Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - International Coffee (remix)

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Now that international travel is becoming more and more a realistic possibility, I find myself dreaming and scheming about new journeys for the podcast. This episode is an audio travelogue of the last journey I was able to do before Covid: A trip through Paris, Copenhagen and Kenya. An international ode to Good Coffee. Radiotopia is a network of creators who are able to follow their curiosity and tell the stories they care about the most. Show your support for my fellow Radiotopia shows during our Spring Fundraiser. Donate today at https://on.prx.org/3wl9pWn

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. Last summer, when I was in Paris, I discovered a new café. At first glance, it looked like just another trendy Parisian hangout. There were old magazines on the floor, a tape cassette player on the wall, and beautiful people from all over the world Instagramming themselves with their pastries and beverages. But when I saw that the barista was serving up two pour-overs at the counter, I went inside. A lot of people like cafe latte or cappuccino or something, but here I'm serving a lot of fritter coffee. I think a new thing is for Paris, you know.

That's Yuchiro Tsujiyama. He's the owner of this recent addition to the Paris coffee scape. And as a non-native from Japan, he's acutely aware that dark, viscous espresso is as rooted in the French psyche as

the Eiffel Tower. But in his cafe, espresso is as rooted in the French psyche as the Eiffel Tower. But in his cafe, espresso is not king. He served me up a filter coffee from Kenya. And let me tell you, it was light and delicious. 80%, 90% customer, they drink this kind of coffee coffee and then they said, oh, this is really, really good coffee or something. So I'm also happy. This really, really good coffee was roasted in Copenhagen by a company called April.

And even though I'd never heard of them before, Yuturo assured me they are world famous. But here's the thing. Even though I prefer to drink these light roasted filter brews, I am by no means a coffee expert. In fact, fancy coffee culture is totally not my thing. I'm a coffee dilettante. But sitting there in that Parisian cafe, drinking a cup of coffee roasted in Copenhagen and grown in Kenya, my ignorance, well, for the first time, it left a bad taste in my mouth. And I started daydreaming about getting myself a proper coffee education. Perhaps there's just something about Uchuro's cafe. I forgot to tell you. It's called Dreamin' Man. Most of the coffee shops, name is something cafe or something coffee shops I like but my girlfriend told me I'm always dreaming it's my problem we love Nih Lian so your shop name is dreaming man it's cool

a month later I'm in Copenhagen and I meet up with April Coffee's Patrick Rolf. We're going to make coffee in my friend's kitchen, if we can figure out the stove. You just hold it down and just turn it. Patrick is a little annoyed that I don't have anything to weigh out the coffee. We're trying to brew coffee here with our scales, which is always fun. A lot of people will describe April Coffee as Nordic style. We're trying to brew coffee here with our skills, which is always fun. light roasted coffees. In fact, it was right here on this very street in Copenhagen where Patrick and I are hanging out that I had my first Nordic style coffee. This was in 2009 and I can still remember that first cup. It was so sweet, so flavorful. And I was like, if this is coffee,

then what the hell have I been drinking my whole life? Patrick says it's just the light roasting. We love them because of the berry-like quality, the flavor intensity, just like sweetness and balance and vibrancy. I mean, they're just fun. That cup, which first blew my mind, came from a cafe called Coffee Collective. And it turns out they were a huge influence on Patrick too. One of the main reasons he set up shop here in Copenhagen was because he loves their light roasts. We don't want the roast process to actually taste, if that makes sense.

We just don't like when it tastes like ash. Yachuro was right. April's kind of a big deal. Patrick's won a ton of international awards, both as a barista and a roaster. But the secret to his success, he told me, is the farmers that he buys from. Roasting never gets better than the green coffee that we work with. So it's not so much about creating these beautiful new flavors because the farmer has already done that based on varietal processing methods, you know, how good of a farmer you are.

So our job is kind of showcase what that comes from as roasters. I think as long as you have, again, a good raw material, a decent roast, you're kind of good to go, right? Pour a bit of water on it and it's going to be tasty. Wow. Oh, man, it smells great already. It's going to be really warm though. Too hot to taste. April is almost a one-man operation,

which is another reason Patrick set up shop in Copenhagen, because here there is a ton of post-industrial artisanal infrastructure. He roasts out of a co-working or co-roasting space outfitted with the greatest coffee roasting machines in the world, Loring Roasters, and he can use them whenever he needs. The way contract roasting works for us is that we pay per day. If we want more days, we get more days. We can do that as well, right? But it's being flexible that matters for us.

