Processing, Pt 1 — Coffee rockstars and picking’s brutal economics

James: Welcome back to Filter Stories. I'm James Harper, and today we're listening to the second episode of the Coffee Producer Toolkit, a podcast I made with my friend and collaborator Lucia Solis. This episode is on post-harvest processing.

Now, to remind you, this is a series aimed at coffee farmers. Lucia and I had a specific farmer in mind: somebody Latino, mid-30s, whose family maybe had 10 hectares of coffee, and it's a farm they're about to take over and manage for the first time, and they're seeing it all with fresh eyes. This series is to help them make that farm more profitable — because the chances are, right now, it isn't. The financial situation for coffee farmers has been dismal for years.

But despite this series being aimed at coffee farmers, this is a series that I think you are going to find extremely helpful too. Coffee farming is the industry's biggest blind spot. It's the hardest place in the entire supply chain to make a living. Green coffee is a very low value commodity, and yet it is what underpins a $200 billion plus global coffee market.

My promise to you is that at the end of this series, you are going to understand coffee farming — and in this specific case, coffee processing — better than most of the coffee professionals you'll meet at a trade show. This knowledge is going to shape the rest of your coffee journey, and I hope you use it to mould this industry into something better.

So, like I mentioned, today's instalment is about post-harvest processing, which is actually one of the hardest parts of the entire coffee supply chain to wrap your head around. I mean, it took me years.

So here's a quick rundown on what post-harvest processing actually means. Coffee cherries get picked off a tree. Then they go to a wet mill, where the flesh is removed until what you have is coffee parchment — this is where you have the green seed surrounded by a shell, kind of like a pistachio shell but a lot thinner. And then later in the process, this parchment coffee gets taken to a dry mill where they husk off the parchment until what you're left with is just the green bean, which is what you can put into a roaster.

This episode is only concerned with the moment that the coffee cherry is picked, down to the point the coffee parchment is dried and sitting in a warehouse ready to leave for the dry mill. Basically, everything that's happening at the wet mill, minus fermentation, because that's covered in another episode. And what happens in the wet mill is tremendously important for how the coffee tastes, and to some extent what it costs.

Now, throughout this episode, Lucia and I are going to be referencing three types of coffee processing, which I want to explain to you now — and forgive me if you've already heard this a million times, feel free to skip a couple of minutes.

So there are three very popular ways coffee is processed. The two big ones are the washed and the natural, and then more recently, in the last 15 years or so, you have the honey process, which is also quite big these days. And this is just the start. There are so many ways you can make these processes much more complex — for reasons you're going to hear later on, Lucia and I are really only concerned with getting the basics right, doing the basics better and more cost effectively.

Okay, so the washed process. This is most common in Latin America, where there is a lot of water. So what happens? You put the coffee cherry through a pulper. This is a machine that strips off the coffee flesh — so imagine like the skin of the cherry. Going into this machine is an entire coffee cherry, and coming out of this machine is the green seed surrounded by its parchment and some degree of coffee flesh stuck to it. Then that coffee seed, it's surrounded in gooey coffee flesh. You have the option to ferment it, and many producers do, in a large tank or a tub. During the fermentation, all the coffee flesh around the seed is eaten away by microbes, and so what you're left with is like a cleaned coffee parchment. And so, once all the coffee flesh is fermented away, you dry the parchment, and boom — you have dried coffee to send to a dry mill. Cool.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum, you have the natural process. This is where you take the whole cherry from the tree. You don't strip off the coffee flesh — you just let the entire cherry sit in the sun, slowly dehydrating. And then you can just husk off the dried fruit, and you have the coffee parchment. This is the oldest, traditional way of processing coffee. You find producers doing it in all parts of the world, but it tends to happen more in places that are very dry, where it's harder to get water.

Now, between the washed coffees on one end and the naturals on the other, you have the honey process. A very common approach is to basically do the first steps of the washed process, right? So you have the coffee cherry, you pulp it, so now you have the parchment surrounded by thick gooey coffee flesh, and then instead of fermenting, you stick it straight onto the patios to dry. So you dry the coffee with a lot of gooey, fleshy mucilage all around the parchment — but it's a lot less flesh than the natural process, where the entire cherry was surrounding the seed. Here, it's just some of the cherry left.

