In the previous post, we used a quasi-dialectical model to follow coffee through the Second Wave, showing how the market attempted to keep the First Wave’s industrial coffee by further industrializing it with various forms of flavoring. We then saw how Third Wave Coffee attempted to sweep the palate clean by ditching the flavoring, while improving the cultivation, sourcing, processing, and brewing of specific cultivars to bring out their complex, beautiful flavors. We showed that Third Wave coffee increased costs, resulting in an adaptive industrial response, and that both lead to sustainability issues that Fourth Wave Coffee will attempt to address in this, the third and last of this series of posts on where coffee is going.
Fourth Wave Coffee
Fourth Wave Coffee will hinge on Robusta.
As Rob Dunn’s Never out of Season argues, monocropping – the overuse of single strains of crops – is a threat to global food supplies with potentially catastrophic results. Genetic diversity helps fight against things like rust blight or mosaic disease.
And, there’s the problem with single-origin coffee. It intensifies monocropping, at least on a local scale. The point of a coffee plant originating in a specific Peruvian valley is that it is uniform in that place. It’s sort of a micro-monocropping.
According to Perfect Daily Grind, Arabica varieties have a 98.8% genetic similarity, as compared to rice – which is vulnerable to all sorts of diseases – at 70-80% genetic similarity.
Industrial agriculture attempts to solve these problems by genetically modify crops or to spray them with chemicals. Whatever the merits or demerits, such practices run up against the clean food (e.g., organic) paradigm that rich, Western countries are shifting toward. As the rest of the world gets wealthier, they will also insist on cleaner foods if they aren’t already.
(Which reminds me to cover the Latino or Hispanic Health Paradox.)
If the problem of climate change is anywhere what some claim, our very special Arabica strains will struggle, and struggle leads to greater susceptibility to disease.
In 2016, Starbucks launched a Vietnamese Da Lat coffee. The effort took seven years to develop because most of Viet Nam’s coffee is Robusta, due to its relatively low elevations, and so standards for cultivating Arabica were not up to par with much of the rest of the world. Viet Nam’s average elevation is about 170 meters while Colombia’s stands in at about 600m, and Peru at about 1,500m — the elevation of Da Lat city in the Central Highlands.
If we want to continue to shore up the durability of the coffee supply against climate and disease, while steering away from increasingly unpopular industrial practices, we have three options:
- To modify Arabica alone to be more durable and easy to grow.
- To modify Robusta alone to be more flavorful.
- To hybridize the two.
The third option is the shortest path, but can come at the cost of some of Arabica’s flavor. A natural hybrid from Timor has been blended with around 30 Arabica varietals for some time, according to the Specialty Coffee Association.
I don’t think hybrids alone will quite solve the problem of growing populations that want better coffee in the face of changes in the climate and the risks of disease propagation by international trade. While instant coffee’s bitterness is usually blamed on the industrial processes used to make it, a lot comes from the Robusta itself. However, Robusta can be delicious and complex. If we want better, more durable, and sustainable coffee that is more available to more of the world, Fourth Wave Robusta will need to be treated with at least the same care as Third Wave Arabica.
In addition to improving the resiliency of whole bean coffees used in Third Wave applications, the improvement of Robusta and use of hybrids should lead to better and more widely-available Fourth Wave whole bean and instant coffees.