Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/491371
40 STiR tea & coffee industry international here are approximately 150 million green coffee beans in a shipping container – no two are identical, but many are similar in color. Would cupping scores improve if roasters could sort and selectively blend the dark, medium, and lightly colored green coffee beans by hue? Isolating the best from the rest is a challenge that begins with selective harvesting. The benefits of picking perfectly ripe cherries cannot be overstated (even as few as .5% of green cherries negatively impact flavor). Quality controls continue through hulling, polishing, and mechanical grading by size. The final step is tedious and labor-intensive culling by hand, known as garbling, often in combination with optical sorters. The Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. allows up to 23 defects per 350-gram sample. The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) Class 1 guidelines are far stricter: a bag of Class 1 beans has five secondary defects or fewer in a 350-gram sample. To reach that level of quality, producers need to rid the lot of many more flaws, including black, faded, sour, moldy, or crystallized beans. Nipped beans and those showing insect damage, immature beans, shrunken beans, and crushed beans must all be discarded to reach this highest class, one of five in SCAA guidelines. The reward for defect-free coffee is a substantially higher price over the approxi- mately $2 per pound paid for commodity coffee. Defect-free coffee may look great but frequently scores well below the 80 out of 100 points necessary to command prices as high as $25 per kilo. To get the highest price at auction the coffee must not only be clean, it has to display distinctive attributes in taste, aroma, body, acidity, and after taste. Roasters who perform a second sort by color may enhance that distinctiveness. Beyond class 1 During a demonstration of the capabilities of the latest generation of optical sorters at Satake USA's Houston headquarters, STiR wondered if there are any advantages in sorting for uniform characteristics beyond SCAA Class 1? The defect-free coffee remained a mix of colors. STiR asked: Would sorting by color make it possible for roasters to improve cupping scores? Sorting green coffee is time-consuming and until recently much too expensive to even test the idea of roasting beans of an identical hue. However, using sophisticated full-color optical sorters that eliminate defects in a single pass, STiR Tea & Coffee International asks: Is a second pass through the sorter to separate beans by color worth the effort? Uniformity: Sorting by Hue Bob Benck, Batdorf & Bronson Coffee Roasters Rob Hoos, Nossa Familia Coffee T Photo by Mike Russell By Dan Bolton and Jenny Neill