And depending on which process you choose, the flavours are like a spectrum, right? So on the one hand, if you have the washed process, they will produce very clean, bright, delicate, tea-like cups of coffee. In the natural process, where the seed sits inside its own fruit for weeks, it can taste really jammy, boozy, fruitier, much heavier — and if you're not careful, it can very easily taste very funky. And then honey is kind of in between those two extremes. Honey is sweeter and rounder than washed, with more pronounced fruit flavours, but nowhere near as intense as a natural process.

And in case this wasn't already obvious, I am talking in very broad generalities. That's coffee processing at a very high level. And so, without further ado, let's enjoy the opening to the episode.

Lucia: Welcome to the Coffee Producer Toolkit.

James: A podcast series built specifically for coffee farmers, to help you build a more profitable, sustainable coffee farm.

Lucia: I'm Lucia Solis, a fermentation and winemaking specialist working in coffee. I live on a coffee farm and I work directly with producers to improve their lots and their livelihoods. My podcast, Making Coffee, explores the latest science and the future of coffee production.

James: And I'm James Harper. I'm a coffee journalist and the creator of Filter Stories, a documentary podcast about the history, science and culture of coffee. My thing is, I like to go deep and understand why the industry works the way it does.

Across the series, we're covering the topics that matter most to your bottom line: agronomy; post-harvest processing, which is this episode; coffee quality assessment; sales; marketing; and more. Each episode features best practice from leading coffee farmers and experts, presented in a way that's practical and easy for you to act on.

Lucia: This series is made possible by The Coffee Quest, Pinhalense, GrainPro, Novonesis, BWT, Descamex and Inter-American.

James: It launches first in English, and then there's the YouTube version, where we'll have subtitles for all the major languages spoken by coffee producers. And so, whether you're a producer, or you work with producers, or you're just curious about what it really takes to make coffee farming work —

Lucia: — we think this is going to be useful if you're a farmer. And if you're not a farmer, we think it might change how you see this industry entirely.

James: In this second episode, we are looking at post-harvest processing.

Lucia: We're going to start at cherry picking and selection. Then we'll move to pulping, and specifically how water is being wasted in the most traditional setups. Then we'll talk about drying, where the cheapest fixes are often the most effective. And finally, we'll talk about the measurement tools that tie it all together. We'll also touch on water sustainability, which is becoming impossible to ignore.

James: Lucia, of course, fermentation is absent from this list.

Lucia: It's really important, and it's right in the middle of all of these stages. But because it's too big of a topic, we are going to do its own episode on fermentation later in the series.

James: All right. Let's get into it.

James: Pressing pause. Okay, so in this next section, Lucia and I caution against a line of thinking that Lucia has seen many producers heading towards. It goes something like this: We have a farm. We need to make it more profitable. So what if we did some of that really cutting edge, avant-garde stuff that we see on Instagram? You know, some crazy fermentations, get some amazing flavours, we might win a competition, we'll sell the coffee at a big premium. Our farm will be at the next level.

But Lucia and I think that is a very, very bad idea. And this next section is really trying to convince producers: don't do that.

So right now, when it comes to avant-garde coffee production, the big focus is fermentation. It's really exploded these last 10 years. We're now getting flavours we could never have dreamed of 20 years ago. And it's brought with it even a new vocabulary that's become completely standard in specialty coffee. For example, anaerobic fermentation — you seal it off. You put it in a plastic drum with a lid. And now it ferments without oxygen. Different microbes then take over, and you get very different flavours, often much more intense ones.

Another really buzzy piece of kit that some producers have is a bioreactor. Bioreactors come from the wine world. They're these big metal cylinders where you can control the conditions of the fermentation — the temperature, the pressure, the gases. Because, remember, wine is also a fermented product.

Now, these bioreactors are very expensive, and, as you're going to hear in the next episode on fermentation, the results are extremely difficult to replicate, because nobody really knows what is going on microbially inside of these bioreactors. Wine producers have a much better handle on it, because they've been doing it for hundreds of years. But in coffee, we are just at the opening stages. And so a lot of producers who have this really novel, avant-garde equipment struggle to reproduce flavours.

