 and a very warm welcome to British Library food season, which is generously supported by KitchenAid. My name is Angela Clutton. I had the complete joy of being the guest director of the food season, working with Polly Russell, who founded the season four years ago and is its curator. Great event for you tonight, but a little housekeeping to get through before we get to that. You should be able to see some tabs on screen. Using those, you can leave feedback on the event. You can also leave a question for our speakers, that's in the box under this video. You can find out a bit more about our speakers, and you can make a donation to support the work of the British Library. Also there are the social media links, if you'd like to carry on the conversation on other platforms. You will also see details about the food season competition that we're running with KitchenAid, who are our supporters. You could win a set that they're called as appliances, a place on the virtual cooking class, and a signed copy of the pie room by Callum Franklin. Okay, so tonight's event, which I am really looking forward to, is the collaboration with The Sauce Project, which is founded and run by Anna Sue Langmasing, who we have tonight, and Chloe Rose Crabtree. Over the next hour or so, we're going to be immersed in the interplay between coffee farming and indigenous communities. We have a cracking panel put together by Anna. I'm going to let her introduce them, because she did all the hard work getting them together and also getting some of them up in the middle of the night. But first of all, from me a few words on Anna. Anna Sue Langmasing, a writer, editor and academic, focusing on food and drink, and with a PhD exploring identity and storytelling. She founded Sourced with Chloe Rose as a public research project to investigate global food and drinks pathways. She's one half the claimed podcast of Voices at the Table, which is brilliant. In 2020, she co-founded the platform Blackbook, which looks to lead discussions and support black and non-white people within the food and drinks industry. And as if all that wasn't enough, she has just launched a magazine which is all about cheese. Anna is brilliant. The panel is brilliant. This is going to be brilliant. Anna, over to you. Thank you so much for that introduction, Angela. It's really wonderful to be here and I'm really excited for the panel that we've got this evening. Also for the fact that two of our panelists are based in Kuching in Sarawak, which is a state of Malaysia on Borneo Island. So they are up in the middle of the night to chat with us about coffee. So I'm going to just quickly introduce everyone and then sort of give us a little bit of context on what we're going to talk about this evening. So first of all, we have who's also based in London with me is Thomas Haig, who is a coffee q-grader and consultant. He has over 10 years experience in the specialty coffee world, was head of coffee at Tate from 2016 to 2020 and set up, has done a lot of work around the, sorry, set up the gallery's gender equality projects, has done a lot of work around thinking about equitable supply chains. And then we have Melissa Raman who is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Swinburne University of Technology with experience in indigenous communities, livelihoods and mobility research. And in 2019, Earthling's coffee workshop invited her and her PhD supervisor, Dr. Bertha Chin to co-organize the first Borneo coffee symposium. And this allowed Melissa to the opportunity to start coffee cultural research back looking in the backyard of Sarawak. And we also have Dr. Kenny Lee, who is also based in Sarawak, who is a coffee lover who's been traveling the world to learn about coffee since 2012 is a q-grader and specialty coffee trainer. And he's the co-founder of Earthling Coffee Workshop in Kuching. So thank you very much and hi everybody. So again, thanks, thanks so much for agreeing to do this, this conversation with us. I think it's really interesting. One of the reasons why I was pretty keen to talk about coffee, you know, for lots of different reasons, but I feel like at the moment, we're obviously in the midst of this global pandemic. And although I can only speak to London and the UK, I do feel like there's a a similar thing happening elsewhere, which is that coffee has become quite a to refocus in this time, you know, we're all at home and so coffee is a way to rethink, you know, we had this moment to make our own coffees and rethink what coffees we are choosing to buy and how we're making them. And also one of the things that has been happening in the UK is that we can go for a walk and we can go get a takeaway coffee and go for a walk, which again, like gets us time for us to rethink what coffee means in our world. And, and yeah, just a moment to sort of recalibrate about this, this drink that feels sort of so everyday. So to start with, I would actually like everyone to just talk a little bit about how you all got into coffee, because it's such a such a wide experience on this, on this panel. I mean, for me, I'm not a coffee nerd, but coffee was is such a great way. I, when I started looking into coffee, it was such a great way to think about trade and sort of historical structures like colonialism and obviously slavery and really rethinking about what that that means today. So, so yes. So first of all, Kenny, how did you get into coffee? Well, there's a very sad story 10, 10 years back, because I have a friend who was a journalist, a woman, a very, very nice woman. And then back then we were in a meditation center. So we went to meditate every like weeks. And then she often, you know, brought this like small mocapot with the burner to show us the coffee. And then that's where I get to know the coffee. But fortunately, this friend got killed in a car accident like eight years ago. She got killed but in a car accident. So yeah, that's that's how I get into coffee. So it feels a bit like a homage to her or your work you're doing and if she's introduced you to this, this world. Yeah. And Melissa? I