this book was published;
see note 16.
8. Ukers, All about Coffee, 471.
9. Philippe Sylvestre Dufour, The Manner of Making of Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate as it is used in most
parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. With their Vertues, 1685.
10. Philippe Sylvestre Dufour, Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, and Bartolomeo Marradon, Traitez
nouveaux & curieux du café, du thé et du chocolate: ouvrage également nécessaire aux médecins, & à tous
ceux qui aiment leur santé, 1685.
11. Treatise new and interesting on coffee, tea, and chocolate: a work equally necessary to doctors and to
all those who like their health, 1685.
12. Treatise new and interesting on coffee, tea, and chocolate, 4–5.
13. Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 97.
14. The image can be found at http://www.amazon.com/Postum-Cereal-Coffee-Breakfast-ADVER
TISING/dp/B005DGXIR8, accessed February 5, 2012.
15. http://www.periodpaper.com/index.php/subject-advertising-art/food-soda/coffee/1908-vintage
-print-ad-postum-drink-coffee-substitute, accessed February 4, 2012.
16. http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/CentennialofFDA/HarveyW.Wiley/
default.htm, accessed February 5, 2012.
17. Quoted in Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 108.
18. Ukers, All about Coffee, 473.
19. Ukers, All about Coffee, 473–77; quote on 477.
20. Examples are in Ukers, All about Coffee, 474.
21. Examples can be found at http://mattauber.blogspot.com/2010/08/mr-coffee-nerves.html, ac-
cessed February 7, 2012.
22. See T. R. Reid, “Caffeine,” National Geographic, January 2005.
23. Neal D. Freedman, Yikyung Par, Christian C. Abnet, Albert R. Hollenbeck, and Rashmi Sinha,
“Association of coffee drinking with total and cause-specific mortality,” The New England Journal of
Medicine 366, no. 20 (May 17, 2012): 1897.
24. Freedman et al., “Association of coffee drinking,” 1894, 1897.
25. Bobbi Brown in Health (January–February 2012): 28.

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57
Caffeine
How Much Is in Your Cup,
and How Much Is Bad for You?
Robert W. Thurston

Investigators disagree on the amount of caffeine in an “average” cup or espresso shot. That is
partly because it’s impossible to say what an average portion is, partly because different variet-
ies of beans contain different amounts of caffeine and partly because the way coffee is made
affects the amount of caffeine it contains.
The amount of caffeine in coffee beans may vary from harvest to harvest or tree to tree,
perhaps even from the berries at the bottom of a tree to those at the top. Brewing time and
methods can result in different levels of caffeine from the same beans. Meanwhile, U.S. federal
regulations state that for any coffee to be labeled decaffeinated, 97 percent of the caffeine has
to be removed. But that says nothing about how much caffeine actually remains in the drink!
In short, there is no way to tell how much caffeine is in your drink without testing it. Table
57.1 lists estimates for coffee, tea, Red Bull, and one stay-awake pill.

Table 57.1. Estimates of Caffeine in Beverages

National Geographic
Brewed coffee, 12-oz. cup 200 mg
Espresso, 1-oz. shot 40 mg
Brewed tea, 8-oz. cup 50 mg
Red Bull, 8.3-oz. can 80 mg
Dicum and Luttinger
Drip arabica coffee (8 oz.) 95 mg
Drip robusta coffee (8 oz.) 130 mg
Espresso, from arabica (1.5–2.0 oz.) 95 mg
NoDoz 100 mg
Harvard Health Letter, January 2012
8-oz. short cup of Starbucks bold coffee 180 mg
8-oz. cup of Lipton green tea 35 mg
8.4 oz. can of Red Bull 80 mg
Mayo Clinic, “Nutrition and Healthy Eating,” October 2011
“Generic brewed coffee,” 8 oz. 95–200 mg
Sources: T. R. Reid, “Caffeine,” National Geographic 207, no. 1 (January
2005); Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger, The Coffee Book: Anatomy
of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop (1999), 117.

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Caffeine 349

A study at the University of Florida College of Medicine tested ten coffee samples of decaf-
feinated coffee from different shops; the drinks contained a range of 0 caffeine to 13.9 mg
per 16-ounce serving. The researchers also tested Starbucks espresso and brewed coffee from
one store; these samples registered between 3.0 and 15.8 mg/shot of espresso and 12.0–13.4
mg/16-oz. serving of the brewed coffee.1 A Mayo Clinic report found that “eight ounces of
generic, brewed decaffeinated coffee” can contain from 2 to 12 mg of caffeine, while one
ounce of “espresso, restaurant-style, decaffeinated” can have from 0 to 15 mg.2 At the upper
level of these numbers, caffeine intake can be a problem for people with high blood pressure
or various other medical conditions and of course for anyone who is simply intolerant to caf-
feine. Since the chemical is also found in chocolate, many over-the-counter medications, and
some foods, anyone who reacts to caffeine should be careful about drinking “decaf.” The Mayo
Clinic recommends no more than 200–300 mg per day for “most healthy adults.”3
Caffeine in dried, powdered form is a highly powerful, toxic substance that has medi-
cal uses. Whether caffeine or any other drug put into the body helps or hurts typically
depends on the dosage. Aspirin in huge quantities can kill you. The Harvard Health Letter
states boldly that, “The lethal dose of caffeine is about 10 grams, which is equivalent to the
amount of caffeine in 100 cups of coffee.”4 But the fatal amount depends on body weight
and other factors, including gender, and the statement does not address the issue of how
much caffeine is in any given cup. “In short,” writes Bernadine Healy, M.D., “it all depends
on how your body handles the stuff.”5
Let’s assume, however, that it would take 100 cups of coffee drunk in the span of a few
hours to kill you. But “only small amounts [of caffeine] are around eight to 10 hours later”
in your system, once you stop ingesting coffee, says the Harvard Health Letter. In all likeli-
hood your body would rebel at the quantity of liquid necessary to take in 10 grams of caf-
feine by drinking buckets of coffee; you would vomit or gag and be unable to drink more.
Do not try this at home.
If you can’t carry a gas chromatograph around to test the amount of caffeine in a bever-
age, what can you do? Test strips are now available (we are not recommending any particular
brand, nor can we vouch for the accuracy of any on-the-spot testing) that supposedly indicate
within seconds of being dipped into a spoonful of liquid how much caffeine is in the drink.
Maybe the best advice is the obvious: if you have a problem with caffeine, be careful.

NOTES

1. R. R. McCusker, B. Fuehrlein, B. A. Goldberger, M. S. Gold, and E. J. Cone, “Caffeine Content

of Decaffeinated Coffee,” Journal of Analytical Toxicology 30, no. 8 (October 2006): 611–13.
2. http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/caffeine/AN0121, accessed January 29, 2012.
3. http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/caffeine/NU00600, accessed January 29, 2012.
4. “What Is It about Coffee,” Harvard Health Letter, January 2012, 4.
5. Bernardine Healy, “On Health,” U.S. News and World Report, March 20, 2006.

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58
Recent Research on Coffee and Health
Lawrence W. Jones

As a roaster-retailer and a practicing physician, I am increasingly asked by the public for my

opinion regarding coffee and health. The world specialty market is preoccupied with health
issues surrounding coffee, and I am sure that other roaster-retailers and practicing physicians
also frequently receive queries. Besides concerns about coffee’s direct impact on the brain and
body, people are interested in decaffeination and the possibility of reducing gastric irritation.
This review outlines the current state of research and views on coffee and health.
Health and wellness have become increasingly serious matters for consumers. One best-
selling author advises, “Eat non-processed food . . . not too much . . . mostly plants.”1 With
those principles in mind, what could be better than coffee, a natural beverage? As awareness
grows that coffee in moderation is part of a healthy lifestyle, health concerns are affecting the
world coffee market.
From the earliest known coffee advertisements forward, coffee’s effect on health has been
the object of considerable speculation. Only in the past several decades has our scientific
knowledge of the beverage developed substantially. Biochemical and behavioral scientific
investigations of caffeine undertaken in the latter half of the twentieth century helped to
define coffee’s influence on health. Earl W. Sutherland studied adenosine triphosphate (ATP)
and cyclic adenine monophosphate (cAMP). He demonstrated that hormones like adrena-
line activate specific receptors on cell walls that send signals to the cell interior by increasing
production of cAMP. He further showed that caffeine inhibits the breakdown of this cAMP
stimulus.2 For this work, Sutherland won the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1971.
Three developments thereafter were responsible for changing how we look at coffee and
health. Despite limitations of food-frequency questionnaires, most of this discussion is the
result of large Western European databases.3 The populations are stable, the data collection is
comprehensive, and the analysis is thoughtful.
Modern advances in cell biology have provided laboratory confirmation of data-based
epidemiologic studies. High-performance liquid chromatography is used to identify the mo-
lecular composition of complex solutions such as coffee.4 Mass spectroscopy is employed to
define the chemical structure of each molecule of interest.
Recent biomedical discoveries have come from our ability to selectively “knock out” genes
coding for specific molecules one gene at a time. Hence, every human disease including

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Recent Research on Coffee and Health 351

neurodegenerative and metabolic disorders has a corresponding mouse model. Coffee-related

health issues are no exception.
Four agents in coffee may affect health: caffeine, the diterpenes (cafestol and kahweol),
chlorogenic acids, and niacin. Here is how these compounds work.
1. Caffeine in the brain acts by a variety of chemical and electrical mechanisms. It is a cen-
tral nervous system stimulant. It is a potent source of the energy mediator nitric oxide through
cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) accumulation and sugar production through glyco-
gen breakdown.5 Outside the brain, caffeine is also a selective smooth muscle relaxant, notably
in peripheral and cavernosal vessels and in the bronchial tree.6
Caffeine results in improved physical and cognitive performance during and after exercise.7
In the liver, acute caffeine administration impairs glucose tolerance, but increases insulin sen-
sitivity and promotes energy metabolism. Administered chronically, coffee improves glucose
tolerance.
Decaffeination typically leaves about 3 percent caffeine behind. Less than 10 percent of cof-
fee sold is decaffeinated. Nevertheless, most diet surveys separate the two and fail to identify
significant health differences.
Caffeine increases urinary output by actively inhibiting sodium reabsorption. Renal con-
centration of urine decreases as water follows sodium.8
2. The diterpenes alter lipid enzymes, contributing to increases in cholesterol and low
density lipoproteins.9 They are absent in coffee brewed with paper filter techniques. The
adverse effect on cholesterol of coffee brewed by other methods is marginal, yet sufficient to
contribute to an increasing demand for paper filtration brewing in preference to boiled or
steam extraction techniques.
3. Chlorogenic acid and cinnamic acid are polyphenol antioxidants. Dietary polyphenols are
a group of chemical substances found in plants, characterized by the presence of more than one
phenol unit or building block per molecule. They are generally divided into hydrolysable tannins
and phenylpropanoids, such as caffeic acid. As a group of natural antioxidants, plant polyphenols
are thought to protect against cardiovascular disease and cancer. Although this class is of intense
interest to the lay public, there are few reports validating its clinical relevance.10
4. In conventional coffee usage, one micronutrient, niacin, may modify lipids and thus
contribute to the control of atherosclerosis. The other micronutrients, magnesium, potassium,
and vitamin E, are only present in 0.1 to 5 percent of recommended daily requirements.
Therefore, coffee’s potential contribution is negligible.
Thanks to modern research techniques, a revolution is taking place with how we regard cof-
fee in relation to the pathology and epidemiology of specific health issues. Coffee drinkers are
at less risk for neurodegenerative disease such as the dementias and Parkinson’s disease. This
may be due to a neuroprotective influence of caffeine that prevents leakage of toxic serum pro-
tein into neural tissue. Coffee protects against disruptions of the blood-brain barrier in animal
models of Alzheimer’s disease as well as Parkinson’s disease.11 Indeed, there is strong evidence
that caffeine and coffee may be therapeutic against Alzheimer’s disease by reducing deposits
of toxic beta amyloid polypeptides (proteins).12 It has been proposed that other neurodegen-
erative disorders such as posttraumatic brain injury, HIV-1 dementia, stroke, and multiple
sclerosis may be similarly amenable to pharmacologic stabilization of the blood-brain barrier.13
Coffee drinkers are at three to five times less risk than non-coffee drinkers for Parkinson’s dis-
ease. Dopamine-like drugs are used to treat Parkinson’s disease. Caffeine promotes dopamine ac-
tion in the brain stem by competing with dopamine’s antagonist, adenosine A2, a caffeine look-
alike molecule.14 Adenosine A2 antagonists such as caffeine may palliate Parkinson’s disease.15

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352 Lawrence W. Jones

Mild to severe headaches, including migraine, can be lessened by coffee. Caffeine is effective
in the treatment of the acute migraine attack.16 Its mechanism of action may be to counteract
genetically related dopamine hypersensitivity. It may also act by preempting the more severe
postvasoconstriction vasodilatation that causes the headache. Recent work suggests that mi-
graine may be associated with transmembrane sodium pump alterations.17 This mechanism
of action can be modulated by caffeine. However, the potential for caffeine’s role in migraine
treatment has not yet been studied.
Depression and depression-related suicide risk in the U.S. is 50 percent less in moderate
coffee drinkers than in non-coffee drinkers.18
One study on strokes demonstrated less cerebral arterial occlusion in coffee drinkers. Also,
there has been nothing to suggest an association between coffee, hypertension, and cerebral
hemorrhage.19
Adenosine controls the sleep-wake cycle. Sleeplessness due to caffeine is mediated by its ef-
fect on adenosine A1 and A2 receptors.20 The speed of caffeine breakdown may also contribute
to sleeplessness. Variability in the enzymatic breakdown of coffee may account for caffeine’s
variable effect on sleep induction and arousal.21
In Holland, a study of 17,000 Dutch men and women found 50 percent less risk of type II
diabetes in heavy coffee drinkers compared with light or non-coffee drinkers. Similar studies
have been reported from Finland, Sweden, and the United States.22
Liver injury, cirrhosis, and liver cancer may all be alleviated by coffee. In patients with liver
disease, certain liver enzymes are lower in coffee drinkers. Likewise, the risk of cirrhosis and
cirrhosis-related death is lower. Finally, in one study, patients with hepatitis B or C who had
at least one cup of coffee per day lowered the risk of liver cancer by 48 percent.23
Palpitation is an awareness of perceived heart rhythm irregularities and can be caused by
excess caffeine. Palpitations are seldom associated with organic cardiac disease.24 However,
significant arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation and flutter have not been found to be associ-
ated with caffeine.25
The odds of a heart attack are significantly lower in people who consumed up to three
cups of coffee daily than in those who did not drink coffee. No relation between coffee intake
and cardiac arrest in patients with established coronary heart disease has been found. Despite
isolated reports of paroxysmal atrial tachycardia, there is no association between coffee con-
sumption and ventricular fibrillation or sudden cardiac death.26
In patients susceptible to osteoporosis, the risk can be minimized by calcium and vitamin
D supplementation and coffee consumption limited to three cups of coffee or less per day.27
With regard to gout, serum uric acid, the marker for gout, is lower in coffee drinkers includ-
ing drinkers of decaffeinated coffee. Uric acid is not lower in tea drinkers. Perhaps chlorogenic
acid, absent in tea, is responsible for controlling gout through its antioxidant properties.28
Suggestions that coffee may increase the risk for cancer have not been validated.29 On the
contrary, recently, a prestigious journal reported a study that uncovered a significantly lower
incidence of high-risk prostate cancer among coffee-drinking men.30
Lay literature often supports restrictions on coffee for individuals complaining of urinary
frequency. Coffee’s effect on causing urinary frequency may be due to its diuretic action. Cof-
fee’s diuretic effect occurs at the level of the proximal tubules of the renal nephron. Coffee may
also irritate the urinary bladder mucosa. However, there is nothing to suggest a relationship
between coffee and chronic interstitial cystitis.31
In regard to kidney stones, caffeine modestly increases urinary calcium as well as oxalate.
Despite these effects, controlled studies have failed to substantiate any differences in stone

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incidence as a function of coffee intake.32 It may be that the lack of a significant difference is
due to caffeine’s diuretic effect, thus reducing stone formation by solute dilution.
Coffee may alter sexual behavior. Male rats treated with caffeine prior to copulation dem-
onstrated significantly decreased latency and increased rate of coitus.33 Caffeinated female rats
showed an increase both in sexual motivation and locomotor activity.34 Fertility rate probabilities
in women may be obscured by alcohol, tobacco, and drug use. Nevertheless, for women desir-
ing pregnancy, few studies support coffee limitation below three cups per day. Spontaneous
abortion is likewise not associated with coffee intake below three cups per day. Coffee does not
cause preterm delivery or birth defects. Caffeine is present in the mother’s milk of coffee drink-
ers; however, the American Academy of Pediatrics categorizes caffeine as a maternal medication
that is usually compatible with breastfeeding when consumption is below three cups per day.35
In children, any drink containing more than 3 milligrams of caffeine/kilogram may cause
nervousness in children.36 This finding prompted Canadians to limit caffeine intake for chil-
dren to 2.5 milligrams/kilogram per day—that is, approximately a half cup for a six year old.
Low acid coffees are hitting the markets as a coffee source that provides symptom relief
for those with dyspepsia, diarrhea, bloating, pain, and irregular defecation. Coffee increases
gastrointestinal motility but lifestyle studies suggest that dyspepsia is the consequence of food
intolerance rather than the cause.37
Does organic coffee affect health? To our knowledge, no toxic levels of herbicides or pes-
ticides survive the roasting process. One German study tested pesticide residues in raw and
roasted coffee and their degradation during the roasting process.38 The residues were reported
to be reduced to insignificant amounts during the roasting process.
The relationship of coffee consumption to mortality has recently received new attention.
Regular coffee consumption is not associated with an increased mortality rate in either men or
women. Indeed, the major study on this question suggests the possibility of a modest benefit
on all-cause and cardiovascular mortality.39
In summary, coffee consumption contributes to the control of type 2 diabetes mellitus
(metabolic syndrome), Parkinson’s disease, liver disease, perhaps depression, suicide risk, de-
mentia, and migraine. Moderate coffee intake, below 300 milligrams per day, or 3 milligrams/
kilogram in children, will not increase the risk for stroke, arrhythmia, hypertension, cardiovas-
cular disease, cancer, infection, complications of pregnancy, calcium imbalance, bone disease,
or kidney stones. Finally, coffee may be associated with a variety of adverse but relatively
inconsequential side effects such as sleeplessness, heart palpitations, and urinary frequency.
Quality over quantity is an emerging market consideration for heavy coffee drinkers. From
the roaster-retailer’s standpoint, these changes in public opinion are increasing the demand for
specialty coffee. Specifically, they are focusing the public’s attention on brewing techniques,
caffeine content, and quality. The public should regard coffee in moderation as generally ben-
eficial and, with minor qualifications, seldom harmful.

NOTES

1. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 244.
2. R. W. Butcher and E. W. Sutherland, “Adenosine 3,’5’-phosphate in biological materials,” Journal
of Biological Chemistry 237, no. 4 (1961): 1244–50.
3. J. V. Higdon and B. Frei, “Coffee and health: A review of recent human research,” Critical Reviews
in Food Science and Nutrition 46 (2006): 101–23.

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354 Lawrence W. Jones

4. M. A. Ramirez-Coronel, N. Marnet, V. S. K. Kolli, et al., “Characterization and estimation of

proanthocyanidins and other phenolics in coffee pulp (Coffee Arabica) by Thiolysis-High-Performance
Liquid Chromatography,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 52 (2004): 1344–49.
5. Z. Huang, Y. Urade, and O. Hayaishi, “The role of adenosine in the regulation of sleep,” Current
Topics in Medicinal Chemistry 11 (2011): 1047–57.
6. J. D. Corbin and S. H. Francis, “Molecular biology and pharmacology of PDE-5-inhibitor
therapy for erectile dysfunction,” Journal of Andrology 24, no. 6 (2003): 38–40.
7. E. Hogervost, S. Bandelow, J. Schmitt, et al., “Caffeine improves physical and cognitive per-
formance during exhaustive exercise,” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 40, no. 10 (2010):
1841–51.
8. D. G. Shirley, S. J. Walter, and F. H. Noormohamed, “Natriuretic effect of caffeine: Assessment
of segmental sodium reabsorption in humans,” Clinical Science 103 (2002): 461–66.
9. A. De Roos, R. Van Tol, L. M. Urgert, et al., “Consumption of French-press coffee raises choles-
teryl estertransfer protein activity levels before LDL cholesterol in normolipidaemic subjects,” Journal
of Internal Medicine 248 (2000): 211–16; S. H. Jee, J. He, L. J. Appel, et al., “Coffee consumption and
serum lipids: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled clinical trials,” American Journal of Epidemiology
153, no. 4 (2001): 353–62.
10. I. C. Arts and P. C. Hollman, “Polyphenols and disease risk in epidemiologic studies,” American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition 81, no. 1 (2005): 317S–25S. K. M. Wilson, J. L. Kasperzyk, J. R. Rider, et
al., “Coffee consumption and prostate cancer risk and progression in the health professionals follow-up
study,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute 103, no. 11 (2011).
11. X. Chen, O. Ghribi, and J. D. Geiger, “Caffeine protects against disruptions of the blood-brain
barrier in animal models of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases,” Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease [JAD]
20 (2010): 127–41.
12. G. W. Arendash and C. Cao, “Caffeine and coffee as therapeutics against Alzheimer’s disease,”
JAD 20 (2010): S117–26.
13. Chen et al., “Caffeine protects against disruptions.”
14. G. W. Ross, R. D. Abbott, H. Petrovitch, et al., “Association of coffee and caffeine intake with
the risk of Parkinson disease,” Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA] 283, no. 20 (2000):
2674–79; K. Saaksjarvi, P. Knekt, H. Rissanen, et al., “Prospective study of coffee consumption and risk
of Parkinson’s disease,” European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 26 (2008): 908–15.
15. Chen et al., “Caffeine protects against disruptions,”127–41.
16. P. Dusitanond and W. B. Young, “Neuroleptics and migraine,” Central Nervous System Agents in
Medicinal Chemistry 9, no. 1 (2009): 63–70.
17. M. G. Harrington, A. N. Fonteh, X. Arakaki, et al., “Capillary endothelial Na(+), K(+), ATPase
transporter homeostasis and a new theory for migraine pathophysiology,” Headache 50 (2010): 459–78.
18. I. Kawachi, W. C. Willett, G. A. Colditz, et al., “A prospective study of coffee drinking and
suicide in women,” Archives of Internal Medicine 156, no. 5 (1996): 521–25.
19. S. C. Larsson, J. Virtamo, and A. Wolk, “Coffee consumption and risk of stroke in women,”
Stroke 42, no. 4 (2011): 908–12.
20. Z. Huang, Y. Urade, and O. Hayaishi, “The role of adenosine in the regulation of sleep,” Current
Topics in Medicinal Chemistry 11 (2011): 1047–57.
21. M. R. Youngberg, I. O. Karpov, A. Begley, et al., “Clinical and physiological correlates of caf-
feine and caffeine metabolites in primary insomnia,” Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 7, no. 2 (2011):
196–203.
22. R. M. Van Dam and F. B. Hu, “Coffee consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes, a systematic
review,” JAMA 204, no. 1 (2005): 97–104.
23. T. Shimazu, Y. Tsubono, S. Kuriyama, et al., “Coffee consumption and the risk of primary liver
cancer: pooled analysis of two prospective studies in Japan,” International Journal of Cancer 116 (2005):
150–54.

