The Coffee Producer Toolkit #7: Storage

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In this seventh episode, we give you a practical manual to protect the quality you've worked so hard to create, all the way from the coffee tree to the export container.

During picking, we look at why heavy jute sacks crush and heat your cherries, and why smaller, ventilated, stackable baskets protect both your fruit and your workers.

On the drying patio, we cover what unseasonal rain does to your parchment, from mould to faster fading, and compare plastic tarps with a collapsible dryer that zips shut. We also hear what Flávio Borém's research says about multi-phase drying.

Once the coffee leaves the farm, we follow it through warehouses, ports and shipping containers. We hear what happens to jute sacks at the port of Cartagena, explain why regular plastic sacks aren’t good enough to protect coffee and how GrainPro's multi-layer bags block both oxygen and moisture.

And we finish with the money: what hermetic bags cost, how to clean and reuse them, and why you should build their cost into your price when a buyer asks you for a micro-lot.

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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