think it was Melbourne, because I spent a lot of time in Melbourne for my previous work. And so I remember this first cafe that I walk into is called Brother Baba Budan. So I was curious of the name and I start Googling. So he has a lot of these interesting background stories to eat to eat about how this merchant Baba Budan sneak in seven different seats from Yemen to India. So I thought it's such an interesting introduction to this place that I go to. And then after that, I met, came back in Coaching, a flings open, met Kenny. So basically it was Kenny and his friends who turned me into a coffee nerd. And Thomas, what was your sort of version to coffee? Well, I first came across coffee personally, not a very exotic place. It was Huddersfield that I did my first coffee training. I've got a background in hospitality, probably about 11 years ago. And this led me to move to London, change my life, start work as a barista like many people in coffee. And then quickly I became a roaster in East London, started working in the Roast Street then and got very quite enthralled with the subtleties of the industry, but also the complexities of coffee itself. And started to learn about the sensory aspect of coffee, about the different varieties and processing methods involved. And I got my Q grade certificate, which is kind of a quality certificate that enables me to grade coffee about six years ago. And this is when I started to travel in coffee, and started to think more conceptually about the supply chains that we work with and thinking more about the communities and the people who grow the coffee. And that led me to my journey in coffee equality as well as coffee quality, working at Tate, setting up the general quality projects. And now I'm a co-founder of a company called Heaps, and we focus on working with Indigenous communities in South and Central America, making coffee easy and easy for everyone really. There seems to be a lot of some ways to approach coffee and how to kind of get into it. There's also quite a difficult space to be in. I mean, you just mentioned the Q grading, and we were talking a little bit before this started about what it takes to be a Q grader. So both Thomas and Kenny are both Q graders and have set the test. Am I right in saying that it's six days? Kenny, how was your experience to being a Q grader? It's like drinking 100 cups of coffee every day for six days. And I actually failed my exam at first in Taiwan, so I have to fly back second time to take the exam, just to make the exam. There was like six years ago, so I'm kind of like an expired Q grader, having a new license here. I mean, it sounds like such an intense thing to have gone through. When did you, when you set up your coffee shop, what was the, what made you decide to set that up and yeah, open, opening in Kuching? I think because back then, like I'm a coffee lover, and I like to roast coffee, and then back then is, I think eight years ago, because Kuching is like a small town, you know, isolated, you're from Kuching, you know, and because there's nothing we can play with, there's no other third wave cafe in Kuching. So I finally come to the point that why not, we make it ourselves. So the idea is to bring in the entire third wave coffee culture into Kuching. That was like eight years ago. And what, Thomas, what is, what is this meaning of third wave? Like, I mean, I'm sure we've got loads of people who are listening who are coffee nerds, but probably a lot of people who just wanted to discover coffee for the first time. So just a little explanation about what third wave. Yeah, so third wave coffee, it's hard to know which wave we're actually in at the moment, because I find like the coffee industry is such a quick paced industry, there's a lot of innovation and change that happens both in places where people drink coffee, but also where they grow coffee. The third wave was really, I think the first wave was maybe the introduction of coffee into, like the global north, the second wave being kind of introduction of commodity coffee and the coffee shop, the high street coffee. And the third wave is more looking at coffee as a product that has provenance and quality and flavour inherently within it and looking at coffee as something similar to wine. So we see different flavours in the varieties, the terror, the region, the processing and giving coffee a bit more of an appreciation. Right. Okay, that makes sense. I mean, I'm thinking about why it's a really great way of kind of contextualising what we mean about, and I guess that's what specialty coffee is. So Melissa, you've been doing some really interesting projects with coffee and I sort of mentioned it in the introduction to introduce you, but I didn't fully go into the sort of work you've been doing. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about some of that that project because you have rediscovered an old plantation and you're now also working in developing sort of women and indigenous communities around coffee. Right. So it started with my PhD project actually. So for my PhD project, I look a lot into Srawak's history. So when Kenny invited us to join him for the coffee symposium, I found, you know, at that time I was looking into evidences of coffee farms in Srawak and I found more and more evidences of it. And the interesting part of it is that there's a lot of experimental farm that the Brooke government in the late 1800s, they set up around Srawak in the late 1800s. So there was this some sort of like curiosity of where these farms are because the names that were used back then is not similar to the names that this area has right now. So I was just looking into like all of the whatever possible archive document to find out about these places. And with it I found quite a rich story about our history and coffee. So apparently Srawak has the earliest coffee farm in Malaysia today. And the interesting part about this is also I got to meet some of the farmers that are still working on coffee farms right now and most of them were women. So I think it's also because of women's role