By Rachel Beebe
This spring Steampunk launched three coffees grown in Peru: a regional lot called El Conjuro and coffees from the producers William Manchay and Anderson Guererro. Despite all three being grown within the same country, and even the same region, these coffees are unique and distinct from one another. We’ve chosen to release these coffees as a series, in addition to selling them individually, to showcase the spectrum of flavours possible from one origin and to highlight how variety, processing and terroir can impact flavour.
As a single origin roastery, we’ve built our practice on the recognition that every lot of coffee has its own unique characteristics. Our job as a roastery is to select the best tasting ones and roast them in a way that highlights their positive flavour attributes. We don’t make blends, which would mean mixing coffee grown in different places. We only roast coffee that is traceable to a particular place and producer or set of producers.
Given this framework, you might assume that origin or region is the most important factor impacting coffee flavour. And often consumers use country of origin as shorthand for what they like. You might know you love Kenyan coffee, but don’t enjoy ones from Mexico. In this case, it could be inferred that what you love are high acidity coffees with juicy notes of berries, currants and stone fruit. And what you don’t enjoy are coffees with fuller mouthfeel and strong notes of chocolate along with cherry or dried fruit flavours. But why do Kenyan coffees usually taste more fruity than Mexican ones?
Terroir
When we talk about origin, what we’re talking about is terroir. This is a word the coffee industry has borrowed from the wine industry. It refers to the unique conditions of the location where a coffee was grown, encompassing the soil, climate and weather, altitude, aspect of the slope, shade management and what is growing nearby.
When it comes to terroir in coffee, savvy consumers are usually most aware of the impact of altitude. Generally, higher grown coffees are both more sweet and more acidic, i.e more complex. In my 20 years in coffee I’ve only ever heard a full explanation for this once, and here it is: the fruity flavours in coffee come from acids (citric, malic, etc.). Those acids come from sugars that have broken down. Plants make sugar (sucrose) through photosynthesis, but photosynthesis happens more slowly at lower temperatures. So, all day in the sunshine the plant makes sugars to grow, then at night it cools down. If the plant has leftover sugar, it breaks it down and stores it as acids, increasing the acidity of the eventual coffee. Also, paradoxically, the presence of acidity makes sugar taste sweeter. So overall the flavour effect of having some acids present is a sweeter cup.
A less talked about variable regarding terroir is soil health, but there is a growing body of work and number of producers focusing on this piece of the puzzle. In some places, notably Brazil and Colombia, coffee farming is done intensively, with chemical fertilizers and rows planted as a monoculture in the full sun. This style of farming is detrimental to the environment and it leaves farms vulnerable to the impacts of climate change including unpredictable weather patterns and outbreaks of pests and disease. It’s bad for the Earth and bad for coffee production, and some industry leaders also believe it’s bad for flavour.
In 2024 I heard Ana Luiza Pellicer speak at Glasgow Coffee Festival about the agroforestry project running at her family’s Brazilian farm, Mió. The Sombra Project (sombra means shade in Portuguese), done in partnership with Assembly Coffee and Volcano Coffee Works, has planted 15 hectares of land with a mixture of coffee and native shade trees. “We'll create a sustainable and integrated management system of different plant species to protect the area from extreme weather conditions, recover soil health and native species diversity, and improve yield from the area at harvest,” says Assembly’s website. Ana said during her talk that the project aims not only to show that agroforestry is better for the plants and environment, but also that coffee grown in soil with a healthy microbiome tastes better, even if it is grown at a lower altitude. Their project is located below 1,000 m.a.s.l., and many Brazilian farms are at similar or lower altitudes (relative to other specialty coffee farms).
In Colombia, Laura Meunier, founder of Minga importers, agrees that focusing on sustainable farming practices will yield better tasting, more resilient coffee. “I hope the focus moves back toward terroir,” she said in a recent conversation about processing methods and varieties. “It shouldn’t be one or the other, there should be an awareness of both.” Laura and her partner have recently harvested the first cherries grown on their farm, El Micelio (Spanish for mycelium, the underground threads of fungi that create networks between the roots of plants). They bought the farm last year and are in the process of reforesting and growing new coffee seedlings to plant. “Through permaculture techniques and reforestation, we are working to rebuild biodiversity and cultivate coffee in harmony with nature,” she says on her website.
