Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries

This episode explores the black box between coffee leaving the farm and the roaster's warehouse, and how quality can be ruined. Wrapping the coffee in any old plastic bag won't do. We get geeky looking at how hermetic bags like GrainPro actually work. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most p...

This episode explores the many ways coffee can get ruined while still on the farm, including fishy concrete tanks, the importance of not using jute sacks to collect coffee cherries, and solutions to unpredictable rains ruining coffee drying on the patio. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than mos...

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 water. But whose water standards should you choose? Why do roasters often get to define what the "right" water is? What would the coffee world look like if producers set quality standards instead of roasters? Part of The Coffee Produc...

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’re early in your coffee journey and want to learn the basics without spending thousands on equipment, starting with a frying pan or a $30 popcorn popper. If you work in coffee, it reveals the obstacles producers face when they tr...

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 Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes one part of the farming business - agronomy, pr...

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 Colombian farmer's coffee. Yet specialty coffee still uses this number to price the coffees it says are anything but a commodity. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you un...

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 of cold emails couldn't, and why learning English may be a better investment for a farmer than a longer fermentation. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you underst...

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 with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes one part of the farming business — agronomy, processing, fermentation, storage, quality,...

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 nobody asks a winemaker what yeast they used, and how producers can talk to buyers who think starter cultures are cheating. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you u...

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 money, and what a well-run fermentation looks like on farms of very different sizes. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than mos...

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 tank when microbes multiply into billions on their own, and why farmers who used to ferment as fast as possible are now trying to do the opposite.  Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia So...

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-perfect coffee farms. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes...

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 The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes one part of the farming busines...

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 to sort coffee cherries in the wet mill.  Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show...

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 Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes one part of the farming business — agronomy,...

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 Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , this series will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes one part of the farming...

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 professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes one part of the farming business — agronomy, processing, fermentation, storage, quality, sales — and lays out what the best farms are actually doing.  In this first episode, we co...

Welcome to The Coffee Producer Toolkit, an eight episode series to help producers have long-term profitable farms. Hosted by coffee journalist James Harper ( Filter Stories podcast ) and fermentation specialist Lucia Solis ( Making Coffee with Lucia Solis podcast ), this series breaks down essential topics including agronomy, fermentation, pricing, sales, and marketing. In this introductory episod...

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.   This episode explores the tension between the values of the Mayan communities who grow coffee, and the values that drive the specialty coffee movement.   Many of the signals we typically look for in our coffees - super-special...

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 uncomfortable truth.   This episode explores how land has been understood, used, and eventually fought over in Guatemala for centuries between indigenous people, Europeans and those in-between.   It’s a story of what happened immedia...

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, supply shocks.    When coffee is not around, people still need something warm, comforting, and familiar. And throughout history, people have reached for coffee surrogates: roasted plants and grains engineered to look like coffee…...

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 wild coffee matters more than most of us realise. It is the genetic ‘library’ we can turn to find new varieties to help us keep coffee thriving in the face of climate change.    But the communities who live alongside them and h...

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.    But this giant coffee bean represents a staggering fact: one in every three cups of coffee drunk in Europe has passed through Hamburg.    In the first half of this episode, we explore the many profound ways coffee shaped one of...

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 to Ethiopia, not just to a single town, but all the way back to one tree? We’ll uncover the uncomfortable history of Guatemala — a story about who inherited the rich volcanic soil, and who was forced to work it. We explore what hap...

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 disadvantaging producers.    In this episode, we follow two producers whose lives collided with the myth of universal quality. These stories reveal how a single idea of “quality” can close doors for the people with the least power in...