Note: This article was very much inspired by Christopher Feran's brilliant essay on the role of middlemen, and coffee sourcing in general. Please give a read at this link if you haven't already!
As a small micro-roaster, sourcing coffee can be made to sound more glamourous than it actually is. When I speak to non-coffee people, the assumption is usually that these are some form of direct trade relationships, where I negotiate with and order straight from the farmers themselves. Perhaps the general impression of “specialty” coffee is that it cuts out the middleman, thereby discovering rarer microlots and ensuring fairer wages.
In some ways, this view makes sense given the sheer scale of labor abuses, poor quality, and sub-standard wages that can be associated with commodity coffee or even global upscale brands. By comparison, many smaller roasters who are dedicated to quality and traceability are rightfully also committed to avoiding these prevalent issues. Many established specialty roasters do in fact rely on direct trade relationships with farms and farmers, reflecting longstanding commitments to ensure quality and economic stability for all parties involved. Yet, these relationships are not easy to build, especially if a roastery is still starting out with inconsistent green ordering and less-than-certain financial resources.
I guess the point of this blog post is to highlight that while direct trade relationships are ideal, it’s also in everyone’s best interest if the supply chain partnerships are clearly broken down. At Sybil, asides from selling quality coffee, my goal is also to be as transparent as I can about the various behind-the-scenes processes. If a coffee is purchased through importers, I want to ensure that the importing company is clearly given credit where credit is due, as well as acknowledging that getting this bean to your cup is a group effort on many levels.
You might think this sounds obvious, but there’s been past trends where green sourcing has been described by roasters as if they themselves were at origin, discovering and sampling coffees on the farm. It can be a bit disappointing to sometimes find out that these marketing descriptions were directly copied from the importer’s pages, giving consumers a misleading understanding of a roaster’s buying practices. Simply put, I could write out the descriptions for each of our offerings in a way that implies I’ve been to these faraway destinations, spoken with the farmers, or discovered the microlots myself, when in reality all I’ve had to do is go through offer lists online and request some samples to try. Honestly, all of it can be done without leaving my apartment since I also do my sample roasting at home.
In situations like this, I think it’s important to not only avoid overexaggeration of our roles in sourcing, but to also recognize that importers and local partners are a crucial aspect of specialty coffee. Besides from allowing smaller companies to purchase small lots without having direct trade connections, these companies also play a vital role in expanding a farmer’s reach through their international networks. Some importing companies add further value by reinvesting their time and resources to ensure that these partnerships are mutually beneficial. This ranges from making sure that required technologies are available, providing educational programs to enhance processing quality or yield, as well as ensuring trust between local communities and external buyers.
There are of course downsides to these relationships as well – discussions on these roles can inevitably start mirroring uncomfortable elements of broader economic hierarchies. For instance, conversations on fair wage practices or educational programs can take on neocolonial undertones (perhaps unwittingly, but maybe I am being a tad optimistic) with patronizing depictions of wealthy buyers/importers commending themselves for not exploiting farmers. Another trend I’ve seen before, which is gladly dying out, was when coffee professionals would overemphasize the importance of fixed variables like terroir or varietal, but curiously fail to mention that a skilled farmer is equally crucial. I couldn’t imagine that being the case in other sectors; it’s as if the success of a world-renowned café was entirely boiled down simply to them having good beans, and completely ignoring the thousands of dollars spent on equipment and training. Needless to say, you could have a winning COE coffee, but if it was ground using a blade grinder and brewed by someone who had never used an espresso machine before, I don’t think it would turn out that well. To use a farming analogy – I’m confident that you could put me in charge of Hacienda La Esmeralda, and I could manage to churn out some horrific beans since I wouldn’t know what to do as a farmer. Previous ignorance or downplaying of this seemed to be rooted in the desire to elevate the roaster as the true auteur behind your expensive coffee. With the current emphasis on farmers and producers, this oversight is thankfully becoming less common. I almost see this growing recognition of producer and process as a hallmark of the next “wave” of specialty coffee (“Fourth Wave”? Not sure which one we’re on now at this point).
Another Way to Think of Roasting
On the off chance that you’re also lurking on the r/nba reddit forum, there’s a funny metric that people use to describe certain players. Russell Westbrook, a dynamic but inconsistent player, has often been said to be a “floor-raiser” but not a “ceiling-raiser”. He might make a crappy team better and win more regular season games, but he’ll never be the missing piece to take a talented team all the way to a championship.
This analogy (whether you agree with it or not) is similar to how I see the role of roasters in the overall production process of coffee. I view farmers / producers tilting more towards being “ceiling-raisers”, in the sense that a talented producer can greatly influence the maximal potential of their harvest whether it’s through innovative processing, careful harvesting, or highly selective quality control practices. By comparison, a great roaster is capable of fulfilling this potential via their roasting practices, through measures like proper roast profiling, quality control, and of course green buying. What we cannot do however, is exceed the inherent potential of the bean. The opposite is definitely possible – just order and brew some of my grinder seasoning beans to understand what a bad roast can do.
In an ideal world, the “floor” (what I would consider to be an acceptable roast) would be pretty close to what a maximally enjoyable “ceiling” would be. In reality, these things start becoming very subjective, as well as being hard to ascertain without bias. It’s also rarely linear, since roast profiles often feature dichotomies where one might be sacrificing clarity for more complexity, or acidity for sweetness etc. Despite this, I firmly believe that a micro-roaster’s value in this whole exercise is their ability to connect with consumers that share the same niche tastes. For me, I know nothing makes me more excited than realizing that a sample I tried would be amazing as a light filter brew, with the cogs turning in my head about how to roast it, and inevitably how happy it would make me for others to try it for themselves. It only makes sense that as roasters, we remain perfectly transparent about the various roles and expertise needed to make this become reality.