Did the French invent washed coffee processing?
A question with no clean answer, traced through cocoa, colony, and the patent record.
Jamie Treby
thinking carefully about coffee
I came into coffee in 2000, just back from travelling and looking for work. Starbucks were new in the UK, the country still drank mostly tea, so the training budgets were uncapped (that didn't last). Within three years I was a regional trainer and troubleshooter whilst managing my own store in the middle of the high street battles between Starbucks, Costa and Nero. I did not want to grow into management, so when the offer came to join the new roastery in Amsterdam I took it and was living there three weeks later. The roasters were still being commissioned and I learned the underneath of the trade there: strip-cleans, rebuilds and a thermal cleaning process we developed in-house, the analogue and digital sides of roasting systems before cupping up to five hundred cups a day in the quality lab. Alfred Peet came through occasionally to hang out and share knowledge. His father had owned a roastery the other side of the river.
The years after my return to the UK in 2006 filled in the rest. A sole trader business that a robbery ended followed by warehouse work that taught me picking and fulfilment from the inside as I rebuilt. A cafe owned by international sports stars that brought the business onto the SCA competition circuit around 2009. Event barista work that took me round the world with trade shows, working backstage at festivals as artist-only, and serving private events for the wealthy and famous. Speciality at scale, in unusual places, under performance pressure. I had a blast. Then the offer that asked the question too intriguing to refuse, which became the innovation manager role for coffee at Taylors of Harrogate. The coffee bags I helped develop are still on shelves today and the format is now used by smaller speciality roasters, built on around fifty thousand pounds of research and a careful read of what the market actually wanted. Other work was less commercially successful. Capsules that were awarded but withdrawn a few years later. The first shelf stable cold brew and tonic in the UK passed sampler approval and a fifteen thousand bottle batch trial alongside a scientific lab, but never reached launch. A novel-food approved cascara drink would go the same way years later. Both were too far ahead of the brands that commissioned them, which is the most common kind of innovation failure and the one that teaches the most. Stints since as a mid-size roaster and green coffee trader, and now remaining in green coffee importing, have filled in the structural positions in the trade.
I have visited origin many times: Brazil the most, and Rwanda, Guatemala, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Colombia. Repeat visits surface what a single one cannot, the slow shifts in how a region values its own product, the changes in farm practice, the relationships evidenced across years rather than declared. I push speciality Robusta and have written publicly on why I think the future of coffee is as much Canephora as Arabica. A trade environment favours selling before purchasing, which makes that a hard position to hold, but the trajectory is there and what I continue to learn in origin only strengthens it.
What holds me most now is the politics and ethics of coffee, the international trade and the question of authenticity, on top of the storytelling and information behind the drink. I judge for the Guild of Fine Foods at the Great Taste Awards. I was head judge for the UK Barista Championships with World Coffee Events and have judged internationally both with them and by invitation. I am working on a book about coffee. I am writing novels alongside it. I am building a buying intelligence tool for roasters, equal parts assistant, information layer, and confidence gauge. AI adaptation sits adjacent to much of it, because some of the questions that interest me about coffee are the questions that AI is now in the middle of, and someone with the time inside both fields is well-placed to think about what is, and is not, happening at the join.