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Recent Research on Coffee and Health 355

24. R. Mayou, D. Sprigings, J. Birkhead, et al., “Characteristics of patients presenting to a cardiac

clinic with palpitation,” Quarterly Journal of Medicine 96 (2003): 115–23.
25. L. Frost and P. Vestergaard, “Caffeine and risk of atrial fibrillation or flutter: The Danish diet,
cancer, and health study,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition [AJCN] 81 (2005): 578–82.
26. J. A. Greenberg, C. C. Dunbar, R. Schnoll, et al, “Caffeinated beverage intake and the risk of
heart disease mortality in the elderly, a prospective analysis,” AJCN 85 (2007): 392–98.
27. J. V. Higdon and B. Frei, “Coffee and health: A review of recent human research,” Critical Reviews
in Food Science and Nutrition 46 (2006) 101–23.
28. H. K. Choi and G. Curhan, “Coffee, tea, and caffeine consumption and serum uric acid level:
the third national health and nutrition examination survey,” Arthritis and Rheumatism 57, no. 5 (2007):
816–21.
29. International Agency for Research on Cancer [IARC], Coffee, tea, mate, methylxanthines and
methylglyoxal, Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, 51 (1991): 41–197.
IARC, Caffeine, Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, 51 (1991): 291–390.
30. K. M. Wilson, J. L. Kasperzyk, J. R. Rider, et al., “Coffee consumption and prostate cancer risk
and progression in the health professionals follow-up study,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute 103,
no. 11 (2011): 1–9.
31. G. Tettamanti, D. Altman, N. L. Pedersen, et al., “Effects of coffee and tea consumption on
urinary incontinence in female twins,” BJOG International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 118, no.
7 (2011): 806–13.
32. G. C. Curhan, W. C. Willett, E. B. Rimm, et al., “Prospective study of beverage use and the
risk of kidney stones,” American Journal of Epidemiology 143, no. 3 (1998): 240–47. G. C. Curhan,
W. C. Willett, F. E. Speizer, et al., “Beverage use and risk for kidney stones in women,” Annals of Internal
Medicine 128 (1998): 534–40.
33. P. G. Zimbardo and H. Barry III, “Effects of caffeine and chlorpromazine on the sexual behavior
of male rats,” Science 127 (1958): 84–85.
34. F. A. Guarraci and A. Benson, “‘Coffee, tea and me’: Moderate doses of caffeine affect sexual
behavior in female rats,” Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior 82 (2005): 522–30.
35. American Academy of Pediatrics, “The transfer of drugs and other chemicals into human milk,”
Pediatrics 108, no. 3 (2001): 776–89.
36. P. Nawrot, S. Jordan, J. Eastwood, et al., “Effects of caffeine on human health,” Food Additives
and Contaminants 20, no. 1 (2003): 1–30.
37. R. Lind, S. Olafsson, I. Hjelland, et al., “Lifestyle of patients with self reported food hypersensi-
tivity differ little from controls,” Gastroenterology Nursing 31, no. 6 (2008): 401–10.
38. M. Cetinkaya, J. von Duszeln, W. Thiemann, et al., “Organochlorine pesticide residues in raw
and roasted coffee and their degradation during the roasting process,” Zeitschrift fuer Lebensmittel-
Untersuchung und -Forschung A 179, no. 1 (July 1984): 5–8.
39. E. Lopez-Garcia, R. M. van Dam, T. Y. Li, et al., “The relationship of coffee consumption with
mortality,” Annals of Internal Medicine 148, no. 12 (2008): 904–14.

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Part V
THE FUTURE OF COFFEE

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59
Coffee Research in Kenya
Current Status and Future Perspectives
Elijah K. Gichuru

Kenya predominantly produces arabica coffee (Coffea arabica L.), which was introduced into
the country around 1900 by French missionaries. Since then, it has been a crop of major
importance in the country’s economy. Formal coffee research in Kenya started with the ap-
pointment of a coffee entomologist in 1908 by the colonial government. In 1963, the govern-
ment passed the responsibility of managing the research to coffee growers through the Coffee
Research Foundation (CRF), which was incorporated as a company limited by guarantee. It
is managed at the policy level by stakeholder representatives plus representatives from relevant
government ministries and national agricultural research institutions. Its headquarters are in
the central part of the country but with subcenters in other coffee growing areas. The themes
of coffee research expanded with time, and the Foundation is currently mandated to investi-
gate all issues along the coffee value chain and to recommend ways to promote the produc-
tion of high-quality coffees that meet consumer needs.
Currently, CRF is organized into seven technical research sections: Plant Pathology;
Chemistry, comprising crop nutrition, processing and quality units; Crop Physiology; Plant
Breeding; Entomology; Agronomy; and Agricultural Economics, as well as two information
dissemination sections, Research Liaison and Advisory, and Kenya Coffee College.
CRF is a farmers’ organization funded mainly through a levy on green coffee sales within
the country, an arrangement that has helped to develop a unique relationship between the
institution and stakeholders along the coffee value chain. In addition, more funds are obtained
from income-generating activities, government of Kenya grants, externally funded collabora-
tive projects, research grants from development partners, and collaborative activities with the
private sector. The Foundation has consequently developed strong collaborative linkages with
national, regional, and international partners.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Over the years, CRF has generated remarkable research outputs that have contributed to the
growth and development of the coffee industry. These include selection of arabica coffee va-
rieties with high yields and quality, development of disease-resistant coffee varieties, disease

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360 Elijah K. Gichuru

and pest management programs, soil fertility management recommendations suitable for
different areas, and coffee processing technologies. These technologies are disseminated to
stakeholders through advisory and training activities supported by services such as soil fer-
tility analysis, production of planting materials, and quality control checks for production
inputs and coffee product. CRF also provides technical backstopping to regulatory, policy
development, and marketing organizations of the government. In carrying out its core
services, CRF is a beacon benchmarked with similar national and international institutions
with which collaboration has been developed. In fact, the Foundation is an international
hub for research and development in coffee.

CHALLENGES

Challenges facing CRF in its operations are characteristic of agricultural research globally. One
of the main issues is adequacy and sustainability of funding. For continued and enhanced
research, CRF needs to develop and sustain capacity in terms of skills, instrumentation, and
infrastructure that respond to new technologies and demands. This creates vibrant dynamics
in the economics of financing research for development. Although rapid changes in technol-
ogy would imply high depreciation of equipment due to obsolescence, increased efficiency and
high-value results make the investments suggested by research pay off. Such benefits should
then attract further funding for research and development. Research managers and policy
makers therefore need to emphasize their successes and develop strategies leading to sustain-
able financing of research organizations.
The main source of funding for CRF is a 2 percent levy on green coffee sales within Kenya.
This amount is barely adequate to support research, especially when total revenues are low
due to low production, low prices, or both. Furthermore, emerging marketing systems and
new legislation could negatively impact the collection of the levies. CRF constantly faces the
challenge of enhancing both the amount and sustainability of its funding.
Private sector players, including farmers’ organizations, civil society groups, companies, and
individuals, can contribute to funding the institution. However, currently their contribution is
low due to several factors, such as inadequate opportunity to derive direct economic benefits
from the generation of knowledge and technology by the public sector. This problem can be
addressed by strengthening intellectual property rights, which in turn would promote private
investment in agricultural research. It should be noted that the system of funding the Foun-
dation is one whereby the coffee sector funds coffee research; the long-term existence of this
mechanism is testimony to the fact that the financiers derive benefits.
Researchers hope that in the future, CRF will be increasingly geared towards the generation
of knowledge and technology while partnering with the private sector to improve and com-
mercialize technology. This will encourage more investment by the private sector in research as
a step upstream while private farmers benefit downstream. Such efforts could be in the form
of contract research, competitive grants, and consultancies. Other internal revenue genera-
tion activities can also be enhanced and diversified to include, among other points, contract
research, consultancies, charging for services, enhanced commercial agricultural production,
hospitality, and agrotourism.
Another challenge is institutional research capacity. As is the case with many research insti-
tutions, CRF does not by itself possess adequate technological, infrastructural, and skills ca-
pacity to meet all its needs. This gap is aggravated by rapid changes especially in technologies

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Coffee Research in Kenya 361

such as analytical instrumentation, computer science, and molecular techniques. The Founda-
tion has invested considerable sums in modern equipment, laboratories, and staff training to
address issues such as DNA technology, tissue culture, soils and leaf nutrient analysis, pesticide
residues analysis, biochemical analysis, and coffee quality assessment. To complement its ca-
pacity, CRF has developed partnerships with other research and training institutions around
the world. These connections build on the now widely accepted reality that partnership and
sharing of resources improves efficiency and outputs compared with isolated individual work.

CURRENT AND FUTURE RESEARCH AREAS

Agricultural development is increasingly concerned with diversification, improving product

quality and safety, capturing markets, mixing on-farm and off-farm incomes, adding value,
entering market niches, and balancing agricultural and ecological interests. Dynamics arising
from processes such as liberalization of markets and national economies, globalization and
regionalization of markets, advances in science and technology, and evolving ideas on the roles
of the public and private sectors pose constantly evolving challenges. These issues create the
need for more complex research programming, on which CRF is focused and will continue to
be responsive to emerging needs.
In particular, CRF is currently addressing the effects of climatic change on the entire cof-
fee value chain, emerging markets fragmentation, the socioeconomic patterns of production,
customer concerns such as health and safety, environment protection, involvement of youth,
gender balance, and diversification of coffee products. Information technology and access to
computers have also helped the CRF in Kenya by disseminating timely information, especially
to stakeholders located at a distance from the research station.
Even as global coffee consumption increases, various constraints have reduced produc-
tion. Past efforts to boost yields have focused on these constraints either through research or
policy development. In addition to breeding for the traditional agronomic traits of yields,
quality, and tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, future coffee breeding programs will ad-
dress emerging producer and consumer issues including parameters of climatic changes, soil
fertility and salinity status, the biochemical composition of coffee, and suitability for alterna-
tive processing and brewing methods. Incorporated into these concerns will be sensitivity
to water conservation and pollution. Agroforestry and intercropping are becoming more
common, and future production systems need to be compatible with these systems. Some
effects of climatic changes have socioeconomic attributes related to coffee production levels
or patterns. Coffee research programs in Kenya have initiated studies to address, among other
issues, uniformity of cropping, water harvesting and conservation, the influence of climate on
coffee physiology, biochemical composition, and sensory attributes. Development of suitable
alternative coffee processing technologies is also a priority. CRF will endeavor to obtain basic
solutions that improve agricultural practices, especially in pest management, uniform flower-
ing due to artificial induction of stress, genetic control, or even application of hormones.
Socioeconomic analysis will not be limited to monetary factors alone. Evolving consumer
preferences, lifestyles, and market fragmentation will be analyzed to provide information
about potential markets. In this respect coffee may not only be marketed as a beverage but
may expand into other market sectors such as cosmetics, landscaping, and potted ornamen-
tals. The viability of coffee farming will also be aligned to emerging farming enterprises such
that complementarity is maximized. Tied to some of these farming systems is certification

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362 Elijah K. Gichuru

of coffee and its implication in socioeconomics. It is important to note the intricacies that
emerging issues such as agroforestry and certification will have as a dimension of the carbon
credits market, which is potentially a large source of funds for development. It will also be
important for research to address gender, youth, and sociocultural aspects of coffee farming
and consumption in support of holistic policy development and practices.
CRF has been a premier institute of coffee research and has achieved the following, among
other marks of progress:

• Selection of high yielding, quality Arabica coffee varieties such as K7, SL28, SL 34
• Development and production of disease-resistant arabica coffee cultivars Ruiru 11 and
Batian
• Development of good agricultural and manufacturing practices (GAP and GMP) along
the value chain
• Establishment of a credible and responsive field advisory and training system
• Mainstreaming socioeconomic issues in the research programs
• Networking and collaboration with international organizations

To ensure greater performance and service delivery, CRF will pursue benchmarking and
accreditation of its laboratories, which will enhance support to the coffee industry. The Foun-
dation also strives to decentralize farmer-oriented laboratory services such as soil, leaf, and
agrochemical formulation analysis and coffee quality assessment. We will incorporate modern
information delivery technologies for dissemination. The Foundation will also enhance part-
nerships with private and public agencies at both the international and national levels.
Coffee in Kenya, like the crop almost anywhere around the world, faces daunting chal-
lenges. But the Coffee Research Foundation expects to stay abreast of or ahead of problems in
the industry. We will continue our critical efforts to improve cultivation, processing, market-
ing, and the lives of everyone who works with coffee.

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60
Genetically Modified (Transgenic) Coffee
Robert W. Thurston

A number of European governments, among them France and Germany, have expressed op-
position to genetically modified (GM) foods, in particular to corn (maize). This resistance to
GM is based on grassroots discussions that reveal broad dislike of any GM crops. The Ameri-
can corporation Monsanto has been denied permission to experiment with an altered form
of corn in France.1 At the same time, consumers in the U.S., and the farm animals they raise,
eat enormous quantities of GM corn. American law does not require GM foods to be labeled
as such, so that in the U.S. few people are aware that their food often began life in laboratory
experiments. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that many Americans would care to
know. Different cultures produce, once again, different attitudes toward food.
Those people who fear and dislike genetically modified food and drink products naturally
oppose GM or “transgenic” coffee. But farmers desperate to reduce losses from pests and
diseases, as well as to lower costs for treatments designed to defeat those problems, are deeply
interested in engineered strains of the plant. Moreover, if arabica coffee trees can be developed
that are more resistant than natural varieties to drought, frost, global warming, poor soils,
and wind damage, the range and productivity of high-quality coffee can expand. Could good
coffee be grown in the Mexican desert or the Amazon jungle? These questions, and in fact any
and all issues related to GM, are sometimes answered ideologically or on the basis of hopes
for a particular crop or region.
Work on genetically modified coffee began only in 1993. More recently, researchers in vari-
ous countries have announced several intriguing but largely undeveloped results. Here the goal
is to present recent research and offer some ideas about where GM coffee is going—because
like it or not, it is going somewhere.
The University of Hawaii received a patent in 1999 for procedures involving the coffee
genome.2 The patent
describes how biotechnologists have “switched off ” the natural ripening processes of coffee cher-
ries. The purpose of this delayed ripening is to bring about uniform ripening with the result that
all coffee cherries would develop to become green and hard but no further ripening would occur.
Final ripening could then only be triggered after berries were exposed to a sprayed application of
ethylene, a naturally occurring plant hormone. Harvesting would then be easier, and yields higher
but there is, as yet, no indication that the quality of coffee produced in this way would be retained.3

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364 Robert W. Thurston

As early as 2000, field trials of coffee, altered in the French Agricultural Center for In-
ternational Development, were underway. The tests occurred in French Guiana, specifically
chosen because no coffee is grown there commercially, thus reducing the chances of accidental
cross-fertilization with existing, natural varieties. Then in 2004, someone cut down the experi-
mental plants, all but ruining the trials. Nonetheless, French scientists state that they gathered
enough data to confirm that, “Seventy percent of our GM trees were totally resistant to the
coffee leaf miner.”4
In 2003, the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center reported on work that transferred “new
germplasm and selected genotypes” to arabica plants; the resulting hybrid was much more
resistant to attacks on the roots by nematodes than were natural plants.5 According to a re-
cent report circulating on the web, the state’s Integrated Coffee Technology, Inc., located on
Oahu, started field trials of transgenic coffee engineered to ripen simultaneously after ethylene
spraying.6 However, the company has gone out of business, and nothing came of their efforts.
Researchers at Japan’s Nara Institute of Science and Technology reported in 2003 that
they had developed transgenic coffee seeds. These work on an “RNA silencing technique,”
meaning that the introduced genes take the place that caffeine would occupy in normal mo-
lecular structures. The caffeine content in the new trees is reportedly 70 percent lower than
in “conventional seeds in the natural plants.” Yet at the same time, the research team said
that it would take another four or five years before actual results from coffee plants could be
measured,7 presumably in field trials. The research was conducted on robusta seeds, which
have as much as twice the caffeine content of arabica beans, but the Nara scientists predicted
success for arabica as well.8
In any event, the amount of caffeine in “natural plants” varies, so there is no absolute stan-
dard against which transgenic coffee could be measured. Perhaps unfortunately, high caffeine
levels in “selected” arabica plants from Ethiopia and Kenya demonstrate increased resistance
to both coffee berry borer disease and coffee leaf rust.9
The Colombian research center for coffee, CENICAFE, is working on coffee that would
contain inhibitors for digestion in the coffee berry borer, or broca.10 If the borer can’t eat inside
coffee berries, it will certainly decline and perhaps even disappear as a pest. What a colossal
break that would be for farmers!
A combined Brazilian/Colombian group of scientists has carried out more work on coffee
designed to thwart the berry borer. This time, the researchers took genes from common bean
plants and inserted them into arabica coffee DNA. The results are promising: the new bean
genes inhibit up to 88 percent of the enzyme activity in the coffee berries that is necessary for
broca’s survival.11
Peter Baker of CABI believes that GM coffee varieties will probably be “high-yielding dwarf
varieties requiring high inputs to perform well.” Smallholders who cannot afford to replace ex-
isting plants, which may in any event require more application of sprays and other treatments
than conventional coffee, may be overwhelmed by large corporations who have the capital to
make fundamental changes. But that scenario is likelier to occur in robusta production rather
than in arabica fields, where the emphasis will continue to be on quality.12
Thus GM coffee presents a tangled web of interests and hopes. Will coffee cherry without
caffeine grow beautifully on the trees, both robusta and arabica? Could GM reduce depen-
dence on synthetic herbicides and pesticides, thus benefitting the earth and greatly reducing
farmers’ costs? Could it expand the range and productivity of arabica, and might that in turn
save the species—or lead to so much production that prices would again crash? Will big farm-
ers reap most of the gains and wipe out the little guys? Today about all that can be said for

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Genetically Modified (Transgenic) Coffee 365

certain, in a tale that unfolds almost daily, is that GM is likely to become a major factor in
the coffee industry.

NOTES

1. http://earthfirstnews.wordpress.com, January 26, 2012, citing Gordon Davis in The Scottish

Farmer, accessed April 16, 2012.
2. Ezzeddine Boutrif, chairperson (Food Quality and Standards Service, United Nations Food and
Agricultural Organization), Seminar on Genetically Modified Coffee, International Coffee Organiza-
tion, 2005, http://dev.ico.org/event_pdfs/gm/presentations/Ezzedine%20Boutrif.pdf.
3. “GM coffee: Brewing up a storm?” New Agriculturalist on line, http://www.new-ag.info/01-4/
focuson4.html, accessed April 16, 2012. No author or date is given, but Peter Baker (see his “Coffee as
a Global System” above) of CABI is listed as the person to contact for further information.
4. Andy Coghlan, New Scientist 186, no. 2501 (May 28, 2005): 44.
5. Powerpoint show by Chifumi Nagai, “Coffee Breeding Update with New Tools,” HCA Confer-
ence 2003, at http://www.hawaiicoffeeassoc.org/03pdf/HCA03-CNfinal.pdf.
6. Erica Strauss, “Genetically modified coffee confrontation brewing in Hawaii,” June 2009, http://
www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/0906/sc0906-coffee-gm-hawaii.html, accessed April 16, 2012.
7. Asia Pacific Biotech News, July 7, 2003.
8. Shinjiro Ogita, Hirotaka Uefuji, Yube Yamaguchi, Nozomu Koizumi, and Hiroshi Sano, Nature
423, no. 6942 (June 19, 2003): 823.
9. Vinod Kumar and G. A. Ravishankar, “Current trends in producing low levels of caffeine in cof-
fee berry and processed coffee powder,” Food Reviews International 25 (2009): 175–97, 176.
10. Diana Molina, Humberto Zamora, and Alejandro Blanco-Labra, Phytochemistry 71, no. 8/9 (June
2010): 923–29.
11. Aulus Barbosa, Érika V. S. Albuquerque, Maria C. M. Silva, Djair S. L. Souza, Osmundo
B. Oliveira-Neto, Arnubio Valencia, Thales L. Rocha, and Maria F. Grossi-de-Sa, “α-Amylase in-
hibitor-1 gene from Phaseolus vulgaris expressed in Coffea arabica plants inhibits α-amylases from the
coffee berry borer pest,” BMC Biotechnology 10 no. 44 (2010), http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472
-6750/10/44.
12. “GM coffee: Brewing up a storm?”

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61
Mechanization
Robert W. Thurston

In the coffee industry, mechanization generally refers to the use of machinery in harvesting, as
opposed to picking coffee cherry by hand. Machines for processing coffee fruit, for example
pulpers (which would be better called depulpers, as they are in Spanish) have been used for
many decades around the world. At first pulpers were hand-operated; today even relatively
small farms can often afford one that runs on gasoline, natural gas, or electricity.
Harvesting mechanically is another story. Essentially, two types of machines can harvest
coffee. One is a tool resembling a grass trimmer in size, weight, and configuration, except that
the working end is a scissors-like assembly. These machines usually run on gasoline. An opera-
tor first spreads a cloth around the bottom of a coffee tree, then positions the machine where a
branch emerges from the tree trunk. Pushing a button makes the blades, which are deliberately
dull, close around the branch. The operator pulls the whole device toward himself, stripping
all the coffee fruit from the branch, along with lots of leaves and twigs. All this falls onto the
cloth. Once a tree, or several at a time, have been stripped of fruit—giving this technique
the name of strip harvesting—the cloth is pulled away and its contents dumped into a large
container. Strip harvesting can also be done by hand; pickers just wrap their hands, hopefully
in strong gloves, around a branch and pull all the fruit off. But the mechanical stripper does
that faster and with less physical effort.
If pickers are working by hand or with a small blade stripper, and any breeze is blowing,
they may flip the contents of the cloth into the air, so that the wind carries leaves away. Pickers
may also have small, round, handheld screens, again used to flip the harvested matter into the
air. People also pull out the more obvious twigs. Pickers are usually paid by the weight of what
they bring in, but there are penalties for too much debris with the cherry.
At this point the coffee fruit and anything else on the cloths is collected and conveyed, by
machine, human beings, or burros, to a central point. There it is dumped by hand or machine
onto a screen that captures most extraneous material but allows the fruit to fall through. In
wet processing, the leaves and twigs must be removed before depulping; in dry processing
this should occur before the cherry is spread on a patio to dry. Sometimes stones and an occa-
sional bullet make it all the way through processing at origin, and from there in bags of coffee
to roasters in consuming countries—hence the need for mechanical destoners in roasteries.

