Good Coffee vs Great Coffee

“Coffee drinkers in the U.S. don’t know how much work it is to produce our coffee — how much more work it takes to grow a great coffee, if they did they’d want to pay more for our coffee, they’d understand why we need more.” The speaker, a woman and a coffee grower in Cauca, Colombia was attending a meeting comprised of fellow women coffee growers from the surrounding area; but she was speaking to the organizers of the meeting. With her comment the direction of that meeting changed abruptly: it was assembled to tell the attendees all about the U.S. market for specialty coffee — but it quickly became about telling the us what the U.S. Coffee Drinker needed to know about the Colombian Specialty Coffee Farmer and the work that they do.

Since that meeting, I have remembered listening to that farmer and knowing that she was right, and also knowing that, as an industry, we’re dropping the ball: as much as we talk about coffee, about the 2,000 or so hand-picked beans in each pound, we don’t talk to the ones who we’re hoping will buy that coffee, we are not getting through — we are not making it clear to the coffee drinker that coffee is produced along a continuum and that the further you go out along it, from bad to OK to good, and then to great, it takes more work and more money (more “inputs” as the agronomists say). Coffee drinkers understand today that there’s bad, OK and good coffee but beyond that most don’t know what else is possible in terms of the quality of the coffee they drink and many are suspicious of better coffee when the coffee that they’re drinking now is already good, as far as they know. They can tell when they have a different coffee and most of those folks, in my experience, don’t like something different when it comes to their coffee, they want the same.

Coffee drinkers come in many shapes and sizes and most aren’t interested in anything better than the coffee they already drink. Often, when presented with a more expensive coffee (a “better” coffee) many coffee drinkers will not like it. The relatively few who like trying another coffee every now and then, or who have found a higher priced alternative to what they previously drank are the ones we need to work with. Most specialty coffee businesses, however, take the first conversion, and settle for another fan of their house blend. A small coffee roaster & café can sometimes survive on enough of those changes in habit, but they aren’t enough to sustain that coffee grower, or her fellow coffee growers in Colombia and beyond.

While that meeting with those coffee growers was a few years ago at this point things have not changed enough to keep coffee growers like that woman who spoke up prosperous enough to continue producing a great coffee as opposed to a good one.

I hope she is still struggling to produce a better cup, if not a great one.