Kyle Ramage, who took first place in the 2017 United States Barista Championship and sixth in the world that year, talks to our technical ambassador, Nicholas Flatoff, on color sorting your coffee, the benefits of long-term relationships with coffee farmers, and the future of coffee.
Transcript:
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Sovda podcast. I'm Nicholas I'm here with Kyle Ramage who's a bit of a legend in the specialty coffee world. Kyle, you want to go ahead and just give us a little intro?
Kyle Ramage: [00:00:10] I'm Kyle Ramage. I'm one of the owners here at Black and White Coffee.
My job now is mostly green buying and quality control, but a lot of people know me from the 2017 United States Barista Championship where I took first in the U.S. and then got sixth in the world that year in Seoul, Korea.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:00:35] You're partnered with Lem [Butler] as well who's a bit of a legend in his own right. Remind me, was he the year before or the year after for USBC?
Kyle Ramage: [00:00:44] Yeah, year before. So he and I worked together in 2016 when he won and then went to worlds and got fourth in Dublin. And then he worked with me the following year when I won. And then that kind of following summer, we opened Black and White Coffee Roasters here in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:00:59] Well and Kyle, you had what? Just a cafe that was just finished. A cafe that was just kind of getting started and the roastery move all at once, right?
Kyle Ramage: [00:01:09] Yeah. We had a cafe open in July, a cafe opened in November and then the rotary was in December and it was of course, like, you know, a full-on thing. We were $30,000 over on one of our build-outs the roastery cost more than we expected. They always do. They just cost more than we hoped it would cost more.
You know what I'm saying? So it was just kind of like a perfect storm, but then like somehow, February last year came around and things just started trending in a better direction. And then yeah, 2020 was the best year we've ever had. So that doesn't make any sense.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:01:42] Nah, but you know, you're putting out good coffee and I do think that there's been a trend towards treating yourself to a good bag of coffee at home, especially when you start adding up the $2, $3, $4 for a pour-over people are willing to pay.
Kyle Ramage: [00:01:58] Yeah I think it's a lot of our customers who are buying in the store now buying online, and then a lot of new customers are buying from us and they're buying from all these other roasters. It's the crazy thing.
I don't know how many people you've talked about this, but it's been kind of feast or famine, right? Like you're either smashing it. Like you're either like record numbers or you are half volume. It seems to be no in between like a lot of the big roasters took a big hit. And then a lot of the small roasters are doing really well.
And well I guess we're not really small anymore, but yeah, it's wild.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:02:30] So the install of your Pearl Mini was actually my first ever job with Sovda back in December, 2019. And, you know, we had a lot of fun. I think you were just in line with a lot of my passions on origin and coffee quality. And then more specifically, you opened up my eyes a little bit to the world of the impact that the Pearl could have on contracts and some of the coffee that you're getting. And just how that, that played into being able to use coffees that maybe you otherwise would have had to reject or you know, up-sorting coffees a little bit. That was the first time I had... you opened my eyes up to all that.
So yeah, I guess in general, now in into it about a year, what are your just general thoughts and takeaways on having that Pearl for those purposes?
Kyle Ramage: [00:03:16] Oh, yeah, totally. It's a, it's a really interesting tool to be able to utilize and optimize to make us just that little bit better, specialty coffee, especially in America, I mean, actually not as competitive in America as it is in some other countries like Australia, but in the United States, it's incredibly competitive market to be in whether it's price competitive or it's quality competitive or just personally competitive. So it just gives us that little leg up. People always know that when they see the Sovda, they hear us talk about it, they always know that we're committed to coffee quality because we're willing to throw away coffee and make our coffee cost more so our quality can be higher, which has really proved its dividends, especially in espresso extraction when say if you get one Quaker or one, like even, maybe not even Quaker, but one like low sugar seed in a batch brew, or maybe even two or three or four, you're most likely not going to notice that stretch across 200, 300 grams, whatever it may be.
But if you get one Quaker in an espresso for barista competition, or an espresso, serving a customer, you may have lost that customer forever because your coffee tastes like hot popcorn and that's not really what you're shooting for. So for that, regardless like in the cafe, it does a lot, a lot of like even Unsane work.
It does, which is really, really cool. And then for our wholesale partners, it gives us that little leg up because we always know the coffees are going to come through with more clarity and more sweetness than our competitors. And also ensures us what we talk about a ton and what it's very important to me.
In particular, is it insures us against crop loss or crop failure or crop difficulties? Right. So we're in a world right now that is especially as coffee producers. They are in a world where the climate is changing all the time, though, the rains are moving around all the time. And so it's really difficult for them to.
Take these big risks on this huge crop. And maybe it comes when they don't have enough water or they have too much water or it didn't rain at the right time to make the coffee of flowers bloom properly or whatever it may be. And in that you have some development issues within the seeds and you have some Quakers that kind of pop up in wash coffees and natural coffees.
It happens in all coffees, but us in particular, we're really committed to naturally processed coffees. Especially in Africa and even now more so in central and South America. And we've just noticed over the years that coffee Quaker count goes up and down, even when they're floating cherry, even when they're, even optically sorting at origin with these larger producers who have like optical sorters for their physical green coffee, that doesn't ensure you 100%, that there will be no Quakers.
So kind of have this as another level of, of security. Most specifically, because we want to work directly with producers year in and year out where we can buy their coffee, regardless if there's Quakers or not. Because like this year in particular, we had an Ethiopian coffee that was natural, that came in with a little bit higher Quaker content than the year before, but also a little bit higher, what we call like low sugar seeds.