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Back on the farm, the second, much larger and more expensive kind of mechanical har-
vester is a self-propelled machine that straddles coffee trees as it rolls forward. Tall but still
hulking, these harvesters are built in an upside-down U shape and have nylon or fiberglass
wands that vibrate in the central cavity. The driver has to climb a ladder to reach the cab at
the top of the machine; from there she controls the speed of the vehicle and the operation
of the wands. As the machine crawls over the tops of coffee trees, it covers them completely,
while the wands knock the fruit off. All the cherries, along with lots of leaves and twigs, are
collected in a pan at the bottom of the harvester. From there they are either sent on a conveyer
to a bin at the back of the machine, in a self-contained unit, or the beans are pushed up and
through a pipe over to a separate truck or trailer pulled by a tractor. The tractor driver stays
on the side of the trees being harvested, between that row and the next one over. Whatever
the catcher vehicle, it has to keep pace with the harvester. All mechanical pickers move at a
leisurely pace, only a few miles an hour.
This way of harvesting gathers much more waste, in the form of unripe and overripe cherries,
leaves, and branches, than the handheld machines do. Of course, the capital needed to acquire
a self-propelled harvester and a truck is considerable; a large harvester can easily cost $100,000.
Finally, such machines can only operate on ground that is at most gently rolling. Shade trees
would get in the way of the big harvesters, so they are used on technified or sun-grown coffee.
On the muddy, 45° slopes of Nicaragua or Kenya, where human pickers must sometimes tie
themselves to trees to keep from rolling down the hill, such machines don’t work.
Nor are the big harvesters an option for small family farms. Like any large piece of agricul-
tural machinery in use from Manitoba to Queensland and the Brazilian Cerrado, the rolling
harvesters are most effective on contiguous, open land. Any time they spend moving from one
field to another is wasted. So while in theory co-ops could buy wand machines, getting them
from one farm to another would seriously reduce their utility. Small farmers will therefore
largely continue to depend on their own and their families’ labor.
When the mechanical harvesters, either handheld or self-propelled, produce waste in pick-
ing, extensive sorting systems separate usable fruit from unripe berries and debris. After the
nonfruit debris is excluded, the beans are separated by their different stages of ripeness. Using
water channels to move and divide the cherries, dense ones (underripe and ripe) fall, while
lighter cherries (overripes) float and are channeled away. The underripes and ripes are then
sent to a pulper where the ripes are depulped and the underripes pass through unchanged.
Then, using a rotating slotted cylinder, the seeds from the ripe cherries fall through the slots
while the underripes and pulp are moved away. The overripes (sometimes called raisins) are
essentially naturals that are dried on a deck or, occasionally, in a mechanical dryer. In our
heavily capitalized scenario, pulped seeds are either sent to fermentation tanks to remove the
mucilage or to a demucilager to mechanically remove the mucilage before drying. The under-
ripes are sent to be dried right away.
After the coffee has dried and the outer layers (pulp/fruit, mucilage, and parchment) have
been removed, the green beans may go through a number of sorting stages, depending on
how automated the operation is. First, they may be separated by bean size. The coffee will
be placed on motorized shaking beds with screens set at a slight angle, perhaps 30°. As many
as eight screens, with holes of different sizes that get smaller towards the bottom, can be set
up, including screens to separate out peaberries. These machines accomplish two tasks: First,
they allow beans of certain sizes to fall through the holes. The smallest fall to the bottom of
the apparatus, while bigger beans fall to the screen whose holes are too small for them to pass

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368 Robert W. Thurston

through. Wherever they land, each screen establishes a more or less uniform sized lot of beans
that will be shaken and moved by gravity to one side and thence into separate containers. At
the same time, any remaining extraneous material such as leaves and branches will be borne
to the side of the top screen and removed.
After sorting by size, the beans may be taken to a density (also called gravity) table. These
devices are slightly inclined in both the direction of flow, down and forward, and perpen-
dicular to flow. The surface vibrates and has perforations that permit air to be forced upwards
through the surface. When uniformly sized green beans pass over the table, the vibration and
tilt cause them to separate according to small changes, as little as 1 percent, in density. The
tables remove many defects that come either from the field, for instance, from insects, or from
machinery during pulping.
Finally, in some well-financed operations, the coffee is separated by color. This occurs in
plastic tubes perhaps one foot (about 300 centimeters) in diameter and several stories high,
mated with color sensors. Beans are conveyed to the top of the tubes and then allowed to fall
through them. The sensors recognize off-color beans and shoot out puffs of air to expel them
from the main channel. Since roasting coffee properly depends to a fair extent on the evenness
of bean size, these sorting techniques affect quality in the cup.
Mechanical dryers for pulped cherry or for naturals are also fairly common today on bigger
farms. Partially dried fruit is fed into the dryers, which sometimes look like big clothes dryers,
sometimes like large metal chutes, that can be as much as 90 feet (27.4 meters) tall. One way
or another, for example by blowing warm air into chutes, the dryers move the beans about
and slowly heat them, just enough to dry them out. This process is much quicker than patio
drying, and the machines don’t care whether the sun is out or not.
Another way that machines have replaced workers in coffee processing also involves drying.
Large Brazilian farms, for example, have huge drying patios, where the coffee is constantly
spread out and respread for several days; this can be done by one person driving a small vehicle
with a rake attached to the back. I have seen two types of these machines: one was clearly
built for this purpose, while the other was a converted motorcycle that pulled a rake behind
it. On the other hand, I have seen perhaps fifty people at a time raking drying fruit on patios
in Nicaragua.
Productivity per worker soars with mechanical sorting and harvesting. Patrick Installe,
managing director of the coffee trading company Efico, told interviewers from Oxfam in 2002:

To give you an idea of the difference, in some areas of Guatemala, it could take over 1,000 people
working [picking] one day each to fill the equivalent of one container of 275 bags, each bag weigh-
ing 69 kilograms. In the Brazilian cerrado, you need five people and a mechanical harvester for
two or three days to fill a container. One drives, and the others pick. How can Central American
family farms compete against that?1

Actually, my own observations in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state indicate that mechanical harvesting
equipment can require only two workers, one to drive the harvester and one to drive the truck.
With the completely self-contained harvesters that convey coffee into a container at the back
of the machine, one person does all the work.
Capitalized production, with a correspondingly low number of employees, is vividly
demonstrated at Kauai Coffee Company. Their orchard occupies 3,400 acres (about 1376
hectares) of land on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. The firm brags in a 1999 film that, on its
fully mechanized estate, it employs 57 workers in harvest season, while a farm of equal size
elsewhere but not mechanized might need 3,000 pickers. Kauai Coffee harvests twenty-four

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Mechanization 369

Figure 61.1. A mechanical harvester at work; the cherries are shot into the bed of a truck to the
right. Brazil, 2010. Photo by Robert Thurston.

hours a day, seven days a week in peak season, bringing in between one-half and three-quarters
of a million pounds of cherry every day. Bob Rose, mechanical equipment and harvesting
manager at the time the film was made, put the company’s goal for harvesting in these terms:
“maximize the amount of ripe coffee collected with a minimum amount of employees.”2
At Kauai Coffee, every part of managing the orchard, harvesting, and processing is mecha-
nized. Machines with large spinning blades march through the fields to prune the sides and
tops of the trees. The whole estate is supplied with drip tubing for irrigation—2,000 miles
(3,320 kilometers) of it in 1999. Coffee cherry is moved from mechanical harvesters to dump
trucks by wheel loaders. All sorting is done by machines, and the beans are dried in the kind
of columns mentioned above. The color sorters, the slowest pieces of equipment on the farm,
can handle about 300 pounds of coffee per hour. The sorters look at every single bean from
two sides and blow out discolored ones.3
Since 1999, the changes in the company’s production appear to have been in quantity, not
in the basics of the operation. Now there are 2,500 miles of irrigation tubing. Herbicide use
has been cut by 75 percent “through our cultivation practices” (presumably this means in the
past few years). The average daily amount of coffee cherry processed is now given as 650,000
pounds. Each year the company produces over half of all coffee grown in the United States.4

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370 Robert W. Thurston

To return to Patrick Installe’s question about how small farmers can compete with large,
mechanized operations like Kauai Coffee, the answer has to be quality. Mechanical harvest-
ers and pruners do not discriminate between useless fruit and cherry at the peak of ripeness.
Handpicking and pruning are still considered by many to be the best ways of ensuring that
only quality beans reach the market, although some mechanically harvested farms are earning
high marks from specialty coffee drinkers. Yet hand-harvesting, too, has another cost: pickers
must usually make three or more passes through the trees to catch berries that, naturally, fail
to ripen simultaneously.
Arnoldo Leiva, then president of the Costa Rican Specialty Coffee Association, said in 2008
that small machines, more or less the size of a roto tiller, are under development in his country.
The need for a portable, reliable, inexpensive machine that can traverse the slopes of many
coffee-producing lands, without doing too much damage to the trees, is growing. For some
years, Costa Rican farmers have relied on migrant labor from Nicaragua to harvest their crops,
but the laws regulating immigration into Costa Rica for any purpose are becoming tighter.5
Hawaiian farmers have imported Mexican workers. But, as levels of education and urbaniza-
tion rise in poorer countries like Nicaragua,6 the supply of people willing to work extremely
hard for a few months of each year, then somehow get by the rest of the time, will decline.
Meanwhile, the overall quality of Brazilian coffee, for example, continues to improve. Yet,
given the growing global demand for the finest arabicas, there will surely be a niche for the
best handpicked and hand-sorted coffees for a long time to come. But for anything of lower
quality that comes from a nonmechanized farm, the future may not be bright.

NOTES

1. Quoted in Charis Gresser and Sophia Tickell, Mugged: Poverty in Your Coffee Cup (Oxford: Oxfam,
2002), 18.
2. Kauai Coffee Company, Kauai Coffee: From Tree to Cup (video), 1999.
3. Kauai Coffee Company, Kauai Coffee.
4. http://www.kauaicoffee.com, accessed March 31, 2012.
5. Interview with Arnoldo Leiva, San Jose, Costa Rica, May 27, 2008.
6. At the moment, Nicaragua is not making great progress in education, despite the Sandinista
government’s commitment to it. Teachers’ salaries are abysmally low, and only 45 percent of elementary
school pupils go on to secondary school. Their dropout rates are high, even for the developing world.
See The Christian Science Monitor, March 26, 2012. Yet at some point the general improvement in Latin
American economies over the past ten to fifteen years will also reach Nicaragua, making the supply of
people desperate to find any kind of work shrink.

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62
A Life in Coffee
Ted Lingle

Editor’s Note (SS): Ted Lingle is one of the most respected and admired elders of the specialty cof-
fee industry. He was actively supporting specialty coffee before the term even existed! A founding
member of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, he has been active in the organization
since its inception. Perhaps he is best known for writing the Coffee Cuppers’ Handbook, a
guidebook for cupping that has probably influenced more cuppers than anything else. His likely
final contribution to specialty coffee, quality standards for robusta coffees, will be another large
part of his legacy. The following chapter is a brief autobiography by Mr. Lingle, featuring his
relationship to the specialty coffee industry.

I was very fortunate in beginning my coffee career in the 1970s, as it was a period of transi-
tion for the coffee roasting industry in the United States. Many small and medium roasters
were either selling out or closing their doors, as the multinational and big regional roasters
were intensifying the price competition in the industry and consolidating the market. Lingle
Bros. Coffee, Inc., a small Southern California roasting business started by my grandfather
and his two brothers in 1920, was among this group of struggling roasting operations. On
my third day of work after joining my father at Lingle Bros., I will never forget visiting with a
longtime customer who had announced he was switching to another roaster the week before.
During the “lost customer interview,” he told me that “the owner wanted to switch to using
raw butter, and I needed to save money somewhere in order to keep my food costs down.
So I switched in order to save 3 cents a pound.” At that moment in time, I knew the coffee
industry needed a major transformation if it was going to survive and prosper. If coffee val-
ues were only determined by price, not quality, the consumer would lose in the process and
migrate to other beverages.
During the early 1970s a small group of roasters joined together to form a national sales and
purchasing group. Known as DINE-MOR FOODS, it was comprised of a number of firms
and individuals just like me. They were from second and third generations of sons now in
closely held family roasting businesses that served small regional markets. The driving force in
pulling this group together was Bill Smith of Royal Cup Coffee in Birmingham. It was a great
experience for me because of the integrity and openness of the individuals in the group. Be-
sides being great coffee men, they ran very successful operations. These coffee friends opened

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372 Ted Lingle

their plants, their coffee-buying strategies, and even their financial statements, and through
them I was able to see and understand the changes I needed to bring to Lingle Bros. to make
it a stronger company. Lingle Bros. was a DINE-MOR member for over decade and I was able
to meet and get to know a large number of terrific coffee people all over the United States.
Selling coffee to restaurants in the Southern California area had some daunting challenges,
low prices being but one of them. But it also had its rewards; one was getting to know Marvin
Saul, the owner of Junior’s Deli in Los Angeles. Marvin was not only a great “foodie,” but also
a tremendous and unafraid marketer. If he liked something personally, he would introduce it
in Junior’s, immediately. My favorite memory is Marv calling me up, saying his doctor had put
him on decaffeinated coffee and wanting to know if Lingle Bros. had any decaf.
I was out to see him the next day with a decaffeinated Colombian coffee we carried for our
specialty coffee and office coffee service customers. He instantly liked it, and the next day he
was serving it in his restaurant. By the end of the week he had sold out and not only wanted
more coffee but also the supporting items: orange-handled coffeepots and colored coasters
to help the waitresses distinguish the decaf drinkers from the regular drinkers. We eventu-
ally caught up with Marv’s needs to make fresh brew decaf a regular item at Junior’s. Within
six months, fresh brew decaf was a regular item with all of our food service customers, and
through a DINE-MOR connected customer, Far West Services, it was on everyone’s menu
nationwide. Goodbye Sanka, the leading instant decaf coffee of the era.
In addition to selling to restaurants, Lingle Bros. also created products for and sold to the
office coffee service (OCS) industry. One of our customers, Don Stoulil, was the brother
of an employee, George Stoulil. And like many of the great customer relationships I’ve had
through my twenty-year career at Lingle Bros., Don and I became close personal friends. He
is and remains a true testament to the American dream of building a business from scratch
and, through hard work, turning it into a major success. And there are many success stories
like this in the OCS industry. In fact, the OCS industry was actually the springboard that
launched my coffee career, so that it became my avocation and my vocation.
The turning point came during a sales call on one of my other favorite OCS customers,
Don Donegan of Major Domo Coffee Services in Los Angeles. Don was on the board of the
National Office Coffee Service Association (NCSA) and asked me if I thought the NCSA
members needed to spend $1,200 a session for a training program currently being offered by
Michael Sivetz, one of the great coffee technicians in the industry. My answer to Don was that
for what the OCS industry needed to know, I didn’t think their money would be well spent
hiring Mike. So with his great Irish charm, Don asked me what I thought NCSA should do.
I told Don I would think about that and get back to him. A few days later, I was back in his
office with a proposal for a day-long class called the “Coffee Blending Game.” Don loved the
idea and within sixty days I was giving the class for the first time in Los Angeles. The next
month I gave the second class in San Francisco, and by the end of the year I had given the class
four more times across the country. It was a great success, and it remains one of my favorite
classes to teach nonroasters because it is highly interactive.
The following year, I was asked to join the board of NCSA, and I was now standing on the
springboard. NCSA, at the time (1978), was the most vibrant and active trade association in
the United States. It enjoyed the leadership of three dynamic individuals: Don Donegan, Tom
Williams, and John Conti. It was the NCSA board who decided they wanted to begin a coffee
promotion campaign to help build market share for the OCS industry. With coaching from
me, they sent a proposal to the International Coffee Organization similar to one crafted
by Alf Kramer for Norway, which the ICO had approved the year earlier. It was a modest

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A Life in Coffee 373

proposal, a $100,000 program based on matching funds from the ICO and NCSA. It got the
ICO’s attention, and their executive director, Alexander Beltrao, sent his friend and confidant
in the United States, Sam Stavisky, to a meeting with the board of the NCSA. We earned his
trust, and the promotion program went forward.
As the relationship with the ICO continued to develop, NCSA created two more promo-
tion programs. At this point, Beltrao organized a joint meeting with key members of his
ICO staff and the NCSA Board. The ICO wanted more promotional activity in the United
States and NCSA wanted a bigger program. Accompanying Beltrao from the ICO were Barry
Davies, the promotion fund officer, and his assistant Marsha Powell. Two big projects were
started as the result of this meeting: number one was the launch of the Coffee Development
Group (CDG), initially the Office Coffee Development Group (OCDG), and number two
was the beginning of the effort to form an association within the specialty coffee industry.
The Coffee Development Group (CDG) concept came from Arman Duplaise, an OCS
operator in the Baltimore area. It was based on his experience with Burger King in which field
representatives carried out a series of consumer-focused marketing campaigns on a national
level. In the CDG concept, field reps would work in the areas of office coffee service, vending,
specialty coffee, and food service. The annual budget for this program exceeded $2,000,000
per year over a ten-year period and resulted in a quantum leap in changing the perception of
coffee in the minds of U.S. consumers. I still like to remind my friends at the ICO that this
was the best use of the Promotion Fund they ever made.
By default, I became one of the principal coffee trainers of the CDG staff. By design, the
CDG staff were selected based on their “youth and inexperience” in the coffee field. We
wanted to tap into the generation that appeared to be “leaving coffee” at the time. Two of the
great hires at the time were Stuart Adelson and Susie Newman (now Susie Newman Spindler).
In the year following their start with CDG, I spent a great deal of time working with these two
people, who struggled through an uneven start at CDG headquarters in its quest to find the
right executive director. For reasons still unclear to me, they embraced coffee with a dedication
and passion that I had never seen before. Susie was an intuitive marketer, and her guidance in
all of CDG’s programs brought depth and finesse to the consumer outreach. Stuart, who had
a food service background through his experience at Universal Studios, brought real-world
strategies into the theoretical discussions of coffee promotions.
Together they helped design and execute three of CDG’s most successful campaigns. First
was a program for the vending industry that helped change the consumer perception that
vending machines brewed bad-tasting coffee. Second was the college campus program that
put over 200 “coffee cafés” on major college campuses across the country. These cafés trained
a generation of young consumers for more than a decade in the 1980s on the wonders of
espresso-based drinks; in turn, that created a ready and waiting market for Starbucks to fill
when the company emerged nationally in the 1990s. And third, and in my opinion CDG’s
finest accomplishment, was the discovery, creation, and launch of iced cappuccino through
a promotion carried out during the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. It was
a “shot heard ‘round the world,” as some form of iced cappuccino is now included on the
menu board of every coffee café in the world. Both Susie and Stuart remain part of the coffee
industry, with Susie going on to form the Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE) and Stuart
becoming the corporate counsel for SCAA.
The second major development to come out of the ICO-NCSA collaboration at the
end of the 1970s was the formation of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. It
started with a question from Barry Davies of the ICO Promotion Fund Office. He asked

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374 Ted Lingle

me if there was any organized group representing the fledgling specialty coffee stores in the
United States. I responded that there was no specialty coffee association at this time. He
said that was too bad, as the ICO Promotion Fund could not give money to individuals or
individual companies. I told him I would check with my friends in the specialty industry to
see if there was sufficient interest to form one. Based on Barry’s encouragement, I drafted a
rough outline and charter for the Specialty Coffee Advisory Board, an association created to
do coffee promotions, and sent it out to the people I knew were operating specialty coffee
bean stores. Included on this list was Marvin Golden in Boston, who was active in both the
office coffee service and specialty coffee segments of the industry. Marvin in turn sent it
out to his friends on the East Coast, including Donald Schoenholt of Gilles Coffee in New
York, whom I had never met.
About a month after the draft of the specialty coffee association charter went out, I got a
call from Schoenholt, who spent the first thirty minutes of the call explaining to me why this
was a bad idea and would not work and then spent the next fifteen minutes telling me what
to do to get it started. The result was a series of meetings over a two-year period, mostly in
conjunction with the Fancy Food Show, in which a group of people volunteered to serve on
a steering committee to rewrite the charter for the Specialty Coffee Association of America
(SCAA). Ten of us met at the Hotel Louise in San Francisco and hammered out a charter in
1982. We sent out the final version of the charter to everyone in the specialty coffee sector we
knew and asked them to send me a check for $100 in dues if they wished to become charter
members. At the end of 1983, we had thirty-three charter members and $3,300 in a bank ac-
count opened with my social security number, as we had yet to form a corporation.
For the next five years, SCAA grew slowly; that it grew at all was mainly due to the efforts
of Dan Cox of Vermont’s Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, who virtually ran the association
from his desk drawer. SCAA had two sources of revenue in the beginning, membership dues
and sales from the Coffee Cuppers’ Handbook, which I wrote and gave to SCAA in 1984. By
1987, SCAA had about 225 members, too large a group for Dan to handle by himself, so
SCAA’s board made the decision to hire a management firm to take over. SCAA, with the help
and underwriting of CDG, began organizing a conference in 1989, with the first one held in
New Orleans in 1989. We had about 100 attendees and 25 tabletop exhibits. It was a close-
knit and intimate meeting, but it was the precursor of bigger things to follow.
As CDG was winding down in 1990, so was my career at Lingle Bros. It was obvious to
both my brother Jim and me that when my dad retired from the company, he and I would
not be compatible business partners to co-manage a small family business. So I left the family
business and after a brief sabbatical, I began to look around for a new job. At the same time,
SCAA’s board began looking for a full-time person to take over operational control from the
management firm. I went for my “job interview” at SCAA’s third annual conference in Or-
lando in April 1991. Essentially the board said if you can find an appropriate place from which
to run the association, we will give it a shot. In June of 1991, we moved SCAA’s headquarters
to the Greater Los Angeles World Trade Center in Long Beach, opening a new chapter in
SCAA’s development.
The next fifteen years is best described as a “rocket ride,” with SCAA experiencing record
growth in both membership and conference attendance. When we finally leveled out in 2003,
we had over 3,000 members and our conference attendance in Seattle exceeded 10,000 people.
I attribute SCAA’s success to four factors. First, we were part of a new and growing market
segment, specialty coffee cafés. Second, we were doing the right things in focusing our efforts
on standards, education, and ethics. Third, we were blessed with outstanding board members.

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A Life in Coffee 375

Figure 62.1. The SCAA “Event” and Trade Show are held every year in April. This is the 2012 edi-
tion. The specialty industry of America and of many other countries gathers to trade information,
hear lectures, attend workshops and training sessions, look at new equipment, and just talk and
make contacts. One of the nicest things about the show is that race and ethnicity seem to disap-
pear; the subject is coffee. Photo by Robert Thurston.

