Bad Taste in their Mouths

[ChrisSchooley]

I just put this piece up on the chronicle:

http://www.scaa.org/chronicle/2012/01/1 ... ir-mouths/

I want to clearly state that it's not specifically about Seasonality, and it's not against concrete information at all. This is an idea that maybe the best starting point for educating consumers about quality in coffee is to teach them how to identify BAD coffee in terms of degraded green and stale roasted coffee. If these aspects become widely recocognizable, it should really open them up to the many ways in which a coffee can be great.

Thoughts?

[rojo]

I remember discussing this with you a bit at the retreat. thanks for putting this idea together in the article (and subsequent comment). It really seems that marketing in coffee has completely skipped the roaster altogether and this gap is part of the problem. I remember loving how coffee marketing used transparent practices to bring the story the coffee's origin right to you. Farmer names on bags, posters, etc.. In that respect people learned great coffee (well, coffee period) came from specific lands and many humble hands. Then as things evolved, I feel that origin stories have stuck around for sure, but long term direct trade has kind of slid off and the techy nerdery filled the gap with agronomic info on bags to ultra specific brewing instructions that emerged with the surge in different brewing styles and hyper tricked out 3rd wave cafe-ery... all the advances are of course helpful. I do think though that there are things worth sharing that start a consumer off right, and freshness of roast is well up there. Seasonality is weird to me because some places have 2 harvests a year and green, when well cared for will hold it's character for 6 months + in some cases, so the issue is can you keep it fresh? But 6 months isn't a season. Its half the year.
I also kind of feel that its just odd to function with a perspective that you bought, maintain and operate roasters and employ and educate Roasters, but assure the public that their goal is to essentially have no effect on the coffee. It cheapens the role and knowledge required to operate a roaster, understand cupping, profiling, etc... and puts forth the perspective that the pretty machine just needs someone to open the doors at the right time.. saying nothing for developing blends, profiling for brew methods or customer preferred tastes in your market. And these things may well be more important information to a consumer than the altitude of the farm, which is really most relevant to the green buyers and professionals themselves for reasons of science....

this is especially true when you folks on one hands saying they impart nothing on the roast, while others use roasting in marketting to spread total contrary information about quality (slower the roast, the better the cup..c'mon)..
but i digress...truly important: the hands that cultivated that coffee(origin,farm or farmer, maybe varietal). the way the roasters handle it to bring it to you fresh (new green then well preserved, roasted fresh, packaged for intended shelf life that is stuck to with QA). digestable best practices for preparing it (teach, offer, suggest, make available).