in the local farming system as well. So they're the one who stayed back in their household while their husband or while their men goes down to the city to find jobs. So they're basically the ones who are managing and maintaining the farm back at home. So that's one of my interests right now. Unfortunately because of the pandemic so I have to like you know give it up for a while until the pandemics until things are going you know going back better after this. With that so where was so these these coffee farmers that you were kind of learning about are quite small aren't they? Are they and are they getting where are their beans going to where are they selling their coffee to? Is it just staying in Srawak or is it going to a general? Okay so there was never a big plantation industry in Srawak. A lot of it's like some backyard farming sort of model or a micro lot model. So for now I know some of the farmers are actually supplying to Kenny but it's true a middleman system. So if we are going to talk about middleman system there's a lot of negative connotations on this middleman this middleman system but I think Kenny will talk about it again later. So there's an interesting story and the symbiotic relationship between this middleman and these women farmers and you know Rostri is like Kenny as well. Yeah okay Kenny do you want to have talk about that and your sort of supply chain especially if you are working with people directly within Srawak? Yeah I actually buy coffee from Sawa and also direct trade with coffee farmer from Saba also from Kalimantan which is also in Borneo and like what Mel said I also buy from the middleman because in some cases you know these coffee are scattered in the villages in Sawa which is so rural you can hardly get the transportation to the farm so you kind of like need the middleman to collect the coffee from the farmers from different villages to supply it to you. So we're doing in two ways first we buy directly from the big farmer from Sawa from Saba and also Kalimantan and in some cases we also buy from the middleman. And what is that relationship who is the middleman and is there kind of is it a complicated positive or quite mixed sort of relationship? I would say there's a reason for middleman because you know it's often said that it's good to have direct trade coffee in the past you know for many years everyone's talking about you know the benefit of direct trade coffee because in that way you kind of like you kind of like maximize the value of the farmer and also the roaster buyer and also the the user. But traditionally the coffee trading normally go through many middlemen you know you have this man to collect the coffee from farmer you have these places for them like like what we call here corporacy to help the farmer to process the coffee and then you have this transportation you have this exporter you have this importer and also graders and also roasters. I think it's important to look into different culture and different context because in some cases direct trade does create values for everyone but in certain cases I do believe that there's a reason for middlemen and other parties to involve because they actually create certain value in terms of quality control and also provide places for them to store the coffee and also they provide some kind of service to the farmer as well. I guess it's a bit like having a bit of a translator or you know the middleman can operate knows the different cultures that they're going to from the city to the rural spaces and particularly in Sarawak where there's a lot of different indigenous communities it's probably quite helpful to have someone who has the sensitivity to that. I mean at Thomas you've obviously the supply chain is something that's really important to you and you've worked with indigenous communities in both central and South America I understand and so how was that sort of supply chain and what Kenny was saying about like sometimes it can be quite beneficial obviously not always how have you found those those sort of sticky points between lots of different people? Yeah I think like the term direct trade is used an awful lot in the specialty coffee industry now and it's one of those terminologies that is used so much that it has kind of like for us has come to mean very little because we don't necessarily understand what direct trade actually is so what I've always done is you know I rely heavily on on partners and people who create links within the supply chain obviously being here in the UK it's quite harder to work directly with coffee producers especially in times of like this year of the pandemic when traveling isn't isn't available. What I have found and what my experience in coffee has taught me is that coffee works better for some people than others and some producers have to work a little bit harder than others to access these markets and it's about choosing the supply chain that is right for you and your values and working with people who understand the kind of relationships that you want to build. Usually there's there's two main ways in which you source coffee from my experience and that's either going to origin and meeting farmers producers and finding coffee that you wish to buy or you get samples sent to you where you're based in the UK or wherever but the opportunities for different producers to get those coffees into your roastery or to be introduced to you at their country is very different. So for some producers it's easier to sell coffee than others and for some producers it's easier to grow coffee than others so I think yeah it's about being selective about the relationships that you build and being intentional in the relationships that you want to build with producers as well. I think I mean I think that's one of the key things sometimes when we have these conversations around supply chains and farmers and then you know consumers at this end like you know me we also sometimes hide the fact that I guess that that coffee is a product and needs to be sold and that farmers you know are growing something to be sold and to sell