And fourth, we had a superb meeting planner, Jeanne Sleeper, who did an unbelievable job
in making the conference a huge success in each and every year she was the show manager.
During this period of unprecedented growth, under the leadership of Phil Jones of Barnie’s
Coffee in Florida, SCAA created the International Relations Committee, giving the specialty
coffee movement an international character while assisting in the formation of a number of
specialty coffee associations worldwide, including Europe and Japan. Under the goading,
prodding, and guidance from Paul Katzeff, SCAA stepped into a leadership role in the area
of sustainable coffee agriculture. At the urging of Mohamed Moledina, SCAA opened the
Specialty Coffee Institute, which later became the Coffee Quality Institute. With the assis-
tance of Ellen Jordan Reidy and Karalynn McDermott, SCAA developed an incredibly rich
and diverse educational curriculum. Under the guidance and direction of Don Holly, SCAA’s
administrative director, who later joined Green Mountain Coffee, SCAA launched the World
Barista Championship in partnership with the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe.
With assistance from Linda Smithers of Susan’s Coffee in Ohio, Becky McKinnon of Timo-
thy’s Coffee in Toronto, JoAnne Show of the Coffee Beanery in Michigan, and Mary Petitt of
the Colombian Coffee Federation in New York, SCAA formulated strategic plans that guided
SCAA through its dynamic period of growth.
By 2004, I was burning out as SCAA’s executive director and began working with the board
to find my replacement. The search was complicated by the discovery that SCAA’s new admin-

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376 Ted Lingle

istrative director had embezzled funds from SCAA; the transition became even more difficult
when SCAA’s board hired someone to replace me who did not work out. But by 2007, I had
matriculated to become the executive director of the Coffee Quality Institute. CQI gave me
the opportunity to initiate coffee cupping training programs on an international level, culmi-
nating in a program to set standards for robusta coffees in order to reframe the industry and
consumer views on what this species of coffee could and should be. CQI’s board is now in the
process of finding my replacement, which hopefully will happen in 2012. Then I can keep a
promise to myself, and more important to my wife, Gale, that it is time for me to leave the
“fast lane” of coffee.
As I wind down my career, I cannot thank my wife enough for keeping the home fires burn-
ing while I was out championing my coffee causes. And I also need to thank my brother Jim
for tending the store at Lingle Bros. that helped fund, indirectly, many of my coffee campaigns.
My advice to anyone interested in making that great journey in changing coffee from an
avocation to a vocation is simply, “Take only memories; keep only friends; and give back all
you can—it’s a mistake not to.”

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63
How to Make a Great Cup of Coffee
Robert W. Thurston with Shawn Steiman and Jonathan Morris

There are more ways to make a cup of coffee than you can shake a stick at. Here we will briefly
discuss only two ways of preparing brewed coffee and will offer a few comments on espresso.
Although a wide range of electric coffeemakers has long been available, and the Specialty
Coffee Association of America has begun to recommend some of them, we will stick with the
simplest, manual methods of making brewed coffee. Espresso is a world unto itself, one which
has evolved extremely rapidly in the past few years. To make good espresso, a machine is neces-
sary; below we will mention several of the features to look for in a home espresso machine.
To make any kind of potable coffee, some basic factors must be in place, namely good
beans, proper water, and a mechanism for extracting solids from the beans. Coffee in your cup
is mostly water; only about 1.25 to 1.45 percent of any cup is composed of solids extracted
from ground coffee as water passes through it.
Start with good beans: it’s impossible to make a good cup of coffee from poor quality beans.
Ideally, the beans will be specialty coffee, roasted no more than a week before using. Grind
the beans just before making each cup or pot. Using coffee that is already ground, whether
from a bag or from a can, will simply not produce tasty results. Store beans in a container that
is as light- and airtight as possible. Keeping unused beans in the original bag, folded down to
the level of the beans and crimped or held in a rubber band, then placed in a dark cupboard, is
a handy way of storing them. Most coffee industry people we know don’t recommend keeping
beans in the freezer or refrigerator, since they may pick up moisture every time they are taken
out of there. But there are some pros who do store beans this way and say the results are fine.
Get a good grinder, which means a burr grinder. In these machines, the coffee beans fall
between two metal burrs, which are disks with low ridges or with grooves cut into them. The
beans are literally ground, not chopped. Many people have small electric machines that are
called grinders, but which actually rely on a blade that spins around in a top chamber and
cuts or chops the beans into small pieces. The major problem with these devices is that they
produce an uneven grind, which makes the coffee brew uneven and unpredictable. Choppers
may have to run so long to get the desired fineness that they will heat the coffee. While there
seems to be no evidence that extra heat at this point affects the taste in the cup, we say why
take a chance? If roasting the coffee has been done properly, all the heating of the beans neces-
sary has already occurred.

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Use good water: not “hard” water that contains much iron, calcium, or magnesium but
“soft water,” which does not have more than tiny traces of these elements and is free of
chlorine. In some areas of the Western world, water straight from the tap is okay for mak-
ing coffee and tea. But generally, even clean drinking water should be filtered—and the
filters changed regularly—to remove undesirable chemicals. Water passed through a reverse
osmosis system is preferable. On the other hand, don’t use distilled water for brewed cof-
fee. Different explanations have been offered as to why some “hard” content in the water is
necessary for proper extraction of flavor from the beans. At any rate, the simple fact remains
that distilled water won’t do the trick.
The SCAA recommends the use of 55 grams of coffee per liter of water, or 1.925 ounces
by weight of the coffee per 34 liquid ounces of water. As a very rough rule of thumb, use
about 10.6 grams—slightly over a third of an ounce—of coffee, or about 2 tablespoons, per
6 ounces of water. That is a ratio by weight of about 18:1 water to coffee (though this ratio is
somewhat a question of personal taste). In the specialty industry, ratios of as low as 15:1 have
become common. A kitchen scale, handy for many other purposes as well, makes it easy to
measure the coffee and the water. One serving would therefore be about 15 grams of coffee,
225 of water. Another, easier but less precise way to reach a reasonably effective ratio is to use
two tablespoons of coffee per six ounces of water.
An all-glass water boiler or a stainless steel kettle, preferably with a long, goose-necked
spout that allows pouring the water with precision, is a great addition to the process. Kettles
that automatically maintain a desired temperature are now available. The water should be
between 195 and 205°F, or 92-96°C; that means just off the boil.

BREWED COFFEE MADE IN A

CAFETIÈRE/FRENCH (PISTON, PLUNGER) PRESS

Many coffee lovers prefer the French press, invented in France and often called by its proper
French name, cafetière. There are no paper filters involved, the press can be washed easily, and
the coffee retains all of its flavor. For these devices, the coffee should be ground fairly coarsely;
follow the instructions on your grinder for the proper setting. The ground coffee should feel
a bit on the chunky side. Experimentation is the way to discover the right grind at home.
Ground coffee is dumped into the cylinder of the press and hot water is poured in. Insert
the plunger/piston at the top of the cylinder. Wait four or five minutes, push down the piston
to trap the grounds, pour and enjoy. What could be simpler?

BREWED COFFEE USING A FILTER

The other simple brewing method we’ll discuss is commonly known as the pour-over or man-
ual method. All that is required is a cone-shaped funnel for holding the coffee and the filter.
Most upscale coffee bars use paper filters. Yes, they are made from trees, but they can
be composted with used grounds inside. The grounds, incidentally, make an excellent soil
amendment for many plants. Which paper filters to use, brown or white? Try a taste test with
each; keep in mind that today’s white filters are not bleached using nasty chemicals but with
oxygen. Many experts prefer white, as it definitely does not affect the taste of the coffee. Some

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How to Make a Great Cup of Coffee 379

industry figures and good home brewers like metal filters; be sure to wash these carefully after
each use, so that they don’t retain flavors from the last batch of coffee made or from all that has
gone before. Many coffee professionals are fond of paper-filtered liquor because it produces
a “clean cup” and has no fine coffee particles, the results most likely to be free of flavors or
influences other than those revealed from the beans themselves. After all, the goal should be
to experience the natural qualities of the coffee.
If you like paper filters, keeping in mind the happy thought about their beneficial effect
on cholesterol mentioned above by Dr. Jones, place one that is the proper size into the kind
of cone funnel you are using and put the cone onto a cup or carafe. Bring the water to a boil,
with a little extra for the next step, depending on the size of the filter. Now wet the filter—
without any coffee in it yet—and allow the hot water to flow into the cup or carafe. Dump
the water out. The point is twofold: to rinse the filter and remove any taste it might have,
and to heat the filter and the cup. Grind the beans just before using them; the grind setting
will depend largely on the brew method but also on the amount of coffee you are making.
Since the point of making filtered, or any kind of coffee, is to get the proper extraction from
the grounds, the time that it takes the water to pass through the grounds is important. Given
equal amounts of water and coffee, the more finely ground the beans are, the longer it will
take the water to go through. The greater the quantity of coffee used, the longer the water will
take. Therefore a small amount of coffee should be ground more finely than a large amount.
Coffee can be overextracted if the grind is too fine or the quantity of coffee too much for the
amount of water used, resulting in a bitter brew that smothers delicate flavors. Coffee can
also be underextracted if the grind is too coarse or too much water is used for the amount of
ground coffee, producing a weak, thin liquor. Here, too, experiments are in order.
Whatever the quantity and grind used, put the ground coffee into the wet filter; give it a
shake to settle the coffee and to make sure it is more or less level. Now pour on just enough
water to wet all the grounds. Note that some baristas find that this process of infusing the
grounds slightly dampens the highlights of some coffees; everyone is experimenting, it seems.
If you do wet the grounds, wait twenty or so seconds to allow various gases to escape, then
pour on the rest of the water, not too fast. For best results, stir the coffee once, gently, as it
goes down through the grounds. Don’t put the carafe on a burner at this point or later. If you
want to keep the coffee hot for a while, make it directly into a thermal vessel. However you
catch the brewed coffee, it should be cool enough to drink right away. Starting with water at
195°F and following the directions just given, the cup temperature should be about 175°F.
Most electric coffeemakers work on the principles just described. However, with a few
exceptions, these machines don’t reach or at least don’t maintain the proper temperature for
brewing. And their water lines and other parts can be next to impossible to keep really clean.
Old sayings along the line of “coffee should be hot as hell, black as night, and sweet as
love” might be amusing on a tee-shirt or potholder, but they don’t point the way to optimal
flavor. In really hot coffee, as in very close to the boiling point, the heat will override many
subtle characteristics. Black is fine, and the natural sweetness in excellent beans is great.
Our house rules for anyone drinking a cup we’ve prepared is to take a sip of unadulterated
coffee first. Then our guests can put anything they like into it, from sugar to fake cream to
rum and whiskey. But we hope everyone will come to enjoy coffee, just coffee, because of
its own complexity and flavor.
Another experiment to try: make a cup of coffee and drink it slowly, even over the course
of several hours. See what different flavors emerge as the coffee cools to room temperature.

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380 Robert W. Thurston with Shawn Steiman and Jonathan Morris

ESPRESSO

In the past few years, espresso has become more and more complex. New blends and single-
origin beans that are great for espresso appear almost daily. The industry has moved away
from using only dark roast beans, which tended to produce a standard flavor, to beans roasted
across a spectrum from fairly light to moderately dark.
The central factors involved in making good espresso are pressure and time of extraction.
Pressure is provided by the machine or stovetop device. Extraction time depends above all
on grind; that is, extraction is controlled largely by the fineness of the grind. Therefore you
must have a grinder capable of producing grains of coffee that are like very fine sand and
that are even in size. Extraction also depends on the amount of coffee put into the basket of
the machine’s coffee holder, the portafilter, and on the operation of the machine. Any good
barista or home coffee brewer must practice to get the right grind and quantity of coffee for
a particular machine. In fact, good coffee bars will “dial in” the espresso several times a day
by adjusting the grind, amount of coffee in the portafilter, and, if possible with the machine
in use, extraction time.
Again, as with brewed coffee, the goal is to achieve a certain percentage of solids in the
liquor. But of course the extraction system is different in the two methods: brewed coffee

Figure 63.1. A few pieces of basic equipment for making brewed coffee at home. A glass water
kettle is good for large servings, but the stainless steel goose-neck kettle provides more accuracy
in the pour. The scale is almost essential; it allows the preparer to be consistent in making coffee.
Stiff brushes are useful for keeping a grinder and other equipment clean. Filter cones obviously
come in different sizes; some are now designed to agitate the water as it passes through the
ground coffee. Photo by Robert Thurston.

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How to Make a Great Cup of Coffee 381

depends on gravity, or in the French press on simple infusion of the grounds; for espresso,
you must have a device capable of forcing the water through the ground coffee at relatively
high pressure. A pressure of 15 bars, or roughly fifteen times atmospheric pressure, is neces-
sary for a home machine, which produces only a few cups at a time. Commercial machines
in continuous use typically operate at 9 bars. Most tabletop “espresso” pots should better be
called by the Italian term moka; they do not produce enough pressure to make true espresso.
If that is to your taste, no one should argue with you.
But a serious espresso machine that reaches 15 bars of pressure at home, 9–12 bars in a
coffee shop, does a much better job of bringing out the depth and finish of a good “shot.”
Hundreds of fine machines are available; at the top end are ones that allow the home or
professional barista to preinfuse the grounds—again, to allow a little water into them for a
few moments—and to regulate the pressure as the shot is pulled. The barista may, for ex-
ample, keep the pressure at 9 bars for the first part of the shot, then raise it to 12 bars, then
ease up for the remaining time. The whole shot should last 25–30 seconds in a commercial
operation, probably less at home. Equipment capable of such finesse, including machines
that can program shot profiles, costs thousands of dollars. But excellent espresso can be
made by machines that cost far less.
We will not delve here into issues of tamping the grounds into the portafilter; of adjusting
the grind according to air temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure; or of many other
steps that baristas can take to pull superb shots. Then there is the realm of steaming milk,
getting the proportions of a cappuccino or latte just right, and even developing latte art skills.
All well and good, but we want to emphasize that any good espresso-based drink must start
with good espresso liquor.
Espresso alone is so complex that it can be a road to heaven or to madness. Talk about ma-
chines to your friendly local barista. Go online to compare machines, looking carefully at their
features. With a little investment of time, including really learning how to use the machine
you buy, and hopefully not too large a financial outlay, you will impress your friends.
Final words: There is no limit to the number of coffee-making devices you can buy and
the money you can spend on them. But it is possible to make excellent coffee at home with
simple equipment.

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Acknowledgments

Besides, of course, the contributors to this volume, we owe many deep debts to others in the
coffee industry.

Robert Thurston: Thanks for all your help and generosity to:
Brazil: Edgard Bressoni, Christian Wolthers
Colombia: Jaime Raul Duque Londono, Oscar Jaramillo Garcia, Pedro Segovia
Costa Rica: Ermie Carman and Linda Moyher, Arnoldo Leiva
Ethiopia: Kedir Kemal, Ato Million, Meskerme Tessema
Germany: Mohammed Taha
Italy: Dr. Isabella Amaduzzi, Dr. Alessandra Cagliari, Enrico Maltoni, Paolo Milani, Ro-
berto Turrin
Kenya: Kennedy Gitonga, J. K. Kinoti, Samuel Mburu, Peter Orwiti, Michael Otieno,
Solomon Waweru
Nicaragua: Father James E. Flynn, Denis Gutierrez, Mausi Kühl
Switzerland: Dr. Monika Imboden, Cornelia Luchsinger, Paolo Stirnimann
United States: Bob Arceneaux, Katie Barrow, Anna Clark, Pan Demetrekakes, Judith Ganes-
Chase, Tracy Ging, David Griswold, Bill Mares, Sidney Mintz, Stephen Morrissey, Jenny Rob-
erts, Kelly Stewart, Brett Struwe, Quentin Wodon
I also thank the History Department and other divisions of Miami University, Oxford,
Ohio, for granting me funds and time to pursue the research and writing of my sections of
this book.

Jonathan Morris: I’ve been helped by so many people in the industry over the years that there
is no space to list them all here. For specific help with the pieces in this particular volume I’d
like to thank:
Costa Rica: Gonazlo Hernandez Solis
Germany: Jens Burg, Barbara Debroeven, Stefan Graack, Margrit Schulte-Beerbuehl
Italy: Isabella Amaduzzi, Elena Cedrola, Maurizio Giuli, Angela Hysi, Enrico Maltoni,
Carlo Odello, Luigi Odello
Mexico: Rachel Laudan

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384 Acknowledgments

Switzerland: Manuela Flamer, Roman Rossfeld

United Kingdom: Claudia Baldoli, Laura Dalgleish, Claudia Galetta, Barry Kither, Anya
Marco, Charles Praeger, Michael Segal, Jeffrey Young
United States: Kent Bakke, Mark Prince, David Schomer
And finally I’d like to acknowledge the support of the University of Hertfordshire in grant-
ing me sabbatical leave and awarding me a travel grant to pursue my research.

Shawn Steiman: As with anything I’ve ever written, my work always becomes better with the
assistance and generosity of others. I especially thank my wife, Julia Wieting, for her time and
brilliant editing skills. I’m also grateful for the friendship and expertise of:
United Kingdom: Dr. Peter Baker
United States: Dr. Skip Bittenbender, Dr. Mel Jackson, Ric Rhinehart, Miles Small, Spencer
Turer

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Glossary

acidity: A sensation in the mouth when tasting coffee. Acidity is a bright, lively, sparkling feeling, most
often associated with citrus fruits and vinegars. In coffee, acidity is typically considered desirable. If
too intense, it may seem sour, like a lemon, rather than merely acidy, like an orange. Acidity is a basic
characteristic of coffee quality and is almost always described in quality assessments. Note that in the
context of coffee tasting, acidity does not refer to pH balance.
aeropress brewing: A brewing system using a column that sits on top of a cup or carafe. Water and
ground coffee are allowed to sit in an upper chamber for a few minutes, then the water is pressed
through the grounds into the cup.
afterburner: A device attached to a roasting machine that burns away particulates coming from the
roaster and chaff from roasting beans, thus reducing emissions to a minimum. Afterburners can cost
$14,000 and more, even for a small roaster.
aftertaste: The echo of flavor that remains once coffee leaves the mouth. The intensity of that echo or
its pleasantness is the aftertaste. It can also be called the finish. Aftertaste is a basic characteristic of
coffee quality.
agroforestry system: An agricultural system involving the production of coffee beneath a species-diverse
canopy of shade trees. See also shade/shade-grown.
Agtron numbers: A measure of roast level by color. An Agtron is a spectrometer, a machine designed to
measure light intensity. Agtron machines measure the reflectance of light from whole bean or ground
coffee and translate it into a number on a scale of 0 to 100. Higher numbers represent more reflec-
tance and, hence, lighter coffees.
altitude: The geographical altitude at which coffee is grown, thought to influence its cup quality; higher-
grown coffees are generally considered better tasting by the specialty coffee industry. Higher altitude
coffees are widely perceived as more acidy and more complex. The scientific literature both supports
and disagrees with this idea. Air pressure and ambient temperature decrease as altitude increases, but
temperature is thought to have more influence on cup quality. Consequently, altitude is only a proxy
for temperature and latitude, which highly influences ambient temperature, and which must also be
considered when predicting potential cup quality.
arabica: Common name of the species Coffea arabica. It is one of 124 known and published species in
the genus. Considered to be the most pleasant tasting of the Coffea species, arabica makes up about
70 percent of world coffee production.

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386 Glossary

aroma: The smell of brewed coffee. It has no specific smell-type other than “coffeeness.” As green coffee
ages or roasted coffee stales, the intensity of aroma tends to decrease. Aroma is a basic characteristic
of coffee quality and is almost always measured in quality assessments.
bags: The packaging for coffee beans, traditionally a jute sac containing 60 kilograms, or 134 pounds,
of coffee beans. See also packaging.
balance: All of the individual characteristics of a cup of coffee that interact to create a united taste for the
cup. Balance describes how they fit together in relation to one another. It is a subjective description
of the coffee based on the drinker’s sense of how everything interacts in the cup.
barista: The person operating the coffee brewing equipment, principally the espresso machine, in a cof-
fee shop. Although Italian in origin, the word only became established in that language in the 1930s,
when the Fascist administration attempted to suppress foreign words such as “barman.” But “barista”
became firmly established as both a standard term and a specialized profession only with the rise of
international espresso culture.
Barista Guild of America: An official trade group, founded in 2003, of the SCAA. Its purpose is to train
and certify baristas while celebrating the barista profession. It offers classes at official SCAA events
like the annual exposition and also operates Camp-Pull-A-Shot, annual training retreats held on both
coasts of the U.S.
biennial bearing: The two-year production cycle in coffee where one year a tree produces a lot of coffee
and in the next year much less. It results from coffee’s phenology: the branches that will produce the
next year’s crop are unable to grow very much because they are competing for nutrients with the cur-
rent maturing berries. Biennial bearing can be mitigated with pruning and shade.
Big Four (sometimes Big Five): The largest international coffee companies, which market largely com-
modity (or commercial) coffee. With their headquarters country and their leading brands, they are
now: Nestle (Nescafe, Nespresso, Taster’s Choice), Switzerland; Smucker’s (Folgers), U.S.; Sara Lee
(Douwe Egberts, Senseo, and others), U.S.; Kraft Foods (Maxwell House, Sanka), U.S.; and, in some
counts, Tchibo (Tchibo, Piacetto), Germany. Together these companies control 50–60 percent of
global coffee sales. The composition of the Big Four has changed in recent years, as Procter & Gamble
and Phillip Morris (now Altria) have left the coffee business.
biodynamic agriculture: Farming according to the principles of Rudolph Steiner, known for Waldorf
schools, but based on earlier, traditional practices of following the cycles of the moon for such work
as pruning. Biodynamic farms are managed according to moon phases and position of the stars. Or-
ganic vessels, for instance a cow horn packed with manure, are buried in the earth or left to dry out
on the soil’s surface. The idea is to draw cosmic and terrestrial forces into the packed material and
thence into the soil.
bird-friendly: Coffee farms that have a considerable amount of overstory trees, which are attractive to
migratory birds. Bird-friendly coffee is a trademark of the Smithsonian Institution, which promotes
this certification as a way of encouraging farmers to plant more shade trees, in turn attracting not
only more birds to the land but also spiders, bats, and other creatures that are a pleasure to observe
and also help control coffee pests.
blends: Beans that are mixed from various origins or varieties, with the goal either of balancing charac-
teristics in the cup or keeping the cost of the coffee low.
body: The level of viscosity or thickness in coffee. Two common drinks with noticeable body are milk
and red wine. Skim milk has little body; whole milk has a lot. Red wine has more body than white
does. Not well understood chemically, coffee’s body is likely derived from dissolved cell wall bits and
oils that made it into the cup. Body is another basic characteristic of coffee quality.
branding: The presentation of a product by a specific company, usually with a label and a logo. Branding
contrasts with generic coffee, marketed without indication of who put it into salable form. Brands
offered by coffee companies began to appear in the U.S. after about 1862. The idea behind branding
was to cement an association in the consumer’s mind between a product and a company: ads urged
coffee drinkers to demand Hills Brothers, Folgers, and so on.
Brazilian naturals: See naturals.

