Producer Toolkit: Storage, Pt 2 - Why plastics are not all equal
This episode explores the black box between coffee leaving the farm and the roaster's warehouse, and how quality can be ruined. Wrapping the...
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Arts
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 95 episodes
Producer Toolkit: Storage, Pt 1 - How coffee gets ruined on the farm
This episode explores the many ways coffee can get ruined while still on the farm, including fishy concrete tanks, the importance of not usi...
Producer Toolkit: Quality Assurance, Pt 2 - The basics of good water for coffee
This episode takes you through the basics of good water for coffee. To objectively assess a coffee's quality, both producer and buyer need t...
Producer Toolkit: Quality Assurance, Pt 1 - A practical guide to tasting and roasting coffee
This episode is a practical guide to tasting coffee, sample roasting and judging quality, built for small producers on a tight budget. That...
Producer Toolkit: Price, Pt 2 - Discovering the true value of coffee
What is the right price for coffee? This episode shows what the journey of price discovery looks like from the perspective of a coffee farme...
Producer Toolkit: Price, Pt 1 - How the C market works
This episode explores the strange world of the C market, where movements in the Brazilian currency or rebels boarding a random container shi...
Producer Toolkit: Marketing & Sales, Pt 2 - Navigating trade shows
This episode explores what a trade show actually feels like for a farmer who flew in on money his community pooled together, why a sausage d...
Producer Toolkit: Marketing & Sales, Pt 1 - The power of story
This episode explores why specialty coffee is a luxury business that runs on story more than flavour. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a...
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...
Producer 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...