So they didn't necessarily look like full Quakers, but they were like a lighter color than most of the lot. And when we sorted that out, we were able to make the coffees cup almost three points higher than with them in. So we were able to aggressively sort the coffee and get it up to the quality that we wanted. Did we make as much money as we possibly could have on that coffee? No, but did we ensure that our coffee was as good as it could have been? And we represented this producer as well as possible with what we had available. One thing that has really intrigued me and given me more confidence in with the Pearl Mini, the Sovda sorter that we have is that the ability to actively pursue coffees from new producing areas, or even maybe coffees from different processing methods, from origins that have not historically done those processes.
And given me the ability to have confidence that I can bring that coffee in and it still be delicious and meet that Black and White standard, right. For instance, we partnered with - crazy long story, like a lot of my relationships are - like how Samuel and I met it is quite a long and convoluted story, but I have a friend in Laos who produces coffee and they are seeking to produce high quality anaerobic, natural coffees in Laos. And because I knew that I could sort that coffee when it arrived, even if they didn't have access to some of the better density sorters, I knew that I could make that coffee into a coffee that was tasty once it arrived here in the US. I was able to agree based on pre-ship sample to purchase a coffee and then have it arrive in the US knowing I was likely going to have to sort it pretty heavily, but I was able to make that deal work and give them confidence to go into the next year's production to produce in theory more.
Right. So we bought a natural coffee from them and it was quakery-er than I would have hoped in a perfect world, right. But it was still super delicious, met all of our quality specs and we sold it and our customers loved it. And we were able to buy an anaerobic wash coffee from them as well that we actually put out in our birthday box to just stump people, because it was a really fun, it tasted like a, like a nice, like a really high grown Brazil, or like a nice Colombian coffee. Like sweet had a little bit of nuttiness on it, but it was sweet, clean, vibrant acidity. So it was like one of those things that really - that was really the difference maker in that competition. A lot more people would have gotten a higher number right if they would have been able to pick out the anaerobic wash, Laos coffee. So that was super fun. So Chelsea who actually does QC for us right now, before Chelsea started working with us in QC actually was second in that competition.
So it was kind of a funny, a funny thing, but I was so close to winning. That was an amazing competition. There was a, a single group Slayer and like a year's worth of Pacific non-dairy milk, non-dairy product, non-dairy beverage, whatever the actual name is, please forgive me... and like customization for the panels and tons of stuff from Slow Pour, [?] donated cups. So it's basically like a little pop-up cafe, E65 from [?] as well. Massive. massive cool stuff.
Samuel Gurel: [00:09:46] It's so fun when marketing not only helps you sell a product, but actually brings people together. And I think that was a great contest. A lot of fun. I actually wanted to sign up for it, it was just sold out too fast to even get involved. It was, but it was a great, it was just a, I was like, this is really good. And it's really fun. It's the kind of thing people want to do. I want to try it.
Kyle Ramage: [00:10:08] Yeah, we were able to donate all that money to Grounds for Health. I think it was $15,000. Like the total sale of those boxes went all to Grounds for Health, which was, the project they chose was cervical cancer screening in, I think it was Kenya and Ethiopia. I could be wrong on that, but either way it's like, it was fun. It was great. Like all the... basically all the money was sponsored by either Pacific Foods or Slayer Espresso, [?], they all put in money. They all put in help. They all put in amazing support to just really show support during a kind of a dark time in the specialty scene. As far as we're not able to get together for these competitions, we're not able to do anything super like intriguing and fun. So here just taste these five coffees and see if you can pick it all out, right. I know a lot of people were very humbled by it and I'm certain, I would have been very humbled by it as well. Cause it was a, I made it hard on purpose. I mean, how many people have tasted an anaerobic wash coffee from Laos? I'm going to guess not a ton.
One person that we bought a coffee from in a very relational sense is the producer who produced the coffee that Lem and I won the competitions with. And we continue to buy his coffee every year. His name is Jose Manuel Guyardo and he is a trained engineer who owns a coffee farm, or his family owns multiple coffee farms, but he, his family and he own one in particular, one geisha farm called [?] in [?] Panama.
Jose's awesome. He's an indigenous Panamanian. Super, super cool. Incredibly intelligent dude. Works most of his time as a professor at the University of Panama in David, but like I said he has a small geisha farm and is incredibly experimental with his processing. Invented and implemented a drying room, which I'm not going to tell you a ton about, because I don't think he... I'd let him share that information of how he created and implemented it. He's very free information, but that's him and his information. I don't want to like give it away, but implement it, this crazy drying room and was really working on natural coffees one year and just had some coffees that just didn't turn out. And he didn't exactly know why. But they presented with an incredibly high Quaker content, like 10% Quakers.
So like basically undrinkable natural coffee at that point, a natural geisha from the Casa portion of his farm, which is like middle elevation, where the most of the great coffees come from, Lem and I, both of our competition espresso coffees came from that plot. I mean, we're talking about a tiny farm, it's like five hectares. It's naturally shaded because it's in a nature preserve. So you cannot cut down trees there. It's not legal. So we had this one lot - he called it Black Bag Natural - he was like, "I don't know what to do with this. If I ship it to you guys, can you pay me what it's worth?" And I'm like, "okay, sure."
So he shipped it to us and ah... man. Wow. So many Quakers. I roasted a batch, like maybe a 10-pound batch and it took me maybe two and a half hours to sort it cause it was just so many Quakers. It's like when you accidentally pour green coffee into roasted coffee and you just have a panic attack and just want to throw it all away. That's what it felt like when you dropped that coffee into the cooling tray. So once you got it sorted, it's an amazing coffee. It's still like a, you know, a high, super high eighties coffee, but with the Quakers it's like not specialty. So I mean, that's what, 8 to 10 points from a sort. So yeah, it can happen to anyone and it allowed us to be able to pay him money for that coffee and have it be used for something other than just, I don't know. He would probably blend it into one of his dad's commercial coffee lots.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:13:51] Do you have a general idea on the Delta, the cost per pound spread between what sorting at what it's worth, and what do you think it would cost you?
