As I've posted recently, specialty coffee is specifically defined as (among other things) green coffee which is free of defects and must meet certain minimum standards. A 350-gram sample of green should yield no more than five secondary defects; and no primary defects are allowable.
Examples of secondary defects include: Shells, floaters, broken or chipped beans, insect damage, etc. Primary defect examples include: Full black beans, full sour beans, pods, large or medium sticks, and large or medium stones. With this in mind, I present to you a video which demonstrates the green sorting process:
Venture Coffee Company posted onto YouTube, yesterday, the video above which demonstrates the sorting process they are using for one of their coffees. In it, you will be able to see many of the defects I've listed above. Near the end of the video, the roaster mentions how he got the coffee at a low price because it had not yet been sorted.
Prior to seeing this video myself, I too had done a lot of thinking about the benefits and drawbacks of purchasing low-priced coffees. I have come to the following conclusions:
1) One may be able to get a coffee at a low price, but that price effectively increases the more defects are weeded out of the green. For this loss of green to be worth it to a roaster, the price must be sufficiently low in order to make it worth his time and the amount of green which is being discarded. Even then, the sorting process does not indicate that the remaining coffee will possess distinctive characteristics when considering the coffee's flavor, body, acidity, or aroma. Good processing is only a prerequisite of specialty coffee -- not an end in itself.
2) It might be more worthwhile for a roaster to begin by purchasing a coffee at a higher price and not having to go through this extensive process personally. If this processing has already been done and done well beforehand, he will be able to save valuable time and energy; and less of the green he buys will end up discarding as unusable.
Let me be clear, however: I have no idea if the coffee being sorted in this video is either good, bad, great, or awful. Without tasting it, that is impossible to determine. By no means do I intend to disparage Venture Coffee Company for making the decision to purchase this green. I'm assuming he has weighed the pros and cons of his decision and has gone the route which makes more sense to him in achieving his goals. Also, I have great admiration for them in making this process transparent for us to witness.
Another thing I admire about Venture: Like me, he is roasting on an Aillio -- which shows the amount of confidence start-up roasters like he and I have in this remarkable little machine! Think of it: He intends to roast thousands of pounds of coffee on this 1 kg roaster -- as I intend to do myself.
When I decided to start Rube's, I wanted to be certain that I had a machine which was capable of meeting the high standards which I've come to expect from roasting on some of the best machines in the business. Otherwise, I would have a hard time looking myself in the mirror. I only want to offer the best that I possibly can.
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