Original subtitles

Coffee is something I drink every day.

But I never take it for granted.

There's always this moment when I'm holding the cup of coffee.

I'm, like, grateful for it...

and then there's just this moment there that feels... sacred.

There were moments when I was very young...

and my parents would drink coffee and begging to open the can.

You know? It's like...

It was vacuum-packed. Like... Smelled so good.

And then there was that tension,because it was, like...

“Ah! How can something that smells so great taste so horrible?”

And I think it was that tension that made it mysterious and interesting.

I think the thing that got me most excited in coffee in the beginning was taste.

Like, “What's inside that cup?”

Mornings like today, I just did not want to get out of bed...

and I think, like,“Oh, but I can go have coffee.”

And it's, like, that thought never gets old.

This is a story about coffee.

And every story about coffee has the same chapters...

or has the same acts, but the details are totally different.

When you talk about the idea of...

specialty coffee versus commodity coffee...

and they're two entirely different things.

And when you look at who actually understands it...

it's remarkably few.

The specialty market is your higher-end coffee, so to speak.

And the commodity is typically sold to your big brands.

Most coffee is traded on this blanket price...

irrespective of the quality that it carries with it...

and almost regardless of where it comes from.

Then you have this other world.

The quality that is produced in specialty...

and the fact that every hand that comes into play there...

dramatically affects what you taste in the cup.

I don't think it registers in a lot of people's mind.

They don't realize that it's such a wide gap.

The commercial coffee market has been stagnant since the '60s.

This is coffee?

But specialty has been growing at about 10% a year.

A lot of it's just putting it

People experience something and find out,

What is it about it that isn't

The ideal of specialty coffee is transparency.

And that's-that's both flavor...

and that's also production...

you know,and-and-and the facts of the coffee... knowing where it comes from.

If you look at coffee historically...

Ethiopians have been drinking coffee since 500 or 600.

And hundreds of years ago, people took coffee...

from eastern Ethiopia to Yemen.

And then coffee went from there to Indonesia.

And it went from there to a greenhouse in Europe.

And one plant was taken from there to Martinique.

That one plant became the forefather...

of all the coffee that was grown in Latin America for a long time.

All that time, coffee's been special and treasured and unique and precious.

And it was only relatively recently historically that it became ubiquitous.

You know? Like the 20th century.

Honey, this coffee is the greatest.

Then it became commonplace in everybody's house.

Easy to get to.

You know, “you go down to the corner, every restaurant has it” kind of thing?

That's an historical anomaly.

How did something that's so exotic...

all of a sudden become kind of a mainstay of our culture?

Like, we're a coffee-drinking culture, and that clearly is embedded. It's there.

There had been in the '90s this sort of boom mentality.

Starbucks is growing,everybody's growing.

Drinks and syrups and everything. It was this fiesta of coffee.

And ten, nine, eight, seven, six...

five, four, three, two, one.

Happy 2000!

In 2000, there was a big problem.

The bottom fell out of the coffee market.

Scuffles erupted in Colombia on Monday...

after scores of angry farmers stopped work...

to demand an increase in government subsidies...

as compensation for falling coffee prices and meager harvests.

Coffee went from being at a normal level...

of, say, $1.25 a pound for green to 60, 50 cents a pound.

And that was way below the cost of production for coffee farmers.

Suddenly we were looking at actual famine in the coffee world.

Commodities are by nature interchangeable.

That's what commodities are.

When you commodify something you say...

Okay, I'm gonna make it so that I'll never run out of this thing...

and I will be able to have a bunch of perfect copies of the same thing.

Commodification was important for the food industry.

They invented it at a time where they were trying to stabilize food supplies.

But in coffee, that means extinguishing its specialness...

to have it conform to “coffee-ness.”

And that standard is pretty low.

Higher-quality coffee means higher prices...

which sounds like something that you would take for granted...

but that's a revolutionary idea...

especially in the countries where coffee is grown.

I think truly good coffees are harder to get, you know?

Today we're starting to see cafés presenting coffees...

and they're single farm, single origin.

And they're not fair trade anymore only.

They're...They are now direct trade.

This has now brought coffee farmers who are really caring...

who are real craftsmen

it's allowing them, for the first time...

to be independent of the commodity market...

and the swings that take place where for years in a row...

they could be paid under the cost of production.

If you go back in time and look at the beginnings...

of some of the new coffee movements...

it was that there's got to be something better.

There's got to be something more unique, and how do we get closer to it?

The D.T., the direct-trade stuff...

the incentives are based on performance...

and if we're able to assist and help, we can't do it from here.

There are certain things that could not have gotten accomplished...

in terms of knowing certain areas and when they're cultivating...

when they're harvesting, why they're processing those particular coffees.

And that doesn't happen without the exchange.