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Glossary 387

brewing methods: The way in which water is used to extract flavor from the ground beans, resulting
in coffee liquor. See the individual methods: aeropress, clever, Clover, dial in, drip, espresso, filter,
flip (Neapolitano), French press, percolator, Turkish/Mediterranean, vacuum.
broca (Spanish). See coffee berry borer.
C coffee: The coffee that serves as the basis of the C price.
C price (C market, Coffee C): The “C” price refers to a number in dollars per 100 pounds of arabica
coffee on the New York ICE commodity exchange. Officially called the Coffee “C”®, the C price is
usually cited in dollars per pound, for example $2.46. How the C price is derived is a complex process;
see chapter 15, “The ‘Price’ of Coffee.”
caffeine: A purine derivative xanthine with methyl groups attached at positions 1, 3, and 7. Its
stimulating properties are the reason many people drink coffee in the first place. Caffeine, which
long had a fairly bad reputation in the public mind for causing health problems, has lately been
found to have various health benefits, if consumed moderately in coffee (three to four cups a day
of brewed coffee).
caffè latte: A single or double shot of espresso topped with large quantity of steamed milk and a small
head of foamed milk on top in which latte art can be created. See the discussion of the many variations
of the beverage in terms of size and coffee to milk proportions in chapter 45, “The Espresso Menu.”
California red worms: Widely used in Latin America, worms that digest coffee fruit skins and pulp and,
in a matter of weeks, produce useful compost. One of the most effective means of reducing pollution
and waste from the harvest and of recycling material on the farms.
cappuccino: A single or double shot of espresso, topped with equal parts of steamed and foamed milk—
increasingly served “dry,” that is, with a greater proportion of foam which has often been heavily aer-
ated (macro-foamed). Often topped with a dusting of cocoa powder or cinnamon.
capsules: A single portion of ground coffee sealed into a small disk, usually aluminum, that can be
used to brew a single cup of coffee in an appropriate machine. Nestle originated this technology for
use in its Nespresso machines; see chapter 45, “The Espresso Menu.” Keurig is the market leader in
the United States, but Starbucks recently launched its own capsules and machines for using them.
See also pods.
catch crop: A crop, usually a fast-growing one, that can be used to provide some income while waiting
for another crop (such as tree crops like rubber or cacao) to reach economic maturity.
certification: Programs designed to provide a good price to farmers for their coffee, to protect and im-
prove the environment, or to improve working and living conditions for farmers and their hired labor.
See chapter 20, “Coffee Certification Programs.”
chemical composition of the beverage: The complex chemical makeup of coffee. No complete descrip-
tion of the composition currently exists. Many factors influence the composition of any given cup.
Among them are the genetics, the environment the tree grew in, the processing method, storage con-
ditions, roasting, freshness, and brewing. A cup of coffee likely has at least 300 different compounds
in the liquid brew. Over 1,000 compounds have been detected in the aroma.
cherry: The ripe coffee fruit (or berry). Generally used in the singular, it is called “cherry” because some
varieties have a deep red color when at their peak, ready to be picked, and because the size of coffee
cherry is often close to that of cherries. Certain varieties produce yellow, pink, or orange ripe berries,
which are still called cherry. In Spanish, coffee fruits are called “grapes” (uvas).
chicory: Cichorium intybus, a small, herbaceous, perennial plant. In many parts of the world, its root
is used as a coffee substitute. Chicory became associated with France when it was widely used to
compensate for the loss of access to coffee supplies following the Haitian revolution and the British
blockade of Napoleonic Europe in the late 1790s. In the United States, it became a common cof-
fee substitute or additive during the Civil War, when the South had little access to coffee due to the
Northern blockade. Coffee with chicory remains popular in the southern United States, particularly
in New Orleans.
Clever brewing: A brewing system using a device that allows coffee to infuse in a self-contained plastic
cone, then to be released into a carafe.

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climate change: The incremental rise of global temperatures. Climate change poses a serious problem
for the coffee industry. As average temperatures rise, many current locations for growing coffee will
be too hot to continue quality coffee production. New land, at higher elevations, is scarce, less fertile,
and not easy to farm. Whether more land at low to moderate elevations but high latitudes will become
available for coffee has not been determined. The warmer temperatures also facilitate the spread of
some coffee pests, particularly the coffee berry borer.
Clover brewing: A brewing system using a machine that can be adjusted in many different ways, for
example brew temperature and extraction time, according to the coffee used in it. Starbucks purchased
the right to manufacture and use the Clover in 2008.
coffee bean: The seed of the coffee plant, encased within the coffee fruit.
coffee berry borer: Hypothenemus hampei. This pest originated in Angola but now exists in nearly every
coffee-producing country in the world. It is considered the most disastrous coffee pest as it is very dif-
ficult to control and, so far, impossible to eliminate. The female insect bores through a coffee cherry
and into the seed, where she lays eggs. Once they hatch, the newborn insects mate and the pregnant
females leave to begin the cycle anew.
Coffee “C”® price: See C price.
coffee cake: Also called puck. The disk of used coffee grounds left in the portafilter after an espresso
shot. Baristas check wetness and hardness of the puck as a way of determining whether the shot has
been drawn properly.
coffee cherry: See cherry.
coffee fruit: The fruit of the coffee plant. The coffee fruit is covered first with a skin. Below that is
mucilage or pulp. Next is parchment, and finally there is a thin layer called silverskin that envelopes
the beans (seeds). See figure 2.1 for an illustration of the parts of the fruit.
coffeehouses (bars, cafés): A business whose principal source of revenue comes from selling coffee
beverages for consumption on the premises. The first coffeehouses appeared in Arabia during the
fifteenth century, reaching Cairo in the 1500s and Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman empire, in
1554. The first European coffeehouses appeared in England in the 1650s, with the first American
coffeehouse opening in Boston in 1670. In continental Europe the café, combining alcohol, food,
and coffee service, developed into the dominant coffee retailing institution. In the twentieth century
the espresso bar evolved, with customers drinking their beverages while standing at the counter, while
the branded coffee shop has become the primary location for coffee consumption in the twenty-first
century, featuring a comfortable furnished environment and the provision of facilities that encourage
customers to treat the coffee shop as providing a “twenty-minute experience,” which is paid for in the
price of a premium coffee. See chapter 42, “Coffeehouse Formats through the Centuries.”
coffee leaf rust: A fungal disease (Hemileia vastatrix) considered one of coffee’s worst pests. The fungus
appears as rust-colored spots on leaves, causing them to function less efficiently and, in many cases,
killing them and the whole tree. It is considered the most severe coffee leaf disease. Arabica is much
more susceptible than robusta to rust. Robusta’s superior resistance is one major reason for breeding
programs that aim to incorporate robusta lineage into arabica varieties.
coffee plant: A member of the botanical family Rubiaceae and the genus Coffea. The two commercially
important species are Coffea arabica (arabica) and Coffea canephora (robusta). It is an evergreen tree
with glossy leaves that form as pairs along the branch. The flowers are white and pleasantly aromatic.
Coffee Quality Institute (CQI): A nonprofit organization affiliated with the Specialty Coffee Associa-
tion of America (SCAA). It works internationally to improve the quality of coffee and the lives of the
people who produce it through training, building institutional capacity, and operating quality stan-
dard systems. CQI provides training and technical assistance to coffee producers and operates both
the Q and R programs (for arabica and robusta coffee, respectively), which certify cuppers to grade
coffees using a standardized system of evaluation.
coffee taster’s wheel: A wheel, usually presented as a poster, that lists both defective and positive flavors
in coffee. Examples of negative ones are horsey, hidey, woody; of positive ones, floral, citrus, malt-like.

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The wheel gives terms for defects produced in growing, processing, and handling coffee, while the
pleasant descriptors refer to flavors and scents revealed during proper roasting.
Colombian milds: Wet-processed Colombian coffee that serves as the standard level of quality for
Coffee C.
commercial coffee: Coffee that is not specialty. Usually sold in grocery or big box stores already ground
in cans or plastic tubs, such coffee is a blend of low-quality arabica and often robusta. Still the world’s
most widely consumed kind of coffee. See also Big Four.
commodity chain: All the people and stages in handling a commodity from the ground to retail sales.
commodity coffee: Non-specialty coffee. For coffee, the major markets for selling commodity coffee
are, for arabica, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE, New York), which determines the “C” price, and for
robusta, the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE).
condiments: In coffee shops, milk, cream, sugar, and artificial substitutes for them.
conilon: Brazilian robusta.
consuming countries: Those countries that grow little or no coffee but consume imported coffee. A
country may be both a producer and a consumer; examples are Brazil, Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia,
India, and Vietnam.
conventional coffee: Coffee that is not certified, for example, non-organic.
crema: The layer of foam typically found on the top of an espresso coffee (from the Italian word for
cream). Under high pressure, the water used in the espresso brewing becomes supersaturated with
carbon dioxide and other volatile gases. As the liquor leaves the portafilter, the gases begin to disperse
and move out of the water. These gases are then trapped by a mixture of water and non-water soluble
compounds, likely mostly oils. These trapped gasses create microbubbles that determine the sensory
characteristics of the crema. Although a layer of crema indicates that the coffee has been brewed under
high pressure, it offers no guarantee of cup quality in itself. Indeed there is now a school that holds
that espresso tastes best after the crema has been removed. See chapter 47, “Coffee Quality,” and
chapter 45, “The Espresso Menu.”
crème café (French): Taken from the term caffè crema (Italian), an espresso beverage served above all in
France and Germany. Crème café is larger and less intense than Italian espresso but still topped by a
mousse of crema.
cultivar (or variety): Within a species, types different enough in some way to warrant classification as
a subcategory (for example, ‘Fuji’ and ‘Red Delicious’ apples or poodles and golden retriever dogs).
These differences tend to manifest themselves physically, which is how farmers and breeders tend to
identify and select different cultivars. In coffee, differences in cultivars can be related to plant height,
fruit color, or cup quality, for example. There are many cultivars of C. arabica, and new ones are being
actively created by breeders.
Cup of Excellence: A competition measuring coffee quality. The Cup of Excellence (CoE) competitions
began in 1999 as a price discovery system based on cup quality. Coffees within a country are submit-
ted to the competition and judged by local cuppers. A group of international experts conducts the
final round of judging. After the experts score the coffees, they are sold at an online auction.
cupping: Cupping is the formal method for evaluating coffee cup quality. Coffee is brewed in cups or
bowls, ingested using spoons, and often expectorated. An array of quality traits, like body and acidity,
are assessed and recorded. See also Q-grader cuppers.
decaffeination: The process of removing caffeine from unroasted coffee. To be classified as decaffein-
ated coffee, at least 97 percent of the caffeine needs to be removed. There are three main methods.
The chemical method treats green beans with a solvent; common ones are water, ethyl acetate, super-
critical carbon dioxide, and methylene chloride. The solvent removes the caffeine and some other
compounds. The caffeine is separated from the extract and the other compounds are returned to
the coffee. The Swiss water process works without the use of chemicals. The caffeine is removed by
soaking the beans in hot water for an extended period of time. This water is then channeled through
a series of charcoal filters to remove the caffeine, before the water is returned to the beans. Although

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this may sound like a “purer” approach, critics claim that it removes more of the flavor than the other
methods. A recently developed alternative uses CO2 to remove caffeine.
defects: Problems in the beans that can result in unpleasant tastes. Defects may result from pest in-
festation, overripeness, overfermentation in processing, diseases, and other problems in cultivation,
processing, or storage. Broken beans are also considered defects, as their multiple surfaces are inviting
to mold.
Demeter: Named after the Greek goddess of fertility, an organization based in Philomath, Oregon, that
certifies coffee grown according to biodynamic principles. See also biodynamic agriculture.
demucilation: A form of washed processing in which the mucilage is mechanically removed from the
seed. The seeds are then moved directly to drying or soaked in water.
density: A physical property of an object that is defined as its mass per its volume. Green coffee can be
graded according to density using a density table. Denser coffees are considered to be of higher quality.
depulping: The action of removing the outer layer of fruit, the pulp, from the coffee cherry. This is the
common term in languages other than English, which for some reason uses “pulping” instead.
dial in/to brewing: The process, in making espresso, of adjusting the grind, the amount of coffee in the
portafilter, and the extraction time.
direct trade: A system of buying and importing coffee that links importer/roasters directly with farmers.
See chapter 21, “Direct Trade in Coffee.”
drip brewing: A brewing system using any machine or hand device that uses gravity to pass water
through ground coffee.
drying: The process in which, before coffee is shipped and roasted, it is dried down to a certain level
of moisture (humidity). This can occur using the sun on specially made drying decks, the ground,
tarpaulins, or elevated (African) screens. Alternatively, mechanical dryers can be used to reduce the
seed’s moisture content to 9–12 percent.
dry processing: See natural processing.
ejido system: In Spanish-speaking Latin America, a system of land tenure in which all land is held in
common, for example by a village, but plots are farmed individually. Many nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century non-indigenous commentators found this system objectionable, as in their eyes it
encouraged “native” people to stay at home and not work on large commercial farms.
energy drinks: Heavily caffeinated beverages. These drinks are designed to be alternatives to beverages
that naturally contain caffeine; they are essentially stay-awake products. The best known of these is
Red Bull, invented in Thailand in the 1970s and marketed internationally from 1984 on. As sold in
the West, Red Bull contains about 80 milligrams of caffeine per 8.3-ounce can.
espresso: Coffee brewed under high pressure. The coffee is finely ground and tamped (i.e., pressed) into
a filter basket. The basket sits in a portafilter that is clamped on to the espresso machine at the so-
called group head. The bottom of the portafilter contains two spouts through which the coffee flows
into two cups positioned underneath. Sawing off the bottom of the portafilter (making it a “naked”
portafilter) is sometimes done to produce a more theatrical effect. Hot water is forced through the
coffee cake, usually under around 9 bars of pressure, to produce a shot of around 25–30 milliliters.
Adjusting the grind of the coffee will alter the length of the delivery time (usually 25–30 seconds),
which in turn affects the extent of extraction and taste of the coffee in the cup. Espresso brewed un-
der high pressures will be topped by an emulsion known as crema. Espresso is closely associated with
Italy, where most machine manufacturers are still based. For an extended discussion of the history of
espresso, see chapter 45, “The Espresso Menu.”
espresso-based drinks: Beverages in which espresso provides the coffee component. Although originat-
ing in Italy, many of these take different forms elsewhere in the world. See cappuccino, caffè latte,
lungo, macchiato, and ristretto, and chapter 45, “The Espresso Menu.”
espresso beans: Beans used to prepare espresso coffee (as espresso refers to a process rather than an
origin). In Italy espresso is nearly always produced using a blend of beans, traditionally combining
arabica and robusta beans, although the proportions vary dramatically. Many specialty blends are 100
percent arabica or even single-origin.

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espresso brewing: Coffee made under pressure. The term espresso first appeared in Italy in the early
twentieth century, although the machines of that era brewed at much lower pressures than today.
A manually operated piston to power the water through the ground coffee cake appeared in 1948,
resulting in the crema (Italian for cream) on top of the coffee shot. During the 1960s, new machines
switched to electric pumps, operating at around 9 bars of pressure, which remains the norm today.
See also the main entry espresso.
espresso coffee: Coffee used for espresso, often dark roasted in deference to the supposed Italian
tradition. This probably stems from the fact that the blends often feature substantial quantities of
robusta beans whose bitterness in the cup can be somewhat counteracted by caramelizing through
dark roasting. However, many northern Italian blends, which tend to be higher in arabica content,
are light roast.
espresso machines: Machines intended to brew espresso. They are usually divided into “traditional”
semi-automatic machines in which the barista controls most of the brewing parameters, “automatics”
in which these are regulated by the machine itself, “supra-automatics” that include the grinding pro-
cess, and “bean to cup” machines that also prepare and mount milk onto the beverages. The espresso
machine has evolved substantively over the years. The first so-called espresso machines, such as the
original Pavoni Ideale of 1905, relied on steam to generate pressure and brewed at little more than one
and half atmospheres. Achille Gaggia’s manually operated piston, developed in 1948, revolutionized
espresso by introducing high-pressure brewing and its accompanying crema. This system was later
superseded by the use of electric pumps in the first semi-automatic machines such as the Faema E61.
See chapter 45, “The Espresso Menu.”
estates: Large coffee farms using hired labor. Estate coffee is truly single-origin and is likely to be mar-
keted as such.
extraction: The process of drawing or forcing water through ground coffee to produce liquor. Proper
extraction time for the device used to make a coffee beverage is critical to its quality.
fair trade: A system of coffee contracts that provides a guaranteed minimum price for green beans,
regardless of movement in global markets. The American oversight and labeling organization is Fair
Trade USA, having changed its name from TransFair USA. For more on Fair Trade and other ethical
certifications, see chapter 20, “Coffee Certification Programs,” and chapter 22, “Fair Trade.” See also
Fair Trade USA.
Fairtrade International: A fair trade organization based in Bonn, Germany, that provides certification
and labeling for fair trade practices.
Fair Trade USA: The American organization that provides ethical certification for coffee. See also fair
trade.
farm gate price: The price actually paid to the farmer for coffee. Since coffee passes through many hands
before it is made into a beverage, the price rises as it passes in turn from a buyer to an exporter, an
importer, a roaster, and a retail establishment.
fermentation: One of the initial stages in dealing with harvested coffee. After picking, the cherry is gen-
erally either pulped (wet processing) or left in the skin (dry processing). In the first case, the mucilage
is removed by microorganisms present in the fruit and by immersion in water. In dry processing, the
microorganisms carry out mucilage degradation by themselves. Both processes bring down the level
of acidity—here the word does refer to the pH scale—to below 5 or even below 4.
fertilizer: Any substance added to a living system that is intended to provide nutrients. In agriculture,
fertilizers can be derived from organic sources (typically compost from decomposed plant matter,
manure, or animal parts) or produced in factories. Organic and synthetic fertilizers may be the same
in the chemical composition of the nutrients they are promising to provide; see chapter 5, “What
Does ‘Organic’ Mean?”
filter brewing: A brewing system using material, usually in a cone or another holder (dripper), that
holds ground coffee in drip systems. It can be made of metal, paper, cloth, sometimes even an old
sock in Costa Rica.
finish: See aftertaste.

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first wave: A presumed stage of development of the coffee trade in which coffee was mass produced with
little regard for quality. In the Western world, this phase lasted roughly from the mid-1600s into the
1970s and 1980s. Trish Skeie Rothgeb coined the phrase in 2002, but coffee professionals and histo-
rians disagree about the periodization of coffee in the Western world. The only phrase widely used to
designate a period of coffee-making is third wave. See also second wave; third wave.
flavor: The paradigmatic taste of a beverage, in this case the essential coffee flavor. Cuppers add a point
value for flavor to the scores they have assigned to any coffee for its other characteristics in the cup,
for example finish.
flip (Neapolitano) brewing: A small metal stovetop device from Italy. An upper compartment is a
basket for ground coffee; a lower compartment holds water. When the water boils, the whole device
is flipped upside down. The hot water falls through the grounds in the basket and back into the
container that first held the water.
FOB: See free on board.
Folgers: One of the Big Four brands. Recently sold by Procter and Gamble to another Ohio corpo-
ration, Smucker’s, Folgers remains one of America’s most popular commodity coffees. Jim Folger
began the company with several partners in the California gold fields in the 1850s. Riding the crest
of mass advertising and communications, Folgers became a national brand in the next forty years.
In 1963 Procter and Gamble bought the company, helping it to become America’s top seller into
the early 1980s.
Food Safety Modernization Act: A U.S. law adopted in 2011 that gives the Food and Drug Admin-
istration the ability to issue mandatory recalls of processed foods suspected of being contaminated.
fragrance: The smell of freshly ground, unbrewed coffee. It has no specific smell-type other than coffee-
ness. As green coffee ages or roasted coffee stales, the intensity of fragrance tends to decrease. Fragrance
is another basic characteristic of coffee quality.
free on board: A designation for any commodity or product, manufactured or otherwise, that is on a
ship and ready for departure from a port. That is, all taxes, duties, charges for labor, perhaps even
bribes, have been paid. The FOB price is quite different from the farm gate price.
French press brewing: A brewing system invented in the early nineteenth century in France using a
piston press or cafetière. A cylinder, usually of glass, is held in a frame that keeps the bottom of the
device above the level of a table or counter. Fairly coarsely ground coffee is poured into the bottom
of the press, followed by water just off the boil. Then a piston or plunger is inserted in the top of the
cylinder. After four minutes or so, the piston handle is pressed down. Attached to the bottom of the
handle is a close mesh screen, which traps virtually all of the grounds at the bottom of the cylinder.
The coffee liquor can then be poured into a cup.
futures: A system of buying and selling many commodities, especially raw materials and agricultural
products. Contracts are made, usually between a large buyer and a commodities dealer, that specify a
certain amount and quality of coffee to be acquired for a set price on a certain date. See chapter 15,
“The ‘Price’ of Coffee.”
grading: A quality measure typically made at origin by an authorized government agency. Different
governments use different criteria for grading coffee. The criteria can include coffee species, elevation
at which the coffee was grown, bean size, cup quality, and defect count.
green: See green coffee/bean; green movement; green taste.
green coffee/bean: The processed, dried form of coffee that must first be roasted before it becomes a
palatable product. Green coffee is the coffee of commerce; it is above all in this form that coffee is
exported from producing countries. In Spanish, coffee at this stage is called oro, gold.
green movement: An effort to preserve and improve the environment through the use of recycling,
composting, and self-sufficiency in energy and soil amendments. The coffee industry in general, and
specialty coffee in particular, has put considerable emphasis on going green; after all, the environment
must be carefully tended in order to grow coffee on a sustainable basis. Western cafés are increasingly
using biodegradable cups, for instance, or giving customers discounts for bringing their own mugs.
green taste: A grassy taste in coffee, often from insufficient drying time.