something stories need to be told and which is obviously the you know key point in this this talk in the title of this of this conversation. So I guess I'm quite interested you know off the back of what you've just what you've all been saying so what are the stories that get told you know along this supply chain and out into the world you know some of them are quite problematic and why are they needed and what do we need to think about when we're telling these stories you know I mean just sort of back to you Thomas because I know a little bit more about your sort of coffee background but at Tate you were very keen on not using photography because of the sort of global north white lens that can happen on these sort of stories. Do you want to just talk a little bit about that if I mean if I'm correct in understanding? Yeah yeah that's absolutely right we made a decision not to use photography of the producers we worked with mainly because it was out of respect and also we didn't want to create an assumption that the producer was okay with that but also what I find very fascinating about the coffee chain is that it's a product that involves people throughout you have you know people growing the coffee you have exporters importers roasters baristas and as the coffee product travels through those many different hands it's actually a really beautiful thing there's a lot of collaboration and a lot of community globally in the coffee industry because of that but but also that the product it changes it transforms from a raw product into a roasted product so it becomes something which is a commodity into something which is consumable and through that process the value changes of that product as well so once the coffee has arrived at a roastery has been roasted often this happens in a different space to where it was grown unless there's a very unique relationship that exists it gains in value and this is value which is not accessible to the coffee grower this is like necessarily now the the industry the retail industry is now an 83 billion dollar industry a year but coffee producers are receiving pretty much the same they were getting paid in the 1970s when you're taking inflation into account and using the stories of the producer and using imagery of the producer in some instances I don't I feel maybe isn't appropriate to to market and sell that coffee so it's a very complex discussion and it's something which is it requires a lot of thought and a lot of consideration so at Tate we took the decision not to use the photographs of the producers but to tell the producer's story and words and through art actually we hired a local artist to translate flavour into different patterns and marbling images just to kind of give a nod to that that complexity and to say just to kind of acknowledge that we're thinking of this and kind of in this way and and as you're saying like you know these stories operate in very different ways depending on the spaces they're in I mean what are the what sort of coffee story that gets told in Kuching where there is this a slightly shorter chain of the supply chain and and Kenny as you're saying you know the your coffee shop is one of the first it was the first and one of the few you know sort of specialty coffee shops in Kuching how is how is that specialty coffee scene developed and how do you engage people with coffee is it is it a growing scene and how do you describe your coffee on your packets all that kind of stuff yeah there's um there's one thing we have to understand when we talk about coffee in Kuching and coffee from western world because the coffee the local coffee we're talking about like 30 cent to 50 cent euro per cup of coffee that is local coffee and then when you talk about western coffee the long black americano that's around seven to ten times more expensive so they are they they suit to different markets there are different market cementation and then um they're they're totally different because when we talk about local coffee we're talking about the dark rose coffee the dark rose robusta rose dark and then they'll add margarine they'll add sugar in the coffee and then they will add condensed milk in the coffee and we talk about single origin coffee that's a totally different things um I think due to the economic economical context in Southeast Asia historically the traditional local roaster can only afford to buy in the cheapest red coffee like I said earlier this robusta and they also buy in the food defects bin and then they have to roast it really dark because you know it's like we're talking about 30 cent euro so when I first started my cafe the the biggest challenge is to let the local know what's the different so what we do we actually offer different kind of coffee from different origins and then we do a lot of communication in interaction with the customer and that's the way we really convey the message to the market and throughout time like seven years I think we're getting more and more um special to coffee drinker nowadays in coaching right I mean that's really interesting of course like my um when I think of coffee in Sarawak or when I think about going home um and what I want to eat and drink it's always that that dark roasted coffee it's a very particular flavor and it does you know resonate with me as as as a kind of nostalgic idea um and so do you are you what beans are you using in in your coffee shop are you using the robust are you using a few different ones I would say my my strategy here is to complete the circle of culture interchange of local coffee and international coffee so what we what we do here is that we offer various kind kind of coffee we have um single urging from different countries we have robusta we have Liberica and then um what we do here is to bring in the coffee from outside world into the local market and on the other hand we also promote the local grown Liberica coffee to the outside of the world so it's like an interchange of culture yeah I think it's really interesting and and and we'll we'll touch on that in a little bit I think further um Melissa