The Coffee Producer Toolkit #6: Quality Control

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In this sixth episode, we give you a practical manual to judge your own coffee quality, so you can negotiate with buyers on a level playing field.

We start with the simplest step of all: drinking your own coffee. We cover how to brew and taste it, how to build a catalogue of its flavours, and why tasting your neighbours' coffees in a monthly tasting club gives you negotiating power.

Then we look at sample roasting, and why a producer's goal is consistency rather than the perfect roast. With help from Thompson Owen of Sweet Maria's, we go from roasting in a pan, to a $30 popcorn popper, to top-end sample roasters, and lay out the basics of a consistent roast: weight, moisture loss, time and your own senses.

We spend a good part of the episode on water, the most overlooked factor in how your coffee tastes on the cupping table. We start with a blind test at World of Coffee Geneva, where the same coffee tasted completely different just by changing the water. Then we explain alkalinity, how to test it with an inexpensive drip kit and what range to aim for, and we compare the options for getting good water on your farm: bottled water, distilled water with mineral sachets, under-sink filtration, and a full system that matches what your buyers use.

And we finish with grading. How to use the Coffee Value Assessment to describe your coffee in the same language as your buyers and why you should always get more than one independent opinion on your quality.

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is the podcast that helps you run a more profitable coffee farm.

Hosted by coffee journalist James Harper (Filter Stories podcast) and fermentation specialist Lucia Solis (Making Coffee with Lucia Solis podcast), it's built for farmers who want to run their farm like the business it is.

Over two years we interviewed 50+ producers and experts across 20 countries. Each episode takes one part of the business — agronomy, processing, fermentation, storage, quality, sales — and lays out what the best farms are doing.

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