It should be noted that many traditional and indigenous coffee producers have been growing coffee using what we’re calling the agroforestry method for centuries. In places as diverse as Ethiopia, Mexico and India, coffee plants are intercropped with shade trees and food plants. So, this is not a new phenomenon being discovered. But because coffee was spread round the world as a colonial crop and grown intensively in most places, it’s a significant shift in the conversation and an interesting way to add value and decomodify coffee.
Returning to our Peru Series, the range of flavours in that box proves that terroir is just one factor contributing to how a coffee tastes. And some would argue, as you’ll read below, that terroir doesn’t exist.
Variety & Processing
In terms of flavour, it does matter whether a coffee is grown in Ethiopian or Colombian soil or at 2,100 m.a.s.l. versus 800 meters. It’s important to note that certain varieties are typically grown in particular countries and that coffees tend to be processed using the infrastructure available and methods established by tradition. For example if a coffee was grown in Colombia it’s statistically likely to be a washed process Castillo or Caturra variety, whereas if it was grown in Ethiopia it’s more likely to be a natural process native landrace variety. The exceptions to these rules is where some of the most interesting innovation is happening in coffee.
Rob Hoos, a roaster and coffee consultant, recently published his book, Cultivar, in which he seeks to “understand how cultivar, terroir, and processing culminate to produce the flavor of a roasted coffee.” He observed that cultivar, or plant variety, tended to take a back seat to terroir and processing in discussions and training materials and he set out to question that assumption. He says early on that he thinks processing has the biggest impact on flavour, but that “the terroir interaction with the cultivar cannot be overlooked.”
To shed light on the impact of variety on flavour, Hoos systematically roasted and cupped different varieties grown on the same farms and processed the same way. In total he conducted 309 roasts, analyzing 31 coffees from six farms in four different coffee-producing countries. He concluded that, contrary to what we thought previously, “cultivars have a massive and seemingly consistent effect on a coffee’s flavor profile.”
If you taste the Geisha in our Peru Series, and compare it to one grown in nearby Colombia, or even one grown in its native Ethiopia, could you tell the difference? Maybe, but I’d wager that the intense florality the variety is known for will be the primary tasting note on all three.
For someone who is new to coffee, learning more about varieties and how they taste is really fun, especially since there is so much innovation in the space. Because coffee is a commodity there has been a ton of research and investment on engineering varieties that are disease and climate change resistant and that also taste good. Castillo, mentioned above, is one example. It was developed and spread throughout Colombia in the early 2000s by the country’s national coffee research centre, Cenicafé. The most common figure (though I don’t know if it’s up to date), is that 40% of the coffee grown in Colombia is Castillo. But the variety is just the latest in a long line of variety development stretching back to the 1960s when Cenicafé first crossed Caturra with Timor Hybrid, which is a natural hybrid of the two coffee species, Arabica and Robusta.
The point is, in coffee, most varieties don’t just appear by mistake (with some notable exceptions, including, obviously, the Timor hybrid mentioned above, Pink Bourbon, and possibly other landrace varieties “discovered” in Colombia in the last decade or so). They’re developed and spread intentionally.
(Side note: For an excellent deep dive into coffee varieties and their history, look at Chris Kornman’s A New World History and Geography of Arabica Cultivars. And for fantastic infographics, check out this Coffee Family Tree by Cafe Imports or go to World Coffee Research.)
In specialty coffee, part of what drives the spread of certain varieties is their flavour and the market value attached to it. So, in the early 2000s, when Gesha started taking prizes in competitions in Panama and Colombia, farmers flocked to plant it and cash in on the excitement in the market. A similar thing has happened around other varieties like Pink Bourbon and Sidra, and it’s also happened in the area of coffee processing. The boom in so-called experimental processing in coffee seems to have kicked into a second phase. About a decade ago we began to see new processing methods such as anaerobic fermentation, carbonic maceration, thermal shock and koji processing. In the last few years we’ve begun to encounter co-ferments, infused and inoculated coffees. Anderson Guererro’s coffee in our Peru Series is an inoculated coffee.
These coffees have generated a ton of excitement in the market, because of their wild and larger than life flavours, and because using these methods is a way for farmers to add value to their crop. It has to be said, though, the results have been mixed, both in terms of quality of flavour and the impact on farmers.
First, let’s talk about flavour. We describe the taste of Anderson Guerrero's coffee as “process driven” because the primary flavour notes derive from how he processed the coffee. Put as succinctly as possible, this coffee is honey processed, which means some mucilage is left on the beans for drying and it was inoculated, meaning the gooey, mucilage-covered beans were dipped in fermented coffee cherry juice, called mosto, before being spread out to dry. This fermentation-heady processing method led to the development of big fruity acidity and a pronounced booziness in the coffee.