So now, producers see anaerobic fermentations. They see the bioreactors. They see producers who are doing really, really well, and they see the roasters who champion these novel flavours, and they think: maybe I should try that as well.

But here's what you can't see. The really avant-garde producers who are investing in bioreactors and anaerobics and all the rest of it — you sometimes hear them called coffee rock stars. They're extremely loud, very popular, but a very, very small minority. And they tend to be a very wealthy minority. They tend to be larger farmers. They tend to be farmers that can afford for it all to go wrong.

And this is not a coincidence. Coffee farming has a very long history of inequality in land ownership, and a very bloody history too. I mean, I've covered this in the context of El Salvador — a civil war, massacres of indigenous people. I've covered it in Guatemala — a civil war, indigenous massacres. Coffee farming historically has been dominated by European settler elites. Now, especially in Latin America, their children are now sitting on the privileged side of history, with land, with resources to be able to do the avant-garde of specialty coffee, to attract all the attention. And if it goes wrong for them, it's fine. They can afford it.

But the vast majority of coffee producers are not them. They don't have that cushion. They have very modest amounts for investment — very modest. And wherever they invest their money, they must get a good return. Lucia and I believe they should not be gambling their farm on cutting edge processing that, heaven knows, may not even be popular in five years' time, because trends come and go.

So this is the centre of the entire episode. One: a lot of producers are drawn towards gambling a lot of their farm on a very high-profile experimental lot of coffee, hoping it wins an award. But the reality is, it's probably going to fail. And even if they do manage to produce something amazing, monetising it is even harder.

All the agronomists we've spoken to, all the advisors, Lucia and I — we all think the best thing a producer can do to be more profitable is to produce high quality coffee, reliably, consistently. And Lucia finds in her work as a coffee farm consultant that there are very simple things producers can do to improve their post-harvest processing that will raise their quality, help them get consistent coffee, which will boost their revenues and make their farms more profitable.

These things, though, they're not glamorous. They're dependable. And not everybody does them, because they think that their post-harvest processing is great and that what they need now is a bioreactor. But Lucia thinks that's really not the case.

So in the opening of this episode, we set that out. We say: ignore the bioreactor. Choose the safe path. Okay. Pressing play.

James: So Lucia, when it comes to improving post-harvest processing, I think a lot of producers look to the frontier — things like anaerobic fermentations, bioreactors — and they say, okay, if I do these things, then that's going to translate to higher quality, higher prices. But we don't think that's the right approach. And actually, we spoke to a producer who we think is thinking about this in the right way.

Lester Lerner: Mi nombre es Lester Lerner y soy la tercera generación de cafetero.

James: Lester Lerneris a third generation coffee farmer working a five hectare farm not far from [town name — check audio] in Colombia. He runs a boutique specialty coffee exporting house called Old Willow Coffee. Lucia, there was a moment in our conversation where we were talking about the frontier of coffee processing, and you asked him about bioreactors.

Lucia: ¿Te gustaría tener un biorreactor?

Lester Lerner: Uy, vamos con los sueños. Son costosos, pero sí, me encantaría tener un biorreactor y poder diseñar las curvas, ¿ah?

James: Lester dreams of getting a bioreactor. He knows they don't come cheap, but what he wantsis to be able to control his fermentations with precision. And you can feel the passion when he talks about it. He wants to be at the cutting edge of coffee processing. But then Lucia, you asked, okay, but what are you going to prioritise first?

Lucia: ¿Y cómo escoges cuál vas a hacer primero?

Lester Lerner: El café. Después vamos poco a poco con el resto. Cuando ya tenga, pues, decir, tengo un café que está top, y lo he hecho diez veces ya con el mismo proceso, perfil igualito, ya me puedo meter en otras cosas.

James: He says his first priority is consistency. Can he produce the same coffee with the same process and get the same flavour profile in the cup 10 times in a row?

Lester Lerner: Hay que buscar también las eficiencias, ¿no? De cualquier forma.

