Defining the Terroir of Coffee as a Radical Movement

Posted on by in Terroir +.

Sumatran and Ethiopian Coffee at Batdorf. Photo taken by Annie.

The owners of Batdorf and Bronson and Olympia Coffee Roasters showed little interest in terroir. OCR was incredibly dismissive of it as a concept as we slurped our way through their different coffees from Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. They highlighted their coffees from Burundi, Kenya, El Salvador and Honduras. All of their beans are tied to a place, sometimes to a single farmer. As we meandered around the table of coffees, all labeled by their origins, I was overwhelmed by the importance of terroir in coffee. Why is origin labeling so important to specialty coffee if the origin labeling doesn’t tell the consumer what it will taste like? If taste is represented through processing, why not just roast all of the coffees that were processed similarly together and label them by roast?

Terroir in coffee fights anonymity. Origin labeling is a palpable representation of the politics encompassing terroir. Labeling is an admission of past injustices and acknowledgment of the environmental and human exploitation present in the coffee industry. The trend of labeling coffee by origin, of representing its terroir, is specialty coffee’s version of radicalism.

Can the taste differences in coffee be attributed to terroir?

Posted on by in Terroir +.

I do believe that terroir has a large effect on coffee’s flavor, we have tasted different coffees from different regions around the world and also from different roasting companies and they all have very distinct flavor profiles. It’s amazing how many different flavors, ranging from raspberries to black tea, can be expressed in coffee. These flavors come out using different combinations of variations in the roasting, processing, and growing methods, which I all consider to be part of the terroir.

Cafés Create an Intellectual Stew

Posted on by in Permaculture and Coffee, Terroir +.

Photo by Annie. Words by Bach.

You can thank coffee for electricity, existentialism, the FDA, the Enlightenment, and Beethoven’s 5th. That may be a stretch, but Benjamin Franklin, Søren Kierkegaard, Teddy Roosevelt, Voltaire and Beethoven are just a few of the noted thinkers who drank inordinate amounts of coffee. Bach wrote The Coffee Cantata in 1732 to defend the Vienna coffeehouse scene (Pendergrast 1999:11), Maragaret Atwood helped create a coffee with The Smithsonian and coffee allegedly killed Balzac.

Mark Pendergrast, the author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World points out “One of the ironies about coffee is it makes people think. It sort of creates egalitarian places—coffeehouses where people can come together—and so the French Revolution and the American Revolution were planned in coffeehouses” while being interviewed on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” In his book he writes that the cafés “provided an intellectual stew” and allowed men and women to exchange ideas without impropriety (9). In Uncommon Grounds and during the interview he asserts that cafés made a major impact on the rise of business, progressed literature and newspapers and sobered up Western Civilization.

I believe the superfluous amount of coffee shops today may be in response to our vanishing sense of community and time for free thought in the digital age. I love Jay Oldenburg’s piece “Our Vanishing “Third Places.” One of his many valid arguments is that “Third places are ‘sorting’ areas. While third places serve to promote the habit of association generally, they are also the places in which those with special interests find one another. In third places, amateur musicians, shooting enthusiasts, poetry lovers, fishermen, scuba divers, etc., get introduced and find local outlets for their interests. Here is provided the basis of whatever kind and degree of local culture will emerge. In the modern subdivision, “local” culture is provided by television.” (Oldenberg 1996)

I often think about his argument for the balancing “third place” (home and work being an imbalanced bipod) when opening my screen at a coffee shop. And while I think it is important to engage with other humans or the occasional piece of paper while working at a coffee shop, I also believe coffee shops provide a supervisory relationship for academics and artists. Coffee shops provide an audience to be productive for and a reminder of the world outside of your house and work that is worth producing for.

Plus, coffee offers hedonic and utilitarian motivation!