All right, we have to taste this. I know. Tastes great. For me, the appeal of specialty roasters like April doesn't just come down to taste. There's also the relationship these companies have with the farmers they buy their coffee from. Unlike coffee conglomerates who rip farmers off, these specialty coffee companies pay farmers more, and they help them sustain and grow their businesses

well at least that's what i always assumed it's so easy you go on to any website and it's transparency and it's you know sustainability it's paying the right prices right but i mean that's all and there's a copy pace and in reality and this is probably the biggest issue, and it's so interesting coming from the specialty copy scene, because, I mean, we're all tiny, we're all really loud, we all have very strong opinions. And most of us hate the big guys, which is the funny part here, because the big guys are the one creating the value. The big guys that roast000 tons a year, they are the ones that can go down to a farm and actually create a financial security to that. Even if the buying price might be different, but there's a security and a volume that comes with that. We're too tiny to make a big difference, which is heartbreaking, but it's completely true.

Patrick made it obvious how little I actually know about coffee. And while I don't care that much about ever mastering the scales, I do want to be a part of the solution, not the problem. So I decided to continue my education in Kenya. If you want a description of the Kenyan coffee, you will find a coffee with high acidity, citrical notes, very complex, pleasant in the palate, with long aftertaste. Andres is a coffee trader for Dormans, one of the largest coffee companies in Kenya.

I met him at the Nairobi Coffee Exchange. This is where traders like him buy Kenyan coffee at the bi-weekly auctions. You see, Kenyan coffee farmers can't just sell their products to foreign customers like Patrick. Kenyan farmers are required by law to form cooperatives. These cooperatives then hire marketing agents, and the marketing agents then come here to the exchange where buyers like Andreas make the final judgment as to the monetary value of the coffee it's kind of an archaic legal system and the auction house fittingly looks like an antiquated lecture hall the auctioneer sits on

a raised Dias in front of a giant screen and all the traders sit at these little wooden desks with control panels embedded in them. And when the lots they want to bid on come up, they start pounding on the buttons. That's what it sounds like. In this screen, you can see the lot of the coffee and the prices start pretty high and start going down until someone push the button you know and in this moment everyone started to push the button and suddenly the prices start to go up again until the price get high enough for someone that want it really hard to get the coffee and you move forward to the next lot. On this list, what looks exciting to you? Oh man, I love the coffee that CMS, Coffee Enough and SMS sell.

We work quite together with them. So yeah, we have a good relationship with them. The laws were designed to keep monopolies from ever controlling the entire Kenyan coffee sector. But today, farmers complain that the system is now rigged against them. And they question why marketing agents have such good relationships with buyers. And they question why there are so many middlemen. But everyone I met at the auction, including the auction manager, said this is just the way it's got to be.

I don't think it's a lot of middlemen. You can't have all the farmers bring their coffee here. It's illogical, and you find that it might be too costly for them. Well, I did meet a group of farmers who had traveled to the auction at great personal cost in order to check in on their marketing agent because they don't understand

why the prices they're getting are so low. They're concerned they're being cheated. So I just want to see how the auction starts. And where is your cooperative? What part of Kenya? Muranga. I decided to take a trip to the Muranga region myself to better understand why farmers feel like they're being cheated

and what they're doing about it. I just gave up. Yeah. In fact, the coffee was where the bananas are today. Yeah, that's where the coffee was. I got rid of the coffee because I didn't get any money. A lot of people came in, you know, cheats between us and the consumers who get more than the farmer. Many of the farmers I met have replaced their coffee plants with avocado trees.

Avocados, they hope, will bring them more money and less exploitation. They do not allow farmers to export coffee directly. Those are the people who destroyed coffee industry. The farmer there in the field get almost nothing, but they are driving big cars. How do you keep that from happening again with avocados? Avocado, no. That's why we are struggling to go to these big companies to invite people like you who are conversant teachers

about varietation. So do you know what avocado toast is? Avocado toast. What do you mean by toast? The piece of bread with avocado on it. And do you know what it costs? Do you know what it costs? No, I don't know.

