A friendly reflection on twenty years of Quaffee, what coffee has taught us, and how we are celebrating with a few special coffees.
TL;DR
- Quaffee is turning 20, and this newsletter reflects on what two decades in coffee have taught us.
- Coffee begins long before roasting: farming, processing, pricing, and relationships all shape what ends up in the cup.
- The coffee industry often pays too little attention to producers, especially when pricing is driven by commodity markets and convenience.
- Quaffee has learnt to focus on quality, consistency, thoughtful sourcing, and the small group of coffee lovers who value those things.
- The celebration is centred where it should be: on coffee, including some special lots.
Intro
Twenty years feels like a good moment to pause, not only to look back, but to share what this journey has taught us. Quaffee began with a simple idea: fresh-roasted coffee, chosen with care, for fellow South Africans who wanted something better in the cup. Two decades later, that idea still guides us.
While putting together this newsletter, I was tempted, as many people are, to look back at what has passed. Instead, I thought it would be more useful to share the take-home lessons from the journey: what we have come to understand about coffee, and about its place in South Africa.
Some of What the Journey Has Taught Us
These lessons are not listed in any strict order. We start at the farm and follow coffee’s journey towards the cup.
Coffee Begins with Farming, Not Branding
One of the clearest lessons is that coffee is agricultural before it is anything else. Every cup begins with a farm, a harvest, weather, soil, labour, cost and risk. Long before it becomes a roast profile, a label or an espresso, it has already been shaped by people whose work is often the least visible part of the chain.
Coffee is also grown mostly in poorer producing countries and consumed mostly in wealthier markets. Many of those consuming markets enjoy the result without having much interest in the dilemmas faced by the people who grow it. That imbalance sits quietly behind almost every cup, and it is one of the reasons why price alone is such a poor way to judge coffee.
Brazil Shapes the Price
Brazil sets the tone for coffee pricing across the world. Its farms are among the largest in coffee, rely heavily on mechanisation, and need far fewer workers per hectare than most origins. There is good Brazilian coffee, but most Brazilian coffee is commoditised and forms the base of a huge amount of the coffee sold globally.
Depending on the year, Brazil produces roughly 30% to 40% of the world’s coffee. Because Western coffee markets are tied so closely to the commodity futures price, news from Brazil ripples through the entire industry. The uncomfortable result is that traders in New York and London, reacting mostly to Brazil, influence a price that affects millions of farmers and farming families around the world.
There are about 300,000 farmer-producers in Brazil. That represents roughly 2.5% of the world’s farmer-producers, with the global total sitting just below 13 million farming families. Yet the livelihoods of many of those families are influenced by pricing signals that often start with Brazil. Living wage rarely factors into that calculation. In short, futures traders in New York and London use mostly news from Brazil to help set the price of a commodity that affects almost 13 million people, and that is still an underestimate.
Globally coffee pricing is always variable, but there is another lesson we have seen again and again. When raw coffee prices rise sharply, those increases normally move through to retail prices. When prices correct downwards, very few in the industry reduce their selling prices again. The market remembers the increase far more easily than it remembers the correction.
Coffee Is a Chain of Responsibilities
Coffee travels through many hands before it reaches the person drinking it. It begins with farmers and producers, then moves through exporters, importers, agents, roasters, retailers and finally consumers. Each part of that chain has a duty. If one part only chases margin and ignores the people before or after it, the whole chain becomes weaker.
Good coffee is never the work of one person alone. It is the result of enough care being carried from the farm all the way to the cup. The farmer, producer, exporter, importer, roaster and consumer all shape the final outcome, even if only some of them are visible to the person drinking it.
Coffee Farming Is the Most Neglected By Consumers
We are fascinated by where coffee comes from, how it gets to us as roasters, and how each step in the process has its own challenges. What has stood out to us is how little interest there is, overall, in where coffee comes from. In the decades we have spent researching and learning about coffee, one fact stands out: very few people seem to share that fascination. If you look for books on coffee farming and production, they probably make up one in every hundred coffee books, if that. Most focus on the final step of the chain.
If you follow your friendly YouTube coffee people, look at the view counts on the videos they have made about coffee farming and production. I’ll give you an example: Tim Wendelboe. His brew-guide videos have more than 20,000 views. He worked with a professional team and made a full documentary about some of the farms he works with, yet those videos have less than 10% of the views, even with his promotion. Tim is on the esoteric side of the industry, but those in the know, know of him, so his followers are the most passionate coffee drinkers.
The most popular YouTube coffee personality, “The Hoff”, has his highest view counts on his brewing videos. The few videos he has on farm visits receive less than 1% of those views.
