Coffee with Maxwell

The market for green coffee has spiked to ten year highs in the last several months. It means a lot of industry conversation turns to pricing and how it works. There are strong narratives in speciality about pricing and quality premiums. I have spent the last several months trying to learn more about what is a very complex topic, and as with many things it transpires some of the over simplified narratives are inaccurate. In this episode I explore some of the business of green coffee, and what good and bad prices look like ( they are contextual)  and also what the new higher prices will mean for speciality and mass coffee, as well as wether or not they will stick around.

We have all likely come across the idea of pay per click internet advertising. In speciality coffee the results suggest its unusually costly in the coffee space... at least in the UK market. This probably suggest a few things about customer behaviour in the space. In this episode I look into this topic. 

Specialist fields are niche's of varying degrees. Speciality coffee is no different. This episode looks at this idea and explores why not everyone will be interested in deep diving into coffee but also why the taste preferences across the wider market won't always align with what speciality coffee is rewarding and exploring. 

In this episode I get the opportunity to talk with Olympic Sprinter Jodie Williams. We discuss her passion for coffee, and the highs and low's of her athletic career. The underlying theme circles around the concept off success. 

Following the World Barista and Brewers Cup championships in Milan, I was lucky enough to get hold of some of the different species used at the completion and that were the talk of the town following their success at the event. They taste curious and raise many questions. 

Craig Simon is a three times Australian Barista champion, Q instructor and founder of Criteria Coffee in Melbourne. We sit down to discuss the challenges in communicating flavour and quality in coffee, in particular looking to the world of wine for potential solutions. 

I took part in Barista championships for several years. I got a lot form the platform to be grateful for, but I also saw a lot that didn't make sense. Following this I joined an evolutionary working group0 for the global competition and ran the UK chapter. I saw even more systemic issues at these levels. This episode digs into these and open challenges the structure and system that runs these competitions in the hope they can evolve to be better. 

Coffee is a passionate and fascinating field to work in. However it doesn't necessarily offer a traditional career framework. I this episode I discuss the topic and offer three pieces of advice to follow. 

The topic of automation is across all industries. In coffee, as obssessive coffee geeks we often get drawn to the concept of how robots could be better brewers than people. In this episode I dive into this idea but focus more on why I dont think it will happen and that there is not enough of a value gain in handing brewing over to machines in speciality coffee shops. At least this is my prediction. 

I catch up with Prof Mandi Caudill to talk ecology at coffee farm level. A measurement of shade cover can be a simple and effective marker for sustainability on a coffee producing plot of land, but this concept seems to be so far from the market place. In this episode we discuss the topic and how it could become more adopted by speciality coffee.