Why specialty coffee falls short
This week, we’re launching our ‘Misfits’ line of reclaimed coffees. You might just call it Post Specialty Coffee. At a time when roasters go to great lengths to tell you how picky they are about buying ‘only the best,’ we’re looking for the coffees that are undervalued or rejected. The aim is to salvage coffees that normally wouldn’t make the cut — improving a farmer’s fortunes in the process — while telling some fascinating stories about how this happens. These coffees are ABSOLUTELY delicious and deserve to be shared.
Our first one has just dropped, and it’s a beauty at a real bargain: A rare natural Kenya that took about four runs through our sorting machine to remove most of the stones in it (you'll still need to check) and the very first crop from a new producer. More on this here.
Why?
Here’s the problem: As a professional coffee buyer and (lapsed) Q grader, I’ve spent a career assigning the value of a coffee based on the cup’s score, not on the farmer’s actual cost of production and certainly not on social values. My not-so-hot take: Our focus on quality often comes at the expense of ethics.
The definition of specialty is already miles away from its thoughtful, artisanal roots. Nestlé owns Blue Bottle. JAB Holding Co. owns Stumptown, Intelligentsia, and many more. Top mid-size roasters like Black & White in the US sell out to private equity every year. Blank Street built an empire of sage-coloured satires of specialty cafes. Meanwhile, Dunkin' Donuts and Keurig are two of the biggest buyers of 80+ coffee in the world.
I’d argue that specialty isn’t special anymore. That doesn’t stop people from trying to push the bar ever higher. Roasters brag about rejecting coffees that didn’t meet their rigorous quality standards, but say nothing about what happens to those rejected coffees and the people behind them. Some roasters invent new types of quality and defect, essentially diluting the value of coffees from already top-tier farms and triggering mini trends of roasters competing to be pickiest.
Try explaining this to a struggling coffee producer whose 90+ coffees still may not generate a livable income. Our friends at Bette Buna produce phenomenal coffees every year that still contain quakers (pale, under-developed beans) in spite of their good growing practices, excellent processing, and thousands of person-hours dedicated to sorting. Instead of asking them to reinvent the agricultural practices of thousands of farmers or perhaps buy a new wet mill and dry mill at a cost of millions, we’ve decided to buy a $6,000 colour sorting machine that easily removes quakers after roasting. And that’s one way we can offer Misfits — beautiful, reclaimed, freshly sorted coffees that otherwise wouldn’t make the cut.
A home for every coffee
It’s a fact of life: The best coffee farms in the world produce some coffees that don’t clear the specialty score sheet. Some Bette Buna coffees contain too many quakers to technically meet the specialty definition, but in the cup these coffees score 87-91 points — easily an elite flavour profile. Meanwhile, the social work at Bette Buna is the best we’ve seen in Africa. Telling them to discard up to 40 percent of their volume because of ever-increasing quality standards could mean that an individual producer would go from making $30 a month to $18, quite often for a family of 9. That’s the opposite of progress.
The average coffee farmers make (at best) an 8% profit margin – and that’s presuming they sell 100 percent of their production. If we only value the slice that scores above 80 points (or, good grief, 87.5 points according to some roasters now) at best we’re saying, ‘It’s not my responsibility to make sure you make a living income.’ At worst, we’re saying we don’t care if you do.
Therefore, it becomes crucial to find homes for every coffee. When we do, we’re preserving social value. Does the average coffee drinker know that almost all specialty coffee from Africa is sorted by hand, by hundreds of women, most of whom are paid around $1 per day? Do regular customers know that when a specialty roaster rejects a coffee for being slightly below the expected score the farmers often don’t get paid (and almost always get paid less)?
If the definition of specialty coffee remains a score or an acidity level or a freedom from defects — or even if it’s about Instagram popularity, latte art, or million-dollar cafe buildouts — then we’re working with an elitist beverage that is being rapidly diluted anyway. Here’s an alternative proposal: ‘Specialty’ should mean free from exploitation. Simple as.
This is the point of Misfits. These are coffees that technically aren’t specialty but that CAN be cleaned up for a bargain, all while boosting farmer incomes, valuing the people involved, and serving up some real beauties.
What does a Misfit look like?
There are SO MANY examples: Delicious coffee with quakers mixed in. Delicious coffee with patio chips or small stones. Softer-bean coffees from Central America. Coffees that were harvested too late to make it onto an importer’s list of shipments from that country. Cherries that split on the tree and couldn’t be processed as washed. Tree-dried naturals (due to shortage of labour). Even quakers themselves.
Reclamation can mean that (a) we do more of the work, and (b) everyone wins instead of the producer losing badly, as per usual. If it’s about a score, we’re inclined to leave it behind. We think we can do both: Social welfare AND the tastiest coffees in the business.
Welcome to Post Specialty.
Micah Sherer is a co-founder of Skylark who manages daily operations and coffee buying. He has previously worked in South America and Africa to better support coffee farmers, and his master's degree research focussed on the power dynamics of the coffee value chain.