But what makes a good espresso blend? That’s not an easy question to answer. Not just because there are literally hundreds if not thousands of equally good blends that can be created, but because when you’re running a shop there are more parts to the question than what coffees taste good together. A better way to phrase the question might be, “what makes a good espresso blend that I can consistently sell?”

The Flavor Factor

All other factors put aside, if your espresso simply doesn’t taste good, then nothing else matters. Selecting beans that work well together can be a fun but also frustrating challenge–some coffees that taste great on their own don’t play well in espresso, and coffees you might overlook as a single-origin offering might really shine when joined to the right blend. Beyond that, there are a thousand tiny things that can radically change a potential espresso’s cup profile: roast level of the individual coffees, dosing amount in the portafilter, water temperature, and so on.

This is the hard work. It takes time, and the ability to roast each coffee to a given roast profile consistently, and a proper palette, and just the raw patience for continuous trial and error. But it’s also the most fun part, experimenting with and really getting to the essence of individual coffees.

Yeah, But Can I Get It?

Creating an espresso blend isn’t just about flavor, though. For any given blend you like the flavor of, you’ve got to find out if you can get it consistently at the volume you’ll need for your store at a price that you can afford. Many coffees–especially the best coffees–simply aren’t available all year, and may have a lot of competition for the lots. You might create an espresso that features a really distinct estate coffee that make for an amazing shot of espresso, but if that estate’s farm only produces 100 bags a year and you have a busy shop, you won’t be able to offer that espresso once the lot runs out. One thing some roasters do to address this is deliberately build a flavor profile around five or six coffees in a balanced percentage, to ensure that they’ll never need so much of any one coffee to risk running out of inventory; that is, they can offer it consistently because they don’t need as much of any coffee, so it’s more likely to be available.

Price is also a critical factor. One of my favorite espresso blends that I ever created was a blend that used a rare-ish Nicaraguan Cup of Excellence coffee as a base and featured a heavy percentage of Kaapi Royale, a high-grown Indian Robusta. The shots were amazing, but it costs me over $8/lb to make, meaning I’d have to raise all my retail drink prices by $1.50 to sell it without losing money. And daily customers aren’t going to pay $3.99 for an Americano, no matter how good it is (nor should they).

The Certification Issue

Things get even more complicated if you plan on offering an espresso that’s 100% organic or Fair Trade. Your available choices are more limited, with some regions of the world cut out entirely (such as most African coffees), and what’s available is not only going to be more expensive, but–to be blunt–may not be the best-tasting coffee from a given region. It can be a gamble, but it’s also a proven sales booster to offer an espresso with certifications, so the roaster has to weigh the pros and cons.

Choosing Which End to Start From

Many roasters create an espresso blend by starting from the logistical end: they look at the coffees that are available all year round within a certain price range, and then start blending from there. Others start from blending whatever they can find to create the best flavor, and then working backwards to find what coffees they can realistically source to fit that flavor profile. I admit I do the latter, which isn’t always the most reasonable way, because it can frequently mean finding a great blend but having to start all the way over if one of the coffees is too expensive or too rare and there’s no adequate substitution. But my primary concern is always sourcing the best-tasting coffee I can possibly find, and then figuring out later how to get it and keep it. Price, certifications, etc., all come later.

But whichever end you start from, the result should be the same: the best-tasting espresso you can get year-round at a price that’s reasonable.

This is a preliminary result of a 21-year study conducted by Danish and Swedish researchers who monitored the health habits of about 1400 middle-aged men and women.  While there’s no definite evidence yet of a hard link, observations are showing a 65% reduction in the likelihood of developing of dementia or Alzheimer’s among the study group.