James: And then, once he has consistency nailed, his next priority is cost. How do you produce the same coffee for less? Lester is constantly looking for efficiencies across the entire farm to make his farm more profitable.

Lucia: Yeah, James, I asked him about a bioreactor as kind of a trick question. I wanted to gauge where he was thinking. And Lester passed with flying colours. His response, I think, is something that a lot of producers can learn from and should internalise.

James: All right, so let's break that down. Lucia, in your consulting, a lot of producers come to you saying, hey, we want to improve our post-harvest, and oftentimes they say, we're going to get a bioreactor. But that's the wrong approach.

Lucia: We're not saying don't get a bioreactor. It's the order that I see a lot of producers get wrong.

James: And it's an error because a bioreactor is very expensive and very hard to manage.

Lucia: Yeah, that's actually one of the myths that we talked about in the last episode, where people think that if they plant an exotic variety like a Gesha or a Laurina or a Wush Wush, that automatically translates to high quality and high prices. And what I hope you saw in the last episode is that it doesn't — that these investments are really costly, they're risky, and they can go wrong all the time.

James: But Lester knew not to make that mistake.

Lucia: He understands that a bioreactor running on an inconsistent base is not going to automatically give him specialty quality. He knows that he needs to work on his fundamentals.

James: And so, to spell that out, what are those fundamentals?

Lucia: So producers, I believe that you can dramatically improve your coffee quality and your profitability by tweaking what you already have. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in your post-harvest processing. And we're going to talk about improvements that are low cost and reliable.

James: And we're starting with —

Lucia: — coffee picking.

James: Pressing pause. So in this next section, Lucia and I go through tips and tricks for picking and sorting coffee cherries.

Now, generally speaking, to produce a high quality cup of coffee, it helps tremendously to be working with red, ripe cherries. They have a lot of sugar in them, and that translates eventually into a higher cup quality — not because the sugars come through directly as sweetness, but in more complex ways. Essentially it means you're starting with richer material, more precursors for the roasting process to turn into interesting flavours.

So, for high quality coffee, you want red ripe cherries. But coffee trees make that very difficult. On coffee trees, the cherries grow in bunches along the branches. And within a single bunch, every cherry will be at a different stage of maturity, right? So in just one bunch, you might have some unripe greens. Then the yellows, just beginning to get a bit ripe. The orange yellows. The almost-there orange reds. Then the reds you actually want. But then also you'll get the very dark reds, and then the overripe blacks — in the worst case, shrivelled blacks still hanging there on the branch.

So how do you pick this coffee? In Brazil, they harvest mechanically. These big machines come through — honestly, they're as big as a tank. They shake the trees, the cherries fall, and then they get scooped up and loaded into the back of a truck. That truck then dumps them at the wet mill, and they go through a cherry sorter, which is a machine that separates out the underripes and the overripes from the red ripe cherries.

Unfortunately, outside of Brazil, picking is done by hand. Now, if you're not being selective, the fastest way to do it — and this is, for example, how it's done in Vietnam, where Robusta coffee is picked and sold very cheaply to be turned into instant coffee — is that they just strip pick, right? So you don't care what's ripe. You just grab the branch with your handina fist and pull down, and all the cherries just fly off. You strip the coffee branch bare. That is the fastest method.

But this gives you two problems. The first is that everything is now just mixed together — just like with mechanical harvesting in Brazil, all the qualities of coffee cherry are mixed together. Which doesn't have to be a problem, because you could, for example, float them in water in the wet mill. So the red ripe cherries, which are dense, full of sugar, they sink down. And the cherries which have less sugar, they're lighter, so they float. And so you can skim those off the top. That's one approach. Andifa producer is big enough, they can buy the same kind of cherry sorter that a Brazilian producer would use. And we do talk about that kind of machine in this section.

But the other problem, the second problem, is that if you're trying to maximise the amount of high-quality coffee coming from your farm, well, every underripe coffee cherry you pick is a waste. If you had just waited a little bit longer, that cherry would have ripened. You are throwing away coffee you could have sold at a higher price.

