STiR coffee and tea magazine

58 STiR coffee and tea | 2026 Quarter 2 Summer (Jun/July/Aug) S By Diana Jendoubi Michael Sheridan on the Power of Processing Q A TiR Coffee and Tea: A recent article published by Coffee Intelligence discusses how processing is overtaking origin as a means of communicating flavor. Why do you think processing is becoming the more dominant coffee language? Sheridan: Processing is having a moment, and we have a curriculum whose time has come. CQI's mission is to improve the quality of coffee and the lives of the people who produce it. I think our Post-Harvest Processing (PHP) program is a way for CQI to really advance its mission by leaps and bounds. For the first 30 years, CQI's main tool for advancing our mission was the Q Grader program. We succeeded in creating a common language of quality where none existed before. But as you know, cupping doesn't directly improve coffee quality. It improves people's ability to perceive, identify, and characterize quality, but not to create it. Michael Sheridan (above) is CEO of the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI), and an award-winning author who has been leveraging market forces to make coffee work for smallholder farmers and farm workers since 2004. Photo credit: Coffee Quality Institute So the Q itself is an important tool, but it's just one tool. The PHP program gives us the ability to really put our thumb on the scale of quality. As people start to understand processing, they begin to see how central it is to flavor formation and cup quality. Our work in educating, training, testing, and certifying professionals, as well as washing sta- tions and mills, directly supports our mission in a new way, which is thrilling. STiR: Is processing a way for producers to differentiate themselves and enter new markets? Sheridan: I think there is a new appreciation for processing because of what has been called the processing revolution. Processing is ascendant to- day, in a way that varietal lots were 15 years ago. The way I think about coffee has evolved over the years. My focus has shifted from reward to risk. Pursuing reward through innovation is im- portant, but it entails risk. As a buyer for Intel- ligentsia, I worked hard to balance these factors to create real incentives for innovation and increase rewards in the supply chain. But also doing it in a way that hedged the risk for everybody. Beginning with a producer who is, in most cas- es, the least able to bear risk — that is something that I think about in the context of this question, since all innovation and experimentation entails risk. It's important, as we continue on this path of collectively innovating, experimenting, and pushing the frontiers of flavor and understanding, that we do so in a way that protects people, mostly produc- ers, from the risk that's inherent in innovation. There are ways to do that by structuring small lots and pilots, making the first one or two about learning and refinement before scaling. This is an important aspect of CQI's courses and education. We focus on the science, but recognize that we also need to consider the business aspects of innovation. So we teach that in our courses, with the goal that the industry adopts those practices as well. STiR: How does focusing on processing further CQI's ul- timate mission of not only improving coffee quality but also farmer livelihoods? Sheridan: We're going to create better flavors, fewer off-flavors, fewer rejections, and more pre- miums. But at the same time, we want to work to help people adopt practices that will reduce the risk to the whole innovation system. People think of CQI as an educational organi- zation, and we certainly are. But we are also a devel- opment organization that works on the ground with producers to implement these practices in the field. Beginning with those good practices, you're try- ing to scale and generalize them across the board — hedging risk across the entire industry. That's what we did for over twenty years with the Q.

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