Coffee, Sustainability, and Shifting Perceptions
As the climate crisis comes for coffee, new ideas are needed. But some solutions are already out there—we just need to recognize and embrace them.
What do you think of when you think of sustainability in coffee? Composting waste, perhaps, or planting shade trees on farms. New fuels for cargo ships, or more sailboats carrying coffee. Solar panels on cafes, electric-powered roasters, compostable bags or reusable cups.
Coffee’s supply chain is long and polluting, and the need for sustainable solutions is urgent—we need bigger ideas, more innovation, new technologies and increased investment. But as we’re searching for the next climate-friendly breakthrough, there’s also room to reimagine the status quo. A shift in perspective or a reappraisal of how things currently work can open up new possibilities.
There’s also more to sustainability than just recycling and planting trees. Economic sustainability—making sure coffee producers have a stable, liveable income—is a crucial part of future-proofing the industry and ensuring that coffee continues to exist in a world beset by the climate crisis. Without producers, there is no coffee—despite what the tech bros and their beanless coffee companies would have you believe.
So what can the industry do to shift perceptions and encourage a more holistic view of coffee and sustainability? Some solutions are already out there—we just need to recognize and embrace them.
Exploiting Loopholes
Not all coffee grown on specialty farms makes the grade. For whatever reason—insect damage, mutation, small size—it gets separated out during processing to ensure that only the highest quality beans get exported.
But this doesn’t mean it’s wasted. It either gets sold as a lower grade, makes its way to the commodity market, or is roasted for in-country consumption. A good example of the latter is pasilla, defective and inferior coffee combined and sold on the local Colombian market. Thankfully producing countries are starting to taste their own quality coffee, but those imperfect beans still need a home.
“Over the years we've looked for ways to exploit this loophole in coffees that could have high quality or higher than perceived quality, but a lower than perceived price,” says Mat North, Head of Operations for Europe at non-profit green coffee trader Raw Material. The company has several projects in different countries that attempt to reappraise what was previously overlooked. “It's finding a new market for coffees that perhaps would have been ignored.”
Gito
One Raw Material project in Rwanda looks to do this with smaller beans that, while specialty-quality, don’t quite measure up using the country’s grading system.
Coffee grading systems vary by location: in Ethiopia, it’s the number of defects per sample (less is more); in Guatemala, it’s elevation (higher is better); and in Rwanda and many other countries, it’s screen size. In this system, green beans are poured onto a series of screens or sieves with different-sized holes in increments of 1/64 of an inch. As the coffee passes through them it is separated out into different categories—say 16/64, or a quarter-inch in diameter. In general, the bigger the beans the higher the perceived quality.
Many countries, particularly those in former colonies, use the “British” grading system of A, B, C and so on to delineate the different grades—think Kenya AA—whereas Colombia uses words like Supremo and Excelso. In Rwanda they keep things simple (ish) by using the screen number.
Quality, however, is based on numerous factors—not just the bean’s size. Whereas a bigger bean can be a sign of deliciousness, it isn’t everything. Nonetheless, as North explains, roasters buying Rwandan coffee like to have screen sizes of 15-16 or above: “That’s the general export quality.” But along with the bigger beans, the harvest and processing incorporates a lot of smaller-sized beans which, although they’re from the same trees, get treated differently. “It’s from the same genetic stock; it’s essentially the same coffee,” he tells me. “Here’s a coffee that has got intrinsic value, but it’s sold internally at a lower price.”
So Raw Material decided to change the perception of that coffee. “We marketed it, called it Gito—which means “tiny” in Kinyarwanda—and found a market by selling it as a regional blend. It’s cheaper to the roaster, it’s a good blender, and it’s making more money for the producers in Rwanda.”
Electronicas
Then there’s Electronicas, a project in Mexico which repurposes coffee that has been sent through an optical colour-sorter and deemed unworthy. “It’s the electronic sorting for what becomes the micro-lots,” North explains. This machine uses a high-speed camera and tiny puffs of air to discard funny-shaped or discoloured beans. “But like any sorter it’s not infallible, so it’s not only going to take out just defective beans. There’s a lot of good quality coffee that goes in there.”
The trick for Raw Material has been working to change the perception of this slightly weird-looking coffee—it’s made up of defects, after all. “I’m very big on being honest about how coffees and how processes are named,” North says. “At the same time, we realize that there is an element of marketing, so if you can combine the two that’s great. Gito literally means tiny, and they’re tiny beans—perfect. Electronicas? It does what it says on the tin—it’s the output of the electronic sorter. It’s a perception change in that we’re showing that there’s value outside of the prescribed norms. We don’t have to rely on these specialty coffee brackets.”
