Coffee is a fruit, but it comes roasted and therefore there is no easy way to select the best by texture or color. However, after little training it is quite easy to identify only by taste, flawless and perfectly ripe roasted coffee beans from anything else.
Our obsession with ripeness and color
When I visit Europe or North America, I am always intrigued about how beautiful fruits at the markets are, they are big, flawless and colorful, pure perfection. It seems most of the imperfect fruit are just left behind at the farms to compost and fertilize the soil. Even if you make an extra effort to find imperfect fruits at low cost markets or outlets, they are simply hard to find or not available at all. Consumers prioritize good looking fruit over price; consequently, the local fruit market adapts accordingly to satisfy their needs.
Commercial coffee is far from fresh and ripe, why don’t we care?
Surprisingly, these markets are at the same time the largest consumers of commercial coffee, that it is essentially obtained from fruits that are not necessarily the best, nonetheless, inadvertently purchased and drank blindly by consumers in the form of inconspicuous roasted coffee beans and grounds.
Coffee is basically a drupe, a fleshy fruit with thin skin and a central stone containing the seed. Plums, cherries, almonds, peaches, avocados, olives are common examples; the big differences however are when coffee is consumed, we use the seeds instead of the mucilage or pulp and drink it roasted rather than raw. Nonetheless, coffee fruits require the same care and effort as any other fruit, during harvest, storage and/or transportation, nevertheless rarely receive any.
SEE ALSO: Why is conventional coffee so bad?
Commercial coffee = defective.
All commercial coffee sold around the world have some quality issue of some sort in one way or another, from slight to extremely serious, nevertheless not a single bean is thrown to waste and all coffee is consumed regardless how severe the issues were.
Contrary to popular belief, these issues are not always casual or accidental, sometimes they are deliberately induced, depending on the type of market and price tag exporters are aiming for.
The largest percentage of coffee around the world is deliberately harvested immature or green. Immature coffee cherries little sugar content offers protection against any type of processing related risk, (e.g., fermentation, reduction, oxidation, enzymatic activity or rotting are among the most common ones). Although it represents a huge advantage for coffee processors, the final taste of immature coffee beans, even after experiencing the high roasting temperatures, is vegetal, grassy, bitter, astringent, short, rough and unpleasant, (like raw green banana flavor). This is the coffee that better represents the commodity market and its flavor is widely associated by the general public as the inherent and authentic coffee taste.
Commercial coffee is already bad, what about even cheaper coffee
Surprisingly, regardless how low the commodity coffee price already is, still there are countries and markets that require coffee at even lower prices. Therefore, the only feasible option left for them is to compromise in quality and accept sourcing coffee beans with serious defects. The most common of them is a sensory defect known as Phenolic. While, genuine Phenolic coffee is caused by very specific reasons, this denomination is given to all coffees that manifest in different degrees some sort of chemical off-flavor that resembles the smell of a medical room or some analgesics and disinfectants used in hospitals. This peculiar flavor is attributable to fungus’s and mold’s growth and it is directly linked to coffee fruit decay. Interestingly, this flavor could be easily hidden from final consumers by roasting beans dark and/or by blending techniques.
Similarly, common sensory defects consequence of over-fermentation, contaminants, passed shelf time and excessive humidity among others could also be easily hidden by a dark roast and/or blending techniques.
Customers are kept ignorant or misinformed about coffee quality
Despite, long-term effects of phenolic and defective coffees on human health are arguable. Most of the people who consume and prefer them today, do it unknowingly, inadvertently and by making purchasing decisions based on coffee’s low price or deceptive marketing. Otherwise, I personally believe, the market niche for this type of coffee would be rather quite small.
If you thought it couldn’t get worse, think again
Finally, at the bottom of the quality lather we find leftovers from coffee processing, specially sweepings from coffee farms and residues from dry-mills.
Every year, once coffee harvesting season is over, numerous framers go back to plantations and literally sweep the base of each tree, collecting all remaining fruits that may have fallen throughout the season, as you might expect coffee fruits collected this way are severely damaged and decomposed, regardless how bad they are, these fruits are set to dry and commercialized as low grade. Likewise, during dry-milling, just before coffee is bagged and shipped, all beans are scanned for impurities, defects, broken and sort by size and density. The byproducts of this stage are also collected and commercialized as low grade as well.
SEE ALSO: Is coffee really good for your health?
Price is king
Although, technology to perfectly clean coffee from impurities and visual defects is widely available at all major exporting countries. Exporters often preserved or even artificially incorporated defects into otherwise perfectly clean lots of coffee aiming to adjust pricing to any potential customer’s budget.
Price is not a good quality reference for coffee final consumers
While, undergrade commercial coffee is usually cheaper than premium or specialty ones, it is not necessarily clear to the final consumer, who ultimately depends on roasters and coffee shops honesty regarding actual quality. Many successful coffee businesses have made fortunes and controlled entire markets for decades by using ingenious marketing techniques to make commercial coffee appealing to luxury markets.
To conclude
With almost 2 billion cups of coffee consumed globally every day, it is surprising to me how little interest the general public display about the quality and origin of the coffee they so frequently enjoy. Unless we finally learn how to differentiate good from bad coffee by only using our sense of taste and smell and of course pay a little extra, we should expect to keep being used as the coffee industry’s wastebasket.