What’s Special About Specialty Coffee?
Ripeness & Picking
From the outside, the distinction between specialty & “regular” coffee seems nebulous. Presumably it comes down to taste: regular coffee is bitter, with little complexity, roasted dark to disguise defects. Specialty coffee is naturally sweet, with balanced acidity and complex flavors. But where do these differences come from? Over time, I’ve learned they are the result of real, tangible differences in how coffee is grown and handled. These factors mean a coffee sells either as specialty (top quality) or commercial / commodity (everything else). Picking is a primary example of one of these differences.
I grew up in the country, surrounded by woods and wild berry bushes. Every summer day, I scoured dirt roads for ripe blackberries. On each thorny vine were fruits in all stages of maturity — hard and green, blushing red, dark but not yet soft. The ripest berries were matte black and swollen, giving with only a gentle tug. At the end of the season, ripening accelerated, then the fruit rotted and fell to the ground.
Coffee harvest works the same way, but scaled, monetized & much more demanding. Specialty coffee is picked by hand, and pickers quickly judge the ripest cherries by sight. Why does ripeness matter? If you’ve tasted a blackberry just short of perfect, you’ll have an idea. It’s just not delicious. Coffee is the same way — taste is dramatically impacted by ripeness. When an immature coffee seed makes it through picking, processing and sorting, and finally into the drum of a coffee roaster — it’s called a quaker. Quakers roast pale brown, and taste like peanuts.
Overripeness, on the other hand, can cause a host of other issues — from a vinegary taste to mold and rot. So you can see why perfectly ripe cherries are desirable for specialty coffee: they yield seeds at the peak of sweetness and development.
Careful, uniform picking is prized — coffee people drool over Instagram posts of perfectly ripe, red harvests. Coffee companies sometimes doctor their farm photos, making harvests appear more evenly ripe. And that in itself reveals that uniform picking isn’t always simple to achieve.
Coffee, like blackberries and many other fruits, doesn’t all ripen at once. It can take more time for a coffee picker to select only the ripe cherries from a shrub. However, pickers are often paid for the amount of coffee they pick, and not for the quality of picking. In these instances, pickers have little incentive to select only ripe cherries — it can slow them down and make them less money. Since coffee picking is often low-paid work, every little bit counts. (Sometimes pickers are paid hourly, which creates little incentive for quantity OR quality.)
Specialty farmers can solve for this by paying for quality, not quantity. However, this isn’t always a straightforward choice, since it can increase labor costs. When labor makes up around half of production cost, that’s a tough call. And keep in mind that many farmers face selling their crops at a loss, due to unpredictable factors such as market fluctuations, or lower coffee scores as a result of leaf rust or bad weather.
So although the specialty party line equates good picking with superior passion, skill, or hard work on the part of the farmer, that’s an oversimplification. When I visited coffee farms in Colombia, I was surprised to learn that many farmers section their farms into specialty and commercial. The specialty coffee is picked for quality, whereas the commercial section is picked with an anything-goes approach. Different standards are also applied to processing and drying.
Toward the end of the harvest, the shrubs must be stripped of all cherries — ripe, overripe, whatever — or the fruit will fall and draw insects. Even if this happens in the specialty section, the resulting pickings are sold as commercial.
Selling commodity coffee isn’t a failure of passion or skill — it’s just practical. Although specialty coffee fetches a higher price, it also can be more costly and complex to produce. Selling can also be more complicated — specialty coffee exporters and buyers offer different prices for the same lot of coffee, or they’ll pass on a lot altogether. However, a farmer can always sell their crop as commercial, although it will be for a lower price per pound. So, selling some coffee as commercial creates reliable cash flow to supplement a farmer’s revenue from specialty, and allows them to make efficient use of their whole harvest.
Picking is just one of many factors that separate specialty and commercial. As you can see, the factors at play inhabit many overlapping realms. So when someone asks me what makes specialty coffee special, I never really know what to say. Hopefully this helps to illuminate the topic! And sometimes the most helpful thing is just to taste the difference.
If you’re interested in learning more, please tell me what you’d like hear about! umeko@suddencoffee.com