$15. That's a good one. When we have value addition, I think that farmers will benefit. I kind of felt like an asshole regaling these farmers with my lectures about avocado toast. But they didn't even have protective crates to carry their avocados to market. So it just seems extremely unlikely that they're ever going to get to much value addition. Whereas coffee, I mean, come on, with the right equipment and infrastructure,

Kenyan coffee entrepreneurs should be able to start companies like Patrick Rolf did. So I went looking for a Kenyan roastery that exports, and I found one. We buy coffee straight from farmers. We value add it here and export it as finished products. But the only thing is, it was more Danes. I actually came down to this pre-year project. We were suddenly visited by a co-op in Denmark, and they got hooked and they say, all right, we should also start doing the value addition in Africa. So

let's build a coffee roasting factory in Kenya. Jonas Brunsaas is the head of sales at African Coffee Roasters, the first roaster exporter with a license in Kenya that allows them to buy directly from farmers. We have a dealer's license and that allows us to do the value addition and to also export the coffee out of Kenya. Normally for a dealer you have to go to the auction. You cannot deal directly with the farmers in Kenya. But because we have this structure where we are now set up in what's called an export processing zone. It's kind of like being in Freeport.

So we're actually on the other side of the customs border. It also means anything we buy is legally considered exported. As soon as I walked in the gate, I could tell these Danes, they had some serious ambitions. We want to change that perception that you have to roast at the end, consumer end. You can actually do it at origin as well. What is this blowing sound? That was the luring machine switching on. A click you can hear, and then...

Oh, that's great. That's because we're now sucking in the green beans up into the silo on top of it. At African Coffee Roasters, you'll find these same fancy luring machines that Patrick has access to at his roasting lab in Copenhagen. Well, these ones are bigger. Like 20 times bigger. So now we're walking into the roasting room.

This is where we have the two luring machines. These are two 70 kilo roasting machines. So you want to have, you know, top of the line, the best equipment we can find. There's a reason, Jonas told me, these Danes went all out on luring. When people say, hey, let's move production to China or something, people often think, oh, they're outsourcing it, it's cheaper, it's lower social standards, whatever. It's a way to cut corners, you know. So we had to prove that this is not the case.

Actually, we want to show that by doing it down here, we can actually now afford to have higher standards. What's going on in here? Right now, I'm doing a back-to-back roasting because I have to ship three containers of the same coffee in a week or so. So we do one batch after the other. That's why you're seeing me shifting from one machine to another. That's the head roaster, George Warringer.

He's convinced that doing the roasting here will totally reinvigorate Kenyan coffee farming. So bringing the process back in Africa, it would really encourage coffee farming because, one, the children would get jobs in the roasting facilities. Number two, the farmers would be able to make a premium because they would really cut down the chain from all buying selling shipping and all that smells so good in there now i should

point something out there is a pretty basic reason that most people in europe and north america like to drink coffee that's roasted in the cities that they live in, not the country of origin. You see, most people who love great coffee also love fresh coffee. This is why African coffee roasters has invested heavily not just in roasting infrastructure, but top-of-the-line packing infrastructure as well. So this is where we make the nitrogen for flushing the coffee bags. We used to buy these cylinders with 40 kilos of nitrogen in each. The only problem was it took 12 and a half minutes and they were empty. So we had a guy standing out here replacing bottles like 24-7 the first couple of weeks. Then we realized this is not going to work.

So then we bought this setup here so we can produce our own nitrogen. So by doing this, by producing nitrogen flush the bags, remove all the oxygen, we can actually still preserve the coffee. So the condition is in when you pack it, it will still be in when you open it three or four months later. And then from there you are now supposed to start counting your week or two of consumption. And then you'll still have fresh coffee. To set up all this infrastructure, the luring machines, the nitrogen tanks, African coffee roasters received financial help from the Danish International Investment Fund. And they've also got backing from a consumer cooperative that owns about 1,200 stores in Scandinavia. They have a lot of private label coffee, which we also roast for them. That's what keeps the lights on, keep the factory running. Any new customer we bring in is

additional bonus on top. Because they're producing for supermarkets, African Coffee Roasters is buying a lot more coffee from farmers than, say, your traditional specialty coffee company. And they're making a much bigger impact. It really helps the local economy out here. But at the same time, it also creates a lot more knowledge and know-how. Because suddenly, when we start doing these things, others start saying, OK, what are you doing? How are you doing it? Can we do something similar? Now, we've proven that it is possible to to roast here at the at the origin of the bean i do want to try a light roasted coffee before we go yeah where lydia can take care of hi

my name is benjamin lydia nice to meet you, Lydia. Nice to meet you. Lydia Nablumbe is the quality supervisor. And she had two rows of coffee cups laid out on her counter for us to taste. The two cups are of the same coffee because I want to see if the two cups are consistent. Cool, so can we try some? Oh yeah, yeah.