In the industry, this is often summarised as “all coffee has a home.” Most coffee drinkers will always be happy with coffee that is inexpensive and familiar. There is nothing wrong with that. The challenge is that when coffee is treated purely as a commodity, the sacrifices are usually carried by the people producing it. Beyond that layer are good-value coffees that cost a little more but offer much better quality and a more thoughtful return. Then there are affordable quality coffees that give a first hint of complexity; these are often called entry-level speciality coffees. A step above that are higher-quality coffees produced by co-operatives, farmer groups and producer groups that have taken real care in sorting and selecting for quality. These come at a small premium, but they offer the greatest return to the coffee lover and have benefits down the chain too.
After that layer come the smaller lots: single-farm coffees, small quality microlots, producer-led experiments, and the more obsessive projects where every detail is watched, from seed to the final packing of the green coffee. At the very top of the pyramid are the competition, auction and exclusive lots. They are tiny in volume, as an estimate less than 1% of the industry, but they can represent meaningful paydays for farmers and producers, even if they are often more like a bonus than a stable income. And in the cup, they leave their mark.
Coffee Processing Can Make a Good Coffee Great
When we receive coffees, we can usually tell whether the coffee has been cared for up to that point. Few things are more disappointing than seeing a poorly processed coffee. It is sad to think that a farm may have done careful, difficult work, only for something to go wrong after the coffee was picked. That said, a good coffee that is well processed can truly shine. Care shows up in several ways:
- Care taken when removing it from the fruit (this step can be skipped in naturals);
- Careful drying, without exposing it to too much heat or moisture;
- Ensuring the moisture activity is at the right level when deemed ready to be milled;
- Milling done with attention to the final product;
- Consideration given to packing it for shipping.
A coffee that is treated well, will perform well in the cup. The better it is cared for, the more complex and longer-lasting it can be.
The sad part is how often one of these steps is neglected. A badly packaged coffee ages quickly and loses complexity, even if all the earlier steps were done with devotion. Of all the processing steps, drying has had the most noticeable effect on the final coffee we are able to produce. A coffee that is carefully dried, with low moisture activity, often produces a more complex cup and lasts longer as green coffee.
Coffee Tourism Is a Thing
Like many in the coffee industry, I initially bought into the idea that we had to visit origin countries to see where the coffee came from and meet the people behind it. And yes, it was meaningful (to me) to visit places I had only read about, experience local cultures, meet coffee farmers and see production sites. But I also came to realise that these trips often benefit the coffee visitor far more than the farmer. The money spent visiting those wonderful places can be more than some farmers live on in a year. After my trip to Mexico, where we bought one of the auction lots, I realised that if I had stayed home and joined the auction online, I could have bought the top four lots with the money spent getting there and back. The one lot we bought, which placed in the top 20 of 50 high-quality lots, changed a family’s life. If I had bought more, more families could have been affected.
Tom Owen of Sweet Maria’s has said that if you are going to be a coffee tourist, then be one honestly and recognise that the benefit is mostly yours. Using the story to imply you are a coffee hunter can be misleading. We do not hunt for coffee; we select it. The people on the ground, doing the daily work that makes those coffees available, are the real heroes. Too often, they are the people the industry and coffee lovers notice least.
Big Brands Are Limited to the Quality They Can Offer
Because the majority of quality coffee- around 5% to 15% of production (depending on who defines quality) is relatively small-lot coffee, these lots are rarely practical for larger companies. For a company that roasts more than a tonne a week, these coffees seldom come into consideration. Small and craft coffee roasters are the primary consumers of quality coffees. If quality is what you want, it is worth looking beyond brands that place media presence above all else.
South African-Grown Coffee Is Still Finding Its Feet
Over the years we have offered three coffees from South Africa. We would love that number to be much higher, but the local growing industry still has a long way to go. There are fewer than 100 producers, the area under coffee is still small, and reliable quality volumes are limited.
That said, we are hopeful. Coffee production does a great deal for South African coffee, and there are people who care deeply about seeing the industry become stronger. The next decade will be important, and we hope it brings more producers, more consistency, and more South African coffees we can be proud to offer.
South Africa’s Coffee Market Is Still Mostly Price Driven
In South Africa, coffee is driven mainly by three sectors: retail and hospitality, corporate in-house coffee supply, and the large grocery chains. In most of these spaces, price is still the primary driver. The lower the price, the happier the accountants behind those sectors tend to be.
In these sectors, price is king. There are only a few standouts that consistently choose quality over the lowest possible cost. The direct-to-consumer market is different, because home coffee drinkers are often more willing to pay attention to freshness, flavour and the story behind the coffee they select.
Home Coffee Drinkers Are the Most Quality Focused
The fussiest coffee drinker in South Africa is, by far, the home coffee drinker. This was the original market I envisioned we would offer a solution to, which hardly existed. This service is still the largest part of our offering. Our biggest surprise is an odd pattern: people will often spend more on equipment than they will spend on actual coffee they will consume over many years. In two decades of offering equipment, we have met hundreds of prosumers who were willing to spend tens of thousands on machines and grinders, but far fewer than that who consistently put the quality of the coffee ahead of how the equipment looked on the shelf.