when you were working working with Kenny to to develop the symposium um what what did you how did you get people interested in that and what was the kind of new sort of the stories that you were telling about coffee sort of locally um and who kind of came and was interested in in the coffee about the symposium so I think it has a lot to do with what me and Bertha did for the research as well um so because we centered the research around third wave coffee movement where narratives and storytelling is important so knowledge transfer becomes a central focus stories of origin became one of the most important element in that knowledge transfer where coffee drinkers are introduced to the origins of the beans the farmers who produces them the characteristic of the flavors and so forth so and then it's about space production as well for the conference we are putting that in the center storytelling as the center so but from our perspective also history plays a big role in introducing this storytelling as well the origin of coffee in Srawak itself um how coffee arrived in Srawak was a very interesting story where you know Srawak was never a colonial um state until 1941 so before that we have a different colonial experience we have different colonial coloniality um how coffee came into Srawak it's not similar as how coffee came into other parts in Malaysia so that is the the kind of story that we are centering to get people to actually be more interested with what we have to say during the symposium and what kind of stories in regards to the coffee producers are you sort of telling with your research on the symposium but also sort of generally you know what other sort of storytelling aspects uh so we have been talking a lot about supply chains uh before this and you know it's it's an interesting thing also when I talk to all of these women farmers um one of their reason why they kept coffee as one of their important crops in their backyard is also because of the value that they assign to it the heritage value that they assign to these crops as well um it's not some of them for them it's not really about the income generating um possibility of the crop uh some of them like okay let me share with you a story about my uncle's wife so um at first I didn't even realize that every time I went up to visit them in the village I was actually drinking um the coffee that she handpicked herself processed ross grind and brewed herself so one day I started asking question like why she still go through the hassle of um keeping her coffee plants where while everyone around no longer keep their coffee plant anymore and then she told me it's all about keeping the traditional life when the brook government ventured into coffee planting experiment in the late 1800s they set up a few of this like what I said before set up few of these experimental farms around sarawak and one of the experimental farm was right across her village so her grandfather started planting coffee back then and her father maintained it and now she feels like it's her responsibility to maintain it also and um this memory is that she has from where she was young where she was younger how everyone in the village planted coffee together it's sort of become their collective identity as a coffee farming community as well so this assigned value to this crop um I get similar stories as well from women farmers from other community as well um and then there is this element of associating coffee as part of their heritage uh it was also specifically Liberica itself is known as Kopi Dayak so so you see how you know you came to realize that some of the intentions are not really monetary but because you know the death of coffee planting in Sarawak was basically because there was no market almost specifically no access to um the market outside of their you know community area because a lot of these farms are situated far away from the center far away from the town so for these women it's more like because they've assigned heritage value to it that they decided to keep it so those are one of the stories that I thought that was quite interesting yeah that's amazing I mean I I had no I had no idea and this is these are quite um because they're quite remote communities so a lot of these are sort of indigenous communities aren't they yeah yeah so and this sort of brings up brings to this uh to this other topic that I'm really interested in within coffee which is this sort of hierarchy of coffee and as you're saying um uh this sort of value as it as it leaves or the markets um you know even within Sarawak locally uh has shifted but also this the the different species of coffee and particularly in the in the west and the global north we really only know Liberica and Robusta Robusta um and my understanding is that kind of Liberica is like the the one that everyone seeks and has places a lot of value but I understand that in Sarawak Liberica was what was planted and has also grown wild and there's lots of different elements to it and and we're sort of learning a little bit more about that there um do you want to talk a little bit Melissa and Kenny about about how Liberica the flavors of that and how that's working and what people are growing and and how they're enjoying it in Sarawak okay actually I would hand it over to Kenny because he won an award for finding a new discovering a new species for Liberica wow okay tell us about that new species no it's it's just a variety it's not a species but Liberica is not often known as the good coffee in the past because you know like past 10 years during um this 10 this trend of specialty coffee began people tend to believe that only arabica is the good coffees when we talk about Robusta which is Canaphora and we talk about Liberica we we think that's the bad coffee so back then if you look into all this coffee book when they talk about Liberica they say this coffee is bad and it has like molded it has um metallic and it has very unclean that's what they believe in the past but um what truth is if you take care of that tree properly if you process the coffee um appropriate