Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries

Producer Toolkit: Quality Assurance, Pt 2 - The basics of good water for coffee

This episode takes you through the basics of good water for coffee. To objectively assess a coffee's quality, both producer and buyer need to taste it using the same wat

Producer Toolkit: Quality Assurance, Pt 1 - A practical guide to tasting and roasting coffee

This episode is a practical guide to tasting coffee, sample roasting and judging quality, built for small producers on a tight budget. That makes it just as useful if you

Producer Toolkit: Price, Pt 2 - Discovering the true value of coffee

What is the right price for coffee? This episode shows what the journey of price discovery looks like from the perspective of a coffee farmer. Part of The Coffee Produc

Producer Toolkit: Price, Pt 1 - How the commodity 'C' market works

This episode explores the strange world of the C market, where movements in the Brazilian currency or rebels boarding a random container ship decide the worth of a Colomb

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 uncom

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, sanctions,

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. And that

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.