“What’s the difference is between Folgers Supermarket Blend and GTL Adventure Coffee”?
“‘To Blend or Not to Blend?’ That is the question?”
Background/Prelude
For much of the culinary Ice Age of the 1940’s to the late 1960’s, as yours truly and the rest of my Boomers cohort were coming of age, coffee-as-we-knew-it was canned, ground and non-descript Blends.
With the Great Thaw of the/our Boomer sensibilities manifesting in the marketplace on the heels of our erupting politically and culturally, single origin coffees, the ultimate baseline reality of coffee mythologized and morphed into supermarket cans, re-materialized from behind the Wizard of Oz’ Blend Curtain.
Without knowing it, this part of The Revolution shaped my own coffee mind and palate to the current point that blends have seemed to remain an expression of regression to those wasteland times totally in the grip of the global industrialized food chain.
So I was a setup for being blindsided by what I now see are some tricky imperatives in the coffee world, but which I also now see are part of what likely drove the Coffee Big Boys n’ Gals into blending: Consistency, Consistency, Consistency! A mantra of modern business as sacred as that of “Location, Location..” etc..
So what if there’s a bit of Bait & Switch in the realities of blends? Which is to say with the blend, you get always the same name (e.g., “Supermarket Supreme”) but in fact and hence in truth, always different coffees: the art and science of this is coming up with close enough to the same “taste” that the consumer doesn’t know/cant tell that today’s blend is likely to be made up of coffees very different than yesterday’s.
And all the more so given the lack of knowledge of the true variability coffee is capable of left to its own single origin realities instead of obscured by blending.
And all the more so if the consumer is cultivated into ignorance about the true variability of coffee, an essential baseline tenet of industrial food.
Fast Forward to Here & Now: Another Roaster’s Rant by Dr. Koffee
This comes out of somewhat frantically editing email to my distributor around how to talk about changing coffees–the origin of “The Adventure of Coffee”– such that people will literally buy into it.
I realized I haven’t put out to anyone other than my biz partner and my green coffee supplier the specifics of how I’m going about doing the replacement coffee path, even while I did set the context for it in the Adventure of Coffee materials, some of which are on the GTL web site.
But that was about the Why of changing coffees, not the How of it. So now I’m hoping that by sharing the specifics of the How of it, customers will more readily buy into what is not a simple notion.
But first of all, it’s a reality, and the Folgers piece clinches that: (find and insert Folgers tasting operation article on email, also sent to PC)
So of course first I’m looking for coffee from the same country that might have similar traits both for that it really might have similar traits AND/or the consumer might be more inclined to accept a different coffee if it’s also from what seems or sounds like it is the same “place”, i.e., country.
Even while our own real front line cupping experience is that the taste of the place doesn’t hold true just because it’s the same country, as I wrote in the 2 colombians piece.
So the next best other thing I’m looking for in a replacement coffee is geographical proximity, the most obvious being Guatemala proximity to Mexico Oxaca, even while I still don’t know where in Guatemala the Injertal is from and hence, whether it’s really got some kind of kinship with Oxaca which it’s replaced given the Mexico 3 oros Pluma Oxaca’s evaporation until its next seasonal arrival, I think in March?
Same deal with Sumatra Gayoland, all PC ‘d up with organic and fair trade, and Organic Sumatra Mandheling, not quite Fair Trade, so what’s that about? And where the hell is Mandheling in relation to Gayoland?
Even worse, these Sumatras came out of the Timor train wreck last year: Timor, PC out the whazoo, absolutely a knock out origin traits profile in both dark and lighter roasts, but that it just disappeared! Why? Because of a small crop after months of virtual civil war just at the harvest season, and then great demand because it was so good. Until the next harvest, which is in insert
And so guess what the next best candidate was, esepcialy given it;’s a geographical “cousin”?–Sumatra of course! But there’s the Machiavellian substext I wondered about: what blew Timor off the market was a virtual civil war.
That was a rekindling of all the violence that goes back to when guess what, Timor was a province of Indonesia, as is Sumatra still, but that Timor separated and Sumatra didn’t. So was the Timor strife an Indonesian attempt to wipe out or retake Timor, all the more because Timor was makng inroads on Indonesia, and even Sumatra coffees in the world markets?
So there are definitely moral imperatives at stake in the coffee biz indeed bigtime! And oh they can be murky indeed! What if you like and even need coffee from a place and maybe even people you don’t know enough about to be quite sure you’d “like” if you know more about that place and people? The proverbial hall of mirrors.
More than the relatively abstract connections around geography/country names and juxtapositions, again are the very concrete body mind cupping experiences of how in this example, Mex Pluma Oaxaca Tres Oros and Guata (Huehuetenengo) Injertal, compare.
But that’s for next time!