From the New York Times article:

Dr. Kivipelto and her colleagues suggest several possibilities for why coffee might reduce the risk of dementia later in life. First, earlier studies have linked coffee consumption with a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes, which in turn has been associated with a greater risk of dementia. In animal studies, caffeine has been shown to reduce the formation of amyloid plaques in the brain, one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, coffee may have an antioxidant effect in the bloodstream, reducing vascular risk factors for dementia.Dr. Kivipelto noted that previous studies have shown that coffee drinking may also be linked to a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease.

There’s no indication that coffee will have a protective effect for those already developing dementia, but in the meantime, it’s always good to have an excuse to make another pot.

(Note: when talking about tea as a source of antioxidants and flavonoids, we mean”real” tea, that is, tea consisting of camellia sinensis leaves.  “Herbal teas” and tisanes aren’t really tea and don’t provide any antioxidants.)

But did you know that coffee has roughly four times the antioxidants of tea?  A study by Switzerland’s Nestle Research Center found that green coffee beans contain about 1,000 antioxidants, and more are added over the roasting and brewing process.  The end result is that a serving of coffee has more free-radical fighting power than tea, wine, or cocoa.

Unfortunately for the lovers of finer coffees, Robusta coffees are a greater source of antioxidants than the higher-quality Arabica coffess–so believe it or not, that cup of diner coffee is doing some heavy lifting fighting that “he-man breakfast special” you just ate.  But Arabica coffees are no slouch in the flavonoid deparment, so the next time you want to make a healthy beverage choice, you may just want to make a trip to your local roastery.

By “classic” I mean that applicants would travel to Lincoln and stay in the owners’ home, working at the shop 30 hours a week in exchange for training in one of a number of offered programs: Barista Training, Roaster Training, and Small Business Management. Programs last four weeks each, or you can stay for three months and take all three. Here’s a few details on the offered programs as listed on Cultiva’s website:

1. Barista Training (4 weeks)
Latte art, speed training, coffee agronomy and history, and insight on training for regional barista competitions. By the time your training is complete, you will know the basics and be able to demonstrate barista skills that are as seen in regional and national barista SCAA competitions. Jon Ferguson has served as both a NWRBC Sensory Judge and MRBC Technical Judge. Ferguson initially received barista training as an employee at Zoka Coffee Company in Seattle, Washington in 2005. He started Cultiva Coffee Roasting Company in the Fall of 2006, and has been roasting and pouring rosettas ever since!

2. Roasting (4-8 weeks)
We won’t just flip a switch and burn some coffee. I’ll go into depth about buying green coffees from importers, how to get your business certified organic and fair trade. We’ll track our flow of inventory, measure weight loss, discuss “degrees of roast” and how to define them for yourself, how to package, promote, and sell roasted coffees to cafés, bakeries, grocery stores, etc. We will learn how to roast with a few different stylistic approaches, maintain roast logs, and will gain experience on properly maintaining and cleaning a Diedrich IR-12 roaster.

3. Small business management (4 weeks)
I’ll be more transparent with my books than one may expect. I’ll show you our filing cabinet, how I keep them, the problems I’ve had in the past and present and how I fixed it. I’ll basically give you Cultiva’s paperwork ‘tour’ through our filings, talk about city codes, permits, building-out space, loan documents, etc.

It sounds like a fascinating opportunity, and I hope anyone who takes up Ferguson’s offer blogs about the experience. Particularly because the in-shop roasting machine is Espresso Vivace’s old Deidrich IR-12; I live around the corner from Vivace here in Seattle and can vouch for the fact that that machine turns out some of the best coffee possible, making it a great machine to learn on. I can’t refrain from mentioning, however, that my only reservation–besides the obvious disadvantages of spending up to three months away from home with no income, but that’s surmountable–is that Ferguson doesn’t seem to have a lot of experience as a roaster. If I understand his website correctly, then he’s been a barista for less than three years and a roaster for barely one. He clearly has at least some level of real expertise, having served as a judge in two of the official regional barista championships, and he’s got a hell of a machine, so even without the resume it should be worth it to consider the program if you’re new to the coffee industry and serious about learning as much as you can in a short amount of time.

