Evergreen student sampling an espresso blend at a tasting at Olympia Coffee Roasting Company. Photo taken by Willow-Creek Feighery

During our field study at Olympia Coffee Roasting Company and our interview with Sam Shoeder, we were enlightened on the various waves coffee has gone through in the past seventy years, and where OCR falls into the game. The three waves of coffee are so named “first wave”, “second wave”, and “third wave”, the latter being where OCR places themselves in this classification style. Below is the synopsis of each wave of coffee:

1: “Folgers, and your commercially produced coffee . . . where it’s really focused on prices, so price being the motivator . . . going to sell you a lot of coffee for really cheap

2: The beginning of espresso culture and specialty coffee in the United States, Pete’s, Starbucks, focused on crafting you a co

ffee, usually with a darker roast. Making blends, a direct contrast to Folger’s, 1970s to the 1990s.

3: Began around 2003, Olympia Coffee Roasting Company began in 2005. Doing direct trade, paying above Fair Trade standards. Main concern is quality of coffee, and bringing out unique flavor of beans, experimenting with wash processes. Coffee is the product, not a confection using coffee beans.

Coffee going new wave (third wave):

Starbucks is opening “Starbucks Reserve” roastery in Seattle to compete with high quality roasteries. This is good for businesses like OCR because it introduces people to a higher quality of coffee, and to the flavor of coffee, specialty coffees. Starbucks Reserve does not compete with small, quality roasteries because the coffee that the higher quality roastery will produce won’t actually be very delectable.

Folger’s to high quality coffee is a hard sell. However, Starbucks to high quality coffees is an easier tradition as they are very similar in price with great discrepancies in flavor.

Two years ago a close friend, Madelyn and I set out on a long journey around the states in a post graduate search for travel and experience. We had minimal plans and for months we were just wandering as we pleased, meeting new people, living cheaply, sleeping in the car, and frequenting gas stations as well as their coffee.

Something happened one day in the northeast corner of Montana. Madelyn and I looked at each other after we took our first sips of coffee we bought inside the tiny gas station where we just filled up– and I recall looking at each other for even longer, taking more sips without losing eye contact. Almost, in disbelief we both ignored this at first, understanding that there was no way this cup of coffee– probably a robusta, probably old, in a dirty machine, in a dirty gas station, prepared by someone who looked twice as dirty as all aforementioned things–cupped higher in my mind than fancy cups of coffee I’ve bought that have so much thought behind them, crafted with the mind of an expert who is clean and precise to a science with their creations.

I can’t remember a cup of coffee I have enjoyed the way I enjoyed this cup of coffee. I like that this doesn’t have to make any sense, I like that nobody can tell me any differently, and good thing because I can barely remember the way that it tasted anyways.

How much of my experience with food and the way I perceive it to taste, is actually the substance of the food at all?

We credit and understand that the same foods around the world are not produced in the same way everywhere. We can mostly agree that depending how something was produced, handled, processed and so on can affect the current or final product. By recognizing this same thing in humans, that each person is different and has a cumulative past that made them that way, we begin to see how many factors really go into tasting something. Maybe terroir is so difficult to grasp because it is something that’s changing, without form, an invitation, or a template for us to begin thinking about how we think about our food, and how intimate that sometimes is.

To repress something because you cannot fathom it doesn’t allow the culmination of self, in taste. This personal history of our lives is created by moments of honesty within ourselves. To me, that was the most beautiful cup of coffee I have ever tasted– and why? Because I allowed it to be– even if everyone else, people who like similar coffees to me, might disagree. Taste and memory go hand in hand, everything we see, touch– experience in any way, it is due to, and specific to ourselves and without our consent, put through this filter.

As I recall this memory and try to bring myself back to this cup of coffee, and what exactly made it so special, I lose it more and more like it’s a dream, but the important part remains: that I tasted something that day that allowed me to recognize that there is a part of myself that knows more about me than my conscious self can make any sense of. 

Throughout life I think we all experience these feelings of being in an intangible moment, assigning every sensory factor in that moment, to have the terroir of it. We find pleasure in association when it can enhance something, and associations can have just as much to do with memory as they do with place. Terroir is a truly complex notion of how something can embody something else, and how the exterior experience while tasting is unconsciously associated with a flavor, the two things becoming inseparable, locked in space, time, and memory.

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Coffee Roaster	Tasting Insights	Business Insights	Permaculture Insights
Batdorf & Bronson	At Batdorf and Bronson we tasted a fully washed, pulp natural, and natural process washed coffee. A texture difference was noted in the comparison of the three, where a fuller body and viscosity was present in the naturally washed coffee.	Batdorf & Bronson believed in buying the entire crop of coffee from the farmer versus buying the “cream of the crop”. Buying segmented amounts of one yield will make it ultimately harder for farmer’s to sell their coffee, and they most likely will not make the profit they would selling everything together.	Batdorf’s business model included paying farmers before the growing season as opposed to after, once they’ve received the beans. This gives the farmers more, and better executed preparation time. Being able to pay workers with this money so their pre-season preparation goes well, workers are happier, and no costly mistakes happen due to a low budget.
Olympia Coffee Roasting Company	While some liked it and some did not, we found these coffees to be mostly sour and bitter, while 2 certain types stuck out as sweet which were the San Sebastian Reserva from Columbia that tasted of sweet, baked apples and had a creamy body. Also, the Banko Natural, unique in that the mucilage from the coffee cherry is partially left on during fermentation, imparting a flavor strikingly similar to blueberries Olympia Coffee Roasting Company’s Banko Natural Organic -Ethiopia	Olympia Coffee Roasters were serious about educating their consumers, seeing it as necessary to justify prices. They understand that people are willing to pay more for a better product, so they articulate the importance of why their product is superior to others. They accounted this to their close attention to details of quality, and their more involved relationships with those growing their coffee.	Hypothenemous Hampei is the scientific name of one coffee nightmare that is the coffee boring beetle: A bark beetle endemic to Central Africa that is now distributed throughout all coffee-producing countries in the world, with the exception of Nepal and Papua New Guinea. This beetle goes after the good stuff too, predominately boring into the well enjoyed coffea arabica. OCR produced a short video displaying how they wanted their coffee growers to have the knowledge to combat this pest in order to ever have any success on their farms, and to improve the quality of coffee they would be receiving from these farms.The economic importance of this tiny insect is tremendous and is regularly determining the economic success of coffee growers. This pest can be combated in a few different ways, although it is already evolving, and the females are now being able to reproduce asexually due to the ratio of male and female beetles. An effective and natural way of controlling borer beetles is to introduce natural predators like birds that have been shown to, in parts of Costa Rica, diminish the population by 50%. There are pesticides that can (mostly) do the trick but only before the female borer bug has entered the berry. And it should be noted- that in some regions, the beetles have shown resistance to common insecticides, showing how complex this species has evolved to be, and how much of a threat it is to the future of coffee production. (Pérez)

http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/site/cbbmanage.aspx

Sam Schoeder speaking at OCR. Photo by Bonnie Zion

This clip is answering a question about Olympia Coffee Roasting Company’s business strategy, and whether or not they plan to expand in a style similar to that of Starbucks.