At Steampunk we’ve been reluctant to roast many experimental process coffees because we prefer the flavour profile of clean naturals and washed coffees. In over a decade we’ve roasted only three anaerobic natural coffees. But there is pressure from the market to roast them because many people really love the vividness of the flavours and the funkiness in these coffees.
But for all the pressure we’re feeling, producers feel it even more keenly. Lucia Solis talked in a recent podcast episode about how common it is for Latin American producers, who typically produce washed coffees, to be asked to make natural coffees. Even though many don’t have the infrastructure to make naturals, might not have the right climate to dry naturals well and probably have never tasted a well processed natural coffee, many of them are starting to produce them. Natural and honey process coffees are the precursors to many of the experimental processing methods listed above, so being able to do experimental processing well starts with being able to do naturals and honeys well.
The reality is that it’s more difficult to produce natural coffees than it is to produce washed coffees. It takes more space, more time and more labour, and the risks of mould or bacteria growth are higher. And Solis, a coffee processing expert, tells us that it’s not possible to just copy the natural processing protocol they use in Ethiopia and paste it into Latin America. The climate is different, the naturally occurring microorganisms are different, the culture and economies are different, just to name a few things.
Dave Burton from Omwani Coffee Importers, who has done his own experimental processing trials, puts it this way, “There just isn't a silver bullet to achieving outstanding results. I tend to worry that the way we fantasise about creating exotic flavours in coffee-growing countries puts a lot of pressure on producers to take unnecessary risk when what they are creating is already good enough.”
In 2021 the conversation metastasized into an all out drama in the specialty coffee world around co-ferments and infused coffees. World Barista Champion and developer of the carbonic maceration processing method, Saša Šestić, wrote an article for Perfect Daily Grind entitled, What’s the problem with infused coffees? in which he explains what, exactly, the problems are. He describes competition-level coffees he’d tasted that he believed had been infused with artificial flavours without being labelled as such. One coffee scientist called these “adulterated coffees.” Šestić’s argument was about transparency and an unlevel playing field for producers. It’s not fair or safe to use artificial means to create intense flavours not naturally possible, while lying about how those flavours were produced.
There are many who agree with Šestić, and in my experience there are also a lot of coffee professionals who recoil at the thought of anything being added to coffee, especially something artificial. It’s like adding caramel syrup to your latte. Some would call this aversion purist; others would consider that snobbery. Either way, most would agree that the caramel should be on the label. But the public accusation from a coffee professional in the Global North that coffee producers in the Global South are trying to pull one over on the market did not go down well.
Soon after PDG published Šestić’s piece they published another reporting the huge response it got on social media. Christopher Feran, a consultant, roaster and green buyer, also responded with a blog post that voiced many of the concerns. In it he calls Šestić out for positioning himself as “the arbiter of purity and transparency in coffee,” pointing out that, as the creator of his own experimental processing method, Šestić had a lot to lose to the rise of other ways of processing coffee that achieve similarly intense flavours more efficiently and for less investment.
Feran points out that it’s impossible to draw a clear line between what might be considered “authentic” natural additives to coffee during fermentation and what would not. He states that the addition of microbes and microbe-inhibiting or -promoting substances to control fermentation can offer tremendous benefit to coffee producers including greater uniformity and more predictability of flavours.
The issue of whether and where the flavour profiles of infused coffees fit into the specialty landscape is one thing, but the vehemence with which the people in the conversation are stating their points reveals that there are bigger issues at stake. Feran accused Šestić of having “the fury, swagger and self-righteousness of a carnival barker,” and that, “wrestling control” from producers of what’s allowed in the market is imperialistic.
The exchange shows that when we talk about flavour in coffee it’s more complicated than it seems. We’re not just talking about good or bad, not just about authenticity and quality. We’re talking about trust, control and power.
But mostly, the coffee industry is like any other, everyone is working to produce something that consumers will enjoy. Knowing which factors contribute to the flavours that you like will help you pick a coffee with confidence. Do you like the vividly juicy profile of a washed Kenyan? Do you prefer the funky boozy hit of an anaerobic natural? Or do you want to sip on a layered, captivating Pink Bourbon? A little knowledge will go a long way to making the right choice for your taste.