in appropriate way you can produce kind of like super sweet coffee out of Liberica and that's what we did last last year in um Borneo and um yep where did you and where was this Liberica growing that you found or saw noticed there are inner villages in um in Sarawak wow amazing um I'm do you know Liberica at all um Thomas because it's it's not really known here from from my experience I think I've only tasted it once and it's a very different experience to taste in arabica um it's got similarities to Robusta the one that I tasted but I don't know how well it was processed or grown personally I think um I think it only represents maybe two percent of of um global consumption and so I think it's and mainly it's consumed in the Middle East um as well as as Asia as well I think and and with this idea of of um the different species of coffee I mean if we're thinking about climate change I know that this is a topic that I've had discussions with you previously in the past Thomas and the idea of how we are growing these um coffee plants what are we how do we see them now and the kind of flavors that we understand as being you know of value and how does it match with what is able to be grown from my understanding and please correct me if I'm wrong that um Liberica can be um a little tricky to grow yeah interesting that phrase you just said of flavors of value is really interesting I think um I think there's maybe two things that we can touch on uh basically I think I feel like there's there's different values in in the coffee chain and there's a there's a paper written by a guy called Edward Fischer called quality and equality and he talks about he looks at coffee the coffee chain in a marxist kind of analytical way where he looks at the material value versus the symbolic value of coffee and what I talk about is quality and maybe what a coffee grower in Colombia talks about his quality of very different things um I perceive quality in the cup in the aroma and the flavor and the acidity and body of the coffee whereas a lot of the producers I I talk to don't consume coffee in the same way that I do so when they look at quality they talk about the plants the soil the cherries and it's very much of like a material value and we assign like you say stories and romance to that coffee throughout the value chain which creates the symbolic value um however the value in coffee is it tends to be created through flavor and these are things that are kind of led by the the global north but trends in coffee are quite quick whereas growing coffee is is quite slow so it takes maybe four to five years for a producer to to grow and uh and for a coffee tree to to grow and harvest its first fruit so if coffee trends change so quickly in in coffee the producers aren't actually able to keep up with those trends and certain varieties and processing methods and uh growing techniques come in and out of trends and specialty coffee in places where it's drunk um which kind of leaves producers at a disadvantage but when it comes to climate change this these are posing quite major threats to the industry as a whole um 25 million people grow coffee around the world and they rely on it for their income um and by 2050 we're going to lose around half of the land's capability to grow arabica so it's really important that we look at these other varieties as as viable options for these producers to grow coffee in the future um one of those varieties was rediscovered recently it's called stenophila um there's an article published by q gardens last month and it's very interesting because it has the similar flavor properties to arabica so it's um deemed as being quality and of what we understand is taste here um but it can be growing in much hotter environments so it actually poses quite a bright future for coffee maybe moving forward um just to remind everyone actually uh who is listening that we are going to stop the questions or not we will be able to take questions soon and i probably should have reminded everyone sooner so please um submit any questions and we can ask the panel um yeah you're you're burning questions around coffee and coffee supply chains um so just continuing on that idea of of sort of flavor and and and the way we place value on flavor um and melissa how do you see is is someone who discovered coffee um it is quite a similar way i think to me sort of going to a coffee shop and deciding this is really great and then then discovering the local scene where you're living and cooching how how did you understand these ideas of of the different flavors of coffee and what was good and um and had value and particularly since you have like a slightly different outlook because you were also beginning to to look at the different communities local and indigenous communities right um you know before earthlings before understanding about coffee so i think the only thing that i know was Jamaica blue it was good coffee but you know is it though um no doubt it's amazing coffee i really love it but um you see a lot of these tastes has been um the way how we understand coffee is very westernized so the flavor for example we know coffee rich of you know have peach flavor sort of thing like this flavor profile that is so westernized something like green apple that the sort of thing but it's interesting when Kenny started to play around with libraica last year we tried to associate it with local flavors instead so we have this the understanding of you know um local fruits and everything so we assign our own understanding of flavors instead of using westernized ingredients westernized plants westernized fruits um but you know even some of it we we associate it with durian taste for example but also i think when it comes to coffee consumption um because it is to a lot of people out there it's not a necessity or an essential product it somewhat creates hierarchy as well i think it goes back to the matter of taste and preference which is very much influenced by the culture of the community like for example people in southeast asia we are very used to dark roast super dark