Recently Klaus Thomsen of the Coffee Collective felt that the city line water in his native Copenhagen was negatively affecting the delicate qualities of his roasted coffee, so he decided to do a blind taste test with waters filtered in different ways. According to Klaus:

Since we have experimented and tested a lot of water systems before we had narrowed the field down quite a bit:
1) Bottled spring water from Eden.
2) Reverse Osmosis filtered water.
3) Water+More/HOH’s new Bestmax filter.

We did the test mainly to try out the new Bestmax filter, which is a carbon and ion-exchange, four-step filter unit specifically designed for coffee.

Using the water to brew two different coffees, Klaus and co. did a blind taste test to see how each type of water affected the final cup. According to his post, the Bestmax filter performed the best, not tainting the coffee in any discernible way; largely thanks to an adjustable ion exchanger to allow calibration for different types of incoming water (i.e., from different sources). It’s not unlike achieving a flat frequency response in a loudspeaker, with the ion exchanger acting like an equalizer to compensate for any flaws in the incoming signal.

Find out how critical water can be to coffee and check out the full details of the experiment here.

Many coffee consumers wouldn’t be surprised to know that the largest coffee-producing country in the world is Brazil. But what they may not know is that Brazil is also the leading producer of low-grown, “junk” arabica–coffee plants that are grown near sea level in non-volcanic, non-forested soil. The crops are more volatile than Robustas grown in the same soil, but the arabica name commands enough of a higher price that growers find it worth the risk, and employ pesticides and other non-organic methods to preserve the crop. Most if not all the “100% arabica” blends offered by the usual store brands such as Maxwell House, Folger’s, etc. consist of this “junk” arabica. The beans are technically arabica, but the beans were produced without care in bad soil and can’t carry the same flavor notes or terroir of quality, high-grown arabica. You may recall that purines from the soil and sucrose production are responsible for the flavor of coffee, and while arabica is more capable of this production than Robusta, growing it at a low altitude in comparatively dry grassland soil prevents this production. So just because something says “arabica” on the package doesn’t mean you’re getting quality coffee.

Perhaps more surprising is the notion that just because a coffee is Robusta doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting bad coffee. One of the most exciting things to happen in the coffee industry in the past ten years has been the arrival of quality Robusta coffees from India. India started experimenting with high-grown Robustas some time ago, presumably to weather the typical volatility of the specialty coffee market, and the Coffee Board of India has started pushing these Robustas into the market–facing initial resistance right up to the moment they’re tasted.

Probably the best single-origin coffee I have ever cupped that wasn’t a Wallingford Blue Mountain was a 2004 Kaapi Royale from Josuma Coffee, which is a high-grown Robusta. It was an endlessly complex coffee, with intense notes of blueberry and vanilla bean giving way to milk chocolate, then honey, then dark chocolate and rich tobacco, cedar, and cardamom. You could pretty much throw a dart at the entire flavor wheel and hit something this coffee had in spades. It’s hard to sell without holding tastings, however, because the moment someone reads “Robusta” on the bag they’ll naturally wonder why you’re selling them “cheap” coffee. Once they taste a true quality Robusta, however, their minds always change.

Quality Robustas are hard to find; many shops won’t carry them because of the expense and the name’s negative connotations. I’ve seen several shops carry it as a kind of “back-door” thing where you have to specially ask for it, as if you were in a speakeasy. But if you can find a shop that carries an Indian Robusta, give it a try. You’ll almost certainly be surprised.

Caffeine, which does in fact take its name from the word “coffee”, is a xanthine alkaloid compound that develops in the coffee bean about 3-4 months after the coffee flower is fertilized. As the coffee flower continues its cycle of turning into coffee cherries, the roots of the coffee plant pull purines (a nitrogenous base responsible for the tastes and aroma of coffee) from the soil and into the bean. As the fruit of the coffee cherry develops the purines break down, forming xanthine compounds as a byproduct–specifically caffeine.