Kyle Ramage: [00:14:04] For that particular coffee? It would be, you'd be catastrophic, right? Cause you're looking at commercial grade coffee, which is like - commercial grade coffee in Panama is still significantly more expensive than commercial grade coffee anywhere else - commercial grade coffee in Panama, I think farm-gate style. Like they pick it up from your farm in a truck. But for dried seeds is four and some change to his green geisha price is... like the friend and family price is $65 for his baseline geisha $65. His exceptional stuff goes up from there. Like the stuff I used in competition was $95 and then he has another line now that's the fermented coffees so the anaerobics, those coffees are over a hundred dollars a pound just depending on quality.
And then of course the - look at the coffees that get submitted to the best of Panama, which Jose has won, every time he's ever submitted he's gotten a top 10 at least once. He of course has a, is a Cup of Excellence award, like first place award winner for one of his washed coffees. That was in 2016. And then that same year he got second in the natural category as well, by one 100th of a point to the first place winner. So he's incredibly gifted and like just detail oriented producer. So math, science is kind of his thing.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:15:21] Basically it sounds like fif- and obviously this is a unique situation...
Kyle Ramage: [00:15:26] Yeah, Panama is a very unique situation.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:15:28] Yeah, but in that case, being able to sort the coffee got Jose 15 times the price and I suppose it's worth noting this is pre-Pearl, so there's still a lot of manual effort that went into that. But now that the Pearl's there, if a situation like that happens again, boom, no problem.
Kyle Ramage: [00:15:45] Yeah, no sweat. I mean, we sort all of our costs, even like the super high end stuff that we get for these competitions, like I'm talking like super high-end coffees that have seeds that, that if you take them out can make the coffee better, if that makes sense. I mean, I'm talking everyone. I mean, we're talking Jamison Savage. I'm talking to Jose Manuel. Guyardo at [?]. I'm talking Geisha Village Experimental, Auction Lot Coffees, I'm talking Yemeni coffees that are coming in at crazy high prices. I mean, everything can do from a nice sort and you can kick out, just, even some of those, like talk about those low sugar seeds that just don't roast quite as dark that have some of that like, kind of crackery malt-y sweetness that you would really prefer not be there. I mean, La Palma coffees, we all love La Palma coffees that we take to competition, which we've done very well with. Gotten a first place gotten a third place, gotten a fourth place. So yeah, all those coffees get sorted as well. You know, only be like maybe 15 or 20 seeds in a 12 pound batch, but the coffee is still tastes better without those seeds present.
So even the best in the world still aren't perfect. So these coffees are still coming in cupping, you know, 86 points or something like that, but like, you know, for, an amazing natural Ethiopia you're hoping for like 88+, 90 points sometimes, especially at this particular place, which I'm not gonna mention by name, but they, their coffees are amazing and a little sort on those has gone a long way to making those like extra special.
And when I say heavy sort, I'm talking like our max sort is like 3% so we're still not, I mean, we're not going crazy, crazy, like fifties, 40%, 30%. I mean, a heavy sort for us is 3%. An average sort is 1% or less than 1% of total sort kick. And that, you know, that's what, you know, whatever, 8% or 9% of potential over-kicks from just the air hitting the next bean over from the bad ones.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:17:36] Sure. Sure. Well, I think that probably points towards there's multiple applications for the Pearl. And one of the things is upsorting coffee to get the, the cupping point up a little bit. But starting with quality coffee, that's already been picked well, that's already been processed well. You know, that still has value in the end cup, a hundred percent. And it, it comes back I guess, to the quality goals and price consciousness. But I love where you guys are going, where you're taking naturals and honeys, which I feel like to a certain extent the industry has... it's getting better, but still hasn't fully embraced in the ways, that washed coffee - you still run into the roasters that are like, ah, no, we don't do natural process, you know, or we're washed and maybe a honey here and there or something like that.
Kyle Ramage: [00:18:25] Especially out where you guys are in Portland, like there's a lot of well-known roasters there who I'm friends with, who just don't do naturals. It's just not part of their thing. I guess again, I get a lot in Seattle, a lot, yeah, a lot of those - what, kind of Pacific Northwest - lots of washed coffees up that way. Washed coffees, exclusively. I've noticed.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:18:43] Yeah. It feels like that, you know, smaller roasters in the area, definitely picking up some higher-scoring naturals, but it was a real pleasure to be coming in and tasting a lot of your naturals on honey-process, geishas, and just super high end, super well-processed naturals. And you know, I just love naturals. I think it's one of those things you're kind of born a washed person or a natural person, and sometimes you cross over, but you know, for me, the best cup of coffee is a really solid, maybe a little clean, but I don't mind a little funk natural, and yeah, it's a... that's a lot of fun.
Kyle Ramage: [00:19:17] I think a lot of the reason that we see that is there are kind of like "forefathers" in the industry, especially here in the Southeast, who kind of fore-ran that for us with natural coffees, probably one of the biggest names on the East coast, also a huge name in optical sorting, his name is Tim Hill. He was the head green buyer for Counter Culture Coffee for an incredibly long time, oversaw their implementation of, as far as I know, the first optical sorter for roasted coffee in the world. And now it's like the... [he] kind of leads the Africa buying for Atlantic Specialty here in the U.S. and just has gone from brown coffee to green coffee, but still works with us incredibly, incredibly closely.
