Coffee co-fermentation, navel gazing or scandal?
I’ve been exploring coffee and came across this interesting news about “co-fermented coffee”
So in a nutshell, the claim is that you can take green coffee beans and ferment them with some other food item such as spices or fruit, and this process will in turn affect the flavour of the coffee after you roast it and brew it.
Full disclosure, I’ve never heard of co-fermented coffee before. To the best of my knowledge I have never had it before.
The controversy appears to be that perhaps on some or even all cases, the co-fermentation is being augmented or even faked by the addition of glycol and artificial flavours. The suspicion is that typical flavours that are being claimed shouldn’t be stable at the temperatures used in roasting coffee. They also shouldn’t be identifiably the same flavours as the fruit that go in, yet you have lychee co-ferments that apparently taste like lychee, mango co-ferments that taste like mango, and so on.
I’m curious how this all came about. I assume initially co-fermentation was a purely natural process. It sounds like a super obvious thing to attempt. Now we apparently see widespread evidence of chemical additives. Maybe it is in response to instability of the process? Did it ever work as claimed, and did these tests possibly only target the most egregious flavour profiles which therefore found the artificial flavours while not testing the milder and natural variants? I’m sure there are many questions since this seems like an early stage of examination.
So my question is, tilderinos, what’s your take? Is this just gatekeeping, is this fraud on the consumer, do we need certification ala sparkling wine vs champagne for processes, is this possibly just a good and useful evolution of coffee processing?
I hadn't heard of this before, but it feels like it shouldn't pass the sniff test? Typically you ferment in order to get new, different flavours (often sour tones, but also richness/sweetness from chemical breakdown), not the same flavours. Eg. marmite doesn't taste like sourdough, (sour) pickles don't taste like cucumbers, aged hard cheeses don't taste like milk, etc.
You'd normally do an infusion with some sort of solvent in order to directly transfer flavours from one foodstuff to another, like when you dump herbs into vodka, or marinade a steak.
But yeah I don't think anyone is a rube for thinking this could work; I don't know a tonne about how coffee is fermented, and it seems reasonable to trust manufacturers not to lie through their teeth.
Edit: also fermenting one foodstuff with others is a practice as old as time, since often you want to inoculate the ferment with cultures that're often present on another. So that probably has a lot of history. But unless you incorporate that other item in the final product, or bathe it in solvent, you're relying on air transport and chemical volatility to get those flavour compounds into your target material.
Also I should note that I'm just interested in this stuff and not an expert XD this is not culinary advice
For context, coffee is always fermented. It’s part of the process, no matter if it’s specialty or Starbucks.
Cofermentation just means you toss in more fruit to ferment with the coffee fruit.
A coferment should have notes of the fermented fruit. While some don’t, and are sus for that reason, most do.
I’d also note that it’s a fairly light flavor note. It’s like mango lacroix - it has the hint of mango, but it’s not mango juice. Coferments still taste predominately of coffee.
I ocassionally get co-fermented coffee from luminous (https://www.loveluminous.coffee, would recommend if you want specialty coffee, although it's a bit of PITA to order from them), and to be honest I don't really care. A lot of it is posturing.
Coffee additives have a bad rap because people (and by people I mean nespresso, starbucks, your local grocery store, etc) take bad coffee, then add almond or hazelnut or whatever to mask the bad coffee.
The co-ferments are using high quality coffee, and enhancing the flavor profile. Whether they get there by actually putting rotting fruit next to the rotting coffee or not doesn't really change what I care about in the end: how the coffee taste when I brew it.
Third wave coffee is so primed to defend against the ills of what is considered the "traditional" coffee industry that it goes overboard. Blends are another case - yes, nespresso or whatever blends coffee to mask their bad coffee, but in the history of gastronomy it's very clear that you can make new and interesting flavor profiles by mixing two different flavor profiles. It's highly unlikely that this is an impossible task for coffee. Yet there is strong pushback against any blending for specialty coffee.
If co-ferments aren't actually the thing changing the flavor of the coffee, but something added after the fact, then the co-ferment is just marketing playing at gastronomy. I have nothing to say about whether it's an enjoyable product, but if their claims are false that's a problem.
I am sure there are farms doing processing that take shortcuts and so on. As is always the case with sourcing coffee and tea, there will always be a subset of producers that cut corners or don't tell the truth or otherwise act in bad ways.
I have read about and watched some things that talked about various processes and specifically co-fermentation a bit and at least to me it seemed there were farms/producers that were doing it above board. It seemed to be a legitimate process but I could see how some producers could jump on it and use the hype of an uncommon process to demand a high price while "faking it". Some tea producers in China do this too- artificially adding aromas and so on- but a lot of vendors steer clear of these fakes
The better specialty roasters build relationships with farms and producers directly over time and become knowledgeable and connected enough to navigate the market and those relationships and avoid producers that do things in a way they would not approve of.
At the end of the day when choosing your coffee you just have to trust that the roaster/specialty coffee vendor you buy from is making that effort. The more transparent and thorough the information from the roaster, the better. Some roasters will tell you the name of the producer and the exact farm name and talk about the group they're buying from. Some roasters also explain the entire processing of each coffee in detail on their sites. Some even provide granular breakdowns of the price.
All that said, the one that investigated (Pedro at Pergamino) and raised this issue is a producer/exporter that has decided they will not sell co-ferments because of detecting this problem in many coffees they tested.
IMO Christopher Feran (who was probably in some of the aforementioned content I consumed about co-fermentation) is a trustworthy voice in coffee (he is very deeply knowledgeable about different processing methods including many obscure ones) and he is is someone that passed along that Instagram post and is amplifying the voice of a roaster raising this issue (with a university assisting with an investigation/study that found it widespread at least in the ones they tested) so if they're finding it to be of concern themselves then it sounds like it may be becoming a widespread problem in the industry, so maybe it actually is a big problem. I still don't necessarily think that co-ferments are all that way, but if big names in the specialty coffee world are concerned about its legitimacy and there's some proof, then yeah, seems to be a legitimate worry.
I personally very much care about whether my coffee, when called co-fermented is done naturally at the source without any artificial flavors added. I personally despise corporate artificially "flavored" mass market coffee that is flavored by the vendors/roasters too but at least those are transparent that it's fake- I also want it clean at the source/at origin, not adulterated with fake flavoring to get an intense flavor that they can sell as a very specific intense flavor profile. If I am spending the extra money on a less common process for coffee I want to be able to trust that said processing method isn't faked.
A coffee sold as co-fermented inherently comes with an implication of a specific process being used and that process is not typically one that involves artificial flavors being used at source, so if we're getting a different product than the one being presented, it's a fake, and a massive transparency problem.
If a farm/producer wants to artificially flavor a coffee at origin in processing and be upfront and transparent about it and they and roasters come up with a new term that makes it clear that's what's happening then i have no problem with it. I think it's subpar and would never buy it but transparency is key. Just don't lie to me. I care more about the honesty than the flavor.