15th Ave Coffee & Tea

Perched on the hillside of the city of Lausanne, Switzerland overlooking French Switzerland’s Lake Geneva with the picturesque backdrop of the French alps, sits the Starbucks Coffee Trading Company (henceforth referred to as the SCTC); the office responsible for all of Starbucks’ green coffee buying.

There are several steps that take place between the time the coffee cherry is harvested and when it is brewed to your liking in the cafe. The most noteworthy of which are (in sequence) harvesting, processing, buying and roasting/blending. If you’d like to learn a bit more about how coffee is processed on a coffee farm, be sure to check out Luke’s post below. My name is Amanda, one of your 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea supervisors, and today I’m going to tell you a little bit about green coffee buying practices based on the wonderful day I was able to spend with our coffee buyers and tasters in Lausanne.

When the green coffee samples arrive at the SCTC, they are roasted to a sample roast profile for the following day’s cupping. Given that the coffee has yet to be tasted, for sampling purposes, the coffee is roasted to a constant sample roast profile based on its growing region. Unlike coffee sold in the cafe that is roasted for the purpose of showcasing the coffee’s specific attributes, having a constant roast profile allows for coffee to be compared side-by-side without having its roast define the flavor characteristics of the coffee and/or perhaps mask the subtleties that are products of the geographic regions and processing methods. Once the coffee is roasted, it is left overnight to de-gas (approximately 16 hours). De-gassing is an important step in this process. When the green coffee bean is roasted, not only does the water evaporate causing the bean to both dry out and expand in size, but some of the natural sugars in the bean transform into CO2 gas. The de-gassing step allows for the bean to emit the majority of the CO2 helping protect and stabilize the flavor.

When I arrived at the SCTC at 8:30am, I was just in time for the daily cupping. Being the industry standard for tasting coffee, the cupping was prepared nearly identically to one of the 11am cuppings you may have attended at 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea. Unlike our meager quantities of 2-3 cups per type of coffee we taste, at the SCTC they cup 6 cups of each single origin coffee. In order for the coffee to be considered for retail, each of the 6 cups must exhibit a consistently exceptional combination of flavor, body and acidity. One of the coffee samples we were tasting was an Indian coffee with a pleasant herbal flavor and medium acidity. As the Manager of Green Coffee Quality tasted the sixth cup of the Indian coffee she validated her analysis with the other Francophone tasters by asking if they too thought it was “moisi”, the French word for “musty”. When the team concluded there was an evident defect in that one cup, the coffee was to be rejected on a basis of inconsistency.

Tasting with our coffee buyers gave me an incredible insight into the care we take in selecting the coffees we serve in our store. Every day, at our daily cuppings, I learn or discover something new about our coffees and the subtleties that hide beneath the surface of this complex product. I encourage you to join us at 11 am one of these days and experience our coffees with me or one of 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea’s other passionate baristas.

Should you have any further questions about the coffee buying or tasting process, I’d love to hear from you in a comment below!

-Amanda