The answer to that is selective picking. You go through the rows over and over again, week after week, taking only the red ripe cherries. Very hard job. Unbelievably laborious. A truly exceptional coffee picker — somebody working absolutely flat out, getting paid by weight — might earn $20 a day. That's towards the top end. If you or I were to get out there getting paid by weight like them, to harvest selectively, we would be lucky, lucky to make $3. And the work is exhausting. You are on the side of a mountain slope. There are snakes and bugs. It's hot. It rains.

And what still boggles my mind is that, you know, we make a coffee every day without thinking about it. We might tip, I don't know, a hundred beans into the grinder. And that coffee might have been selectively harvested, which means that those hundred beans came from 50 cherries, because every cherry has two beans in there. And those 50 cherries were selectively picked — somebody on the side of a mountain slope, one by one, picking off each of those cherries. It's just wild.

Now, as I've mentioned earlier in the series, coffee picking is one of those huge differences in cost between Brazil and the rest of the world. Brazil can produce so much more coffee, and at a much lower price, because coffee picking is mechanised. In places like Minas Gerais, you have high elevation, gently rolling hills. But in neighbouring Colombia, coffee grows on the side of the Andes mountain slopes. If you put that same machine there from Brazil, it would lose its balance and roll straight down into the valley in a fiery heap. The terrain is just too steep.

There have been attempts to solve the problem of harvesting these coffee cherries selectively — the Colombian coffee growers federation has looked at this [unclear] — but the solutions just weren't that great. There's a whole episode I could make about this. Maybe I will one day.

But the thing is, there are solutions to pick coffee faster. And we mention one in this next section: the Kanguro, literally Spanish for kangaroo. Because, you know, kangaroos, they have a pouch. A picker can pick a coffee cherry, it rolls down a plastic sleeve along their arm, and it drops into a pouch at the picker's waist. And it does genuinely speed up picking. And anything you can do to close that gap with Brazil, you absolutely have to do.

And yet producers face so much resistance getting anybody to actually use them, even though it's faster. Because in many parts of Latin America, coffee picking is done by migrating labour, right? These are people who will move farm to farm throughout the season. Many have indigenous heritage. They might be illiterate. Some tend to keep to themselves and are distrustful of wider society — and when you know the history, can you really blame them? Now, they're most often paid by weight. So they just want to do the job the way they know how, get paid as much as they can, and move on. Trying to persuade them to attach some plastic to their arms and pick in a different way is a challenge.

And in many ways, this is a universal challenge, right? Think about that person in your office that still keeps everything written in a paper notebook when everybody else is using shared documents. You Know, we all know that person. Maybe you're that person. Change is hard — even with a full-time colleague you see every day. Now imagine asking someone who's passing through for a couple of weeks. Why should they change how they've worked for their entire working life for you, for this one farm, when no other farmer is asking them to change?

That is why, outside of Brazil, the challenge with coffee picking is actually a management problem. How do you persuade people to change a long-held practice, even though it might make them faster and they can earn more? It can be done, but it's not easy.

So that is the coffee picking context. In this next section, Lucia and I talk about ways that producers can optimise the picking itself and the cherry selection at the wet mill. Okay, pressing play.

James: So, let's talk about coffee picking.

Lucia: So of course we have to start at the very beginning. And the reason we're starting here is because the decisions that you make at this point have a ripple effect through everything else that follows. The quality of your cherry is going to determine the ceiling of your quality coming out.

James: If you're a Brazilian producer, you're probably doing mechanised harvesting. But for almost everyone else in the world, you need to use manual labour — people moving through the rows, picking coffee by hand. There are also tools that can speed up the picking, allowing each individual picker on your farm to work significantly faster. And one of those is the Kanguro, made by Innovakit, a company we featured in the last episode. You don't see the Kanguro used much across Latin America, which I think is a shame, because the efficiency gains are amazing.

So the Kanguro is a pair of plastic sleeve tubes that run down each of your arms, and they feed down into a pouch at the picker's belly.

Lucia: Yeah. And this dramatically speeds up how a coffee picker can pick, because it shortens the distance between the coffee cherry and the bucket. But with the Kanguro, they can pick a cherry and the cherry will slide down their sleeves into the bucket that's around their waist.