So yeah, I think there are like fore-runners in that whole thing. And like John at Onyx and that crew, they also serve a ton of naturals, also a proud Sovda user. You know, as well as us and Counter Culture here on the East coast.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:20:08] Yeah, that's awesome! Well and being able to, when I was out there in December, 2019, Tim stopped by and that was kinda like, ah, yes, I get to meet Tim! That was a really fun experience for me. And, yeah, he's, he's a little bit of a legend here as well. So, especially within Sovda and the optical sorting, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, that was, that was a lot of fun to, to meet him and chat with you guys and just hang out for awhile.
One of the things that a lot of people, even in the roasting and green buying, green sourcing, they may not yet have experienced a true direct trade relationship. They might be primarily looking at coffee importers, green importers to pick their selections. So, from your experience, what are some of the differences between buying through an importer versus buying direct trade with a farmer? Some of the challenges that go along with that, and then, just for me personally, I'm curious, how do you go about sustaining a longer-term relationship when the crops vary so much?
Kyle Ramage: [00:21:06] Coffee's a natural product, so it's very difficult. It seems like it's been a relatively difficult year in the last couple of years for naturals in Ethiopia. And I'm not a hundred percent sure why. I've always tried to be inquisitive about that with people who are bringing coffees in and who have more contact in Ethiopia for that, as sure as well, but the biggest difference, and I want to kind of demystify something a little bit when it comes to green-buying, like very rarely is a coffee, 100% direct trade. So I think that's a term that gets kind of... maybe used flippantly. So I want to kind of classify that stuff a little bit, at least as far as I've experienced in the last three years, like, when I say purely direct trade, that means that the price for that coffee was bargained between me or the whoever bought the coffee at my company, me in particular and the producer of that coffee. And ideally at that point, the movement of that coffee from the hands of the producer to myself, would be, will be handled at the same time. So that only happens with us... it doesn't happen as much as I would like.
Now we have a lot of like, that's like the most direct, and then there's some [others] like I know the producers, I know them personally, we talk on WhatsApp, we talk on Facebook Messenger or whatever, but they're working through their sources at their origin, to give me a price through that intermediary. And that happens quite a lot as well. And every country has a slightly different variation of how they would like that to be done. Some people are just like, "Oh, I'm on a zoom call with them. I'm on a Facebook call with them. I'm on..." whatever, and we talk about a price and they say, okay, cool. We're shipping it to you. And they send it air freight, or they send it on a, on a box directly for us or whatever. And then some of them were like, "Okay, cool. That sounds awesome. It's great to talk to you. Let me talk to the exporter and then we'll kind of work through that channel." And at the end, doing direct trade is more about what is best for the producer and what makes them feel the most comfortable and the most safe and insured against me being a jerk on the other end and how that stuff works.
So, yeah, like I said, every relationship we have is slightly different. And I think it should be because every person's a little different and their financial situations are honestly very different. Like some of the people that we're able to go direct trade with, have a lot more capital on hand, than some of these producers say the smaller producers in Columbia, who haven't been producing coffee for 35 years on a hundred-hectare farm. They have, you know - they've got five or six hectares and I grow... I maybe make 10 bags, 12 bags per harvest of this plot. So it's kind of a... yeah, it changes a lot.
So, but anyways, to go back to your question, what's the big difference between direct and working through [an] importer? I would say there's just a level of personalness that is different with a lot of the direct trade partnerships that we have. We've cultivated a relationship. Some of them started through importers, exporters, whatever, whatever a particular thing looks like, and then move into more of a direct relationship, but still operating as movement of coffee through that importer/exporter. Yeah. Yeah. They're all a little different, but basically the biggest difference is insurance.
So if you think about it like this, the importer... And it's all about insurance and risk management. So that's where a lot of the cost is in specialty coffee is who's taking the risk. So for instance, like if you buy a coffee forward, like for instance, this year we contracted coffee with long miles, like three months ahead, it hadn't even left Burundi yet. We contracted that out ahead of time so they give us a little bit better price because they have less risk that when it comes in the country, they're going to get stuck with it through its fruition and they have to sell it as commodity at the end. So basically amazing coffees that come into the country if they sit in the warehouse too long, they're no longer specialty coffees, they've "died." Then they get sold off at the commodity or seed price to whomever will purchase them. Thankfully I haven't had to do that. It's a huge hit when you have to do it, but that's how that whole thing kind of works.
So they know that there's an inherent risk that maybe this coffee doesn't sell, maybe it ships across the water and it's not good. And so, depending on the way that you work your contracts, you have a little bit more insurance when you work through a importer. And a lot of times the importers are just like selling you what's called spot coffee, which is coffee that's already come into the country, it's already been quality vetted. It's already like given flavor notes, all the information has been compiled about its origin, all that stuff where sometimes these more direct coffees, you kind of have to do a little bit more legwork about like finding all the crop details, finding the variety details, WhatsApping random people and asking them what the fermentation was like. All those kinds of things kind of changes who does the work and who has the risk. Our biggest relationship is an Ethiopia that's direct. And the risk is kind of on us. Like that coffee is turned over to an exporter who then imports it into the U.S. And then that coffee for the most part comes to us. And it's already been paid for it's already ready to rip. So we take it and use it. Yes. It's not a huge problem when it's, you know, it's like 10, 7, 5, 3 bags, whatever. But when you're talking to those 50, 100, 250, full-container load things you... your risk starts going up exponentially.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:26:22] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, and then on top of that, the more personal, a relationship, business relationship gets, the easier it is to offend or have bad feelings over [it]. Whereas you don't like a coffee from a importer, you just don't buy it. Right? No, one's... no one's hurt by that or, or whatever. I mean, there are most likely consequences down the road for the farmer, if no one's buying that coffee, like you just kind of went over, but as specifically that the kind of interpersonal, when you become friends with these people and they send out a coffee to you, that's not where you want it to be, frankly, how do you kind of handle that situation? You know, it's a whole nother dynamic.
