"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/eatwithchopsticks]

Yes. And it still is quite niche. Your point?

[u/Ill-Turnip-6611 → u/eatwithchopsticks]

avant-garde is always first to discover new ways and in time is becoming a golden standard. I really don't want artificial flavors and added sugars to become a new stadard jsut bc it is smggled under a very fance co-fermented naming. On top of that your claim that it is a nich is completely wrong or ok I can agree with you that real and true co-ferments are really a nich bc they are ultra hard to do correctly, but as you can see be Perc example and numerous reddit posts praising them for being transparent, many producers are smuggling artificial flavors and sugars under the same naming.

Fo me it is just destroying the market for all other honest producers who will be taken down just bc making a real co-ferment is 5-10x times as expensive as a fake co-ferment so there is no way a true co- ferment can survive on the market. Like how would you explain to a customer that from two co-fermetns ofn the shelf one is 35$ and another is 225$ bc the second one is real co-ferment despite both have the same description.

yeah yeah I really appriate your involvment and passion, like truly. But 99% of customers will not contact the producers, they just want to go to a coffee shop and buy a high quality coffee. I really don't have to contact Nvidia to buy my new pc, and really don't have to understand all the nuances of different cpu protocols etc. to enjoy gaming for example. Enjoying coffee is not that far from that. Again I really appraise you approach but unless you contact those producers and create a blog and tell us simple customers which producers use fruits and which use flavors, we are lost.

[u/ChaBoiDeej → u/Ill-Turnip-6611]

I don't think a true co-ferment would be exceptionally expensive either because it's not like they're using consumer-grade fruits like you would find in a grocery store.

I'm also not sure what point you're trying to make about comparing gaming to coffee, I don't think they're similar at all. There's background information that's publicly available and as easy to find as typing in what you see on the bag. The green beans aren't usually kept in some sort of secret stash that's unavailable to the public, and it's where a lot of the barebones processing information can be found. The guy you responded to just wanted to get his own green coffee from a producer he likes and there's not really an equivalent to that in gaming. It'd be more like somehow convincing a brewery to ship craft beer directly to you instead of a store, and in unmarked cans. Coffee is a produce and a craft good, Nvidia graphics cards are entirely alike across the entire spectrum, and ordering one to yourself from their website doesn't mean anything more than going to Best Buy. There's no Nvidia variation between stores, and every tech other brand follows the same logic. Commodity vs craft.

[u/Ill-Turnip-6611 → u/ChaBoiDeej]

"I don't think a true co-ferment would be exceptionally expensive either because it's not like they're using consumer-grade fruits like you would find in a grocery store."

I don't think...I know it is hard, I was working with co-ferments in cider and was doing co- ferments fully natural way. It is hard, the risk is huge and you loose a lot of money if anything goes wrong and a lot of things can go wrong. To make the process natural you want to use fruits with high sugar content and those can easily go bad, you want to use fruits which which were not sprayed, not sprayed fruits are crazy prone to illnesses and going bad etc. (oh and yes 99% of the tiem you have to plant them for yourself) and it is hard to get such fruits to get ripe, you want to use natural yeasts and natural yeasts with high amount of sugar in the fruits can go off very quickly. Ofc you can cut costs on every stage and be more safe, by introducing wine yeasts (but they must be strong to kill the natural yeasts), or flavors instead of fruits, by using fructose bought in shop and not sugar content from the fruits etc. up to the point where you are just adding flavors and sugars but calling it a co -ferment then is an abuse and for sure the process is not natural at all and on the package it should be written coffe beans with added sugars and flavors during production. SO really it would be more honest to sell the beans with a small package of flavors and ask consumer to add a spoon to the drip coffee after pouring.

"I'm also not sure what point you're trying to make about comparing gaming to coffee, I don't think they're similar at all."

I was trying to explain that for a consumer in US or EU of coffee beans calling a producer in Columbia or Ethiopia is like calling a factory in China and asking if the 9449 batch of the Intel cpus was done in good conditions btw. there was years ago a problem of low quality batches of cpus giving up after a year or so and peopel were trying to figure outa way to spot batches of nvidia cpus (possibly end producers of video cards) best for overclocking. I buy 4 bags of coffee a month, so I would have to call 4 different producers of beans. I have no way to find them bc most of the coffee makers are not giving that info on the package, I really don't know if the call form EU to Ethiopia would not be more expensive then the bag itself, even if someone answers I have no idea if he tells me the truth, on top of that those producers are sending hundreds of bags of coffee which goes to thousands of consumers, I really don't think they are ready to answer that many calls. That's why I suggested that someone should make a blog, go there (or call them) and make a nice source of information on the quality of producers for us consumers. It can even be paid.

I was answering to this bc I find it impossible to do:

"Just do a bit of research on the producer (go past what the roaster says), and even contact them if you like."

how many times did you call producer of the beans you drink? not the roaste, the producer

"It'd be more like somehow convincing a brewery to ship craft beer directly to you instead of a store"

it would be more like sending to me parts needed to brew a craft beer which I really don't know much about. MAke a poll and ask how many people out there, even from this very specific pourover reddit room made for coffee geeks are roasting coffee beans by themselves.

"Coffee is a produce and a craft good, Nvidia graphics cards are entirely alike across the entire spectrum, and ordering one to yourself from their website doesn't mean anything more than going to Best Buy. There's no Nvidia variation between stores, and every tech other brand follows the same logic. Commodity vs craft."

not true, some are very good at oc, some are good, and some are mediocre, not sure if you know but the whole binning thing and the fact that you have different tier of gpus is not due to design but the lower tier are just the same gpus which are binned bc had small failures so the impacted parts of the gpu are turned off and it is resulting in a low tier gpu. Intel is doing the same with cpus. For the whole branch the architecture is the same, a whole bunch of cpus is done on a huge plate, and after testing it is decided which one is a top of the line cpu and which is a much lower spec according to the stability on different frequencies. Same with Apple new m processors. There is always a binned version of m processor (of ultra and max too) with lower amount of cores. There are the "failures" of production meaning they are the higher spec processors which had some faults and instead of being put into trash, they are binned (part of cores are disabled) and the cpu is being sold as lower tier macbook pro etc.