James: Astrid Medina, a producer in Tolima who we also featured in the last episode, uses the Kanguro.

Astrid Medina: Y no, aqui también tiene unas mangas que son espectaculares, para coger el café.

James: She told us that the sleeves are spectacular, because they also stop the cherries from scattering when you're working in the tree, which is another frustration with traditional picking. But she mentioned her issue is getting people to adopt them.

Astrid Medina: Eh, hay que irlo implementando muy lentamente.

Lucia: You know, James, I'm not surprised to hear that Astrid is having these issues, because pickers in Colombia are usually nomadic. And when you have a workforce that's not showing up consistently, it can feel really daunting to try to train them when you know that they're not going to stick around. If you can maybe get out of this nomadic workforce and have people that are consistently showing up — even then, I noticed living there, it's a very traditional population. There's a lot of resistance to anything new.

So producers, I think it's up to you to push past this resistance. One of the through lines of the series is that we have to be creative and solve old problems in new ways. And as we know, harvesting is one of the most expensive parts of running a farm. And if you can save money here by providing some training and some simple tools that can make a very difficult job just a little bit easier, we think that you can have a significantly more profitable coffee farm.

James: Absolutely. Okay, now let's cover cherry selection. Because producing a high quality coffee requires picking red, ripe cherries — that's what the specialty coffee industry has been telling itself for many, many years. But in practice, that's very difficult to achieve. And part of the problem is how pickers have traditionally picked coffee.

Lucia: That's right, James. It's most common to strip pick, and that means taking off every single cherry of the tree, even if it's not ready to be picked, even if it's still a little bit green or, you Know, kind of yellow and underripe. And the reason why we strip pick is because pickers get paid by weight. So even though it's not the ripest cherries, and even though the ripest cherries are the heaviest, you still want to get as much as possible.

So yeah, you'd think it would be obvious that it's in their best interest to pick only the ripe cherries because they're the heaviest, but that's just not how it works. It's really challenging to do that. A lot of farm owners are trying to offer premiums to focus just on the red ripe cherries, but the effort that it takes to pick only those perfectly ripe cherries really slows down picking — and because they're still paid by weight, it significantly slows down the process. And the trade-off is just not worth it for so many pickers.

James: But there are also many times when you simply don't have the luxury of being selective. Maybe the weather's about to turn, and you need to strip the trees before the cherries fall and rot on the ground. Increasingly, you can barely even find pickers in the first place. So with the very few you have, you just move as fast as you can and pick as much as you can.

Lucia: So despite a lot of producers' best efforts, sometimes what arrives at the millis a whole mix of ripe, underripe and overripe. The whole rainbow of cherries.

James: And this is just the reality of coffee picking. Picking perfect red cherries every time is extremely difficult. But you can fix this after the fact. There are different tools you can use to segment out good cherries from bad cherries. Let's touch on those.

Lucia: The first option you should look into is a floating tank. The floating tank is an opportunity to separate out the less dense cherries from the higher density cherries. The red cherries, the densest ones, the ideal ones that you want for your processing, will sink to the bottom, and everything that has insect damage, that did not develop very well, that is too dry and overripe, will float to the top, where you can skim it off and separate it.

James: And if you're a smaller producer, we think this should be your first investment. We spoke to a producer who works closely with The Coffee Quest, one of our series sponsors, to get an idea of what it takes to implement a floating tank.

Orlando Osorio: Mi nombre es Orlando Osorio y la finca se llama La Primavera.

James: So Orlando's farm, La Primavera, is 12 hectares, and before working with The Coffee Quest, what he used to do is just pulp everything without floating his cherries at all. But of course, that meant over- and underripe cherries were all being mixed together with the ripe cherries. But the fix for him was very affordable.

Orlando Osorio: Yo hice la inversión de comprarme esta tolva, como la puede ver, es plástica.

James: Just $480 for a very large plastic tank that holds about a ton of coffee cherries. And from that investment alone, he's now able to segment out the best quality cherries that sink to the bottom, skimming off the low-quality cherries that float to the top. And it has made a noticeable impact on the quality of his coffee.

