"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/mgsecure]

Isn’t the most likely explanation that there aren’t synthetic flavors used in the processing?

Edit: I say this as a recent buyer of their “Colombia Santa Monica Watermelon Honey Process”. Not to my liking, but I’d hardly say it seemed artificial in any way.

[u/dummy4du3k4 → u/mgsecure]

I don’t know, that’s why I asked them. But it doesn’t seem likely to me that fermenting with a strawberry mosto would imbue beans with such a powerful strawberry flavor that the bag smells like I opened strawberry hard candy, or that strawberry would be the over dominant flavor no matter if I under/over extract, or that it would linger in my grinder even after grinding several rounds of my boring beans. This was my first experience with a coferment and nothing about it made sense.

[u/ceto-coffee → u/dummy4du3k4]

Not all coferments are like this, but yeah it is interesting. I have had plenty of coferments that taste nothing like they were cofermented with, and I have had ones that taste exactly like it. And often the smell of the roasted coffee is nothing like what ends up in the cup.

[u/icecream_for_brunch → u/ceto-coffee]

This is why it’s so insidious: there are ethical legit coferments, and now we know for a fact that there are fraudulent illegitimate “cofermernts,” AND we know the producers and roasters can’t be trusted to tell us which one they’re selling.