redefining

do you ever wonder where people get their lingo? in our industry, people bandy about terms that sound so hip, so in the know and sometimes they are actually pretty silly sounding when you stop to think about them.

here's one of my favorites: origin. people talk traveling to coffee producing countries as though they were mecca: "have you ever been to origin?" as though "origin" were one place. as though it were some sort of singular experience. i for one don't like to use that term. it seems to me to be sort of condescending toward the folks who live and work around the process of growing and exporting coffee. a phrase "the people in origin" (which i don't think i've heard anyone ever use, but still...) just feels like some sort of white man's burden toward the struggling third world. i have never really adopted that term and i don't intend to ever use it. i think i will speak of them as coffee producing countries, regions, people, not just lump them into the bland, "origin."

another one i hear is "single-origin" to define coffees from one country. but this is equally obfuscating since a country can be as hazy a definition as a blend. many coffee purveyors are content to slap on a country name and call it swell. "this is our tanzania. there is our peru." this is untenable, i believe, in our evolving and sophisticating industry. for one, some countries cover a large geographical swath; others have unbelievably varied climates and microclimates that make country designations near meaningless. does this take us in the direction of refining definitions further down to the micro level? in the vein of jonathan swift, i have a modest proposal of my own on reidentifying the term, "single-origin."

sf: single farm
sc: single co-op
sr: single region (could be a co-op or less well defined group)
ss: single slope on a particular farm
se x-y: single elevation range between x and y

etcetera... it sounds obtuse, doesn't it? but hey, those of us who really geek out about a, ahem, single origin espresso shot should be game to take the game just a little bit further, to run just that much farther down the rabbit hole. i'm certain farmers "in origin" classify and designate their coffees thusly. (i seem to recall hearing tell how one farm keeps track and cups separately coffees from different parts of their farm: north slope versus south; 1500m versus 1800+m; pulped natural versus wet processed, and so forth. copious notes taken on all of those quantifiers ostensibly helps them produce the best product they can. why should we be the flippant and weak link in that chain by simply settling for "single-origin" designators?

just a thought.