roast caramelized coffee and they might not like specialty coffee because that is not their preference that it's not what they're used to so i think it goes back to the community itself and it goes back to the different capitals different experience different preferences so people here can go to kopitiam traditional coffee shop and pay 50 quits for a black coffee but walking into a specialty coffee shop is associated with with prestige in the end it is a performance of class identity that's how i understand what it is absolutely and and i would say in the global north it's also a performance of class identity um and as you say you know like because it's kind of almost like a knowledge sphere like knowing about coffee and understanding it it can and that and that can be quite a difficult thing is like what we're talking about in terms of stories you know the the stories we're telling about this kind of um flavors and complicated flavors and even kind even the sort of ethical chains um can also be a performance because we don't necessarily know and i mean we don't really have time we don't have time to talk about so much of the stuff that i would love to talk about which is you know what happens when it gets to instagram you know and then we kind of like a performance on performance and performance as we post and share these stories that change as they you know go um but i think i think that's that's really interesting and that's something i would love to sort of explore more i've got some questions so i'm gonna i'm gonna ask some of these and then maybe we can tap back into some of the other stuff um right so first first of all i'm just going to read them in line um which links in the in the chain in coffee production do you feel take too large a financial percentage in proportion to what they contribute and how do we as consumers avoid putting money into those hands uh thomas do you wow that's a really massive question but and also really important um yeah i mean everyone in that chain has to be profitable um first and foremost i think it's important to know that they all have a place and they all have value um this is some aspects of that chain take more profit than others um looking at the kind of the traceability of the coffee that you're buying i think is really important if you if you have detailed information available in terms of technical information even provenance of story attached to a coffee then you're probably it's probably a better indication for you to uh that the the supply chain is quite transparent um coffee is not cheap to to ship um to ensure you know customs clearance overland travel overseas travel this all costs money um but you can also we're quite like kind of the certain roasters out there who will make the fob price which is the the free on board price which is the price for the coffee paid when it leaves the origin or even the farm gate price which is the price paid to the coffee grower when it leaves the farm and this information is becoming more readily available on the finished product and this is a really good indication as to how much the farmer received how much was received at origin and also blockchain technology might become quite an interesting part of this process as well um to create extra transparency in the supply chains i think um yeah so yeah the transparency issue is the is the topic is is is super key um so kenny what is your preferred ethically sourced coffee is it single origin or or blended coffee do you think i would prefer single origin because i think it's important to to promote different type of coffee from different origin different species so we could show to the world that you know coffee is just is not just a cup of black water um which is rich but it can be very different it can be fruity it can be nutty it could be you know um even whiny so um i think it's also important to have different um grading standard because in the past when we talk about specialty coffee we often talk about the the western style of um grading um standard meaning that we often think that the coffee that is fruity and acidic is good but that is not the asian standard because if you look into asia the local people they prefer i mean most of the asian they prefer bitter than acidic so i think it's important to have you know different grading standard um when we talk about coffee because there are so many type of coffee there are more than 200 um species they are a library card they are robust and they are different culture they prefer different coffee so i think it's not right to use single standard to talk about you know what is good and what is bad because sometimes we we use the standard of say if i'm going to grab different fruits but i'm holding a grading form with the criteria to grab um strawberry but i'm now grading the pineapple so they're different isn't it therefore if you look into the coffee i think the coffee from um arabica the coffee laberica the coffee robusta even within arabica you've got this bobbin you've got this typical many species i think they're different when they grow from different region when they sell to different buyers i think it's important to come up with a new standard to promote diversity of preference instead of single standard yeah that's that's diversity of preference i really like that that term actually i think that's really cool and and i guess within looking at a single origin you can sort of then develop and understand those um different flavors within within context i have one um question here i'm not i'm not so sure it's a question but it's uh it is a very it's a funny one it's i love earthlings and cooching and the team behind it but i've always wanted to ask why is ac so damn cold so you've got a fan because malaysia is so hot it's a conversation yeah um so uh next question is storytelling around specialty coffee in the uk tends to zoom in upon the individual farmer or family at source might it be productive to shift the scale and focus of the storytelling and bringing into focus longer historical narratives or different parts of the supply chain could