Orlando Osorio: Muy excelente, porque ya el café que cae, el que no flota, eso sale buena calidad. No hay que escogerlo ni nada, hay un café excelente en cuestión de llenado, ¿no?

Lucia: I want to jump in here, because this is one of those places where I think producers, without buying any new equipment, can just do things a little bit differently. So, like you're talking about with Orlando, it's very common to just pulp everything that comes into the mill and then even do a floating on the parchment, because producers do know that when you do that float step on the parchment, you separate out less dense seeds afterwards.

But the problem with doing the float step after pulping is that you've had the overripe cherries in contact with the regular, the higher quality cherries. And a lot of times that contamination will really impact your fermentation later. So if you are just pulping and then doing your float step, I highly recommend you switch that order and float first and then do your pulping. And if you have the opportunity, you can do a second float step — so you can float twice. That's something that I do in our mill. The cherries are floated and then the parchment is floated. But if you're only going to float once, it's better to float the cherry first than to float the parchment after.

James: Right. And Lucia, maybe you're a larger producer, but you want to float for a specific lot. How small can you go? Could you float for just a nanolot, for example?

Lucia: Absolutely. If you're very small, a 50 litre tank is a really great place to start. But if you're as small as a nanolot, even a regular 5 gallon bucket will do, and it will make a really big difference.

And I want to say two reasons why this is. It's not just separating the overripe and the lower quality cherry. This floating step also brings down the temperature of the coffee. With a nanolot, in transit, a lot of times the cherry will heat up and start to ferment and start to decompose on the way to the mill. So when you float it, you have a chance to again kind of claw back some of that control by regulating the temperature and reducing the microbial load — all of the dirt and the microbes that are coming from the farm into the mill. Soit'sa great step to float your cherries if you aren't doing it already.

James: Right, so floating tanks are a great option if you are a smaller producer. Now let's look at what you can do if you are a larger producer to sort your cherries.

Lucia: If you have scale and don't want to be dealing with 50 or 100 five gallon buckets — James, you spoke to somebody who is able to do this at scale.

David Velasquez: Well, my name is David Velasquez. We are a company called Los Naranjos. We own six farms in El Salvador.

James: So Los Naranjos is a collection of six farms totalling about 120 hectares in El Salvador. Like a lot of the very large farms across Latin America, historically they'd been focusing almost entirely on the traditional commodity markets. But six years ago, they decided to transition more towards the specialty market. And to produce exceptional specialty coffee, their wet mill needed massive upgrades. It was using very old, inefficient equipment that just wasn't allowing them to produce higher quality coffees.

And David uses an analogy. As a producer, he knows he has a lot of great base ingredients to create a great dish.

David Velasquez: We had great soils, high altitude, and we started moving from certain varieties to another ones, more exotic.

James: But what he was missing was the right equipment to turn those ingredients into a delicious dish.

David Velasquez: But how are you gonna cook? Because it doesn't matter if you have good ingredients if the cookware is bad.

James: And so the first step for David in his coffee processing was being able to sort his coffee cherries. Of course, many traditional wet mills have big floating tanks to be able to sort out coffee cherries, but they require a lot of water and a lot of manual labour to push the coffee along. And so they decided to invest in a piece of equipment from Pinhalense, the Brazilian company behind much of the world's coffee processing machinery, and a sponsor of this series.

David Velasquez: They have something like a gradient separator.

James: Its official name is a coffee washer and separator.

Lucia: So this machine is a great investment because it separates those high quality cherries from the low quality cherries with little water, and it does it at scale.

James: The underripes and overripes stay on the surface of the water and are skimmed off as the water pushes them to one side, whereas the red cherries sink down. And it requires very little water, because the water is just recirculated over and over.

And for David, this machine, along with other investments he's made — also from Pinhalense, which we'll cover later in the episode — did over time transform his quality. And he mentioned to me that since these investments he's been doing very well in El Salvador's Cup of Excellence competitions.

David Velasquez: And this year we made third place, but we have the best price on auction: $55 per pound.

James: And could you have done that without the Pinhalense equipment investment?