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grinders, types of: Machines used to grind coffee. There are two main types. (1) The blade machine
(which should really be called a chopper) uses a whirling metal blade to chop and bash coffee beans
into smaller particles. It is the cheapest type of coffee grinder, and it produces non-uniform sized and
shaped particles. (2) Burr grinders use metal or occasionally ceramic ridged plates to pulverize beans,
resulting in more or less uniformly sized grains of coffee. Such machines are more expensive than blade
grinders but provide more control over fineness and evenness.
hardness: A descriptive term (largely used in Latin America) related to the altitude at which coffee is
grown. Hardness can be noted as “hard bean” or “strictly hard bean” and is related to quality in the
cup. Coffee berries grown at higher altitudes take longer to mature and are often considered to be of
higher quality than those from lower elevations, though many consider the key element to be tem-
perature rather than altitude. See chapter 3, “Digging Deeper,” and chapter 48, “Why Does Coffee
Taste That Way?”
harvesting: The removal of the cherries from the coffee trees. With hand harvesting, the coffee cher-
ries are removed from the trees without tools of any kind. Selective picking aims to gather only ripe
cherries, whereas strip picking is more indiscriminate; all cherries are stripped from the tree regard-
less of ripeness. Mechanical harvesting uses machines to assist in harvesting coffee. Small mechanical
harvesters are handheld and either gently vibrate a branch, shaking the coffee from the tree, or have
scissors-like jaws at the end that close around a branch. The operator then draws the machine toward
himself, stripping all berries, ripe or not, from the branch. Large mechanical harvesters require a
driver. These machines, equipped with fiberglass rods, shake and beat the tree branches, causing the
cherries to fall into a capturing bin.
hectare: A common measure of land area, 100 meters on a side, about 2.5 acres. Abbreviated “ha.”
honey processing: See pulped natural processing.
horeca: The hotel-restaurant-café market for coffee, as opposed to home consumption.
hotel-restaurant-café: See horeca.
hulling (or milling): The process of removing parchment from the beans. Hullers operate by rubbing
the beans against each other or by gently beating them with strings or rods. Machines must be cali-
brated for the size of the beans put into them. Hulling too deeply or at too high a temperature will
damage the beans and their taste in the cup; hulling too lightly will not remove enough parchment,
which may cause problems in roasting.
humidity: See moisture.
industrial food: Food produced for a mass market; the term implies that the produce is not organic,
probably not sustainable, and probably not especially tasty.
insecticides: Chemicals used to kill or control insect pests in an agricultural setting. Insecticides can be
derived from natural products, like plants, or synthetically created in a factory.
instant: Also called soluble, a coffee that requires only the addition of boiling water to make a cup.
Invented in 1906 in Guatemala by a Belgian by the quaint name of George Washington.
intercropping: An agricultural design in which at least two crops share the same field. It is often de-
signed by farmers to increase their potential sources of income. By diversifying the ecological condi-
tions, intercropping may also provide habitat for a variety of fauna.
International Coffee Agreement (ICA): An agreement first signed in 1962 to set export quotas for the
major coffee-growing countries. The pact was renewed three times before collapsing in 1989. A new
ICA was signed in 1994 and revised in 2001 and 2007, but these agreements do not specify export
quotas. See chapter 19, “The Global Trade in Coffee.”
International Coffee Organization (ICO): The organization created in 1963 to oversee the first Inter-
national Coffee Agreement. Reorganized in 1989 as a recordkeeping and advisory group, with produc-
ing and consuming member countries. See chapter 19, “The Global Trade in Coffee.”
International Women’s Coffee Alliance: An organization founded in 2003 by six American women
(now with chapters around the world) with the goal of improving the lives of women in coffee
through financial support, special purchasing mechanisms, and technical advice. See chapter 12,
“How a Country Girl from Arkansas Became an Importer Leading Other Women in Coffee.”

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kopi luwak: From the Indonesian word for coffee and the name of the local species of civet cat, a coffee
that has been partly processed in the body of the cat. One of the few animals that eat coffee cherries,
the Indonesian civet cat digests the soft part of the fruit and excretes the beans. The price for this
product, considered by most in the industry to taste awful, can be $300 a pound roasted, or more
than $40 a cup in a high-class establishment.
Kraft Foods: An independent company selling Maxwell House until 1988, when it merged with Philip
Morris. Subsequently spun out of Philip Morris as an independent corporation again in 2007, Kraft
also owns Kenco, one of the UK’s leading coffee brands. See also Big Four.
latte: See caffè latte.
leaf rust: See coffee leaf rust.
liquor: The industry term for basic brewed coffee with nothing added.
lungo: A “long” espresso, delivered to a greater volume in the cup. In Italy around 40 milliliters—which,
of course, can be the standard size of an espresso elsewhere.
macchiato: An espresso “marked” with milk—hot or cold, steamed or foamed in Italy, nearly always
foamed in the Anglo-American markets.
Maillard reactions: A class of chemical reactions that occur in coffee during the roasting process. They
are characterized by the reaction of amino acids with sugars. In coffee, these reactions generate the
compounds that are largely responsible for the brown color as well as some of the antioxidant properties.
marketing: Setting and carrying out a strategy to sell any product. Much of the cost differential between
the farm gate or FOB price of coffee and its eventual sale price in a cup is due to the expense of mar-
keting in consuming countries.
Max Havelaar: A novel, whose full title in English is Max Havelaar, or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch
Trading Company, by Multatuli. This was a pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker, who had worked
in Java in the Dutch civil service—that is, the colonial administration. The book first appeared in
Dutch in 1859; it remains a classic of Netherlands literature. It exposed colonial practices that forced
Indonesians to deliver great quantities of food to their own nobles and to the Dutch, often reducing
peasants in a highly fertile land to starvation. Max Havelaar was adopted as the label for products sold
under the auspices of the first Fair Trade organization, created in 1988 and based in the Netherlands.
Mediterranean coffee: See Turkish/Mediterranean brewing.
milds: A term usually used to describe high-grown Colombian coffee. These beans became the standard
around which the C price has been constructed for many years.
milling: See hulling.
moisture (or humidity): The moisture content of the beans, determined at the final stage of processing
for coffee on the farm when the beans are dried. The goal is to achieve 9–12 percent moisture content.
This level renders the seeds fairly stable and unattractive to many pests and diseases. In wet processing,
the beans are dried after pulping and fermentation. In dry processing, the cherry dries as it is spread
out on a patio or on drying racks. Humidity is also often checked again before coffee is roasted, as a
way of helping to determine the optimal roast profile.
mouthfeel: See body.
mucilage: The sticky, sugary component of a coffee cherry. Mucilage is the thickest layer of the coffee
fruit; it is on top of the parchment. See also coffee bean.
National Coffee Association: A trade group founded in 1911, partly to combat the negative image that
coffee was receiving in ads for grain beverages like Postum. Now the major trade association in the
U.S. for all kinds of coffee, commodity and specialty. Publishes various reports including an annual
one on coffee drinking trends in America.
natural (or dry) processing: A method of drying the coffee cherry after harvesting. In natural process-
ing, the cherries are sent directly to a drying area, without removing any parts of the fruit.
naturals (or Brazilian naturals): Beans that are dry processed on patios until they have reached a desired
level of fermentation and humidity.
Neapolitano brewing: See flip brewing.
Nestle’s: See Big Four.

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NGOs: Non-governmental organizations. In the coffee industry, many of these operate to improve
farmers’ health and environmental conditions, the status of women, food security, school programs,
and much more.
organic: In regard to agriculture, any compound or material found in nature, as opposed to inorganic
compounds or substances, which are produced in a laboratory or factory. For example, bird excre-
ment, guano, which contains nitrates and used to be the world’s choice for commercial fertilizer, is
organic. But if chemists make some of the same compounds that are in guano—which is done on a
huge scale around the world—and offer them as fertilizer, the product must be called inorganic or
synthetic. There is no evidence that plants that take up nutrients from soil or sprays distinguish be-
tween organic and synthetic chemicals having the same molecular structure. The U.S. Department
of Agriculture, which certifies organic produce for America, bars “most conventional pesticides” in
organic crops and animal products. But farmers may apply some synthetic substances to fields and
plants and still retain organic certification. See also organic farming and chapter 5, “What Does
‘Organic’ Mean?”
organic farming: Farming that is entirely organic or, in the U.S., nearly so. Certified organic farms use
only organic materials throughout production. For example, an organic cheese maker in Vermont
must use organic fodder for the cows.
organoleptic: A term that describes perceptions of the human senses, particularly the senses of taste and
smell. In coffee, it typically refers to the drinker’s taste experience of the beverage, as in “organoleptic
quality.”
origin: The site where a particular coffee is grown, typically referring to a specific country, region, or
even farm. “Going to origin” means traveling to actual coffee farms. Such trips are organized regularly
by groups like the Roasters Guild of America. In recent years, many less professionally oriented trips
to origin have been organized, for students, bird watchers, or tourists.
oro: See green coffee.
other milds: Beans that are similar to Colombian milds. Colombian milds, always arabica, are the stan-
dard for Coffee C. Other similar beans, especially from Latin America, are considered in calculating
the C price at any given moment.
overstory: The tallest level of trees in a forest or on a shaded coffee farm.
packaging: The material for shipping green coffee or selling roasted coffee. The standard bag for ship-
ping green coffee has traditionally been made of jute. In recent years, vacuum sealing has been popular
for the highest grades of coffee. Bags with several layers of material and an inert gas between them have
also come into use. Whole bean or ground coffee is sold in metal cans, plastic tubs, or sealed bags.
The latter usually have one-way valves that allow gasses produced during roasting to escape, while
keeping oxygen from entering the bag. In recent years, compostable bags for retail sales have appeared
in specialty coffee, as have steel cans that customers may return to a shop or recycle. See also chapter
47, “Coffee Quality,” and bags.
parchment: The hull of the coffee fruit, called pergamino in Spanish.
peaberry: A bean that develops as a single, rounded entity in the fruit instead of two separate beans with
flat facing sides. Peaberries are usually the result of a common mutation, but may also develop because
one embryonic seed was somehow not fertilized. About 5 percent of all coffee is peaberry. While some
drinkers find that peaberry is naturally sweeter, most cuppers do not note this difference. If peaberry
has a smoother taste than the usual beans of the same variety, that may be due to the uniform size of
the bean, which facilitates proper roasting.
peasant: A small farmer who is forced by law, custom, or taxes to give away much of his crops, either
to an institution or individual. Peasants may contribute little to the ultimate price of an agricultural
product, especially one—for example, coffee—that must be shipped overseas to consumers and that
must undergo further processing before it can be sold at retail.
Peet, Alfred: A Dutch immigrant to the U.S. (1920–2007) who opened a small roastery and coffee
shop in Berkeley, California, in 1966. Many of the first American enthusiasts for specialty coffee were
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percolator brewing: A brewing method using an appliance with a chamber for water, into which a tube
with a basket at the top is inserted. Ground coffee, fairly coarse, goes into the basket. The apparatus
is set on a burner. When the water boils, it moves up the tube and spills over the ground coffee. This
process continues until all the water in the bottom chamber has turned into coffee liquor. The percola-
tor was a staple item in American kitchens into the 1970s and even later.
pesticides: A generic term for chemicals that are used to kill or control pests in an agricultural setting.
The pests can be microorganisms, weeds, or insects. Pesticides can be derived from natural products,
like plants, or synthetically created in a factory.
phenology: The timing of recurring biological events, for instance bird migration or the flowering of
coffee plants.
pods: Ground coffee sealed in permeable paper, ready to insert in certain coffee makers.
point of sale (POS): A system that allows recording and tracking of all sales through a computer. Hand-
held POS devices or ones that work with pads are now common, allowing retailers to accept credit
cards or account numbers away from a store or warehouse.
portafilter: A detachable component of espresso machines that holds the basket containing the coffee,
usually with two spouts underneath. A “naked” portafilter has no spouts at the bottom, allowing cof-
fee to flow straight through into the cup.
POS: See point of sale.
Postum: A grain-based beverage invented by C. W. Post, of ready-to-eat cereal fame, in the 1890s. Long
touted as better for health than drinks with caffeine, Postum ceased to be manufactured in 2007 but
resumed production in 2012.
pour-over: A system for making brewed coffee that involves putting ground coffee into a filter, which
in turn fits into a cone (dripper) of glass, plastic, or ceramic. Hot water is poured onto the grounds,
at first just a little to wet them and allow certain gasses to escape, then the rest of the (carefully mea-
sured) water.
price of coffee: See C price and chapter 15, “The ‘Price’ of Coffee.”
processing: The steps involved in coffee production after harvesting the fruit but before roasting. Pro-
cessing involves removing the outer layers of the cherry and then drying and storing the coffee bean.
See also drying, pulped natural processing, washed processing, and wet processing.
producing countries: Those countries in which coffee grows. As coffee is a tropical crop, only countries
with tropical and sometimes subtropical climates can produce it in appreciable amounts.
productivity: Output per unit of input. Agricultural productivity depends on human or machine labor,
quality of the soil, variety of coffee grown, capital inputs, and technical advice and assistance.
pruning: The process of carefully cutting back coffee trees. Coffee trees must be pruned to remain
productive. Both the height (1.5–2 meters) and girth of trees need to be kept manageable, so that
hand pickers or machines can access the cherries relatively easily. Carefully planned pruning also
helps reduce biennial bearing on a farm. Many different pruning strategies exist. One approach is to
conduct a first or main pruning to shape the tree, maintain its desired size, remove any small shoots or
“suckers” growing out of the main trunk, and cut away dead branches. This first stage is usually done
with large pruning shears or, on mechanized farms, by machines with whirling blades set vertically
or horizontally. A secondary round of pruning is often called “handling.” This involves “opening up
the tree” by cutting away excess branches. The purpose is to induce the tree to put more of its energy
into producing fruit and less into producing branches. After several years of production, a span that
can vary widely by variety, place, and general conditions, a tree may be “stumped.” In Hawaii, trees
may be stumped as often as every three or four years. The entire tree is cut down except for a stump
perhaps 100 centimeters high, but sometimes much lower; from the remaining part a new trunk,
stems, and branches will emerge.
pulped natural (or honey) processing: A drying method in which, after the coffee cherries are har-
vested, they are depulped, then sent directly to drying, leaving the mucilage on the seed.
Q-grader cuppers: Individuals who have been licensed by the Coffee Quality Institute to evaluate cof-
fees according to the Q-system. The Q-system is based upon the SCAA coffee grading and assessment

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protocols. To become a Q-grader, aspirants must take courses and pass a battery of tests on sensory
acuity and ability to cup coffee. The Coffee Quality Institute reported that in 2011 there were nearly
2,000 Q-graders working in more than forty countries.
Quaker bean: Defective beans that show up in roasted coffee as pale colored beans. They were immature
when harvested or suffered from stress while on the tree. In a brewed cup, they produce bitterness and
have diminished intensity of most characteristics.
raisins: Coffee cherries that dry on the tree before being harvested. They are most often associated with
mechanically harvested operations. Even though the raisins remain attached to the tree, they are no
longer physiologically connected to the tree. Consequently, they may overferment or the skin may
acquire molds, either of which may detract from the cup quality. While high-quality liquor is difficult
to attain from raisins, it is not impossible.
refractometer: An instrument that measures the refraction, or bending, of light caused by a substance.
In coffee, refractometers are used to measure the total dissolved solids in liquor. Brewed coffee is put
into the refractometer, which generates a pulse of light. The light is bent through the liquid at an angle
proportional to the amount of material dissolved in the brew. Using a predefined calibration curve,
the proportion of solid material can be calculated.
relationship coffee: Coffee that is purchased directly from a producer by a roaster in a consuming
country. See also direct trade.
ristretto: A “short” shot of espresso, one that is smaller in volume and more concentrated than a regular
shot. A ristretto may be about .75 ounce, or around 15–20 milliliters in Italy where it is particularly
popular in the south of the country, possibly because of the greater proportion of robusta used in
blends there. The drink can be made on an espresso machine equipped with a lever by literally pulling
the shot for less time; it can also be made by grinding the coffee more finely than for a regular espresso
or by tamping extra coffee into a one-serving portafilter basket.
roasters: The machines that cook green coffee beans, and also the people who operate those machines.
Roasters (machines) range in size from small tabletop models about the size of a home blender to gi-
ants that fill large rooms. Capacity per roast likewise ranges from 150 grams up to 100 kilos or more.
Drum roasters have an internal, rotating chamber into which green beans are poured. These machines
work by convection—heated air in the drum helps cook the coffee—and by conduction—heat trans-
ferred to the bean by direct contact with the hot surface of the drum. Fluid bed roasters, sometimes
called air roasters, use hot air pushed through tall columns, into which green beans are poured. The
air flow keeps the beans moving, which prevents them from burning—unless, of course, the roast is
allowed to go on for a long time. Sample roasters are small machines used by professionals to test small
batches of coffee, in order to decide which coffees to buy in larger lots.
Roasters Guild of America: Founded in 2000, an official trade group of the SCAA. Its purpose is to
train and certify roasters while celebrating the roasting profession. While it offers classes at official
SCAA events like the annual exposition, it also operates an annual retreat that has begun alternating
sites between the coasts of the U.S.
roasting: The process of heating the harvested and dried coffee beans prior to brewing. Here are some
of the phrases traditionally used to describe the level of roast. From lightest to darkest, they include
light cinnamon (very light brown), cinnamon (light brown), New England (moderate light brown),
American or light (medium light brown), city, or medium (medium brown), full city (medium dark
brown; oily drops produced from sugars in the beans may appear on their surface), light French, or
espresso (moderate dark brown; oil lightly coats the beans), French (dark brown; shiny with oil, the
beans have begun to burn), Italian or dark French (really dark brown and shiny with oil; burnt tones
dominate in the cup), and Spanish (oil everywhere; the beans are seriously burnt). Although some
companies still use these terms, they have tended to give way to simpler descriptions. Note that, out-
side of certain chains, “bold” is not considered a useful adjective for degree of roast. See also chapter
52, “Roasting,” and chapter 53, “Roasting Culture.”
roast profile: The time and temperature curve of a roast. Beans at room temperature are dumped
(“charged”) into the drum, or column in an air roaster, and heated to the desired color in a certain

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period of time, usually 12–16 minutes. An infinite variety of ways to get to any final color and
temperature of the beans exists; for instance, the operator could take the temperature in the roaster
machine up very fast for a while and then finish the roast in a long, slow temperature climb. Or the
temperature could be made to climb slowly and finish in a sharp climb. Different roast profiles can
produce quite different flavors in the beans, even if they are brought to the same final color and
temperature. In theory, an optimal profile exists not only for every variety but for every lot of beans.
Many roasters (operators) take hours to experiment with sample roasts to determine the best profile
for a given coffee.
robusta: Coffea canephora, one of two commercially important species of the genus Coffea. While it
grows better under more stressful conditions than arabica coffee, it is generally considered to be of
lower cup quality. Recently, some farmers have begun to work to improve robusta quality to produce
a specialty robusta coffee.
roya (Spanish): Rust. Commonly used in Latin America to refer to coffee leaf rust.
rust: See coffee leaf rust.
Sara Lee: See Big Four.
SCAA: See Specialty Coffee Association of America.
SCAE: See Speciality Coffee Association of Europe.
second wave: A time period roughly estimated as extending from the early 1970s into the early 1990s.
The second wave was dominated by businesses that intended to offer better coffee than the bottom-
less cup of American homes and offices but whose efforts resulted in the branded coffee shop model
epitomized by Starbucks. Coined by Trish Skeie Rothgeb in 2002. See also first wave, third wave.
seed: See coffee bean.
shade/shade-grown: A coffee agricultural system in which the coffee is grown underneath larger trees
that provide shade for the coffee. Shaded coffee systems can have several benefits for the farmer and
the environment, although they are not ideal for every coffee farming scenario. Shade-grown is often
associated with bird-friendly and sustainable coffees.
silverskin: A thin layer of the coffee fruit between the parchment and the coffee bean (seed). See figure
2.1 for an illustration of the parts of the fruit.
single-estate: Coffee whose beans come from one known estate, with an emphasis on the quality and
taste specific to that origin, in contrast to coffee that is a blend of beans from different origins.
single-origin: Beans from a single farm, estate, or region, and which are supposed to be uniform in size
and characteristics.
single-serving/portion: Coffee packaged in a pod, capsule, or the like that is intended to brew just one
serving at a time.
single variety: Roasted coffee product that is composed of a single variety, for example ‘Typica’ or ‘Yel-
low Bourbon.’
slave labor: Slaves used to pick the largest share of the world’s coffee. Slavery was finally abolished in
Cuba in 1884 and in Brazil in 1888. Other forms of unfree labor, only a small step above slavery in
regard to the degree of freedom that peasants had, characterized Dutch practice in Indonesia into the
twentieth century and was also customary in various Latin American countries, for example Guate-
mala, until the 1950s or later. In systems of unfree labor that were not outright slavery, peasants or
members of indigenous communities were required to work on coffee farms; failure to do so could
result in severe fines and punishments.
social life: The social interaction that can develop around any product. Harley-Davidson motorcycles,
for instance, are at the center of an extensive American culture of bikers. Coffee as a beverage has a
long history of promoting social interaction either in the home or in cafés.
social responsibility: The notion that the members and companies in the coffee industry in the wealth-
ier parts of the world should assist farmers, hired labor, and the environment in the poorer producing
countries. Such efforts could be in the form of increased, “ethical” payments for coffee; donor projects
for schools, clean water, and so on; and technical assistance.
soluble: See instant.

