Producer Toolkit: Fermentation, Pt 3 - Is using yeast cheating? And who decides?
This episode explores why 30 cents a kilo is trivial for a large farm and unaffordable for a small one, the strange power imbalance that let...
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Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries
Filter Stories is a NPR / BBC-style documentary podcast revealing the hidden side of coffee. We visit a stateless barista stuck on a faraway island, meet an award winning coffee grower earni...
Episodes
20 of 87 episodesProducer Toolkit: Fermentation, Pt 2 — The case for avoiding exciting fermentations
This episode explores why the specialty industry's obsession with exotic processing is a dangerous signal for farmers, five ways commercial...
Producer Toolkit: Fermentation, Pt 1 — Nature's lottery and coffee's 3,000-year lag
This episode explores why coffee is only fifteen years into a fermentation revolution that wine and bread went through millennia ago, what's...
Producer Toolkit: Processing, Pt 3 - Critical instruments and poisoned rivers
This episode explores how just a handful of cheap instruments can ensure quality is reproducible year-on-year, and the wastewater crisis poi...
Farming: Drying mistakes that ruin coffee quality
This episode explores the simple drying mistakes that compromise months of careful work, and the low-cost fixes that protect a coffee's shel...
Farming: Coffee rockstars and picking's brutal economics
This episode explores why chasing avant-garde processing before nailing the basics is a trap for most producers, the brutal economics behind...
Farming: Starved soils and vanishing labour
This episode explores what plants really need from the soil beneath them, and the labour shortage forcing farms to rethink how the work gets...
Farming: Water crisis, risky genetics and cash flow crunch
This episode explores the growing water crisis in coffee farming, why farmers are drawn to risky coffee varieties and coffee farming's hidde...
Farming: Low harvests and profit blind spots
Welcome to The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis. This series will help you understand coffee farming...
History: Guatemala's Inconvenient Truth, Pt 2
Specialty coffee changes the story for the indigenous people of Guatemala. Coffee as a tool of oppression finally offers hope....and then so...
Guatemala, Part 1: Whose land is it anyway?
When you buy a bag of coffee labelled fifth-generation family farm, it feels like a good choice. But in Guatemala, that label might actually...
Surrogates: Anything but the coffee
What happens when coffee disappears? This is not a thought experiment! It’s happened many times in history: War, blockades, tariffs, ideolog...
Mother Coffee: The history and heritage of Ethiopia's wild coffee forests
Most coffee is grown on vast plantations using machines, pesticides and fertilisers. But in Ethiopia, coffee grows wild in humid forests sur...
We Built This City…On Coffee: Hamburg and the making of Europe's coffee trade
On a long walk through Hamburg, somewhere between the fish markets and giant cranes, you might stumble a giant bronze coffee bean looks like...
Introducing: Series Three of A History of Coffee
We’re back with more stories about the tiny psychoactive seed that changed the world and continues to shape our lives today. Is it possible...
Coffee Quality, Part 3: When the “quality” myth hits the farm
For twenty years, the 2004 cupping form profoundly shaped the specialty coffee world. But on the hillsides of coffee farms, some of the form...
Coffee Quality, Part 2: How “quality” became a myth
If you ask two specialty professionals what makes a high-quality coffee, you’ll likely get a surprisingly consistent answer: clean, sweet, j...
Coffee Quality, Part 1: The birth of specialty coffee flavours
For the longest time, coffees were dull and bitter. But then a small group of pioneers changed the world. In this episode, we travel back to...
How specialty coffee woke up to water’s role in flavour
For the longest time, the coffee community only cared about water’s impact ruining espresso machine boilers and kettles. But what about wate...
The two ingredients in water that ruin your coffee, and the ancient story behind them
550 million years ago, earth was perfect. We had perfect water for coffee AND we were living in a vegetarian paradise! But then Earth change...