David Velasquez: It could be, but it would be more harder, it would take more time. Because, I'm telling you, we started participating in 2020, and we have every year since — since we have been working with them, right?

Lucia: I want to say that buying equipment in order to win competitions isn't a very sound strategy, because what we want is the equipment so that you can have more control over your process and get more consistent coffee. And that cycle of control, consistency and relationships — that's what builds your income over the years, not just a single success that can win you a competition.

James: Absolutely.

Okay, so coming back to coffee cherry selection. Whether you use the Pinhalense coffee washer and separator or a floating tank, a producer can now separate the red ripe cherries from the less ripe cherries. However, a producer is going to have to decide where to draw the line. And Lucia, I know that you actually advocate here for not being that strict when it comes to cherry selection.

Lucia: I agree that we need to separate the qualities, but I don't think that the goal needs to be 100% red ripe cherries. That's contrary to what specialty will tell us. If that is the aim, then that's a lot of cherries that are discarded. I believe that producers can get really good results if you aim, instead of for a hundred percent, for an 80/20 ratio: 80% red ripe and 20% that can be outside of that perfect target.

James: And what are we talking about? Entirely green coffee cherries?

Lucia: No, absolutely not. Totally green coffee cherries are small and hard and are going to be really difficult to go through the machine. So when we're talking about immature — and this will be different for people — for me, as long as it pulps. If it's too green, it will not pulp, it'll just break in the machine. But if it is immature, like underripe, and there is redness but there may be still a little bit of yellow, there's still maybe a little bit of orange, for me those are still acceptable. Because as long as it is mature enough that the pulper will pulp it, then I can use it during the fermentation. Some people will have a stricter guideline where they want it to be closer to the red side. But we're only talking about cherries that are not perfectly red ripe cherries — the ones that are almost there.

James: Okay, so in terms of percentages, you advocate for 80/20.

Lucia: I think that this is a formula that is really good for quality, because when you blend it in, it's unlikely that you will be able to taste that difference. And if you are chasing that last 20%, if you're spending time and effort to try and get close to that 100%, I think it's really diminishing returns, because it'll cost you more in labour, it'll cost you more in time, and you're losing volume and you are losing that profitability. So doing that 80/20 mix lets you spend less money on wages and increase your revenue — it means you have more coffee to sell.

James: Okay, I can already hear a lot of coffee roasters saying, but wouldn't that affect the flavours negatively?

Lucia: In my experience it's actually the opposite. Like, you would think that if we're keeping that 20% of the less ripe, the less ideal cherry in, that it would reduce the flavour, reduce the quality of the coffee. But I have found that it's actually the opposite. Having some of those less ripe cherries provides some of the balance and the acidity that we need to have a better, more complex coffee.

So when I have tried coffees where people do put in the effort to get 100% ripeness — you know, small micro lots, where they really are able to guarantee that 100% of the cherries are in one stage of maturation — that actually created a very flat, very boring coffee. And when you have that mix, it actually improves the coffee, because you have that variability. You have more of that complexity, different types of carbohydrates, so that when you go to your roasting step, there's more to work with. So counterintuitively, the mix gives you a more complex coffee that is better for flavour than aiming for that 100% — which also means you have less coffee to sell, and a less interesting coffee to sell.

James: And so if a producer wants to go down this path, I think it's critical that they are also an expert taster of their own coffee quality. And we cover that in a future episode as well. Because you are going to have to have flavour-focused conversations with buyers. And if you can articulate your flavours with confidence, why your coffee tastes better, that's going to go a long way into buyers accepting this as higher quality coffee.

Lucia: Correct. I think that the most important part is tasting the coffee. The proof is in the coffee. So before you get to the conversation of telling them that you don't pick 100%, have them taste the coffee first, and then have the conversation.

James: So when it comes to picking and sorting coffee, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. There are a lot of very modest investments you can make to dramatically improve the quality of your coffee, reduce picking costs, and ultimately increase your profitability.

Lucia: Coming up next, we talk about pulping.

James: Pressing pause. Coming up, we cover pulping and drying. And now let's just take a break, because it's already 40 minutes long, and I will see you in the next episode.