Kyle Ramage: [00:27:04] That's hard. And that takes a lot of mutual respect and it takes a lot of like, "try to compile as much data as possible," which [is] where the Sovda comes very useful. Again, is it's a statistical reality. Like, okay, cool we had this - say it was a horrible year. We had 14% Quakers kicked from your coffee this year. That's not good. So cause like a Quaker, when you're looking at the CQI evaluation, a Quaker is a roasted defect, so it's difficult, right? And maybe Samuel will have more as a, as a Q instructor. We'll have more knowledge on this, but, what does CQI think about Quakers? What do they do with it?
Samuel Gurel: [00:27:43] Yeah, so it's interesting. SCA says zero, the limit's zero. And,
Kyle Ramage: [00:27:48] Ok cool, so no coffee's ever been specialty yet.
Samuel Gurel: [00:27:52] Well, that's where it gets weird is because they say zero for a hundred gram sample. Well, so then it becomes a little bit of a lottery because you can take the best coffee in the world and there could be one quaker in a hundred-gram sample, depending on what a hundred grams you pick.
I think that's arbitrary. I think it should be: you take 500 gram samples and 4 of the 5 have none, or something like that, or a bigger sample and allow it because CQI arguably worked closer with producers, they realized that was not a very realistic standard. So they said, what would happen if we allowed for. Three Quakers. So three Quakers can still be specialty. And I think that's partly because they realize the differences in processing and, and so they, they picked that number.
What's interesting is there's a researcher out of Brazil that actually did a ton of research on how many Quakers it takes to affect a cup. And what was fascinating is - it goes back to what you were saying earlier, Kyle - you were calling them like low sugar content beans. And that was, she was really the first researcher that I think articulated that point well, is that Quakers can be defined in - she actually used an Agtron score - so she said, A really light Agtron score is a very Quaker-y quake quaker where a darker Agtron score is less of a Quaker. And she, she categorized them based on Agtron score, which was really fascinating. And so
Kyle Ramage: [00:29:29] I assume, I assume this researcher's from Brazil or worked in Brazil.
Samuel Gurel: [00:29:32] Yeah, exactly.
Kyle Ramage: [00:29:21] Yeah. Like they, they use that Rio-y thing too. That's like a Rio... Rio is like a phenol defect. In in green coffee, but in Brazil it happens quite a lot and they kind of, they kind of categorize how intense that Rio is in their, in their green coffee selling because some people really like that flavor, which I do not understand.
Samuel Gurel: [00:29:56] Well, and that gets the whole larger subject is that every country to some degree have developed their own Quakers and you see different defects. In different countries that other people either don't have because they don't exist or they call them something different, which is a whole 'nother, fascinating subject.
Kyle Ramage: [00:30:15] Right. And every country's Quakers look a little different as well. And they, you have to sort different origins slightly differently because of the way the sugar content and the seed works. And then when you get into anaerobic coffees, you get even more confusing because a lot of times anaerobic coffees does the coffee seeds themselves, once they're roasted, are just a slightly different color. Again like you... we're getting into kind of some maybe too deep?
No, but I think it's fascinating. We we've actually noticed that. So you see a color spectrum from a grayish Quaker to more of a reddish-yellow, to more of a, an actual light tan, and they're three totally different colors. And they can happen based on different origins and how they were processed.
They smell and taste different as well. They all have like that same like underlying flavor, but they all kind of, there's a, yeah, cause there's a varying level of intensity of that quakery, flavor, if you will.
Samuel Gurel: [00:31:11] Well, and well, there's. And this is where it gets fascinating also, because for years we thought of Quakers of only being lack of sugar content based on immaturity. What was fascinating is now they're finding yeah, some of it is that those Quakers were actually... had sugars. It was a, it was a successful mature bean, just like all the other beans, but it got attacked by some microbes and those sugars were ingested and metabolized by the bacteria. Well, that bacteria, what it leaves behind and whatever the bacterial byproducts, I mean the refuse of the bacteria and it's not pretty tasting. So, so that's why you can get, you know, just, let's say immature being that may be popcorned, but you can get a bacterially infected bean that can have all kinds of crazy stuff left behind.
Kyle Ramage: [00:32:09] Yeah.
I mean, we're, I mean, we're talking and, you know, in a, in a slightly different way, like exactly what's happening in anaerobic coffees. So these - with lactobacillus in particular, there's many more bacteria that do this, but lactobacillus consumes sugar to create lactic acid and alcohol. So it's wild. A lot of these, this is kind of a confirmation bias, a little bit for me, but that's why a lot of these anaerobic natural coffees are physically lighter in color than, their washed counterparts or even their just normal, natural counterparts.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:32:42] There's literally less sugar in it from the fermentation. It's all getting eaten.
Kyle Ramage: [00:32:45] But more more, it's you're trading that sugar for acidity.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:32:49] And I suppose one could argue lactic acid has mouth field benefits and all kinds of...
Kyle Ramage: [00:32:55] And it modulates flavor as well, which is really interesting because that's what acids do for us in coffees. When you think about anaerobic coffees, you take a normal, just like a normal nice washed coffee. It's like dried fruits and sweet, right? And then you add, you bolt on this acidity to it, this lactic acidity, you're going to modulate those dried fruit flavors into more fresh fruit flavors or in more winey flavors or whatever else.
