STiR coffee and tea magazine

22 STiR coffee and tea | 2022 Issue 4 (August/September) As customers become more sophisticated they start to shy away from the darker roasts. They go to a lighter roast because it has more flavor. The bean is the seed of the coffee fruit, and it has a lot of sugars in it. As you roast it, the sugars, with their subtle nuances, come to the surface. But eventually some of the nuances burn off. Then as the roast darkens you begin to taste the char of the roast, rather than the subtle flavors that are really wonderful. You know, they might be jasmine, chocolate, stone fruits. You were an executive at Starbucks for seven years during the company's early days. What did you do? It was before the company was public, and I was first brought in as an area manager to open up the Portland, Oregon market. One of the things I noticed right away is the efficiencies behind the counter. They weren't quite there. At that time, you had marketing departments saying, "it's taking 18 to 23 seconds to make a cup. So let's make it in 10 seconds, because we need to move the customer through the line faster." I said, well, wait a minute, if you change the brewing time, it's going to affect how that coffee tastes. But that was the challenge put to me: Get us to 10 seconds. So I watched all the move- ments. I did ergonomic studies, with timers hanging all over me. The people designing the stores didn't see these issues. If you are working at a big coffee bar and you have a big filter basket, and the trash is 10 feet away, then you might be dripping hot coffee over a barista who is bending down to get into the refrigerator behind the bar. So I said, for example, we need to put that function next to the trash. Anyway, I loved it. We were making great coffee, and it was just fun. And we were going to change the world. We wanted everyone learn to enjoy a great cup of coffee, whether it was a cappuccino or an espresso or just a filter-brewed coffee. We worked really hard. What defines a specialty coffee? First: how it's processed, whether it's clean and sweet. And how it represents "the taste of place." That's not just the terroir — it also represents each set of hands that touches the coffee. The people that pick the ripe coffee cherries, the people that pulp the coffee, removing the fruit from the seed. Then, how people are drying and fermenting it. Is it a wash process, a honey process, a natural process? How is that coffee milled, sorted, graded? Then, what about its packaging? Is the coffee exported in a shipping container that held cardamom before, or in a clean, sanitary container? Where and how is it stored? How is roasted? What does the barista decide to do with it? It goes through about 20 sets of hands, and any of those can make a difference in the chain of quality. I do a lot of training and working with baristas, and I tell them that they can break that chain of quality and negate everything that's gone before. It finally depends on that last set of hands that touch the cup of coffee. It's the barista's respon- sibility to pay attention and respect all that work that's gone before, and to do a good job of it. That way, customers will enjoy it and want to come back and pay good money for it again. In the end, it's that final step of quality that ensures the sustainability of those farms. You started out as a barista, ran cafes, became a cupper and now also work with farms. What can the farmer do to help make a better cup of coffee? You have to learn what to do for the health of the plant while it's still growing. I don't like the use of a lot of chemicals. It's expensive for the farmer, and you don't have to do it. The coffee going to taste better without all that stuff. The other important thing is picking ripe red coffee cherries. Maybe your father and your grandfather have always just gone to the coffee tree and taken the branch and just pulled off all the cherries. But it takes some finesse. If you pick the coffee cherries when they're not ripe, they don't continue to ripen. They will just be sour. You can wash the cherries, and the unripe ones float on top, and you can skim them off. But really the best thing to do is just go to the bush six or seven times over a long period of time throughout the harvest season if it's required. You pick only the ripe ones each time, one-by- one, just like raspberries or tomatoes. It's very labor-intensive. Then when you process the coffee cherries, use fresh water. Don't use the same water in the fermentation tank for a week straight. What are your favorite coffee origins? There are great coffees to be had in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica. But I've always liked to help the underdogs, the countries that don't have the big coffee boards. The hidden gems. So, I've done a lot of work in Burundi, Rwanda, India, Thailand, Honduras. I love Bolivia, too. STiR Q&A: Sherri Johns

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