Um, since 2005 we've been very involved...

in this particular area in the southern district of Huye.

We are very committed to continue to buy and source from this area...

because of the culture and the quality of the coffee...

and, really, the partnership that we've been able to establish.

Um, without all of the layers of people that are involved...

to bring, um, coffee to our market, it wouldn't work.

So it's not just a business transaction...

but it's a partnership and it's a relationship.

We're really trying to make sure...

that we reinforce not just the buying of the coffee...

but the things that help build communities.

You know, that's a big part of it.

Even the more expensive...

seven dollars a cup coffee that people see in their boutique café...

is underpriced with the amount of hours and labor...

and everything that goes into it.

They say, on average, one coffee tree...

produces about a pound of coffee a year.

Most of the coffee grown outside of large farms in Brazil...

is handpicked.

You start doing the math on how many pounds of coffee...

are sold just in your corner café.

So that's somebody that's reaching up and pulling every little cherry down.

So we're talking a lot of labor. A lot of labor.

And that's just the picking part.

Processing...If you're getting ripe fruit and ripe coffee...

that's the landscape.

So now you've picked the beautiful landscape.

But the processing is like the window through which you see the landscape.

If the processing isn't perfect,your window's dirty.

All of these things involve...

tremendous focus on the part of the people doing it.

It becomes critical to find coffees...

that are done with that kind of artisan attention to detail and commitment.

Once we take someone to origin, everybody's always blown away...

because they just see...

the things that nobody else gets to see that make up that cup.

I think the sense that it's a living thing.

It's something that isn't just like a widget in a box.

All the while there's tons of challenges...

that could get in the way of the quality.

You know, in Rwanda, we saw that.

There isn't some fancy meter to come in and make sure...

that the coffees are ready to come out of the fermentation tanks.

It's done by hand, literally, or, you know, done by feet...

like we talked about, where people are trying to move that mucilage...

that honey goo substance off of the parchment.

There's still tons of hands that touch that coffee...before it gets exported,

and we probably would say...

at least nine different sets of processes or people involved...

like, make that happen.

All of the drying, making sure that coffees are evenly turned...

so that they're consistent.

You know, those are a couple examples... of, like, just having to hand-care for coffee.

It's cosmic in scale...

how coffee can come that far and become...

bizarrely, an ordinary thing on everybody's breakfast table.

Somehow it ends, once it's roasted...

that people have this kind of, like, static sense of what it is...

that it's not alive anymore that it's kind of just something...

that's just ground and put into a brewer...

and it's a brown solution that wakes you up.

After people started working with farmers...

trying to celebrate individual coffees and individual producers of coffee...

then you wanted to accentuate the differences...

the nuances in the coffee what made it special.

That led to lighter roasting.

Those super-unique coffees tend to be...

from the minute you look at the samples and start to examine them...

you know that this looks good, and even when we sample roast...

a lot of insight's gained.

So when Craig is roasting...

he's seeing things that are developing in the coffee...

and before he even cups it, it's like kind of a window.

The moment that it's harvested, all the quality is there...

and nobody who comes next in the chain...

is gonna add quality to the coffee.

Everybody's gonna take away a little bit.

And I think that the goal should be to take away as little as possible...

and really try to reveal what is locked into that coffee...at the moment of harvest.

The message starts to be, for single origin...

you wanna do a light roast.

The awareness that dark roast covers things.

It's like a heavy sauce.

I think there's that sense...

that there's something still undiscovered in a way...

like maybe from more of a flavor point of view.

It's kind of tough, um...

with, um, odor.

Because you have that wood smoke that's happening outside.

That's why you want a kind of controlled space, but just

Maybe those first moments... of having a coffee experience and thinking...

if they'd just done something maybe a little bit differently

processing or harvesting or fermentation

that there may be some other layer...

something that has yet to be experienced, you know?

And then we might backtrack and find out...

“Oh, well, there were some different varieties... in that particular outturn.”

I thought there was potato.

Yeah, it's really strong. I think it's best just to leave off.

And then we'll give that flavor feedback.

Then that kind of sounds off for people that are on the producer side saying...

“That's interesting. You caught that.”

Once we grind, you really have about 30 minutes maximum, really...

before you start losing some of the aromatics.

I think, you know, those super kind of unique coffees...

tend to be, from the minute you look at the samples...

and start to examine them, you know that this looks unique or special.

Now all I gotta do is try to bring that back.

I can't tell you how many times you would get coffee...

and be so excited about it at origin.

By the time it landed, it's not even a remnant...

of what you thought it was when you tasted it there.

That's changing.

So it's kind of like that pursuit...

that there's something out there that could be even more extraordinary.

Definitely they're right in the zone right now, so.

When you cup hundreds and thousands of samples in a year...

you start to see where the average is just kind of lacking...

any depth, you know, and it's coffee coffee.