Here we go. Yep. And then you breathe in as you sip the coffee. I breathe in. Okay. Like that. I'm definitely getting the consistency here. It has to be exactly the same.

Consistency. That's another obvious thing about coffee we haven't talked about yet. Most coffee drinkers simply want their coffee to taste the way it's always tasted. This is why coffee culture, especially in places like France and Italy, is so hard to change. It's also the reason why African coffee roasters

isn't doing light roasting. You don't want to go for light if you don't know what light roast is. So automatically by writing light roast, you push away probably 80% of the market because they've grown up tasting that coffee their whole life. This is what coffee tastes like. When they get the light roast, they say this is not coffee. It's a tea or something else, but it's not how coffee is supposed to be. But the younger generation, they've not had as much time to grow accustomed to one flavor because most people start drinking coffee when they're in high school, maybe.

So if you're 20 years old and you now have just started drinking coffee, you're interested in this and you go to these fancy cafes. Now you start by having light roast. You're going to start with a dark roast first. But I grew up drinking dark roast since I was in high school. And I had light roast just, you know, a little hungover visiting my Danish radio friend. So I don't know. Like, I wasn't like, this isn't coffee.

I was like, what have I been drinking my whole life? I think you're special in that way, yeah. Like I said, I'm not, I'm more, I more i'm real i'm a dilettante i'm an amateur you should come for more lessons then i never was able to find a kenyan roaster doing anything like what patrick rolf does but then again there really isn't much post-industrial artisanal infrastructure in Kenya. In fact, African Coffee Roasters owns two of the only four luring machines in Africa. And while that number will most certainly grow, all the international development experts agree. In order to truly revolutionize the coffee sector, Kenya needs more than a handful of fancy machines.

It needs industrial revolution-sized infrastructure. But there's something about this logic that doesn't work for me. I have a hard time accepting that big is by default better than small. And medium roasted supermarket coffee, that stuff, no way that's gonna make things better. So I decided to go back to Copenhagen for one more coffee lesson. What are you roasting today? New Ethiopian from Gucci region that just arrived. This roast is actually exclusively for our subscribers.

This is Klaus Thompson. He's one of the co-founders of Coffee Collective. Remember that first cup of light roasted coffee I told you about? The one that changed everything for me 10 years ago on my first visit to Denmark? Well, that's Coffee Collective. And today, they've got a roastery and four shops in Copenhagen and an international subscription business.

Every month, subscribers like me get three bags in the mail. Three bags of great coffee from all over the world. From Ethiopia, Guatemala, Costa Rica. I wouldn't even know how much I love Kenyan coffee if it wasn't for these guys. I think our coffee's ready. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.

After showing me the luring machines, of course, Klaus took me back to his office and served me up an incredible Kenyan coffee from the Kini Cooperative. Yes. I need some coffee. I need some too. I also got the ultimate explanation as to why light roasted coffee tastes so damn good.

A lighter roast will have more acidic compounds. And acidity is basically what brings a coffee to life. And the darker you roast, the more you diminish the acidity is basically what brings a coffee to life. And the darker you roast, the more you diminish the acidity in the coffee. You also diminish the sweetness in the coffee. The lighter style of roasting brings out more of the flavor of the terroir, to use a fancy wine description. It's kind of like making the coffee more transparent and you can taste everything that happened at the farm level. As much as I want to gush about delicious coffee, I winced when Klaus started talking

about coffee terroir. But then he opened up my eyes. Klaus got me to see where my aversion to treating coffee as a fancy specialty product comes from. You can't really look at the coffee market without looking at its colonial past because coffee was a slave product. The workforce producing it cost nothing. It was free labor. And that meant that coffee could be shipped across the globe

and sold to consumers in a way that you didn't really value or you didn't even know the amount of work behind it. We tend to think about this as something that happened 200 years ago, and it's not really true. It's actually only about 55 years now since Kenya gained independence. And the years leading up to that independence from Britain were some of the most cruel years in history.

