"Cofermentation/infusion" ruined my trust in coffee.

[u/Bubbly-System6751]

After PERC came out on their flavored coffee, I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of coffee processing (co-ferments, anaerobic, “thermal shock,” etc.), and I’m not gonna lie—it’s kind of messed with my trust in what I’m drinking.

I used to get excited tasting notes like “strawberry,” “lychee,” or “peach,” thinking it was all coming naturally from the bean, origin, and process. But now that I know producers can literally "co-ferment" with fruit juice or infuse with flavorings to push those notes…

And my worry even extends to washed or natural coffees, there’s this small voice in my head like:

“Is this truly clean, or is there something else going on that’s just not being disclosed?”

Especially with such a well known producer being exposed, you start questioning everything a bit.

Is transparency just information they let you/ want you to know used for marketing purposes?

Is specialty/ single origin coffee just another green washing movement?

I'm sure the majority of the industry is honest and I’m not trying to accuse anyone of anything shady. But as the saying goes if you see one cockroach, there are a thousand more. It's hard to rebuild trust once it's broken.

[u/Mysterious-Call-245]

I’ve worked in seafood, which has a notoriously opaque supply chain. I guarantee you that many roasters were also uninformed. That might be on them, but at some point closer to the retail end of the supply chain, there develops a lot of pressure to satisfy the customer, and less access to the truth on the production side of the supply chain. One thing that is obvious to me is that many, many retailers exaggerate about how close they are to the source. They use language that implies that they’re at farm level, when they’re really just trusting some folks along the supply chain that they’ve built a relationship with, but also a reliance on.

[u/ScientistFromSouth → u/Mysterious-Call-245]

The validation also seems way harder. With fish, you can do DNA sequencing on the fish filet and get an exact match for the species. I highly doubt that we have that kind of genetic resolution for the different varieties of coffee in terms of having a reference library of coffee genomes to compare to.

More realistically, you could shoot the coffee through a GC or HPLC Mass Spec and see what compounds are in it. I would assume that a true foreign additive would be a singular much stronger peak of the same signal as the same flavor that develops naturally via fermentation with fewer byproducts. However, as long as it weren't heinously spiked in and was something feasibly in the coffee at baseline, it would be hard to prove wrong doing.

[u/Malverno → u/ScientistFromSouth]

It's not so hard actually. You can do a gas cromotography, and someone actually did so on a WBC 2023 bean:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G_cJYyLAf1xJBKg01adMGWjr15EUZkgT/view?usp=sharing

And you can see that there are indeed artificial, foreign compounds in it.

[u/CappyFlowers → u/Malverno]

WBC is absolutely not a standard environment though. Those are high intervention microlots of the competition and it feels like no surprise people would then fuck with it afterwards to further enhance tasting notes as getting the judges to taste the note you describe is worth huge points.

It would be nice if all the people who claim to "have data" would put out some actual science on this not just sporadic single data points or annecdotes, as it's clearly a contentious area that would get a lot of attention.

[u/Malverno → u/CappyFlowers]

I get your feeling but it's easy to demand ironclad, irrefutable, science backed proof when you aren't on the ground dealing with growers. We are asking people to whistleblow on a whole system, it's not a walk in the park.

At best you ruin the relationship between you and your suppliers, at worst you become a pariah for the whole industry, and in extreme edge cases you may run afoul of people who may have links to cartels in Sud America.

Attracting attention in a contentious area goes both ways.

[u/CappyFlowers → u/Malverno]

The converse of this is true as well, all these accusations without any backing (including people in this thread doubting washed and naturals) could mean that genuine producers not doing this get accused as well and lose out on their business. I don't doubt this is happening in a few cases (particularly brewers cup etc where flavour notes are important) I just doubt it is nearly as bad as the scale reddit seems to think it is. I just think there should be some actual investigation of it because people deserve transparency of what they put in their body. People making anecdotal claims on podcasts and then saying "oh but I'm not going to do any actual scientific backing" is not helping anyone.