This breaking down of purines isn’t accidental: caffeine is a natural antifungal and pesticide. That’s right–the coffee plant protects itself by giving fatal caffeine buzzes to insects! As a matter of fact, many savvy coffee consumers know that coffea canephora (Robusta coffee) is different than coffea arabica (arabica coffee), but don’t know that Robusta was genetically developed for its higher caffeine content, which makes it more resistant to disease and thus easier to grow in large amounts at lower elevations.

So if you ever wondered why the diner’s coffee often packs more “punch” but doesn’t taste as good as your local coffee shop, it’s because they’re using the cheaper-to-produce Robusta. Remember, caffeine is created by the breaking down of purines, so the more caffeine a bean creates, the hardier it is on the farm, but the less potential flavor it has in the cup.

How much more caffeine does it pack? About twice as much: a double shot of espresso using arabica beans contains about 80-100 mg of caffeine–a simple cup of drip Robusta coffee can contain over 180 mg. So if you find your dad or grandfather resisting the specialty coffee craze and yearning for his daily cup of sludge from the local greasy spoon, it’s hard not to see why. It may not have the same taste, but it will surely wake him up.

On the flipside, this also explains why arabica can be so much more expensive. The subtle flavors of good coffee are the direct result of purine and sucrose production in the bean. The higher an elevation the beans grow, the more sucrose is produced (about a 10% increase for every 1000 m) and the more purines stay intact instead of breaking down to caffeine. Unfortunately, this means a more sensitive crop, as the coffee plant can’t resist insects and disease as easily. The higher price of arabica reflects this increased risk and lower yield, as well as its better taste.

Coffee also provided one of the only true, reliable food staples on the road, as the Civil War was rife with corrupted supply chains selling rotten meat and spoiled milk on both sides of the Mason-Dixon. The following isn’t from the Mental Floss article, but for an idea of how bad it could get, here is an excerpt from a letter written by soldier John D. Billings in 1861:

When the bread was moldy or moist, it was thrown away and made good at the next drawing, so that the men were not the losers; but in the case of its being infested with the weevils, they had to stand it as a rule ; but hardtack was not so bad an article of food, even when traversed by insects, as may be supposed. Eaten in the dark, no one could tell the difference between it and hardtack that was untenanted. It was no uncommon occurrence for a man to find the surface of his pot of coffee swimming with weevils, after breaking up hardtack in it, which had come out of the fragments only to drown; but they were easily skimmed off, and left no distinctive flavor behind.

(Read the whole letter, which is both interesting and cringe-inducing, here.)

The Union soldiers had vastly more coffee at their disposal than the Confederates, and despite the corrupted food providers whole bean coffee is hard to fake, so the Yankees always made sure to have plenty on hand when they could. Soldiers would even eat the beans while marching to keep their energy up. So it’s hard not to wonder if the extra pep from coffee gave an edge to the North. Of course I don’t really think it decided the war, but the role of coffee in it is pretty interesting to both historians and coffee lovers.

(Thanks to Mark for sending me the Mental Floss article.)

But it’s not the world’s most expensive coffee.

That honor belongs to Kopi Luwak, an Indonesian coffee so named for the most instrumental aspect of its creation: the luwak, or Asian palm civet, a small mammal of the Vivveridae family. How does something resembling a weasel play a role in making coffee that can command up to $600/lb. at retail? Simple–the luwak eats coffee cherries right off the tree, which ferment as they pass through the luwak’s digestive tract. The partially digested coffee seeds are then removed from the luwak’s droppings, cleaned, and processed. You read that right. This coffee is made from animal poop.

The theory is that the digestive enzymes of the luwak naturally ferment the cherries on their way through, lending the coffee a smooth, winy flavor that can’t be replicated by different growing or roasting methods. Not everyone agrees that this actually works the way luwak farmers says it does, some arguing instead that the coffee is superior because luwaks only eat the ripest coffee cherries, acting as a natural selector of a coffee orchard’s best beans.