It seems a little bit softer...

in the mouthfeel than maybe

Yeah, very smooth.

You probably can draw the same analogy with good wines...

that are decent and they're sweet and they're tart...

but they don't have any follow-through.

And I think our best coffees tend to always have that.

There's something at the tail end of that flavor spectrum...

that all of a sudden is like,

I totally get bergamot,

Cupping is sort of the international standard for how we score coffee.

And it's the same procedure whether you're in Brazil or Kenya...

Ethiopia, Canada– wherever you are.

Coffee is like the colors of the rainbow.

There are a lot of flavors to them...

and they are intrinsic to those particular coffees...

to where they were grown, the variety and all the rest.

So suddenly the world of coffee really expands.

It's no longer a cup of joe.

It's now an adventure in search of the ultimate cup.

The more you-you taste...

and the more you start to taste better qualities...

and-and-and open new doors...

you really find that how you make the coffee...

how you brew it, starts to change as well.

What would you like, my man?

Uh, an Americano to go in a tall glass.

Today I'm much more into drip, with a paper filter.

I like a very clear cup.

So I don't want any sediment...

plugging the pores in my mouth...

and reducing my sensitivity...to the flavor notes.

When you have a cup of coffee...

you're starting hot...

and that's really just the aromatics.

A great light-roasted coffee is very mild at that point...

almost watery, in many cases.

Let it cool. Take time.

As the coffee starts to cool...

your taste buds start to taste more and more.

You start to be able to smell the flavors more.

And as that temperature goes down from the brewing temperature...

which is like 200-plus...

down to 185...still piping hot

now down to 135...

now you start to really taste a lot more going on in the coffee.

If the coffee's been processed really right...

and if it's ripe coffee...

you start to realize there are these transparent layers...

and you pick up on one layer, and you pick up on another...

then you pick up on another.

And they start to add to each other a little bit symphonically.

Well, the siphon was invented in the 1860s, I think...

by a Scottish marine engineer.

Like a lot of things

it got invented somewhere else but perfected in Japan.

I really wanted to have a siphon bar.

And then I was scouting around locations.

When I walked into this space, it was so beautiful.

Like the elegance and the verticality.

It was like, “This is the perfect place to have a siphon bar.”

I think that's what it does embody...

is this perfect and unlikely combination of the taste

This is a paddle I carved myself.

the theater of it.

I don't want to boss it around. I just want to nudge it a little bit.

The gear is super cool, the light it produces.

So you get all of those things.

Just symbolically think about coffee...

like taking five seconds and going out of a tap.

There it is.

Versus coffee being a process that you get to watch and participate in...

and then somebody hands it to you.

It tends to be more beautiful.

And that's a huge symbolic change.

The great thing about improving your coffee brewing...

is that it's not subtle.

Once you get something that's really good, vibrant and well-made...

it's hard to go back.

Even though we see in the U.S. a lot of popularity...

with brewed, filter, pour-over drip coffee...

espresso is still captivating a new audience.

Katsu's, like, amazingly committed.

I've never seen anyone with his aesthetic.

His shop is New York, right?

Trying to evoke the New York coffee experience.

But, man, he approaches it in such a disciplined and perfectionist way.

I've never seen anything like it.

Dude won't open his shop until he feels like the coffee's right...

in the morning, you know?

And that's really appealing.

There's all this focus on drip coffee...

and then there's focus on espresso.

And really they're the same thing.

This one just has pressure added.

I'm excited. People are exploring what the real effect of that is...

and kind of breaking down the barrier of what espresso is...

versus what drip coffee is...

and demystifying espresso.

Barista competitions are the face that specialty coffee has to offer...

as to the high end of what we're doing in sort of a unified front.

It's a chance for us to say to the media,“Hey. Look at this.

Look at what we pay attention to, what's important to us...

how legitimate we are.”

Part Olympics, part dog show...

part personal crisis.

Now, this is espresso and carbonated strawberries...

which I've supercharged with CO2 in a whipper.

Now, as they sit in the espresso, the strawberries release tiny CO2 bubbles.

Imagine soda going flat...

filling the espresso with strawberry aromatics.

Barista competitions are a sport.

You go out, you have a good day...

you win.

You go out, you have a bad day, you lose.

When you compete, you're going up against people...

that this is their focus in life.

Our champion's already ready to give it another try for 2013...

so I'm not gonna waste any time.

Katie Carguilo from Counter Culture Coffee,Brooklyn, New York.

- I'm Carrie. - Thanks, Carrie.

A great cup of coffee for coffee people is really complex...

but I want to be able to explain it to people...

so they can start to dig their heels in a little bit...

and understand what makes coffee what it is.

I want to just make tasty things for people.

And I want them to be happy, and I want them to enjoy it...

but I want to be able to communicate a little bit...

on a deeper level, sort of, what makes the coffee that I'm making...

so different and so much more special...

than any other coffee that they drink.

