Why I Never Entered a Coffee Roasting Competition in 10+ Years
I’ve worked in the coffee industry for more than a decade. Of everything I’ve done, my longest-running role has been as a roaster. And in all that time, I’ve never once entered a coffee roasting competition — even though they’re common enough.
Every Action Needs a Reason
Any action needs a reason behind it. It doesn’t matter whether that reason is rational or not — it just needs to be enough of a motive to move you.
I never had a reason that could do that for me.
A Career Built on Learning, Not on Overflow
My career as a coffee roaster has been filled up with learning. I never set a size for the container that learning went into, and I never really noticed how big it had become. More than ten years of filling it, and it still hasn’t overflowed.
Thinking about it now, I suspect the reason I never had a motive was simply that nothing had ever overflowed. The container was opaque — I couldn’t see inside it — and since nothing was spilling over, I assumed there was nothing worth showing anyone else either.
What Drives Someone to Compete?
What must it feel like, wanting to enter a competition? I can only guess from the outside. Perhaps it’s people who are curious just how good their own knowledge is, or who’ve found a reason they genuinely want to pass on what they know to others.
Or perhaps they simply have something to accomplish that calls for a shiny trophy.
Competitions have been around for as long as I’ve been working in this industry. Plenty of people have run them, and plenty of champions have emerged from them.
When “Champion” Stops Being Singular
Multiple champions have emerged in similar fields over time. The moment “champion” — a title that’s supposed to be singular — starts belonging to several people at once, competitions lose a bit of their shine.
Not all of it, though. And they’re never likely to lose all of it completely, either. There will always be someone who wants to become one of those several champions.
Ethiopian Coffee Then and Now: Has More Detail Meant Better Flavour?
You really do have to be careful with your palate. Once it’s calibrated to a certain level, it rarely settles back down again. To make matters worse, memory tends to gild the flavours of the past, so what we ate or drank years ago often gets remembered as better than it actually was.
I’ve worked in the coffee industry for more than 13 years now. In that time I’ve roasted and tasted more coffees than I could ever count. Most of them have blurred together, but a few stand out clearly enough to write about. Today I want to talk about Ethiopian coffee.
How Ethiopian Coffee Labelling Used to Work
Ethiopian coffee wasn’t nearly as finely categorised as it is today. What came in was labelled with a simple grade and one of just two processing methods.
In terms of naming, it went like this: first the country, Ethiopia; then the region, Yirgacheffe; then the grade, G1; and finally the processing method, washed. Four elements, and that was it.
How Ethiopian Coffee Labelling Works Today
Things look very different now. The country name stays the same, obviously, but the regional detail has multiplied. After the broad designation of Yirgacheffe comes a smaller sub-region such as Uraga.
Often the name of the washing station gets added on top of that. After that might come the name of the exporter handling the coffee, or the name of the farmer who grew and processed it. Only then do the grade and processing method get tacked on at the end.
Processing methods themselves have exploded from just two or three options in the past to what feels like hundreds today, if not more.
Has All This Extra Detail Actually Improved the Coffee?
Has Ethiopian coffee actually got better as it’s gone from that old simplicity to today’s dizzying complexity? In my experience, no.
If anything, I feel the regional character is getting blurred, and the price has climbed far faster than the flavour has improved. It would be wonderful if quality rose in step with every extra line of information on the bag. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality.
These days I often find myself missing the classic washed or natural Ethiopian coffees of the past. Even weighing the very best of each era against the other, it’s hard to say confidently that today’s coffee comes out ahead. To get a genuinely excellent Ethiopian coffee now, you have to pay a price that makes your eyes water.
And even then, what you get is only roughly on par with — or maybe a touch better than — the good Ethiopian coffee of years ago. I don’t particularly want to romanticise the past, and it’s not really my style, but I do find myself thinking about the old Ethiopian coffees more often than I’d expect.
Why Prices Keep Climbing
Some of this quality gap is almost certainly down to environmental change. As temperatures rise and soil quality weakens, growers have to move to higher-altitude land to keep producing good Ethiopian coffee.
The trouble is, the higher you go, the less farmable land there is — the available area shrinks exponentially with altitude. That naturally pushes prices up. All of these factors feed into each other, forming a loop that drives prices ever higher.
Putting It to the Test: A Recent Ethiopian Coffee Comparison
I recently tested a batch of Ethiopian coffees imported by several different companies. The lineup included coffees carrying an individual producer’s name, with prices ranging from the low twenty-thousands of won up to around forty thousand.
After finishing the tests, the coffee I ended up choosing to use was a Uraga at a price in the low-to-mid twenty-thousands. The producer-named coffee, from Muleta Muntasha, turned out to be less impressive than I’d expected given the price.
I keep learning the same lesson: an expensive coffee is no guarantee of great flavour. You shouldn’t buy a year’s worth of a coffee based on information or price alone.
Testing Should Always Be Fair and Unbiased
Every coffee deserves a fair, unbiased test. My own testing process covers the green bean’s appearance, its screen size distribution, how it behaves during roasting, its defect count, and a full flavour assessment. Not one of these steps can be skipped.
