Your Coffee Needs a Regular Quality Tune-up
Gwen Toohey at the cupping table
Coffee’s performance is the true measure of quality. Branding, promotion, and merchandising will give your coffee initial bursts of speed, but only aroma and taste will provide the endurance and reliability necessary for your coffees to succeed.
Harvest time is important. Coffee professionals know that each country harvests coffee at different throughout the year; even within a producing country, harvesting will occur at different times. Each harvest time is based on the region’s distance from the equator, its altitude and climate variations. The flavor of all agricultural products, including coffee, will vary throughout the harvest year. The difference in harvest times are not necessarily a quality obstacle but should be looked at as an opportunity for coffee buyers and roast masters to manage their blends by introducing fresh coffees throughout the year. Early harvest coffee will have different sensory characteristics than mid-harvest or even late harvest coffees, due to the maturation of the fruit on the tree.
Sometimes it is all about the weather. Fruits and vegetables from one’s garden or from the local farm stand will not taste the same harvest to harvest. These variations are due to changes in the soil composition, amounts of sunlight and rain fall, and differences in fertilizers used. Wine has vintage years with high prices when the quality is elevated and reduced prices when grape production is not exceptional. Coffee quality is very similar.
Logistics is critical for quality. Once picked, processed, and shipped to the roaster, coffee’s peak sweetness, aromatics and flavor must be managed through proper storage and inventory control. As coffee ages it begins to oxidize and stale, creating dry, cereal-type, papery, and dusty characters.
Consumers expect a flavor consistency when purchasing coffee products. For blends and standard offerings, consistency means uniformity of flavors throughout the year. For specialty quality and micro-lots, consistency is defined by uniformity of flavors from roast to roast, and possibly harvest to harvest.
Verification of roast profiles, process controls and manufacturing standards will help ensure that the coffee’s intrinsic quality is not harmed or adversely changed.
In today’s highly competitive coffee marketplace, simply changing green coffee is not always the right answer. Sometimes the performance issue is related to manufacturing or packaging. Here in the lab, our coffee technologists use scientific methods and sophisticated analytical tools to diagnose quality issues with green coffee components and roasted coffee products. Poor coffee performance causes reduction in customer satisfaction, loss of revenue and a bad reputation. Coffee professionals maintain their coffees at peak performance for superior customer satisfaction.