Coffee gets made three times.

It's first made at the farm, when cherries are harvested...

and then they're processed and dried to become beans.

It is next made at the roastery...

where beans go from green to brown.

And roasters use their machines to balance out the flavors in the coffee...

with flavors that are created by the roast.

And the last time it gets made is when it's made into a beverage.

And this kind of gets all the credit 'cause this is what people see.

They see it in their own homes. They see it in cafés.

And on special days, they see it on barista competition stages.

So any day that you drink a coffee...

these are the three acts of its story.

So as a customer, your experience of a beverage...

is not just limited to the flavor.

That's really what I like about cappuccinos is that they're very pretty...

and they're served with a visual representation...

of the skill of the people that make them...

in the form of a little heart or a delicate flower...

which is in and of itself a visual representation...of all things romantic.

And that's sort of how I feel about cappuccinos...

and it's what I like about being a barista...

is that we are the people that get to romance people...

into the world of specialty coffee.

There you are.

All right. I hope you've enjoyed your experience today.

Thank you so much for being here. Time.

Time! Come on back, champ.

Ladies and gentlemen, Katie Carguilo, Counter Culture Coffee...

Brooklyn, New York.

Sound guy, we're ready?

You are good. Press the start button, brother, and take that 15 minutes on.

Devin Chapman.

Of all the people who make up the chain of the industry...

who do you value the most?

Had the opportunity to ask this question to one of our producers named David Mancia...

while visiting his farm this past October.

His answer not only surprised me...

but has brought fresh inspiration...

to the way that we run our retail program at Coava.

This is what he said.

He said the consumer, the ones that you sell my coffee to...

because they're the ones who put food on my table...

they're the ones who provide for my family...

the namesake of my farm.

So I'd like to make espresso for you all to try...

as just the coffee...

but also with steamed milk for cappuccino.

In the cafés, this is the majority of the way that people are drinking the coffee.

Today we have espresso from La Piñona...

and Las Flores...

and Las Manos.

Next is espresso from Las Manos.

Yeah, That's good.

You want to taste it with two shots?

We talk about that whole elevation of quality.

We are very confident that the best coffees in the world...

are processed as a fully washed coffee.

You know, areas where there is a lack of water...

it's a very difficult thing to kind of

Obviously, you need to make a living and you need to be able to produce coffee...

but we are looking for that one source that helps kind of drive it...

all the way through to the finished product, which is water.

David explained it to me later, people are walking up to two kilometers...

to another area where there is a water receiving station.

And if I just brought it down and irrigated it...

then I would be able to accomplish what I need as a company and as a business.

But I also could help the community.

It's like one of those win-win things...

where it's like we're gonna be able to do a lot more...

with just putting this infrastructure in place that really wasn't there.

If we can actually get even better coffee...

and pay a better price...

then what would then be the next cycle that comes out of that?

Coffee rewards practice and discipline.

It makes people, you know, value it more...in a noneconomic way.

You know, the idea of craft and perfection

doing it over and over and over again until it's perfect

is so good for coffee.

I think it's natural to turn to the Japanese kissaten...

or the coffee master in our search for coffee.

You go in to sit down and you order.

Usually say, like, “Blend and demitasse.”

Then there's this wall of cups behind the barista.

And he'll turn and look.

It's, like...

“Which cup?” There are all these mismatched cups, right?

“Which cup is the right cup for this person?”

There's some sort of magic, how they take coffees...

that may be a little more modest,some of them...

but they transform them...

through effort and dedication...

that the transformational moment...

is rendered more explicit...in a Tokyo coffee bar.

A great one.

Coffee can be just like this glorious five minutes.

Like it's not a commitment.

Dinner is a commitment, you know?

If people associate that with being something rare, beautiful and difficult...

they're more likely to appreciate what's in their coffee.

I do think people feel connected to a story...

that might not be about taste or flavor.

But I think that's always been kind of the pinnacle.

I could have something that's just subpar...

but an amazing story about how maybe we've helped people...

in their communities and their villages to improve what they're doing.

But it's gotta all kind of come together.

When you buy anything, you're making a statement.

So if you want people to keep making great coffee...

if you want people to just physically plant coffee...

and not sustenance food...

you have to be willing to put your money into that.

Next, for the ripe coffee...

If we want coffee to keep being great and tasting great...

in a way, you can't buy the other stuff.

The group I see now have pushed the envelope...

much further and continue to do so.

And even if one generation sort of reaches its groove...

there's another set coming right behind it...

pushing the envelope still further.

And that's a really exciting world.

I think the misconception about coffee...

as a ubiquitous, commodified thing...

that just sits in your cupboard like sugar or flour...

it's widely available and inexpensive

That's not what coffee is.