That may sound cynical, but the real coffee lovers tend to do the basics very well. They select coffees with attention to freshness, quality, grind and water. In short, they care more about what is in the cup than about the image around it.
Most Coffee Consumers Are Drawn to Convenience
Most coffee consumers are understandably drawn to convenience. Many would rather accept average coffee than add extra steps to their day. For us, coffee is a love affair, so this realisation was a hard one to accept. We would rather forgo than settle, but we have found we are in the minority, but a minority we are delighted to be part of. Thankfully, we seem to have found our people: those who also place quality above convenience.
Real Coffee Lovers Care About More Than Coffee
This may sound biased, but the real coffee lovers I have met are some of the most wonderful people I have known. They care about coffee, but they also tend to care about people, fairness, detail, and the way they engage with the world. The amount someone earns does not always match what they are willing to spend on coffee. Some of the fussiest coffee drinkers we know are careful with money, but their philosophy is simple: buy less, buy well, and make it count.
The Industry Does Not Always Show Up to Learn
The South African coffee industry has many people involved in it, yet educational events are often among the poorest attended. Not exhibitions, sponsored talks or coffee fashion events, but the events where farmers, producers, importers or industry leaders share knowledge, taste special coffees, show the effect of variables in the coffee chain, or help us understand something more about the product we love. These events are too often attended by only a handful of people. We have seen this again and again, from coffee tastings in 2016 to recent opportunities to taste exceptional award-winning coffees. It remains surprising how little interest there can be in the rare and special, and in learning how to get the most out of selecting, roasting and brewing coffee.
Those broader industry lessons naturally lead back to Quaffee itself: how we chose to work, what we built for customers, and what we discovered along the way.
Lessons from Quaffee
Quaffee Was Built Around a Different Way of Ordering
When I started Quaffee, one of the ideas was to build something for people like me: people who wanted a simple system that would remind them when their coffee might be running low and allow them to order straight away. That reminder system has been running since 2007, and it still surprises me how few customers use it fully. Emails go out the week before, yet only around 15% of our orders come directly from those reminders.
A much larger part of Quaffee has been our subscription system, which has never been a one-size-fits-all model. About 40% of subscribers prefer a narrower choice of blends, but most use the speciality range that rotates all the time, including new coffees as they arrive. Unlike broadly adopted subscriptions where everyone receives the same thing, ours is shaped around each person.
Our tracking system has also become central to how we handle orders and repairs. Customers who are exposed to it seem to love the visibility it gives them. We recently went through a major rewrite of the system, and although there are always things to improve, it feels like it is moving in the right direction.
Functional Recyclable Packaging
We spent years testing and locally sourcing our coffee packaging. The testing we did was to ensure that the coffee itself was well preserved and that packaging be reusable while it contained coffee and home recyclable or reusable. For us, it has been surprising how important some have found the appearance to be in spite of functionality. We have stuck to our guns and have seen how the latest research has justified our decision.
The Importance of Relationships
The relationships we have been able to form at all levels of the coffee industry are the cornerstone of Quaffee’s ability to access great coffees. South Africa is a small player in the speciality and higher-quality coffee tiers. Without the people we have met and built relationships with, we would be lost. To them, we owe a deep debt of gratitude.
Consistency Needed Its Own System
Another lesson came from our custom roastery system. Implementing it in early 2011 was a major step for us in building consistency into the way we roast. Since then, over 14 tonnes of coffee have been roasted using the system. That tracking has helped us maintain a high standard of roasting and made consistency less dependent on memory, mood or guesswork. It is our one of the critical ingredients in our secret sauce.
Quaffee Has Chosen Its Levels
Our lesson from engaging with all levels of the coffee industry has been that, while we have tasted some truly extraordinary coffees, the number of South African consumers who will pay for, or even appreciate, those rather special coffees is limited. That is why most of our coffees sit in what we think of as good commodity and entry-level affordable quality. Every now and then we will choose a special microlot, unusual or award-winning coffee, knowing that we will probably drink 10% to 20% of it ourselves and that the balance will go to the elite group of coffee lovers who really appreciate it.
We have also learnt that these high-quality lots work best for us when we source between 30 kg and 60 kg. A volume of this size is about the right size for South Africa’s enlightened coffee drinkers. These coffees often will take between six and eight months to sell. Once they are gone, they are missed by those few people. However, keeping them longer is disrespectful to these coffees and the people behind them. Coffee has a window where it shows its best, and after that the story changes.
Of interest is how long it can take for these coffees to be discovered. We recently took a gamble on a special lot and purchased 120 kg. The first 60 kg took seven months to sell, and we thought we might waste this special coffee. The next 60 kg sold in two months, and only then did people start asking for it.
