The artisan coffee revolution

We’re talking about your cup-of-joe. This discussion is fully inclusive, we aren’t going to be snobbish about it either, it doesn’t matter if you like it black, strong, instant, peruvian or even served ice-cold. At The Naked Scientists we’ve noticed a rise in supermarket coffee prices in recent months, and Harry Lewis thought it was about time we topped up our knowledge on the beverage before looking to its future...

Harry Lewis - If we are gonna talk about coffee, I should start by introducing you to the biggest coffee drinker that I'm know.

Harry's Dad - Oh. Thanks.

Harry - That's not wrong to say. Is it? That's pretty accurate.

Harry's Dad - Yeah. That's not wrong to say. I do love a coffee.

Harry - How many coffees do you have a day?

Harry's Dad - 4 or 6.

Harry - 4 or 6?! I thought you cut it down to 1.

Harry's Dad - No, I've gone back up again. I cut back for 2-3 months, but 4 has been pretty standard for me.

Harry - Have you noticed a change in the price of it over the years?

Harry's Dad - Yeah. The coffees I get, what they do is they cut down the pods. Prices stay the same, but where they used to buy for example, 16 pots for £3.50 some manufacturers now are doing 12 or £3.50. There's one that still does 16 at the moment, which I'm sticking with. But I do know that they are about to go up again because there's a shortage of coffee beans coming out, of the field. The bad harvest.

Harry - Dad's right. This year's coffee production in Brazil is expected to be down 23% from 2020 due to frosts and droughts. Experts predict that it's gonna get even more difficult to forecast coffee production in Brazil due to increased flooding. I'm also willing to say that my dad is right on record because I checked his facts with someone who knows.

James - Hi, my name is James Hoffman. I've worked in coffee for nearly 20 years now. I've started a coffee company. I've written a book called The World Atlas of Coffee and I also make YouTube videos all about coffee too.

Harry - James tells me that coffee prices have been on the rise for years.

James - There's definitely been a rise in price. Coffee is definitely suffering at the hands of the challenges of global logistics right now and I think just the cost of doing business say in the UK has gone up, wages have gone up, everything's gone up. As well as people trying to build sustainable businesses after one of the most difficult periods of trading in living memory.

Harry - Feels like a runt that quite a lot of people are gonna have to bear, because there's an awful lot of us in the UK that like coffee.

James - Yeah. We're a medium coffee drinking country. We're not a hardcore coffee drinking country, like the Scandinavians; They drink 4x as much coffee per capita as we do. We're about 1/2 of the Americans or the Italians. We're a reasonable coffee drinking country, but we're not super serious.

Harry - What is it about it that we love so much? What keeps us coming back for more?

James - I don't think we can deny caffeine remains the primary driver of coffee consumption. But I think a lot of people have made a leap from having a very transactional relationship with caffeine where 'I will drink this thing and I will feel alert, awake, productive, whatever it's gonna be' into 'I will do that for, for those things, but I'll have a good time along the way.' I think people have seen coffee now as an opportunity for deliciousness. I can get the chemical hit in a really pleasant, enjoyable, interesting way and I think that's really changed our relationship with it.

Harry - And I'm sure you've seen it. There definitely has been a boom in artisan coffee production. I've driven just outside Cambridge to what must be this city's favorite coffee house. It's called Hot Numbers. I'm gonna meet Simon and Emily. It's here that they dream up their aromatic concoctions, which are made purely from arabica coffee. That's one of the two most commonly consumed species. I think we want to know how it's possible in this day and age to get so many products from one single type of bean.

Simon - Let's roast some coffee. We got 12 kilos of Brazil here. Now let's see. I've had all the cherries, et cetera, removed. See here, Harry, it smells kind of grassy, like straw.

Harry - The roasting process plays a pivotal role in the flavour of the final product. Simon's let us join him for the 9 to 12 minutes that it takes.

Simon - Now we're gonna drop the coffee in. The big cast-iron drum is pre-heated. You drop the massive coffee, which instantly cools the temperature on the probe and then it slowly heats up. The roast profile will look like a tick. Once we get a profile we like, we can dramatically change the taste of this coffee. The air flow, the temperature and the time will have dramatic effects on the coffee and also you can get an incredible amount of variety from different countries and the way they grow their coffee, the altitude they have, the way they farm them, and the soil.

Harry - Let's pop over to the shelf and have a look. Over at the shelf, there's all of the Hot Numbers coffees, and they've got a huge variety of flavours. There's also Emily and she has a surprise in store for me.

Emily - We are going to test some of the coffees that we've got here. We're gonna start off with the Roger Chilcon, which is a Peruvian coffee. This is growing at medium altitudes above sea level; about 1,900 - 2000 meters above sea level. I won't tell you what flavours out of this. If we have a go and see what you can figure out.

Harry - Needless to say, I was absolutely useless

Emily - For me, it's more like grapefruit. It hits the sides of my tongue. It coats my mouth and I can really get grapefruit out of this one.

Harry - Maybe for the naive tongue of mine. We could compare it to something else.

Emily - Absolutely. This is actually my favorite coffee. It's the el diviso; this is a Colombian coffee. It's grown in varying altitudes. This is slightly lower than the first one, so we should be getting a lot of different flavors that come through in this coffee.

Harry - Up on the wall, Simon and Emily have this Specialty Coffee Association's flavour wheel. It looks like a chemistry textbook illustration; a big circle where you can help yourself identify the flavours you experience with all these different colours shooting off. When you hear Emily say that this tastes like grapefruit, well, she's using the technical language derived from world coffee research. Me on the other hand, not so much.

Harry - It's completely different.

Simon - Isn't it? It's dramatically different.

Harry - That initial hit is quite sweet so it still tastes quite fruity in that sense. It's just the after-taste is so drastically different from that Peruvian coffee.

Simon - This, I find, is quite boozy. It's quite, you know, fermented fruit. That's a lot to do with the processing method as well as how ‘the natural process’ works.

Harry - What does that mean, Emily?

Emily - The natural process is the oldest method of coffee processing and it takes 3-6 weeks to complete this process. After the cherries have been harvested, they're laid out in a thin layer and they're dried in the sun. This is either done on brick patios or some of them used raised drying beds. These are really great because it gets circulation around the whole coffee cherry.

Simon - Because that fruit's in context for such a long time, that's what gives it that boozy fermented taste.

Harry - Literally everything seems to affect the flavour. Back over whilst we're roasting, Simon tells me that washing the bean, drying it, transporting it, especially grinding it, each little component tweaks and changes the final outcome of that cup of coffee.

Simon - Now what we are doing is we are putting on the cooling drum. We've got a rotating arm here, we're just about to drop the coffee out and gonna cool it down. It's like a giant cullender and it's sucking air through this so when the beans are dropped, they don't carry on roasting. It cools it as fast as we can.