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solubles: The compounds of the coffee bean that are extracted during brewing.
sorting: The process of removing unwanted materials from the seeds after harvesting and of separating
poorer quality seeds from more valuable ones. After the parchment has been removed from the coffee
seed, the seed can be sorted to remove defects and unwanted material such as twigs. The seeds can be
sorted by size, density, and color. Various machines, color sorters (see chapter 61, “Mechanization”),
can do this task. In countries with a vast, poor labor supply, for example Ethiopia, much sorting is
done by hand, usually by women.
Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE): A trade organization in Europe for specialty coffee.
Founded in 1998, its goals are similar to those of the SCAA. It sponsors many events and champion-
ships and publishes the newsletter Café Europa.
specialty coffee: Good to outstanding coffee whose origin is known, which is treated carefully from farm
to cup, and which has depth, character, and subtlety in the liquor. Erna Knutsen, a highly respected
importer, is credited with coining this term in 1974. See chapter 17, “What Is Specialty Coffee?”
Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA): A trade organization dedicated to the specialty cof-
fee industry. The SCAA sponsors an annual symposia of presentations on successes and challenges
in specialty coffee, a trade show, and courses throughout the year for cuppers, baristas, and roasters.
Starbucks: The largest chain of coffee cafés in the U.S. Founded in 1971 in Seattle by three men inspired
by Alfred Peet, the company remained small until Howard Schultz purchased it from the original
owners in 1987. Schultz has repeatedly said that he drew his inspiration for coffeehouse design and
service from a trip to Italy, although the Italian style of making and serving coffee is in fact quite dif-
ferent than most American practices (see chapter 42, “Coffeehouse Formats through the Centuries”).
Schultz built Starbucks into an international giant that now has more than 15,000 stores in 50 coun-
tries. Much further expansion is planned, especially in India and China. Starbucks is simultaneously
envied, loathed, and loved by the independents in specialty coffee. On the one hand, they appreciate
that the Mermaid introduced many Americans and others to the idea that coffee could be better than
swill. On the other hand, independents sometimes regard Starbucks as a huge bully that grabs the best
locations and makes mediocre coffee or milk drinks with some coffee in them.
stinker bean: Defective coffee beans that produce an unpleasant, sour, fermented taste in coffee. One
stinker bean is potent enough to negatively influence an entire pot of coffee. Stinkers are thought
to result from overfermented beans or cherries that weren’t processed soon enough after harvesting.
strictly hard bean: A quality term conveying beans of a certain baseline hardness, often grown at higher
altitudes, usually about 4,500 feet above sea level. The hardness of the beans correlates, in the view of
some specialists, to a denser flavor. See also hardness.
strip harvesting: The process of pulling all coffee berries, ripe or not, from a branch of a tree in a single
motion, either by hand or using portable handheld machines.
sugar: A popular addition to coffee, largely for two reasons. First, the coffee served in English coffee-
houses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a terrible brew, as it was made in large iron
kettles that hung constantly over open fires. Sugar helped to make such stuff palatable. The second
reason that sugar became associated in Britain with coffee, as well as with tea, is that British planta-
tions in the Caribbean, and later elsewhere, began to produce a copious amount of sugar in the sev-
enteenth century. Its cheapness and caloric value, even if the calories were “empty” (providing energy
but no nutritional benefit), made it popular in Britain and America.
sun drying: Allowing coffee cherry in the skin to dry on patios to a desired level of acidity and humidity.
See also dry processing and natural processing.
sun-grown: A coffee agricultural system in which coffee is the only crop or plant grown in the field.
It is typically used to refer to coffee farming without any trees growing over and shading the coffee.
sustainable: An approach to farming that values the long-term health of the land and environment.
Much discussion has taken place in an effort to define “sustainable.” A simple approach to the word is
that in sustainable agriculture, nothing valuable is removed from the soil without providing an equal
replacement. Nutrients taken from the soil by plants are replaced; the soil does not degrade. Therefore
the agriculture can continue indefinitely. Sustainability considers the environment, the people, and

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the economy. Sustainable agriculture is frequently equated with organic farming; however, little evi-
dence supports the contention that conventional agriculture or a system balanced with conventional
and organic practices can’t be sustainable. Sustainability is often discussed in the coffee industry in
regard to every stage, from farming to cafés.
tasting: An informal method for evaluating coffee cup quality. For most people, tasting is equivalent to
simply brewing and enjoying coffee. When tasting is used to evaluate cup quality, the coffees are often
brewed using common home brewing devices.
Tchibo: See Big Four.
technified: See sun-grown.
terroir: A French term, literally soil or ground, referring to the soil and atmosphere of agriculture land.
In the global coffee industry, this term refers to farms in a philosophical sense, as locales where the
farmer has a particular love for the land and its produce. More specifically, terroir is used to describe
the influence of the place (soil, climate, husbandry, and so forth) on the product’s quality.
third place: A term coined by Roy Oldenburg to indicate a happy site of sociability where people go
to relax (the first place is home, and the second is work). See also chapter 42, “Coffeehouse Formats
through the Centuries.”
third wave: A phrase coined in 2002 by Trish Skeie Rothgeb of Wrecking Ball Roasters to describe the
coffee renaissance she had witnessed in Norway. It has been adopted by many members of the spe-
cialty coffee community as an almost symbolic descriptor for an approach to coffee. These roasters and
baristas emphasize their artisanal focus, a willingness to question established notions, and a preference
for “scientific” methods of appraising beans and liquor, in the quest to deliver the highest quality cof-
fee. Volume or profits are less important. For Rothgeb, “the Third Wave is a reaction to those who
want to automate and homogenize Specialty Coffee.” See also first wave, second wave.
traceability: The ability to document the origin of a particular batch of coffee as well as the hands that
it passed through (roaster, importer, etc.) before reaching the consumer.
trade magazines: Magazines that cater to the interests of those in the coffee business. Tea and Coffee
Trade Journal is the leading magazine with a global focus, while other major U.S. publications are
Barista, Coffee Talk, Fresh Cup, Roast, and Specialty Coffee Retailer. In Europe, key publications include
Café Europa, the journal of the SCAE, and the daily e-newsletters Comunicaffè (Italian) and Comuni-
caffè International (English).
TransFair USA: See Fair Trade USA.
trophic: Pertaining to nutrition and to nutritive processes. It can also refer to the position of a food in
the food chain.
Turkish or Mediterranean brewing: A method in which the coffee is ground very finely, like powder,
and is poured into any small device that can be put directly on a burner. The common words for such
devices are cezvik or ibrik, and they typically have a long handle to keep the user from being burned.
Water is added to the device, and spices such as cardamom may also be used. The mixture is then
brought to a boil several times and poured into small cups.
understory: Trees growing beneath the overstory. Coffee originated as an understory tree in the high-
lands of what is today Ethiopia.
unfree labor: See slavery and coffee.
vacuum brewing: A brewing system using a device with two chambers, in which water is heated in a
lower chamber, creating steam which pushes most of the water up a tube into an upper chamber,
where it infuses with ground coffee. When the apparatus is removed from heat, a vacuum in the lower
chamber is created as the remaining steam in the lower compartment condenses, thereby sucking the
coffee liquor down into it. A filter separates the two chambers, keeping the coffee grounds in the up-
per chamber. Vacuum coffee makers can be inexpensive hand-operated products, but machines that
operate on the same principles can cost as much as $20,000.
value chain: The value added to a product at each point in its processing, shipping, wholesale distribu-
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varietal: An adjective that originally referred to a wine composed of a single cultivar/variety of wine.
Recently, however, “varietal” has been adopted by the coffee and other industries (including now
wine) as a noun referencing a particular breed of plant, usually as a synonym to “cultivar” or “variety,”
as in ‘Bourbon’ varietal.
variety: See cultivar.
virtuosi: English gentlemen of the seventeenth century with a fascination for the rare, novel, surpris-
ing, and outstanding in all spheres of life. Possessed of an intellectual curiosity that at times led them
into quasi-scientific inquiry, they were also avid travelers or at least readers of travel literature who
embraced exotic commodities such as coffee. They seized the chance to discuss their enthusiasms in
the coffeehouses that first appeared in England in the 1650s. See chapter 42, “Coffeehouse Formats
through the Centuries.”
washed: Coffee beans that have been processed using washed processing.
washed processing: The process, after harvesting the coffee fruit and squeezing the seeds from the pulp,
of removing the remaining mucilage from around the seeds. The mucilage is eliminated by one of
three methods: (1) The coffee is immersed in water and soaked until the mucilage is degraded (wet
fermentation). (2) The coffee is not covered in water but is left to sit until the mucilage has degraded
(dry fermentation, but also called “pulped naturals”). (3) Immediately after depulping, the mucilage
is removed mechanically (demucilation). In each case, the seeds are usually given a final rinse/wash to
clean off any adhering material.
wet processing: See washed processing.
wind: A highly important factor in coffee agriculture. Too little wind, and the leaves do not dry out,
especially on their undersides, after a rain. The dampness encourages mold and especially leaf rust,
which can destroy the crop of an entire tree, or many trees. Too much wind, and leaves and flowers
are blown off the tree; no flowers, no fruit.
World Barista Championship: An international, annual competition where baristas compete, on behalf
of their country, for the title of best in the world. In fifteen minutes, competitors must prepare three
sets of beverages—an espresso, a cappuccino, and a signature beverage (which must contain a shot of
espresso)—for a panel of four sensory judges. The barista is also graded on technical ability by other
judges. The WBC evolved out of the Nordic barista championships and is jointly owned by the SCAA
and SCAE. In 2011, baristas from fifty-three countries participated in the competition.

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Index

ACDI-VOCA. See Agricultural Cooperative Asociación de Mujeres de Cajibo, 70

Development International/Volunteers in Association for Science and Information on
Overseas Cooperative Assistance Coffee (ASIC), 199
acidity, 101, 296, 305
aftertaste, 101, 305. See also finish bag (coffee shipments), 19, 58, 111, 139, 294
After the Harvest: Fighting Hunger in the balance, in the cup, 305
Coffeelands (film), 89 Balzac, Honoré de, 4
agar, 17 bananas, 30
Agricultural Cooperative Development barista, 1, 108, 262, 332–35; championships, 191,
International/Volunteers in Overseas 223, 332, 375; Guild of America, 332, 335
Cooperative assistance (ACDI-VOCA), 167 bats, 47–48
agroforestry system, 41–42 bees, 47
alcohol consumption, U.S., 207–8 Benz, Melitta, 210, 338
alternate bearing, 25 BD Imports, 77–80
altitude, effect on coffee, 54 Big Four (or Five), 209, 222. See also Kraft
Amaro Gayo, 80 (including Phillip Morris), Nestlé, Sara Lee,
ammonia, 30 Procter and Gamble, and Tschibo
Amsterdam, 93, 218 biochemical oxygen demand, 139
ANACAFE (Guatemalan National Coffee biodiversity, 42–49
Association), 55, 168 bird-friendly, 15, 41, 49, 118
Andes Mountains, 146 birds, and coffee, 45–49
ants, 48 body, in the cup, 101, 296, 305, 320
arabica, 8, 16, 22, 35; as understory tree, 41; Boquete, Panama, 58
price of, 92–97; share in world market, 112 Boston Tea Party, 234–36, 240
Arbuckle’s, 4, 240 ‘Bourbon,’ 16
Arkansas, 77, 81 Bourbon (island), 218
aroma, 296, 298, 305, 320 Bourdieu, Pierre, 312–13
arthropods, 47–48 “bourgeois public sphere,” 6, 227
Asociación de Mujeres Agropecuarias del Bramah, Edward, 191
Departamento del Cauca (AMACA), 67, 71 branding, 235, 285
Asociación de Mujeres Caficultoras del Cauca Brazil, 2, 4, 53, 58, 111; as consuming country,
(AMUCC), 65–74 163; as producing country, 113, 162–66,

403

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404 Index

240–41; slavery in, 58, 238, 242; telegraph climate change, 8, 35

in, 94 coca, 66
brewing, 101, 320–23; culture and history of, Coffea arabica. See arabica
336–39 Coffea canephora. See robusta
broca. See coffee berry borer Coffea robusta. See robusta
bromeliads, 46 Coffeeheaven, 174
Brownian motion, 18 coffee: as food, 155; origin of, 154–55, 364
Buf Café, 79 coffee berry borer, 16, 48, 149; spread of, 32,
Burundi, 80 35–38, 135–36
B2B (business to business), 178–79 Coffee Board of India, 138–39
Coffee Exchange of the City of New York, 93
cacao, 44, 47 coffee fruit, parts of, 20
C.A.F.E., 118–19 coffee-growing regions, 2
caffè crema, 203, 264 coffeehouses, 201; history of, 226–32; as third
caffeine, 3, 346–47, 348–49, 351–53; isolation places, 226; definition of, 226; in Germany,
of the molecule, 201 201; in Middle East, 216
CAFICAUCA coop, 67, 69 coffee leaf rust, 42, 152, 219, 250, 364
California, 15, 116 Coffee Quality Institute, 65, 80, 375–76
call option, 96 Coffee Research Consortium (Brazil), 163–64
canopy, forest, 44–47 Coffee Research Foundation (Kenya), 359–62
capital, in coffee agriculture, 8, 28, 99, 159, 368 coffee shops, cost of operating, 107. See also labor
cappuccino, 184, 186; history of, 269–72 coffee wilt disease, 29
capsules 3, 184. See also single-serve Colombia, 58; Agrarian Reform Law, 66; as
Captain Cook, 134 producing country, 112, 146–52; guerrilla
carbon: in agriculture, 27–28, 30, 123; fighting in, 64
emissions, 178–79 Colombian milds, 94, 220, 248
Caribou Coffee, 209–10 commercial polyculture agriculture, 43
Carman, Ernie, 33 Committee on Sustainability Assessment
catch crops, 42, 251 (COSA), 177
CATIE. See Tropical Agricultural Research and commodity chain, 56, 108, 291. See also value
Higher Education Centre chain
‘Caturra,’ 149 commodity (commercial) coffee, 15, 92, 103,
Cauca (Colombia), 65–74 122, 264, 327; in the U.S. 208
CECOCAFEN (Nicaragua), 87–88 Condo, Christine, 129
Cenicafé (Colombia), 147, 151, 364 conilon (Brazilian robusta), 163–65, 256
Cerrado (Brazilian), 162 Consumers Union, 32
certification, 15, 31, 55, 90, 116, 128, 223; consuming countries, 112. See also individual
and marketing, 168–69, 175, 210, 281; in countries
Hawaii, 135 consumption: comparative by country, 208;
cervical cancer, 82–85 global growth of, 217; history of in U.S.,
Charles II of England, 6, 227 234–44
Chemex, 101 cooperatives, 87, 92, 129; in Colombia, 67–74,
cherry (coffee) 16, 24, 56, 58, 135, 366; 147; marketing coops, 168; producing coops,
processing of, 60–63, 366 168; copper sulphate, 30
Chiapas, 45, 46, 48 Costa Coffee, 3, 189–90, 192
chicory, 202, 270 Costa Rica, 54, 58
China, 174 Cox, Dan, 82, 89
CIAT. See International Center for Tropical coyotes (middlemen), 17, 119
Agriculture C price, 2, 55, 117, 119, 124, 128; how it is
Cielo, Doña, 82 determined, 92–81; rapid changes in, 96–97,
civet cats, 144, 155. See also kopi luwak 167

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Index 405

crema, 3, 186, 223, 253, 263, 321 Fair Trade USA, 117, 119, 128, 281; premium
Cuba, 58, 239; revolution in, 111, 255 paid by, 129
cultivars, 138, 241, 362 FAO. See United Nations Food and Agricultural
cup of coffee: characteristics or qualities in, 101, Organization
295–97; price of, 100 farm gate price, 91, 119, 125, 143
Cup of Excellence, 55, 61, 79, 100, 129; and Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia
marketing, 169 (FNC or FNCC), 66, 68, 72, 147, 151–52
cupping, 55, 100, 103, 129, 138, 305–11; fermentation,16, 60, 63, 126
characteristics identified in, 295–96; and fertilizers, 23, 30–31, 42, 160, 258, 299
improving quality, 168, 304, 334, 376; and filters, 190, 322, 351, 378
consumers, 315; SCAA protocol for, 308 fines (in coffee grinds), 101, 320, 379
flavor, 101
DDT, 30, 32 Flavour of India competition, 139
decaffeination, 201, 222, 349 FOB (free on board), 112
defects, in coffee, 62, 300, 330, 368 Folgers, 95, 209, 220, 239
DEMAC Trading, 79 food scarcity, 88
Denmark, 175–79 food web, 47
Depression, the Great, 58, 111, 207 Fote, Francis, 82
depulping, 17, 301 4C Association, 118
direct trade, 93, 121–27, 138, 282 fragrance (in the cup), 305
Dolmus, Santiago, 87 France, as consumer country, 181–83
Douwe Egberts, 183, 191 Frasier (TV show), 5, 272
Drakulic, Slavenka, 173, 196 free market, 27
drying racks, 21 French press, 190, 378
dry processing, 18, 21, 136, 138, 220 French Revolution, 6
Dunkin’ Donuts, 3, 210, 317 Friends (TV show), 5
fruit set, 44
Ecuador, 46 Fujisaka, Sam, 89
El Injerto (farm), Guatemala, 61, 99 Fulmer, Bob 19
Eliot, T. S., 4 futures, 93–94
epiphytes, 46
Erdos, Paul, 5 Gaberino, John, 120
espresso, 101, 140, 174; characteristics of, 292– Gates Foundation, 84
93; four “M”s of, 262; in Italy, 184; Italian genetically modified organisms, including coffee,
parameters for, 263; machines, 184, 211, 129, 363–65
263–68; making espresso, 262–64, 381 geographical indication, 144
espresso-based drinks, 262–76 German Coffee Association, 204
ethical coffees. See certification Germany, as consuming country, 201–5
Ethiopia, 16, 80, 114, 215; as producing country, ‘Gesha’ (or ‘Geisha’), 13, 16
112, 217; political history of, 156 Giovannucci, Daniel, 31
Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX), 156 GMOs. See genetically modified organisms
extraction in coffee, 186, 319–20, 379 Goodman, Eugene, 33–34
Goodman, Lucy, 33–34
Faema-Cimbali, 186 grading coffee, 168
fair trade, 87–88, 106, 128–29; and marketing, Great Rift Valley, 153
175 green coffee, 15, 18, 24, 54, 60, 106; price of,
Fair Trade Danmark, 177 97, 100, 106, 125; quality standards for, 103
Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, 7, 31, 86, 90,
88 287, 374
Fair Trade Organic, 106, 108 Greenspan, Alan, 27, 29

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406 Index

grinding coffee, 101, 320, 327, 377 International Institute for Sustainable
Grounds for Health, 82–85 Development, 177
Guambianos people, 66 International Research Workshop on Gender and
Guatemala, 47, 52–55, 58; civil war in, 52–53 Collective Action, 72
International Social and Environmental
Haber-Bosch process, 30 Accreditation and Labeling (ISEAL), 177
Haiti, 218–19, 234, 237, 239 International Trade Center, 80
Hamburg, 201, 204 International Women’s Coffee Alliance, 65, 80
harvesting, 17, 54, 56–58, 366; ; and Ipanema Coffee, 120
topography, 367; in Brazil, 164; in India, Italian National Espresso Institute (INEI),
139 263–64, 270
Hawaii, 3, 23, 36, 56, 59; as producing region, Italy: as consumer country, 184–87; regional
133–36 differences in, 186; share of arabica and
hedging (in coffee trading), 95, 97 robusta in, 185
Hemingway, Ernest, 5
herbicides, 117 Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, 16, 313
Holly, Don, 102, 104, 375 Janssen, Rivers, 119
Honduran Coffee Institute (IHCAFE), 168 Japan: as consuming country, 112, 197–200;
Honduras, 19, 54, 122, 169 labeling in, 198
horeca (home-restaurant-café), 175, 182, 184, Java (Indonesia), 142, 218
203 Jefferson, Thomas, 237
Horn of Africa, 153 Jobin, Philippe, 183
humidity (in coffee), 18, 301
Kaburu-ini Coop, 79
ICO. See International Coffee Organization Kaffeeklatsch, 201, 230
Illy Caffè, 182, 186 Kant, Immanuel, 4
Illy, Ernesto, 18, 265 Ka‘u (Hawaii), 60
India: as consuming country, 224; as producing Kenya, 2, 38, 78–80, 252, 284; research in,
region, 137–40 359–62
India International Coffee Festival, 140 Kenya AA coffee, 78
indigenous peoples, 66 Kiambu (Kenya), 38
Indonesia, 47; as producing country, 141–45, Knutsen, Erna, 102
253 Kona: region, 133; coffee, 3, 16, 58, 58, 60, 133
Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute, Kona Coffee Living History Farm, 134
142, 145 kopi luwak (civet coffee), 3, 99, 144, 314
instant coffee, 1, 112, 182–83, 184, 222, 253; Kraft Foods, 7, 175, 182, 186, 209, 258
and robusta, 3, 253–55; in Germany, 202; in
the UK, 189–90; in the U.S., 208, 243 labor costs: in a coffee shop, 107; on farms (see
Inter-American Coffee Agreement, 111 pickers)
Inter-American Development Bank, 167 La Esmeralda, farm, 13, 99–100
IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), 92 lagooning, 139
Intercropping, 137, 144, 251, 361 La Pita, Nicaragua, 90
interest rates, 54, 123 latte, history of, 269–73
International Center for Tropical Agriculture Lavazza, 182, 186
(CIAT), 86, 88 Leiva, Arnoldo, 33, 58, 370
International Coffee Agreement, 64, 111–12, Lingle, Ted, 15, 329
148, 255; collapse of, 149, 158, 223, 257 Linking Farmers to Coffee Markets, program,
International Coffee Organization, 5, 35, 173, 168
190, 197, 372–73; and quota system, 112, liquor, as coffee term, 208, 336, 379
220; changes in, 112–13 Liss, David, 93
International Cooperative Alliance, 65 London, 191, 227–28, 343

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Index 407

Malde, Amu, 78 organoleptic, 139, 263–64, 297, 304

management index, 49 origin: as coffee term, 88, 125; in Hawaii, 135
management intensification, 48–49 Ottolander, Teun, 142
Managua, Nicaragua, 86–87 Ottomans. See Turks
marketing of coffee, 67, 73, 138, 167–70 overstory trees, 135
Max Havelaar (novel), 145n1 Owen, Tom, 97
Maxwell House, 1 Oxfam, 2, 113
McCafé, 7, 182, 210
McDonald’s, 7, 174, 192, 210–11, 317 ‘Pacamara,’ 16, 19
Men with Guns (film), 86 Páez people, 66
Mexico, 45, 47–48 Panama, 13, 58
Meza, R. Miguel, 60–61 Pan-American Coffee Bureau, 147, 338–39
migration and coffee farming, 64–65 Paradise Roasters, 60
Milan, 187, 266 Paraiso, Costa Rica, 58
Minas Gerais, Brazil, 120 parchment, 19, 20–21, 62
Mintz, Sidney, 217, 315, 343 peaberries, 24, 367
Mocha (port), 217–18; coffee, 218 peasants, 41, 58, 66
moisture (in coffee). See humidity Peet, Alfred, 279–80, 329
moka coffeemaker, 184, 266–67 Pesticide Action Network North America, 117
mouthfeel, 101, 320. See also body pesticides, 117, 129
Moyher, Linda, 33 Peterson, Price, 13, 58, 91
Mt. Kilimanjaro, 36 phenology, 36
mucilage, 13, 17, 20–21, 61, 138 photosynthesis, 23
Mujer Caficultora, 68 pickers, 56–59, 91; in Hawaii, 135
Mukashyaka, Epiphanie, 79 pods, 3, 104, 181–83, 184, 190, 267
Musula, Honduras, 62 pollination, 41, 44, 47
Popayán (Colombia), 67, 73
napoletana (flip-over coffee maker), 184, 266–67 pour-over, xi, 293, 378
National Coffee Association (U.S.), 210, 346 price of green coffee, 53, 92
National Coffee Fund (Colombia), 147, 151 Procter and Gamble, 7, 209
natural processing. See dry processing producing countries, 58, 95; history of, 173
Nescafé, 191 productivity, 119, 137–38, 149, 159, 368; in
Nespresso, 181 Brazil, 162; in Central America, 169
Nestlé, 182, 186, 209, 222 Program on Food Security and the Environment,
New York, 2 86
New York Board of Trade (NYBOT), 92 pruning, 20, 42, 168, 370
Le Nez du Café, 182 Puerto Rico, 36
Nicaragua, 8, 58, 119; poverty in, 10n21, 82, 86, pulped naturals, 61, 136, 164. See also dry
91, 370, 370n6 processing
Nogöbé Indians, 91 put option, 96
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 72,
116 Q graders, 13
Nusantara. See Indonesia Quetzaltenango, 52
Nyeri, Kenya, 79
radio frequency identification (RFID), 179
Obra, Lorie and Rusty, 60–62 Rainforest Alliance, 49, 117–19, 258
Oldenburg, Roy, 226, 232 raisins (coffee term), 56, 301, 367
organic, 55, 91, 106, 116, 210, 353; definition rating scale, 102–3
of, 30–34; and marketing, 175 ‘Red Bourbon,’ 61
Organic Monitor Association, 34 ‘Red Caturra,’ 61–62
Organic Trade Association, 31 refractometer, 338

