Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries

Producer Toolkit: Marketing & Sales, Pt 2 - Navigating trade shows

This episode explores what a trade show actually feels like for a farmer who flew in on money his community pooled together, why a sausage dog opened a door that hundreds

Producer Toolkit: Marketing & Sales, Pt 1 - The power of story

This episode explores why specialty coffee is a luxury business that runs on story more than flavour. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration

Producer Toolkit: Fermentation, Pt 3 - Is using yeast cheating? And who decides?

This episode explores why 30 cents a kilo is trivial for a large farm and unaffordable for a small one, the strange power imbalance that lets roasters define quality when

Producer Toolkit: Fermentation, Pt 2 - The case for avoiding exciting fermentations

This episode explores why the specialty industry's obsession with exotic processing is a dangerous signal for farmers, five ways commercial microbes can make a farm more

Producer Toolkit: Fermentation, Pt 1 - Nature's lottery and coffee's 3,000-year lag

This episode explores why coffee is only fifteen years into a fermentation revolution that wine and bread went through millennia ago, what's actually happening inside the

Producer Toolkit: Processing, Pt 3 - Critical instruments and poisoned rivers

This episode explores how just a handful of cheap instruments can ensure quality is reproducible year-on-year, and the wastewater crisis poisoning rivers behind picture-p

Producer Toolkit: Processing, Pt 2 - Drying mistakes that ruin coffee quality

This episode explores the simple drying mistakes that compromise months of careful work, and the low-cost fixes that protect a coffee's shelf life and flavour. Part of T

Producer Toolkit: Processing, Pt 1 - Coffee rockstars and picking’s brutal economics

This episode explores why chasing avant-garde processing before nailing the basics is a trap for most producers, the brutal economics behind selectively picking and ways

Producer Toolkit: Farming, Pt 3 - Starved soils and vanishing labour

This episode explores what plants really need from the soil beneath them, and the labour shortage forcing farms to rethink how the work gets done. Part of The Coffee Pro

Producer Toolkit: Farming, Pt 2 - Water crisis, risky genetics and cash flow crunch

This episode explores the growing water crisis in coffee farming, why farmers are drawn to risky coffee varieties and coffee farming's hidden cashflow traps. Part of The

Producer Toolkit: Farming, Pt 1 - Low harvests and profit blind spots

Welcome to The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis. This series will help you understand coffee farming better than most professiona

History: Guatemala’s Inconvenient Truth, Pt 2

Specialty coffee changes the story for the indigenous people of Guatemala. Coffee as a tool of oppression finally offers hope....and then something a bit more complicated

History: Guatemala’s Inconvenient Truth, Pt 1

When you buy a bag of coffee labelled fifth-generation family farm, it feels like a good choice.    But in Guatemala, that label might actually be a signal for a more u

History: Surrogates - Anything but the coffee

What happens when coffee disappears?   This is not a thought experiment! It’s happened many times in history: War, blockades, tariffs, ideology, health panics, sanction

History: Ethiopia’s wild coffee forests

Most coffee is grown on vast plantations using machines, pesticides and fertilisers.    But in Ethiopia, coffee grows wild in humid forests surrounded by birds.    An

History: Hamburg and Europe’s coffee trade

On a long walk through Hamburg, somewhere between the fish markets and giant cranes, you might stumble a giant bronze coffee bean looks like its crash landed from space. 

Introducing: Series Three of A History of Coffee

We’re back with more stories about the tiny psychoactive seed that changed the world and continues to shape our lives today. Is it possible to follow the story not just

Science: Coffee Quality, Pt 3 - When the “quality” myth hits the farm

For twenty years, the 2004 cupping form profoundly shaped the specialty coffee world.   But on the hillsides of coffee farms, some of the form’s byproducts have been di

Science: Coffee Quality, Pt 2 - How “quality” became a myth

If you ask two specialty professionals what makes a high-quality coffee, you’ll likely get a surprisingly consistent answer: clean, sweet, juicy, bright. To an outsider,

Science: Coffee Quality, Pt 1 - The birth of specialty coffee flavours

For the longest time, coffees were dull and bitter. But then a small group of pioneers changed the world.    In this episode, we travel back to the 1960s and ’70s to me