I’m a Coffee Aficionado. Am I Becoming a Coffee Snob?
As an 80-year-old trying to recover from advanced colorectal cancer, I’m determined to drink better coffee in my remaining years. Life’s too short for anything less than great coffee, and I’m sampling gourmet specialty coffees from different countries.
Is searching for specialty coffees turning me into a coffee snob? Maybe.
For starters, I’m trying to focus on three personal criteria. 1) Organic coffee that’s grown without pesticides. 2) Coffee that’s harvested without child labor. 3) Fair Trade coffee where growers get at least a living wage.
Beyond those three basic criteria, I’m focusing on specialty coffee from some regions known for gourmet coffee. Southern Ethiopia. Kona, Hawaii. Central America. South America. Even Southeast Asia.
I’m also trying to learn about how different techniques for processing and roasting coffee beans affect the final product. Washed vs. Natural. Fermentation. Infusing with flavors. Drying. Light, medium, dark, and espresso roasts.
The learning curve is steep for me because there are so many choices. CoffeeReview.com became my starting point for learning about the world of specialty coffees. It has posted more than 7,000 reviews in the past 25 years and has sections to help people understand specialty coffee.
After two years of chemoradiation and surgery for colorectal cancer, doctors cleared me to drink three cups of coffee every day. Maria’s youngest son told us about some very good coffee from the mountainous rainforest of Huatusco, Mexico, the largest coffee-growing region in the state of Veracruz.
The coffee is from a small farm and not harvested with child labor. I don’t know if it’s organic and fair trade.
El Rinconcito del Café in Guadalajara roasts the Huatusco coffee and the medium roast suits our tastes. We started buying 1kg bags of ground coffee to use in our Cuisinart automatic drip coffeemaker to make 8-ounce cups of coffee for our mid-morning breakfast. Sometimes, we have solo cups after our mid-afternoon lunch using a French Press or my Italian moka stovetop pot (see photo above). The 1kg bag lasts us about three weeks.
In the past couple of months, to compare coffees, I tried French Roast organic coffee beans I bought online from Amazon. The coffee is sourced from a cooperative of farmers in Oaxaca, Mexico. Maybe they receive a living wage, but I’m not certain.
I also ordered 500kg of mild roast beans from the famous La Parroquia de Veracruz coffeehouse in Veracruz, Mexico. Their website says they are committed to fair trade and environmental sustainability in their coffee from Huatusco, and that they comply with the ISO 9001:15 standards. But I don’t know if that means their beans were grown organically or harvested without child labor. I hope so.
Neither of those coffees was satisfying to us and we stopped drinking them after a few days. A primary reason those two coffees were not satisfactory was because the coffee seemed stale. Neither bag had a roast date. Therefore, there was no way to know when the coffee was roasted and bagged, or how long it sat in an Amazon warehouse before I bought it and received it.
The coffee we buy from El Rinconcito del Café has a roast date on the bag and we buy it a day or two after it’s roasted. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can watch them roast it and the aroma fills their little café.
Jan Otto, a fellow colorectal cancer survivor who is a world traveler and also a coffee aficionado, tells me that fresh-roasted is very important. Based on his opinion and my limited experience, I think the roast date for specialty coffee may be more important than the country of origin, organic growing, or processing method.
All of the myriad factors of growing and processing and roasting specialty coffee influence availability and price. Sometimes, it’s a little pricey, especially with confusing foreign exchange rates.
Otto posted an article on Medium in April 2024 describing how he accidentally dinged his credit card for $732 to buy 500g of Indonesian beans at the Singapore branch of Bacha, a world-famous coffeehouse headquartered in Marrakech. He thought he was paying $73, but misunderstood the foreign exchange rate because he had a very bad cold and was taking both antihistamines and local traditional Chinese medicine.
He accepted his error, ground some beans after returning to the USA, and brewed a cup. His article says it was very good, and he compared it favorably to his favorite gourmet coffee from East Africa.
Based on his preference for Ethiopian coffee, I’m trying to learn about coffee from that country. CoffeeReview.com has a great detailed article discussing coffee from Ethiopia and states that superb organically-certified coffees are widely available. The website has more than 800 total reviews of coffee from Ethiopia and identifies several coffees that rate high in their reviews.
More good news is that coffee from Ethiopia appears to be harvested without child labor. The Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) has a detailed 116-page report from 2022 identifying countries that use child labor for specific products. Coffee from Ethiopia is not on the list.
It’s unclear from the article on CoffeeReview.com whether growers in Ethiopia earn a living wage from small farms, but the article indicates they may not: “Unfortunately for the many cash-poor villages of small-holding Ethiopia farmers, but fortunately for coffee lovers elsewhere in the world, most fine Ethiopia coffees are amazing bargains.”
I’m also learning about coffee from Kona, Hawaii, where I enjoyed delicious local coffee on a business trip more than 40 years ago. There are more than a hundred reviews of Kona coffee on CoffeeReview.com and I’m looking at reviews of the top-rated organic coffees before I order one or two. There are no issues with child labor or fair trade.
I should say right here that I’ve had a lot of different coffees over the years before my cancer. Truthfully, I never cared about the origin of coffee and whether it was grown organically, how it was harvested, whether the growers made a living wage, and when it was roasted.
Most of the time, all I wanted was the caffeine hit. I’ve even had stale instant coffee in dingy roadside restaurants while exploring the 1,000-mile Baja Peninsula. Who knows when the coffee was roasted or how long it was sitting in the jar behind the counter? I used Coffee Mate to make it drinkable.
Now is different. Surviving cancer was like starting a new life, with new perspectives and goals in my old age.
Drinking great coffee is high on my bucket list, and I like it black so I can taste it without additives. Some studies suggest that black coffee has health benefits that include lowering the risk of colorectal cancer. Definitely, I want to minimize the risk of recurrence.
It’s almost impossible for me to know the roast date of coffee served in restaurants, or the origin. After dinner at restaurants, the waiters almost always try to get Maria and me to have some coffee and dessert. I’ve begun asking them about the roast date and the origin. Most waiters are too busy to find out.
Waiters also don’t know if the coffee was grown organically. And they don’t know how to respond when I ask if it was harvested without child labor and if the growers earned a living wage. So, I don’t order the after-dinner coffee.
Does that make me a coffee snob? Yeah, maybe a little.
If you’re a coffee aficionado, maybe a little snobbish, post a comment with your coffee preferences. Thanks!
