“What Coffee Should I Drink?”
It's not about picking the best coffees, but asking good questions.
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This week, I interviewed Frankie and Tim Volkema of Joven Coffee. Joven, which means “young” in Spanish, was created when Frankie, who was 13 at the time (she’s 15 now) learned that the average coffee farmer is in their mid-50s. She wanted to find a way to encourage more young people to take up coffee farming to ensure the health of the industry—and in so doing, to celebrate young farmers and directly support their work. In the long term, Joven hopes to educate consumers about a key social concern, and encourage them to take action.
Young people are often (rightly) wary of getting into coffee farming. Coffee farmers earn less now than they did 40 years ago, and the C-market price for coffee can vary widely, rising and falling without rhyme or reason. If we apply the adage that we want better for our kids than what we had, it’d be ill-advised to ask young people to take over family farms when their income is guaranteed to be lower than what their parents made doing the same work.
When Frankie and her father, Tim, learned about the aging farming population, they began to ask questions, and brainstormed ways they could make an impact from their home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As Tim points out:
This is a problem [farmers] are obviously well aware of. They have these programs where they’re training young farmers to produce better coffee so they can get better pricing. And that’s amazing, but to develop a market in the U.S. … I don’t think that, to our knowledge, has been a priority for any other roasters up to this time.
As Tim notes, the issue of aging coffee farmers is not news in coffee-producing countries—and it’s about time that roasters and consumers help build infrastructure to support efforts that older farmers and co-operatives have taken to encourage young farmers. Frankie and Tim built the Joven brand in 2020, and when they reached out to importers to share their vision for buying coffee—to purchase from young producers under the age of 35—they seemed to be the only ones asking questions about how they could directly support young growers. Frankie shares:
I think when we went to Colombia and we talked to these co-ops, they gave us the impression that [it was] not very many roasters. We were one of the first roasters that had ever specifically asked for coffee from young farmers and was specifically interested in this issue.
How information is gathered and shared is a problem across the supply stream. In 2019, I interviewed Karla Boza, the marketing, innovation, and business manager for her family’s farm in El Salvador, Finca San Antonio Amatepec. Karla’s family moved from commercial to specialty coffee production just a few years ago, after she discovered that one of the buyers they worked with was promoting their coffee as specialty-grade but telling her father, the proprietor of the farm, that their coffee wasn’t specialty quality.
When she discovered her coffee was being misrepresented, she reached out to other roasters to find new partners, and you can now find her coffees being sold by specialty roasters across the globe, notably at Phoenix Coffee in Cleveland, Girls Who Grind Coffee in southwestern England, and The New Paradigm Coffee in Sydney. She met or connected with many of these folks through the internet.
I tweeted recently about the power of social media to improve the future of coffee, and Karla responded, “Instagram was probably the main reason we were able to transition from commercial coffee into specialty.”
Joven Coffee and Karla Boza represent two ways to think about the power of information in coffee, and the roads we build to make information accessible.
For Frankie and Tim, that meant taking the information they learned—information that was already clearly understood by farmers—and identifying a way they could contribute. Part of their goal with Joven is to prompt other roasters to consider how they purchase their coffees, along with giving their consumers a tangible way to understand the complexities of the coffee supply chain.
For Karla, misinformation directly harmed her family’s farm—and social media helped her move forward and take the next step. Hundreds of coffee farmers are now on Instagram or Facebook directly interacting with consumers, which means they no longer have to rely on the gatekeepers of information to make their business decisions.
I wanted to focus on the power of information in this piece, because one of the single-biggest questions I get as a coffee professional is: “What coffee should I drink?” I think when people ask me this question, they want me to recommend The Best Coffee—something that tastes unlike anything else they’ve ever had—because that’s what we understand as a marker of expertise. But my coffee knowledge and experience haven’t equipped me to pick the best coffees—they have equipped me to ask good questions about where my coffee comes from.
I think a better way to think about the question of what coffee to buy is to ask, “What’s important to you? What do you care about when it comes to coffee—or any item you want to purchase—and how do you find the information you need to make a decision?”
So if you’re in your local coffee shop, ask questions. Don’t be put off if your baristas don’t know (they might not have been told by their bosses or managers), and feel free to learn more about the roasters in your city or neighborhood. Search social media for farmers, and find out who they work with—it’s likely those roasters share their values. (It’s no coincidence that Phoenix Coffee is cooperatively owned, Girls Who Grind Coffee works to empower women, and The New Paradigm shares a philosophy near and dear to my heart: Stay small, stay impactful.)
It’s OK to ask questions and seek out information—or ask why it’s not more readily available. My friend, Brian Gaffney (also a former guest of the show) tends to look backwards when he buys coffee. In his episode he detailed how he follows farmers, giving them equal weight as the roasters he chooses to purchase coffee from.
Perhaps that’s unfeasible for you where you are right now, but try googling the farmer on the bag of beans you have, or try to find them on social media, or try looking up mission-driven roasters like Joven or other roaster who supports a cause you care about. I promise you this will help inform and empower the future buying decisions you make.
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