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.