these stories produce as much symbolic value i mean i think this is a little bit about what you were saying kenny um in terms of um looking at you know this the difference of preference if we have this sort of wider understanding of what is what is considered you know good um tomas sorry were you gonna say something no no it's a very interesting question um i think maybe like the the historical structures in coffee definitely play a part of the systems that operates today so maybe like bringing that into the into the conversation would be beneficial i think um because it creates disadvantages for certain producer groups um in today's world i think yeah yeah absolutely i mean there's quite there's quite a you know um violent story behind coffee in the regions that it grows in that we think we don't talk enough about and i think it's really important because obviously that created structures of inequality and disadvantage which we you know see not only with colonialism but also you know slavery was a huge part of the coffee history that we we seem to skim across and of course um we have you know the indigenous communities often don't get uh spoken about with as much nuance which is why it's so amazing to hear what you're what you're doing melissa i mean you really focusing on the historical narratives um around that and people have found that quite engaging is that yeah um yeah actually i'm more like a history that but well can he turn me into a coffee lad as well so i sort of like combine both of it um and i think it sells some of it um parts of it it sells it makes uh people out there actually understand you know your source of food where did you get your food from the people that grow your food also um how did your food arrive here for example so i think that's quite an important um elements of uh how consumer actually understand what they are consuming as well yeah absolutely i mean uh just looking at sorry just looking at the other questions what do coffee farmers producers say they want from the coffee supply chain i mean that's that's another thing is like asking you know how often does that does that conversation come up when you are dealing with producers and and what it is that they want uh we only have a very short time so if i can ask each of you because you all speak with producers in different if different ways so melissa what do you what do you understand when you speak to producers and farmers uh sorry can you refresh the question what what what do uh coffee farmers say they want from the supply chain ah okay firstly um if they are doing it for a profit reason so firstly it will be profit and secondly um but a lot of them i think but i talked to all of these women farmers as well what is important for them is that for people to know that they are the one who's producing it that they have put all of this hard work to produce it so basically that that is the main thing that usually these producers especially these women farmers want people to understand and kenny what do you understand that farmers want from the supply chain i think most of this um to be to be um honest i think most of these coffee growers around the world they are still in poverty so most of these coffee growers they they it's not their decision to become a coffee grower but they just happen to grow i mean to to be there and then to grow coffee it's not like you know it's not like what they choose to do but they have no choice and um if we talk about um the high quality co coffee producer we are looking into this um very um dedicated process of um growing and processing coffee because coffee is a is a sensitive um what how to put it is a flavor sensitive product so it's important to take care of every details when you grow coffee um the soil um the temperature the the fertilizer you use the variety and the way you process the coffee and even the way you store the coffee so it's it's important for the farmer to understand that to deal with coffee you have to be very careful because it's it's flavor sensitive so it's important for the farmer to understand um how it works and then to really focus in the quality otherwise if you are talking about quantity there's no way we can compete with um producer from brazil producer from vietnam because you know they have they really have really cheap coffee like three usd per kilo so the only way to make um specialty coffee world is to educate the farmer to really focus in the quality okay and i think we've run out of time now so um we're going to wrap it up but thank you so much i mean we could have there's there's so many more questions that i have and and and would like to have so hopefully other people are also guys thinking about uh continuing their own little research into this but thank you so much everybody for for joining me today thank you for having us here thank you very much i think we're going back to angela now you are you are and thank you so much and and to um sourced for setting all this up for us and being fabulous to collaborate with and i feel that that conversation was so there's so much to kind of get into there i am a complete coffee fiend um and you've given me well so much more knowledge um but also an awful lot to think about um and i will look forward to you know for myself carrying on this conversation so um i'm sure audience will too thank you very much ana and also to kenny thomas and melissa and especially i think to kenny and melissa for whom it's now i think about half three in the morning um huge thanks kitchen aid for supporting the work of the food season lots more to come we're here for the next couple of weeks until the end of may tomorrow eating something very special manta jaffrey food legend is joining us talking about her life and career with revinda bogall that will be amazing um if you want to find out more head to the british library website it's all there um if you'd like to support the work of the british library there's a donate button on your screen um but for now thanks again to our panel thank you for watching and goodbye from the british library food season