So you've taken a coffee that was like dried fruit and kind of simple and turned it into a company that may be potentially like vibrant and very interesting. Yeah, so that's a, maybe... maybe be for another podcast.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:33:31] Hey, it's all, it's spectacularly interesting.
Samuel Gurel: [00:33:35] Well, I think it's stuff roasters do need to be thinking about though, because we've always thought of, "Oh, sugar makes coffee sweet," and it's all about sugar content. And it's like, okay, well, explain to me how a natural, which arguably gets more fermentation, and has shown to have actually less sugars is actually sweeter. And I think, I think Barista Hustle's cupping protocols do a really good job of answering this. When they talk about sweetness, they mentioned the research that was done in Britain on this that says, yeah, generally we think of sweetness being related sugars, but it's not just related sugars.
When you have sweetness, it can be because of the volatile, aromatic compounds that actually help that sweetness be perceived sweetness versus sugar based sweetness. And I think that's really a lot of the phenomenon with honeys, with naturals. And even like right now this morning, we're drinking a really nice geisha here. It's the aroma of it that makes it seem so much sweeter than the other coffees.
Kyle Ramage: [00:34:38] It really is crazy how, how different, I mean, when you start getting into other industries as well, like beer into wine, into spirits. Chemical sugars in spirits don't really exist, but perceived sweetness does exist. So that's pretty mind-bending.
I think this will be good for coffee tasters when we can start opening our minds to other industries and other beverages, other food products, whatever it may be, and what we can learn from them and being good tasters of all things is so important to be a really great coffee taster. I don't think anyone who is that [is an] exceptional coffee taster is only good at tasting just coffee, or should only be just good at tasting coffee.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:35:19] Yeah. It's funny you bring that up. I have a "healthy" cheesecake recipe, and one of the things I put in it as balsamic vinegar, because it makes up a ton for dropping the sugar content. It really heightens, and it's not a whole lot, but having just a little bit of that in there. Especially if you put a little balsamic glaze on top of it. Yeah. It just emphasizes that sweetness that's naturally in, I use Greek yogurt for it, but, you know, in any sort of lactose that might exist already.
Kyle Ramage: [00:35:50] Messing with your acids too. You're mixing, the mixing that lactic with that acetic as well, which is interesting how that happens in natural coffee as well. Fascinating. Yeah, we've gone down a little bit of a rabbit hole but I love it! This is a conversation that I had with Marty Pollock of Torch Coffee in, in China about acetic flavors in natural coffee. And in, in America, acetic is like a big no-no, but in other cultures acetic is not viewed as a problem or as a negative flavor where we're a little bit more sensitive to the balance of acetic. I'm super sensitive to the balance of acetic and other acids. So it's very interesting.
Samuel Gurel: [00:36:28] So, Kyle, there's one question I love to ask everyone. You didn't get where you're at in coffee without working hard, but also being a forward thinker. I'm always curious to get people's insight on where you see the industry going. I mean, obviously we're in an inflection point right now where I think of every industry that's been disrupted by COVID and the pandemic. Probably none has been more affected than food and beverage industry, arguably, other than maybe the cruise industry. And if you sell coffee to cruises...
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:37:04] Well and medical...
Samuel Gurel: [00:37:06] But anyway, this question was already always interesting even before COVID. But I'm curious to get your insights on the industry as a whole, but then specifically, even related to pandemic, like let's say this year things improve with the vaccine and numbers start going down, what do cafes look like in the future? You guys are interesting because you run cafes, a lot of roasters don't, but you guys are running cafes as well. What do you see happening? What do you think potentials [are], are people. I'm going to be excited to go back and cafes or people are going to be reluctant.
Are people going to be... yeah. What do you, what do you predict?
Kyle Ramage: [00:37:45] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, first I want to kind of speak to, you mentioned right as we got into this topic that I've gotten to where I am because of my hard work and my forward thinking. I think both those things are true, but I have to also acknowledge in that same breath, the incredible privilege that I carry around as a white male in America, I walk around with an incredible amount of privilege and people will take what I say as fact when they question other people who look different than them. And I just want to, I just want to talk about that. It was just kind of ran through my mind was like, "Hey, this is the perfect opportunity to talk about this," is that I've lived my whole life with people, believing what I say. And that's just not the case with a lot other people: women, people of color. All that to be said, Lem and I talk about this stuff all the time about privilege one, but also about what the future of industry looks like for people like me, for people like - for the whole industry, for all the people who enjoy, specialty coffee.
Funny thing you should say is we may or may not have a product on our website that is called The Future. And we truly believe, Lem and I both truly believe that the future of coffee is anaerobic fermentation, that coffee we are kind of in the early stages of the anaerobic boom, within fermentation and processing, and I think the understanding of fermentation and controlled fermentation by producers all around the world. I think we've probably, I think don't quote me on this, well you can tell it to quote me on this, I have no idea if I'm right or not, we've sold some like 50-60, probably, anaerobic fermented coffees from all around the world. And those coffees are getting better with every harvest. And people are controlling the fermentation at their farms and controlling the flavor profile and bacteria that they're utilizing at their farms in a way that has never been done before. And it's fascinating. In particular, Columbia really kind of spearheaded this idea and really is pushing super fast-forward into what can be the future for that stuff.
And it may be in created yeasts. I really hope not I would prefer to have more of a taste-of-place concept that also is influenced by the way, I like to drink wine and all that stuff as well. But that's the, I think that's the future of the industry because the future of the industry is typically pushed along by barista competitions.