High-end coffees ARE rare; it takes time for people to find them, but there is only a limited period in which they can be excellent.
We Can Only Roast and Choose from Where We Stand
At Quaffee, we have learnt that our roasting and coffee selection are shaped by our own taste. At times, we taste with a particular customer in mind and imagine what they might enjoy. Still, we cannot experience coffee exactly as our customers do; we can only make an informed judgement about what they may like. That limitation is also a blessing: it keeps us honest about our preferences and reminds us to keep listening.
I often say every roastery leaves its own signature on a coffee. Some people will prefer that roast style and coffee character, and that is how a following develops.
All of that brings us back to the thing itself: the coffee in the cup, how we taste it, and what we have learnt from brewing and sharing it.
What About the Coffee?
So, what lessons have we learned from tasting, selecting, roasting and offering coffees to all those who have supported us? Some of them we have already covered. For many people, freshly roasted coffee is a revelation. While this may have been what first brought us into the industry, we have learned much more about coffee since then. My subjective view of how we consume coffee follows this basic process:
- Coffee drinkers typically start by chasing umami: mouthfeel, body and texture. For them, what the coffee feels like in the mouth is the main driver.
- Some move on from this and start exploring flavours, typically beginning with nutty, spicy and cocoa-based notes. These flavours replace the desire for umami with a more complex flavour experience.
- From there, sweetness starts playing its part. For those who get to the point where they explore beyond nuttiness and cocoa, sweetness starts becoming important.
- Fruit and floral notes are the hardest flavours to find in a coffee. Only the best coffees have these flavours. Some people perceive this only as acidity and do not like it, but I believe acidity in coffee usually relates to how the coffee is brewed, or to a lower-quality coffee that has not been roasted correctly. The more fruitiness and floral notes in a coffee, the higher the quality of the coffee.
There are some exceptions to this basic guideline. With alternative processing becoming more popular, we have seen coffees that have deep cocoa notes as well as sweetness and fruit. While the balance of these flavours is subjective, it is the secret ingredient that makes the coffee work.
In short, the best coffees we have tasted all have fruity and floral characteristics. While some may have nuts, spice and cocoa too, fruit and floral are the most distinguishing factor of a quality coffee.
And Brewing?
We have learnt a lot about the brewing of coffee, and it is a popular form of obsession among coffee lovers. We put together our ABCD Brewing Guide on our YouTube channel, and that has most of what we wanted to say. Summarising is hard, but the basics are:
- A is for acidity, which is linked to being underdone: under-roasted, under-ground, or under-extracted. If a coffee is too acidic, then you have not done enough.
- B is for balance; as you move out of under-extraction, you develop balance.
- C is for caramel, where we hit the sweet spot. But be careful: go too far with over-roasting, over-grinding, or over-extracting, and you hit
- D for deteriorated.
The trick of the perfect brew is making sure you source a coffee that has A, B and C in sync without moving to D, and then brew it with those guidelines.
That said, many people love an over-extracted coffee, saying it has body, is strong and hits the spot. So, the real lesson we have learnt is to learn what you like, then either try to learn another style or stick with what you love.
In Summary
Reflection has its benefits, although every reflection is only a version of what we remember. Having spent more than two decades in the corporate IT world and now two decades in coffee, I can honestly say that, for all I lost in leaving corporate life, I still love the coffee industry. I love the coffee, the people I connect with on a daily and weekly basis, and the beauty of being a tiny cog in an industry that is still trying to do better for people. I met some passionate people in IT, but coffee people are different. Whether as consumers or as people in the industry, the ones we engage with are wonderful.
And because this is a coffee story, it feels right to end not only with reflection, but with something to enjoy.
After twenty years, Quaffee’s biggest lesson is still simple: choose coffee with care, spend where it makes a difference, and keep the people behind the cup in mind.
Celebrating with Coffee
With all we have learnt, the major take-home lesson for us is to spend our meagre coins where they make the most difference. So, in celebration of our two decades, we have concentrated on the coffee rather than the event. While not all of these coffees have landed yet, here are some to look out for:
- Alo Coffee, Ethiopia: There are some special groups that take processing and selecting to the next level, and Alo Coffee is one of them. We will be offering one of their shade-grown coffees. It is one of the most complex coffees we have had for a while. Look out for it on the website and Instagram.
- Colombian Microlot: So many of our favourite coffees over the years have been microlots from Caravela. It took us a lot of planning and negotiating to get a great Colombian microlot from Caravela. The good news is that this may pave the way for us to bring Caravela coffees in again.
Yirgacheffee: In 2016 we visited a few coffee washing stations when we travelled to Ethiopia. Of all the regions of Ethiopia, a good speciality coffee from Yirgacheffee is one we are always eager to offer. We have one on the way.