What everyone agrees on, however, is that Kopi Luwak is a superior coffee. Only about a thousand pounds of true Kopi Luwak are produced each year and it flies off the shelves almost regardless of price.

About six years ago the coffee shop I roasted for held a tasting event for Kopi Luwak. Tickets for the private tasting went for $60 each and we sold out the tickets the same day they went on sale. At the time I was only just beginning to learn the craft, so my mentor roasted the beans and hosted the event. I am a little ashamed to say that I didn’t actually try the coffee; I was no Anthony Bourdain and the prospect of drinking “poop coffee” struck me as profoundly unappealing. I told myself that if I wanted coffee that tasted like crap I could always go down the street to the Starbucks…

Now of course I wish I had tried it, especially since Kopi Luwak may not hold its prominent place much longer. In light of its commanding such a high price, other countries such as Vietnam are experimenting with ways to replicate it, feeding coffee cherries of substandard quality to caged local versions of the Indonesian civet. Vietnam’s “weasel coffee” doesn’t carry the taste reputation of Kopi Luwak but flooding the market with it may well depress prices on the Indonesian archipelago.

If you spend enough time in the coffee industry, it’s almost impossible not to get mixed up in a cause. Coffee is the world’s second-highest traded commodity (behind oil), and that global reach, combined with the inevitable disparities in economy of participating nations, means coffee is by definition political. Be it funding education in poor coffee-producing countries, or lobbying for the right for coffee laborers overseas to unionize, you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone heavily involved in the specialty coffee industry who doesn’t champion a crusade of some kind.

My own banner is hoisted over the current debate about Fair Trade versus what’s called “direct trade”. I prefer the latter, which I see as a systemic solution for many of the industry’s current problems. In an upcoming post I’ll explain why, but before I do I’d like to clear up some confusion surrounding both terms–terms many people have heard, but not everyone clearly understands.

Fair Trade is the trademarked name of a kind of certification, administered an independent monitoring group named TransFair USA. If a coffee is certified to be Fair Trade, that means that the beans meet certain criteria in both quality and economics. Certain quality and labor standards must be met, and in return the producing coffee plantations are guaranteed a minimum floor price for their beans at auction, resulting in a higher wage for the growers. This certification costs money, by way of arbitration fees paid by the growers (this of course has no influence on the actual certification of the beans).

Fair Trade does not mean “organic” coffees, which are coffees produced without pesticides or unnatural processing, though the guaranteed floor price is higher for FT growers who provide organic beans. Coffees may be Fair Trade certified, or organic, or both, or neither.

Direct trade is a general umbrella term for coffees that are imported directly from the growers themselves, rather than brokered in bulk at auction. The roastery develops a direct relationship with the owners of coffee farms, negotiating individual terms and prices. Because there are no middlemen or outside agencies involved to take their cuts, the growers receive a much higher price for their beans.

Think about it like this: typically, a grower will sell his crop to a coffee auctioning agency (or his government, to sell to that agency) all at once, for let’s say–making numbers up here–30 cents per pound. The auctioners sell to an importer for 50 cents per pound, who in turn sells to the roastery for $1.40 per pound. In direct trade, the roastery buys directly from the grower for–still making it up–$1.15 per pound, negotiated down as incentive to trade this way, and barring shipping costs the entire $1.15 goes directly to the grower. In practice it’s a little more complicated, but the gist is that the roastery pays less, and the grower gets considerably more money for his beans.

However, direct trade is a private agreement, one requiring a lot of footwork by both parties, and the only requirements for quality or labor standards are defined by who the roaster or grower chooses to do business with. It is not certification, only a name for a method of doing business.

That said, I much prefer direct trade, and coming this week I’ll explain why I think it’s a better deal for everyone involved in the specialty coffee industry.