As far as like flavor goes, it seems to be over the last five or six years. What you see in the barista competitions you see in the cafes in a year, two years, sometimes if they're kind of weird complex, maybe three years. This freeze distilled milk thing we've seen pop up in cafes. It's on every barista competitions cart, but it's on, it's in a lot of cafes now as well which is super fun. We're actually working with a dairy here locally in North Carolina to see if we can't figure out a way to mass produce freeze distilled milk. So basically milk with double, triple, quadruple the sugar content. It's basically like, think about it as like melted ice cream that is in your latte.
It's delicious. Is it good for you? Likely not, but it's delicious very much so! This year in Africa is going to be amazing. So many experiments, so many fun processing methods. So many like experimental processing methods that are kind of in-between processing methods. Sure. Yeah. Well even hydro...
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:40:50] Hydro, is that a processing method?
Kyle Ramage: [00:40:52] Yeah, it's a processing method, they take it and they dry it as a natural for three, five, twelve [days], depends on where it's done as a natural for a few days. And then they rehydrate the cherries, hence the hydro name, rehydrate the cherries. Pulp them with a normal pulper and then dry them as either a honey or as a traditional wash coffee.
So you get this profile that somewhere in between washed and natural, that has a lot of these like really fresh, fresh, clean flavors, more like a Rosé almost. It's kind of the best way to describe it. It's so like you're getting kind of these, like in-between white wine, red wine flavors that are really fresh, really clean. So like basically really, really fruity wash coffees. So we have a couple of those coming from Uganda and from Ethiopia. Hopefully that one makes, we haven't tasted that one yet. We tasted the Uganda and it, it was the highest scoring, Ugandan coffee I've ever tasted.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:41:43] That's amazing. Do you remember where it landed points-wise, for those?
Kyle Ramage: [00:41:47] Yeah, it was like an 87.5, 88. So like, I mean, right up against like washed Ethiopia coffee quality. So it was on the table with washed Ethiopias. Washed Ethiopia has a different profile, different genetic origin, different varieties, but they were, they were very, very, very exceptional.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:42:03] I'm stoked for that. I'm going to keep an eye and ear. I'll be refreshing your online stuff,
Kyle Ramage: [00:42:07] Yeah, we'll be putting it all over social media once they arrive, as long as they arrive good, sometimes they arrive bad and no one ever knows about them and we blend them off which is a bummer. We've done that with a bunch of lots.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:42:16] I'll be honest, this is the side of coffee I'm just getting into, that I'm pretty stoked about over at Torch. We just got, I believe it's all the same coffee from Yunnan province with 24 processing methods to one coffee. And, just going through and tasting all those is so far what I'm looking forward to most in 2021, because yeah, there's just so much opportunity on the processing side. You know, as much as we've figured out in roasting and coffee preparation, there's at least that much.
I feel like in processing that we're just kind of, you know, it's still a new frontier. People have been studying it for years and I, I don't want to say that any of that work didn't get us progress, but it's going to be a cool time for these experimental processing methods and anaerobics, just like, like you said, I'm stoked for it.
That was question one. So let's go to question two, which was, what do I feel like is the future of the cafe scene in the United States? So we have three stores open right now and I hope it stays that way, but I think cafes are going to look really, really, really different in the future. I mean, I think there are some things that we've done that we're never going to be able to go away from.
So like curbside pickup, online ordering, a lot of this kind of stuff. I think that's here to stay as much as we hate it and as difficult as it is to keep up with at times. I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon. Also, I could foresee cafes, just looking super different in the future. Like being more takeaway oriented, like a lot of other countries are. Here in the United States we have a very big, like sit in the cafe, do your schoolwork, do your work-work, whatever it may be, from a cafe, where I'm not sure that's going to really happen in the same numbers that it has happened in the past. Which is kind of a bummer because cafes are kind of about the community that is created around them.
And it's more difficult to foster and create community wins. You just have to take your coffee and go back to your house or back to work or back to wherever else. But yeah, I'm not, I'm not certain that the like massive 300 seat cafes are going to be a thing anymore. Not that there are very many of those anyway, but the massive even 20 seat, 30 seat, 50 seat cafes, I'm not sure that they're going to look the same ever again.
Outside seating is going to be a huge pivot for a lot of people as well. I think it's gonna be much more time and thought put into outdoor seating, but also don't see the mask thing going away anytime soon, either. I think that will be at least a year, maybe two, maybe 10. Who knows. It's much more common in Asia as well to wear a mask in public.
So I think that may become a public norm. I kind of hope it does. I think it's a kind of a cool thing. I don't really like being sneezed on or breathed on or coughed on either.
Samuel Gurel: [00:45:05] What advice would you give to roasters out there maybe that are struggling during the pandemic? Like, they're trying to think about how to recreate themselves coming out of this. What are like a few things people need to be thinking about in the next year of their business?
Kyle Ramage: [00:45:19] I think your marketing budget should be maybe beefed up a bit and not necessarily like buying ads in newspapers or magazines or whatever, but spending time on Instagram, spending time answering those Instagram messages when they come in. I don't know if you're a super young buck, maybe the Tik-Tok situation may be up to them. It could be useful for you. I think that those kinds of things... think about your customer-base, who your customer-base is and how they communicate. It's going to be really, really important. We have a relatively, especially our online audience is on the younger side. So we focus heavily on Instagram. But then in one of our more, neighborhood-y cafes, we've focused a little bit more on Facebook advertising is that that tends to have a better results for us in that particular demographic. So, so yeah, focusing on Facebook and Instagram, how, how they can drive customers to your door and help you think and be intentional with how you think about communication and how, what you want to communicate to your customers and how you want to do that.
Because the medium in which we use to communicate also influences very heavily the message that is received. And that's the hard thing. A lot of times is a lot of times as marketers or even just as communicators, we struggle. The, the difference between intended communication and what's actually received communication can be quite different.
