There's a Person at the End of Every Bag of Coffee
Every Batch Starts the Same, and I Don't
Beans, heat, time. That part doesn't move. I do. I'm not the same on a Tuesday as I am on a Saturday, and the beans were never really the same either, no matter what the label says.
Here's the answer up front, because it took me years to get comfortable saying it. I roast coffee, and I'm telling you that roasters cannot fully control this. That isn't an excuse and it isn't a request for sympathy. It's the piece of information that's missing from almost every conversation about whether a bag was good.
What Your Coffee Went Through Before Anybody Roasted It
Somebody grew it and picked it, months ago. An importer moved it and wrote down what they thought of it, sometimes in a lot of detail and sometimes barely at all. Most of the coffees I buy score somewhere in the low eighties. The ones I buy from Royal Coffee land higher. Then that coffee sits in a warehouse for however many months until somebody buys it, and the whole time it's losing flavor and losing time, and how it was bagged and stored decides how much.
By the time it reaches a roaster it is already not the coffee it was. That's before anyone touches a profile.
The Thing Roasters Mostly Don't Say
I've gone too fast on a roast and sold that coffee to people anyway. I've done it more than once. I'm not unique in that, and the roasters who've done the same thing mostly won't say so.
I'll go further. Some coffees roast themselves. High altitude beans that are forgiving, where as long as you're gentle and you follow your protocol, they come out lovely and you get the credit. So when a coffee turns out beautifully, part of what you're tasting is a person doing careful work, and part of it is a bean that was going to be good almost regardless. I'd rather say that than pretend otherwise.
The Weather Nobody Puts on the Label
There's more to it than skill. Is the machine clean. Has the maintenance been kept up. Is there more chaff in the container than there should be, so the airflow isn't quite what it was yesterday. Is the person running it having a good day, or a terrible one.
There's often somebody new too. The person who's been sweeping next to the roaster for a year, reading everything, waiting for their turn, and now they've got it and they're moving too fast while the head roaster keeps telling them to slow down.
And then there's a kid in the doorway saying let's go to the park, and you can't think about the park, because you're still on that one spot in the profile where you didn't put enough heat into a hard bean. I had a Nicaraguan like that. Strictly high grown, European prep. In the cup it wanted a one to ten ratio, which told me plenty about my brewing and nothing about my roasting, and it took me a while to work out that what it actually needed was more development.
The Money Explains More Than You'd Think
Seven or eight years ago, my Brazilian was the workhorse. Chocolatey, nutty, exactly what most people want, black or with creamer. I paid a dollar eighty a pound for it. At that price you can sell a good bag at ten or twelve dollars, shrink it to twelve ounces, cover the bag and the advertising and the warehouse, and still make a living.
Last week I bought Brazilian at four dollars and eighty eight cents a pound. Almost triple. That has to show up somewhere, and where it shows up is your bag.
We've Watched This Movie Before, With Brisket
Brisket used to be a cheap cut. Then it turned out that time and smoke made it magical, and everybody got into it, and the lists and the rankings arrived. The purveyors got hip and stopped selling it at a dollar fifty a pound. Prices climbed, and they kept climbing, and some genuinely great barbecue joints closed. Not because they got worse. Because you can't hand somebody a hundred and thirty dollar plate and expect to see them more than twice a year.
Coffee is running the same play right now, and I don't know how it ends either.
A Twenty Five Dollar Bag Is Not What You Think
Do the math on the bag you last thought was expensive. Twenty five, maybe thirty dollars. That roaster paid six to nine dollars a pound for the green. It loses weight when it roasts. Then the bag, the printing, the advertising, the people. There are days it looks like selling mugs would be the better business, and some roasters have quietly reached the same conclusion and gotten out.
The Coffee That Was Magic Once
I once got a Colombian from a roaster I'd been talking to for a while. The bag said Meyer lemon, and I had to go find a Meyer lemon to know what that meant. Sweeter than a regular lemon, subtler. Then I brewed the coffee and it was exactly that. A little one dimensional maybe, but I emailed him to say it was wonderful.
Months later I ordered it again. It was not the same coffee. The Meyer lemon was muted, almost gone, and I had a whole bag of it. I decided he'd messed it up.
He probably did. But the coffee had also gotten older, sitting in his warehouse through whatever temperatures it sat through, after however long it had already spent at the importer. And something might have been going on in his life that I'll never know about. All I cared about at the time was my cup.
What I'm Actually Asking For
Not lower standards. Keep being honest about what's in your cup. If a bag isn't good, it isn't good, and you should say so. I feel that too, and there are mornings I don't think I roast as well as I should after all these years.
Just a little bit of grace alongside the honesty. Go find out who roasts your coffee. Ask them something. There's a person back there working on a profile so your morning goes well, and most of the time you'll never hear from them at all.