And that happened in the 50s. That is only a generation ago. I meet coffee farmers in Kenya still today, and I look at them, and they were probably 18. They were probably fighting some of the British forces at that point. Maybe they were part of the Mau Mau, which were actually in the central Kenya coffee growing region. So it's not that long ago. And coffee is still under this colonial past. A lot of the exporting companies are still Dutch and British. And that goes for everywhere in the world. So the consumer market has also been growing up with this idea that coffee beans, they just come, they're just flowing into your grinder. It's just this product that is endless and it's free for you to brew, you know, two liters of filtered coffee and drink a cup and oh, it went cold, I'll just pour it out the drain and brew a new one, as if it has almost no value. And that's kind of absurd to me.

Like, that doesn't happen in wine. You don't just, you know, open a bottle, have a glass, and pour the rest of the bottle out of the sink. So that was in our mind when we started our company. We wanted to try and build a company that would try and fix this. Klaus also helped me understand why I failed to find a small roastery in Kenya sustaining itself on international subscriptions. It turns out you can't actually run a successful coffee business on international subscribers like me.

It's a very interesting part of our business. It's something that I've firmly believed in for many years. I mean, heck, I subscribe to Foodbox from organic producers at home. I subscribe even to razor blades because it's easy and I know I don't have to think about things. So I do think there's a lot of future in subscriptions, but it's still, it's a fraction of our business. It's nothing compared to the amount of coffee that goes out through our own four coffee shops. It's nothing compared to the amount of wholesale business we do to other coffee shops and restaurants. So it's still small. But small can also be a very good starting point. In Kenya, I learned that farmers need to sell at high volumes in order to achieve any semblance of financial security.

And specialty coffee companies, as Patrick Rolfe explained, just can't buy at this kind of volume. But Klaus totally rejects the idea that this means specialty coffee companies can't make an impact. You can never use that as an excuse that you're not fixing the whole thing, to not try and fix some things. And we just take a look at the farmers that we buy from and see that if we can guarantee that we are paying a lot more money, that will definitely have an effect.

We could see that with Kieni, who we've been working closely with, it has an impact that they are one of the highest paying cooperatives in all of Kenya every single year. One year, I did all the numbers, I got all the sales contracts for all the coffee that Kenya sold. And that particular year, we had only bought like 11% of their total amount of coffee. But the income from us accounted for over 22% of their income. So in that way, we can see it has a real impact.

Over the past few years, Coffee Collective has had a huge impact on the specialty coffee sector. They've been putting the prices they pay on the bags of coffee they sell. It's a direct challenge to feel-good marketing lingo like transparency and fair trade. Ideally and hopefully companies don't just get away with having a vague certification or notion

that yeah we're paying our farmers well but actually have to back it up with evidence. Where we think our biggest role is is getting consumers to ask questions about what are the price of the coffee that's gone to the farmer. Even though the specialty coffee sector is small, it's the only sector of the market that's growing. And according to Klaus, it is specialty coffee that will determine coffee's future. It's been growing so much that not just small independently owned operations like ourselves are doing it, but even the multinational titans like Coca-Cola are investing heavily into specialty coffee. So there is money. That's the crazy thing. There is money. There's loads of money floating around. It's just not getting down to the farmer. So that's crazy.

Like we're so close to losing some of the best coffee on the planet because we've not been paying enough as an industry. We need to get people to see that so we don't lose these fantastic coffees. Eventually, I made it back to my apartment in New York, which is where I do most of my coffee drinking. Hey, do you know if the settings on this are grams or ounces? And while I'm still pretty loose with the scales and all that, Thanks, Gramps. You sure? I did get myself a coffee school graduation present.

A metal thermos so I can cut down on all the wasted coffee I forget to drink before it gets cold. And you know what? I don't feel like a dilettante anymore. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. Special thanks to everyone I met on my reporting trip.

And if you find yourself in Paris, please definitely check out Yachiro's Café, where my trip began. It's called Dreamin' Man. And if you're in the market for some new coffee, check out what Coffee Collective has to offer. They don't even charge for shipping. Additional production support for this episode came from a project out of the London School of Economics called A Tale of Two Green Valleys. It's looking at Kenya's Rift Valley and California's Central Valley. Special thanks to everyone there, especially Laura Mann and Gianluca Lazzolino. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia,

home to some of the world's best podcasts. You can find them all at radiotopia.fm.