Like you put a message out online that says you're doing this one thing and then people don't understand it. And so they either are frustrated by not understanding it, or they hear something totally different than what you intended to say. And then your communication is just jumbled. So it can be very different.
Like for instance, a very good example of this is: we did a pop-up cafe in a neighboring city for the month of December. And we intend to communicate that we weren't going to be open the entire month of December to sell coffee in this, in this, in one of our friend's stores that have been closed down due to COVID.
And what people heard was, Oh, they're going to be open on Saturday as a one day pop-up or maybe a two day pop-up just this weekend. And then after that it's over. So we had pretty good attendance the first couple of days. And then after that, just like nothing. Our intended message and then the message that was received, was very different.
Samuel Gurel: [00:47:33] A real foundation for you and Lem has been competitions. How do you see Black and White being involved with competitions going forward?
Kyle Ramage: [00:47:47] Oh, I mean, we'll be involved in them no matter what they look like, just because like, we owe a lot to that thing. And we believe in what it does for competitive baristas. Now, does that capture every person who is in coffee? Should everyone compete? Absolutely not, but people like Lem and I who are like naturally competitive and naturally like to hone our skills through great difficulty and trial, it worked for us. And so we want our support that for sure. What it will look like? Will it happen again? I really hope so. I think the rules are going to be changed for the barista competition, for sure because part of the deal was like the head judge - it was like four sensory judges and then there's like a head judge that kind of walks around and tastes everyone's beverages to kind of like double check those sensory judges. Right. And, I don't, I don't foresee that being a thing anymore until I COVID is like basically eradicated. We would hate to do an event and then it'd be a super spreader event where every one of the judges got COVID and then all of the people who then went and washed those dishes after those competitors all got COVID. Right. So that would be catastrophically bad for the industry. And that would actually probably be a death sentence for competition if that were to happen. So I come down to take the time and wait till we can do this safely and intelligently, but yeah, it's done a lot for the same for our, even for our QC, QC protocols.
One of the things that I think made us so good during like the majority of the time that we've been open is we were able to cup with the entire production team. So, not just the roasters, not just the green buyer, but like the, all the roasters and the packaging team would taste coffee every morning. Like the whole... everything we roasted the day before we'd cup the next morning with the entire team. And that's how we found out that one of our production guys was an amazing taster and then made an amazing roaster. And now he's being an amazing roaster for someone else. So like, that's been difficult for us and like, safe cupping is difficult. And like, it took Chelsea and I, our other QC person... it took us maybe a month to really get used to how to "safe cup," with spoons and different cups and all the pouring and all the different things. And it's truly changed the way we've had to do things. I'm sure. I'm sure it has for you as well, Samuel with your CQI stuff.
Samuel Gurel: [00:50:01] Yeah. One it's slowed it all down dramatically. I mean, we don't see that change in any time soon. We hope that it can be safe to start doing roasting classes again in the spring, we're looking forward to that. But you know, obviously that's a little easier, cause you're not slurping and out of the same cups or near each other, even, even with better protocols. Roasting is a little bit easier to do socially distanced, but yeah, it's definitely changed the whole tasting arena. We've had problems where good cuppers we know that got COVID lost a lot of their ability to cup, at least temporarily. Now most of them, that has come back, but that's a whole ‘nother interesting phenomenon, but okay.
Kyle Ramage: [00:50:42] I'm mortified. Like the only thing that I do that is... that I would consider to be like above average is smell and taste. So if I can't smell and taste, I'm just, yeah, I'm mortified.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:50:57] So I did have one anecdote. This is going back a little bit to the future of cafe spaces and your point specifically, Kyle, on a lot of smaller coffee shops, opening up, more oriented towards the pickup and kind of the, the, to-go crew.
I spent a fair amount of time in Detroit last year. And one of the things that I had noticed... obviously we missed the Sprudge build out of summer for 2020, which, you know, my life revolves around that. So that's always, always disappointing, but, two that I noticed specifically in Detroit, and then just in general, throughout the United States, there were two shops already, Sabbath Coffee and Milwaukee Coffee that are these really beautiful spaces built out before the pandemic - Sabbath open during the pandemic Milwaukee shortly before that were already that Italian walk-up to-go type, business. And we've seen that in the past every once in a while these popping up. But I did think it was kind of interesting to note that that was the vision of these guys starting these shops, that was their vision from the beginning. And they're doing really well as a result of the pandemic, they're getting a lot of foot traffic. And what I noticed for better for worse is that there was still community engagement in some of the outdoor seating. Everybody socially distanced, still being able to, you know, run into other people in the restaurant industry and the food service industry, that there was a super tight community built around that. So that does give me a little bit of hope, but yeah, it's an anecdote that I thought was interesting knowing these two cafes and the general trends, that's already been on that trajectory prior to the pandemic, maybe getting even propelled by the pandemic with a little bit of hope that that community side of it isn't lost.
Kyle Ramage: [00:52:43] We've made some pretty huge investments into some outdoor patio space in our store here in Raleigh. And it's, it's gone a long way to, to try to reinvent ourselves as far as it goes with. What does it mean to be a cafe in the modern time now it means that you have great outdoor seating. Which I mean, a lot of people have said like our store that is in Rolesville, like our newest store, there's really not any outside seating. It was all built around having a nice indoor seating space, which is now, a great storage space for a bunch of chairs.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:53:13] Kyle, I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for your insights and sharing your industry experience with us and personal experience as well. And I look forward to tasting some of those, experimentals you've got coming down the chute.
Kyle Ramage: [00:53:27] Absolutely. It was a great time. Thanks Nick, man.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:53:29] We appreciate it. You have a good one.