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408 Index

relationship coffee. See direct trade soft drinks, 206–7

Rhinehart, Ric, 9n9, 103–5 soluble. See instant coffee
Rice, Paul, 119 sorting, 21, 138, 368–69
Richardson, Samuel, 4 Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE),
Rio Verde farm, Brazil, 163 191, 204, 339
roasters (machines), 54; history of, 325 specialty coffee, 3, 54, 133; as an industry, 60,
roasters (people), 106–7, 121, 328–31, 371 223; attracting consumers to, 122, 279–87;
roasting, 324–27 definitions of, 102; images of, 279–87; in
robusta, 3, 8, 22, 35, 364; commodity chain Indonesia, 143; price of, 92; revolution, 262
of, 249; history of, 248–59; in France, 181, Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA),
253; in India, 137–38; in Indonesia, 144; in 73, 89, 102–3, 208; and coffee quality, 168;
Vietnam, 159; price of, 93, 250; processing, and robusta, 256–57; foundation and growth,
254, 258, 301; share in world market, 112 223, 330, 373–74
Rodale, J. I., 30 Specialty Coffee Association of Japan, 199
Romero, Francisco, Father, 146 spices, 5
Rosee, Pasqua, 227–29 spiders, and coffee, 47
Rotenone, 30 spot market, 92–93
Rothgeb (Skeye), Trish, 222 Starbucks, 3, 7, 118, 182, 280; and espresso-
Roundup, 34 based drinks, 273–74; in France, 182; in the
Roya. See coffee leaf rust UK, 188, 191–92; in the U.S., 210–11, 232;
Russia, as consuming country, 193–94. See also rise of, 209–10
under tea St. Domingue. See Haiti
rustic biodiversity, 43 Stiglitz, Joe, 29
Rusty’s Hawaiian Coffee, 60 strictly hard bean, 53
Rwanda, 79, 330; economic improvement in, strip harvesting, 56
129, 330 Sufis, 27, 154, 215–16
sugar, 5, 238
Sao Paulo state (Brazil), 32, 58, 120, 368 Sumatra (Indonesia), 142
Sara Lee, 175, 182–83, 209 sun-grown. See technified coffee
Sarandon, Susan, 89 SUPRACAFÉ, 65, 67
Sayles, John, 86 sustainable/sustainability, 4, 24, 29, 30, 55, 67,
SCAA. See Specialty Coffee Association of 117; and direct trade, 121; and marketing,
America 175; and water usage, 129; market share, 176
Schoenholt, Donald, 256–57, 374 Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN), 117
Scholer, Morten, 80 Sustainable Food Lab, 86
Schultz, Howard, 209 Sweet Maria’s Coffee, 97
scoring system, 103–4 Swiss water method, 32
SEBRAE-MG, 128
Segafredo Zanetti, 186 Tanzania, 36
Senseo, 181 Taster’s Choice, 6
Seville, Don, 86 tasting, 307–8
shaded monoculture, 43 tea, 188, 193, 217, 220, 336; in Russia, 223; in
shade-grown, 23, 31, 55, 117, 149; shade, effect the UK, 188–90; in the U.S., 234, 239–40;
on coffee growing, 37, 41–49, 298 replacement crop for coffee, 219, 251
silverskin, 20–21, 106, 324 technified coffee, 31, 42, 163, 165, 298
single origin, 182, 192, 198, 265 Technoserve, 167–68
single-portion or -serve, 198, 202, 208, 267–68. terroir, 6, 157, 258, 292
See also capsules; pods; Senseo third place, 226, 232
slavery, 4, 218, 234, 238, 241 third wave, 3, 19, 255, 265, 334
Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, 118 Thomas, Asnakech, 80
social responsibility, 4 Topeca Coffee, 120

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Index 409

traceability, 125–26, 177 varieties of coffee plants. See cultivars

traditional polyculture agriculture, 43 Velasquez, Norma (pseudonym), 87
TransFair USA. See Fair Trade USA Venice, 217, 229
Trieste, 185, 186 Veracruz, 45, 46
trophic, levels of, 36 Vereenigde Amsterdam Oost-Indische
Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Compagnie (VOOC or VOC), 141, 218
Education Centre (CATIE), 167–68 Vienna, 230
Tschibo, 7 Vietnam, 53; and robusta, 256; coffeehouses and
Turks, 216–17, 228 consumption in, 160; coffee production in,
‘Typica,’ 16, 61, 62, 133 97, 113, 151, 158–60, 202, 249; and World
Bank, 159, 256
Ueshima Coffee Company, 198 Vietnamese Coffee and Cocoa Association,
Ukers, William, 142, 236, 251, 280, 308 160
Ukraine, as consuming country, 195–96 Villa Loyola farm, Colombia, 63
understory trees, 23, 41 Voltaire, 4, 217
United Kingdom, as consumer country, 188–92. Vu, Dang Le Nguyen, 106
See also under tea
United Nations Food and Agricultural washed processing. See wet processing
Organization (FAO), 65, 72 water usage, 126
United Nations Millennium Goals, 118 wet processing, 21, 55, 63, 138, 143; and
United States, as consuming country, 112, 206–11 conilon, 165
United States Environmental Protection Agency, wine, 3, 100–101, 285, 287, 292, 315
117 Wine Spectator (magazine), 100
Universidad Rafael Landivar, 52 Witsen, Nicolaas, 141
U.S. Agency for International Development women: in the coffee industry, 77–81; in
(USAID), 65, 79, 128, 167 Colombia 64–74; in Costa Rica, 72
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 30, 33, Women in Coffee Program, 81
116, 142, 206, 209; and nervousness, 345; World Bank, 65, 158, 161n7, 167
and robusta, 251–52 World Coffee Research, 113, 302
U.S. Department of State, 149 World Health Organization, 84
Utz Kapeh Good Inside, 117–18, 177 World Trade Organization, 80

valorization, 111, 244 ‘Yellow Caturra,’ 61–62

value chain, 67, 177, 204, 359. See also Yemen, 154, 215–16, 241
commodity chain yields, in coffee, 24–25, 31, 164

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About the Editors and Contributors

Entries have been supplied by the contributors. If they supplied an e-mail address, it is given
at the end of the entry.
Abbreviations: SCAA = Specialty Coffee Association of America; SCAE = Speciality Coffee
Association of Europe

Robert W. Thurston, senior editor. BA, Northwestern University. MA and PhD in modern Rus-
sian history, University of Michigan. Currently Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History, Miami
University, Oxford, Ohio. Author of books on twentieth-century Russian history, the European
witch hunts, and lynching around the world and of various articles on coffee in trade journals
and encyclopedias. Managing Director, Oxford Coffee Company. [email protected].

Jonathan Morris, European coeditor. PhD, modern Italian history, Cambridge University.
Research Professor in modern European history at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Au-
thor of books and articles on modern Italian history. Director of the Cappuccino Conquests
research project tracing the transnational history of Italian-style coffee, which resulted in
articles in both the English and Italian academic and trade press. Jonathan is currently com-
pleting Coffee: A Global History. [email protected].

Shawn Steiman, scientific coeditor. BS, biology, Oberlin College. MS and PhD, tropical
plant and soil sciences, University of Hawai‘i. His research has explored coffee science in
horticulture, biochemistry, and sensory evaluation. Author of articles on coffee in academic
journals, trade magazines, newsletters, and newspapers, as well as The Hawai‘i Coffee Book: A
Gourmet’s Guide from Kona to Kaua‘i. Owner of Coffea Consulting, which works with mem-
bers of the coffee industry, from farmers to consumers. Shawn is also a Q-grader. steiman@
coffeaconsulting.com.

Sarah Allen. Masters, journalism, University of Oregon. Editor of Barista Magazine, the inter-
national journal for café owners and baristas, since 2005. In providing Barista’s savvy readership
with relevant training and business articles, Sarah consults café owners around the globe to
determine the most advantageous strategies for success in the coffeehouse environment. She

411

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412 About the Editors and Contributors

has written specifically for the coffee industry for ten years and has lectured around the world.
[email protected].

Jonathan D. Baker. PhD, medical anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Lecturer

and adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at UH Manoa. His research focuses
on nutrition, diet, and health and explores the overlap of food and medicine. He is currently
studying biological and social aspects of food tasters and tasting. [email protected].

Peter S. Baker. PhD. More than thirty years’ experience in research, training, and consultancy
in science for development with particular experience in coffee, including sustainable coffee
production, farmer participatory approaches, biodiversity, coffee quality, climate change, and
smallholder farmer issues. He has worked as researcher, project developer, manager, and team
leader of international coffee projects, including four years with the Colombian Federación
Nacional de Cafeteros. For six years he was head of a CAB International research station in the
Caribbean, then spent six more years researching coffee in southern Mexico. Author of more
than seventy research articles, reviews, and monographs. [email protected].

Jonathan Wesley Bell. A consultant and contributing writer to STiR Tea & Coffee Industry
Bi-Monthly, he has published over 250 articles on coffee.

Clare Benfield. MBA, University of Stirling, where she also studied publishing. Editor of the
UK trade magazines Café Culture and Pizza Pasta & Italian Food, for nearly ten years. Earlier
she worked in marketing communications roles. [email protected].

H. C. “Skip” Bittenbender. MS and PhD, horticulture, Michigan State University. Coor-

dinator of the University of Hawai‘i’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources
research and extension (outreach) activities for coffee, cacao, and kava. With V. E. Smith,
coauthor of Growing Coffee in Hawaii, a revision of the coffee series by B. Goto and E. Fu-
kunaga. Skip’s research on coffee variety evaluation with Cathy Cavaletto and on mechanized
pruning with Loren Gautz contributed to the rapid expansion of Hawaii’s coffee industry in
the 1990s. [email protected].

Connie Blumhardt. Founder and publisher of the award-winning Roast Magazine. Connie
has spent twenty years in magazine publishing and has worked in the coffee industry since
1997, serving the roasting community daily by bringing education to thousands of roasters
through the magazine. In her spare time she can be found drinking lots of coffee and chasing
around her twin daughers. [email protected].

Willem Boot. Willem is the founder of Boot Coffee, a consulting company that works with
coffee producers, roasters, and NGOs on quality improvement and strategic marketing pro-
grams. It also offers training on the art and science of coffee.

Carlos H. J. Brando. Director and partner at P&A International Marketing, a coffee consult-
ing, marketing, and trading company. P&A exports Pinhalense coffee machinery and consults
for the industry around the globe on technology, quality, marketing, coffee consumption, and
strategy. Carlos has coordinated coffee projects in over fifty countries and is a frequent speaker
at coffee events. He is a member of the boards of UTZ Certified, Coffee Quality Institute
(CQI), Ipanema Coffees, and the Santos (Brazil) Coffee Museum.

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About the Editors and Contributors 413

August Burns. MPH, CM, PA. August is an expert in women’s health who has worked in
more than a dozen countries. She is coauthor of Where Women Have No Doctor, a health guide
for women in low-resource settings, translated into more than thirty languages.

Luis Alberto Cuéllar. BA, economics, Grancolombia and El Rosario Universities, Bogota,
Colombia; MA, International Labor Organization University, Turin, Italy. His career devel-
oped as follows: manager of a coffee cooperative in Quindio, Colombia; coffee cooperative
adviser for the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia; international profes-
sional in cooperatives and rural development for the Inter American Institute for Agricultural
Cooperation; program director and country representative for Colombia for ACDI/VOCA,
responsible for specialty coffee programs in five Colombian departments; and currently senior
technical adviser for ACDI/VOCA’s Agribusiness/Specialty Crops Portfolio.

Olga Cuellar. BA, social psychology, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. MA, Latin American
studies, University of Arizona. Born into a Colombian family immersed in both specialty
coffee and international development. Her MA thesis examined the empowerment of women
coffee growers in Colombia. Olga spent two years researching rural development programs
with agricultural cooperatives and rural communities in Colombia, Brazil, and Paraguay. She
is also a licensed Q-grader. Currently she works for Sustainable Harvest as a development
manager for Latin America.

Kenneth Davids. Ken has published three books on coffee, including Coffee: A Guide to Buying,
Brewing & Enjoying, in six editions, including a Japanese translation. He coproduced, hosted,
and scripted The Passionate Harvest, an award-winning documentary film on coffee production.
His coffee reviews appear regularly in Coffee Review (http://www.coffeereview.com) and in Roast
Magazine. He has presented workshops and seminars at coffee meetings on six continents. Last
but not least, he is professor of critical studies, California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

Jim Fadden. Jim is a mechanical engineer and frequent contributor to Roast Magazine.

Elijah K. Gichuru. Graduate, Plant Science Department, University of Nairobi. Plant pa-
thologist. He has worked for Kenya’s Coffee Research Foundation since 1994. In 2010 he be-
came deputy director. He has conducted research work in laboratories in Portugal and France
related to molecular diversity of coffee pathogens and identifying molecular markers (DNA
and biochemical) for disease resistance in coffee. Author of more than twenty journal papers
and articles in conference collections as well as chapters to two books. He currently researches
the mechanisms of plant pathogen interactions and plant resistance.

Jeremy Haggar. PhD in agroecology. A tropical agroecologist with over twenty years’ experi-
ence working in Central America and Mexico on sustainable production systems. Between
2000 and 2010 he ran regional projects building capacity in the coffee sector of Central
America as program leader for Tree Crops in Agroforestry at the Tropical Agricultural Research
and Higher Education Centre (CATIE), Nicaragua. Currently head of the Department of
Agriculture, Health and Environment in the Natural Resources Institute at the University of
Greenwich in the UK. [email protected].

Andrew Hetzel. Founder of the specialty coffee consulting firm CafeMakers. Hetzel provides
consulting and training services for a diverse range of coffee agriculture and roasting clientele

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414 About the Editors and Contributors

in North America and rapidly emerging consumer markets of Russia, India, Asia, and the
Middle East. [email protected].

George Howell. Owner of Terroir Coffee, Acton, Massachusetts. Founder of the “light roast”
movement in America, an originator of the Cup of Excellence program in various countries.
George is widely recognized as one of the most knowledgeable and opinionated people in the
specialty coffee industry. His company’s web site is http://www.terroircoffee.com/.

Juliana Jaramillo. PhD, entomology/biological control, Universitaet Hannover. Visiting sci-

entist at University of Hannover / International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology. Her
research on insects and coffee is based in Kenya.

Phyllis Johnson. Phyllis is the cofounder of BD Imports, which imports green coffee (un-
roasted) from sustainable sources in coffee-producing countries and markets to roaster retailers
and roaster wholesalers located in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Taiwan.

Lawrence W. Jones. M.D., director, Prostate Research Program, Huntington Medical

Research Institute, Pasadena, California. Larry is both a practicing physician and a roaster-
retailer. He has been a surgeon and a scientist for forty years and has been involved with his
family as roaster-retailers for twenty years. He has presented to conferences on coffee and on
medical topics.

Alf Kramer. Alf has been in the industry since 1980, first as leader of the Norwegian Coffee
Information Centre, later as leader of the ICO-owned Nordic coffee Centre. He founded the
Speciality Coffee Association of Norway in 1990 and then proposed a similar association for
Europe. He served as SCAE’s first interim president, then president. He is an active author
and speaker around the world. Among many awards he has received is the European Lifetime
Achievement Award in Coffee in 2011.

Ted Lingle. BS, science, United States Military Academy. MBA, Woodbury University. Vice
President of Marketing for Lingle Bros. Coffee, Inc., for twenty years. A member of the Na-
tional Coffee Association’s Out-of-Home Market Committee from 1974 to 1990. He served
on the Board of Directors of the National Coffee Service Association and was elected an
honorary member in 1990. He was a founding co-chair of the SCAA. Appointed executive
director of the SCAA in 1991, he held that position until 2006, when he became executive
director of the Coffee Quality Institute. Author of Coffee Cuppers’ Handbook and Coffee Brew-
ing Handbook. Awarded medals for contributions to the coffee industry by the Federation of
Coffee Growers of Colombia, the National Association of Coffee Growers of Guatemala, and
the Eastern Africa Fine Coffee Association.

Stuart McCook. PhD, history, Princeton University. Associate professor of history at the
University of Guelph, Canada. He researches the environmental history of tropical crops,
especially the relations between commodities, societies, and landscapes in the tropics. He has
written on the environmental history of sugar and cacao. He is currently writing a global his-
tory of coffee rust (Hemileia vastatrix), as well as on other aspects of coffee’s environmental
history. [email protected].

Michelle Craig McDonald. MA, liberal arts, St. John’s College. PhD, history, University
of Michigan. Associate professor of history at Richard Stockton College. Author, most

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About the Editors and Contributors 415

recently, of Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern, 1500–1800,
with David Hancock. Presently working on a history of United States investment in the
Caribbean coffee industry.

Sunalini Menon. Sunalini has more than thirty years of experience in the coffee industry both
within India and internationally and is directly associated with quality and quality-related
aspects of domestic and international coffee. She worked in the Quality Control department
of the Indian Coffee Board from 1972 to 1995, ultimately becoming the director of Quality
Control. In 1997, she established her own company, Coffeelab Limited, in Bangalore, India,
the first organization of its kind in the Indian private sector. It provides comprehensive quality
related services for the Indian coffee industry. One of Asia’s finest coffee cuppers, she regularly
travels to coffee origins to conduct cupping workshops and speaks to coffee entrepreneurs and
enthusiasts on nuances in the cup. [email protected].

Jati Misnawi. PhD, food chemistry and biotechnology, University of Jamber. Researcher,
Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute.

Joan Obra. Joan is the latest generation to join Rusty’s Hawaiian, the coffee farm, mill, and
roastery founded by her late father in Ka‘u, Hawai‘i. When it comes to coffee processing, Joan
has one of the best teachers: her mother, Lorie Obra. Rusty’s Hawaiian was the grand champion
of the Hawaii Coffee Association’s 2010 and 2011 statewide cupping competitions, as well as a
winner of the 2012 Roasters Guild Coffees of the Year competition. [email protected].

Price Peterson. PhD, neurochemistry, University of Pennsylvania. Owner, with his family, of
Hacienda La Esmeralda, Boquete, Panama. One of the world’s most respected coffee farmers
and innovators. With his son Daniel, developer of the variety ‘Gesha’ as a highly sought-after
coffee. The farm web site is http://haciendaesmeralda.com/.

Rick Peyser. Director of Social Advocacy and Supply Chain Community Outreach for Green
Mountain Coffee Roasters, where he has worked for twenty-four years. He is a past president
of the SCAA, served six years on the Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International (FLO)
Board, and currently serves on the board of directors for Coffee Kids, Food4Farmers, and
Fundacion Ixil. [email protected].

Sergii Reminny. Sergii was the first Ukrainian National Coordinator for the SCAE, 2005-2010.
He is the owner of the company IONIA il caffe (Ukraine). He is a blogger and author about
coffee, drawing on the expertise gained by visiting more than fifty countries of the world.

Paul Rice. BA, Yale University. MBA, UC Berkeley. President and CEO of Fair Trade USA,
a non-profit organization and the leading third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the
United States. Before opening the doors of Fair Trade USA in 1998, Paul worked for eleven
years as a rural development specialist in Nicaragua, where he founded the country’s first fair
trade, organic coffee export cooperative.

Robert Rice. PhD, UC Berkeley. Robert has been at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center
(SMBC) since 1995, working within the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute on
landscape change and managed lands, with a specific focus on agroforestry systems in the

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416 About the Editors and Contributors

tropics. In recent years he has also coordinated the SMBC’s “Bird Friendly” coffee program, a
shade coffee certification using science-based criteria from ornithological fieldwork.

Carlos Saenz. Carlos Saenz is a small coffee farmer in Genova Costa Cuca, Quetzaltenango.
His family has run their coffee farm, Finca Las Brisas, for four generations.

Vincenzo Sandalj. He was president of the Sandalj Trading Company, one of the leading
specialty green coffee importers in Italy. He coauthored the book Coffee: A Celebration of Di-
versity and was a past president of the SCAE. He passed away in July 2013. www.sandalj.com.

Colin Smith. Colin is the managing director of Smith’s Coffee Company, UK, and a founding
member and past president of the SCAE. [email protected].

Steven Topik. PhD, history, University of Texas. Professor of history, UC Irvine. Author of
several books on the history of Brazil. Coauthor of The Second Conquest of Latin America: Cof-
fee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850–1930. Coeditor and contributor to The
World That Trade Created and to The Global Coffee Economy in Asia, Africa and Latin America,
1500–1989. Currently working on a history of coffee on four continents.

Tatsushi Ueshima. Tatsushi Ueshima was appointed representative president of UCC

Ueshima Coffee Co., Ltd., in 1980. This led to his current post as representative-chairman,
appointed in 2009. He has served as chairman of various coffee industry groups represent-
ing Japan: All-Japan Coffee Association, All-Japan Coffee Fair Trade Council, Association of
Regular Coffee Industry for Household Use, and the Specialty Coffee Association of Japan.
Awarded the “Cordon of the Rising Sun” from the Japanese government for contributions to
the Japanese coffee industry. He has also been awarded medals from coffee-producing coun-
tries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Jamaica.

Camilla C. Valeur. Graduate, Roskilde University. MBA, Copenhagen Business School

and University of Rome. Currently project manager at the Danish Federation of Small and
Medium-Sized Enterprises (DFSME). Camilla formerly worked as head of secretariat at The
Danish Network for Coffee, Tea and Cocoa and as market access expert at Oxfam Italia. She
has worked with coffee farmers, buyers, and end-consumers with special attention to sustain-
able coffee trends. She has over ten years of experience with sustainable business development
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. [email protected].

Geoff Watts. Vice president of coffee, Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea, Inc. Geoff has spent the
last seventeen years pursuing better coffee as Intelligentsia’s chief buyer. He has served as an
official judge in more than thirty international coffee competitions. As a pioneer of the direct
trade approach and consultant for several development organizations, he has spent more than
half of his time over the last decade working closely with coffee growers in East Africa and
Central/South America to improve quality and build systems for ensuring traceability and
transparency in the supply chain.

Britta Zietemann. Deputy managing director of the German Coffee Association, Hamburg.
Britta has worked in coffee for nearly five years now, after studying media and English and
working in PR. In 2007, she joined the German Coffee Association (Deutscher Kaffeeverband)
with responsibility for communications, information, and events. She is coauthor, with Hol-
ger Preibisch and others, of Faszination Kaffee, the only recent comprehensive German refer-
ence book about coffee.

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