“We're very entrenched in the decades of information that's been passed down to us of what quality in green coffee is and what we should be buying and should be looking for,” North continues. “So this is part of the mission: How can we return value and through that how can we have impact for producers and give them the freedom to make their own choices?”
Past Crop ≠ Bad
So we can find value in ostensibly inferior or underappreciated coffee. But what about high quality coffee that’s never sold, that sits forgotten and unwanted in a warehouse somewhere just because it’s a year or more old. Should we be reevaluating past crop?
“Hot take, I think a lot of roasters wrongfully turn their noses up at past crop,” says Baylee Engberg, Pacific Northwest Account Manager for Ally Coffee. “While it's true that aged coffee can change in flavor as it ages—i.e. fade, taste faintly of burlap or jute, or even completely lose acidity—it's untrue that coffee always degrades at the one-year mark. Past crop shouldn't inherently equal bad or old.”
(It was Baylee’s interview with Ashley at Boss Barista a couple of years ago that made me start thinking differently about “old” coffee, and why I reached out to her for this piece. I recommend checking out the full interview if you want to go further down a past crop rabbit hole.)
The concept of freshness is one of the founding principles of specialty coffee—just consider the widespread belief that coffee is at its best straight after roasting. And this focus on freshness is even more pronounced with green coffee.
Once coffee is processed, milled, bagged and loaded onto a cargo ship, the clock begins to tick. For the next twelve months it is considered fresh crop, but once a year has passed and the next harvest arrives, that changes. No longer desirable, these coffees go into the “sale” section of coffee traders’ websites, becoming ever less desirable as time passes. But the vast majority of specialty coffee is stored in plastic bags inside those jute sacks, which helps keep them fresh longer.
“So many coffee professionals hear past crop and lose interest right there—they're unwilling to even try the coffee,” Engberg says. “In short, past crop has been stigmatized. The generalization is that past crop is always lesser than.”
As Engberg argues, an industry which prides itself on its sustainability credentials is missing a trick when it comes to past crop. “We live in an era where we're aware of reusing, recycling, the damage of consumerism, and the impacts we have on the global carbon footprint, but we're not applying those same principles to coffee,” she says. “There are entire companies dedicated to ‘buying the ugly’ produce as a means of sustainability, but as an industry, the professionals behind coffee, we haven't been as creative in solutions.”
The Stories We Get Told
The concept of past crop as being inherently bad is one of those coffee industry truisms that newbies hear when they start out and then eventually repeat once they’re in a position to pass down knowledge. Take peaberries, which occur when a natural mutation causes only one bean to develop within a cherry instead of two. “It’s a genetic defect whichever way you look at it,” says North. “Yet I as a baby barista was like, ‘Oh yeah it’s only got one bean so it takes in more of the nutrients, more of the flavour.’ The stories we get told!”
Engberg points out that, counterintuitively, certain coffees actually improve as they age. “Looking at Ethiopia, the coffees are generally more complex and pronounced months after harvest,” she tells me. “There's a popular belief in Colombia that some coffees need to rest in their sugars and settle before roasting. All to say, past crop coffee can be really surprising, and I think the term shouldn't be such a deterrent.”
While past crop coffees might not work for every situation, Engberg says that for blends or for those who roast a bit darker it’s worth taking another look at the older stock. “Bottom line, there's a ton of aged coffee in the warehouses in your backyards—some may be total shit and others may be scoring higher than the [newer coffees]. You don't really know until you taste them, so I implore all green buyers to entertain aged lots. Sample them. Please.”
Baby, You Got A Stew Goin’!
Have you ever found a forgotten bag of coffee at the back of a cupboard, brewed it up and been pleasantly surprised by the results? Or cleaned out the fridge and made a sandwich or a stew with what you find?
If you look at them in the right way, both those things are part of a sustainable approach to modern life. It’s just a matter of perception. Although not included in the three Rs of reduce, reuse, recycle, there’s a lot to be said for using what you have rather than constantly buying something new.
The specialty coffee industry is huge and segmented, with an infinite number of approaches to growing, buying, roasting, and brewing. There’s no one size fits all approach, and the same could be said for sustainability. We need the moonshot ideas that will revolutionize the industry and the subtle tweaks to perspective that make us reappraise something like past crop coffee.