To connect coffee lovers and professionals from all around the world, to inspire others, to make new friends.
Today we feature the story of :
LUCIA SOLIS
Please tell us about yourself.
My name is Lucia Solis and I am coffee processing specialist. I consult with coffee producers all over the world but the majority of my work occurs in coffee farms in Central and South America.
I was born in Guatemala but migrated to the United states when I was 5. I grew up in California and went to UC Davis to study Viticulture and Enology.
I worked in the wine industry in Napa Valley in California and Baja, Mexico for a cumulative 9 years. In 2014 I started traveling to coffee farms and using yeast to control coffee fermentations.
For the last 6 years I have been continuing the work of traveling to coffee farms and consulting with coffee producers on how they can take charge of their processing to differentiate their coffee. For too long the roaster has had most of the credit for “discovering coffee gems” and it’s my goal for producers to contribute to the story of what makes a coffee taste good.
What is your vision and goal?
My goal is to do my part in the anti-oppressive movement by contributing whatever scientific knowledge I can regarding microbiology and processing to coffee producers. My hope is that this knowledge can provide some confidence to producers to push back when buyers ask for trendy processing practices (“anaerobic fermentation”, “carbonic maceration”, “lactic process”, etc) that don’t make sense given the producer’s climate and resources.
My vision is to reverse the trend of buyers asking producers to process coffee in a way that prioritizes the dominant class and exploits the growers.
How did you get started in coffee, what made you fallen in love with it?
I got started when a yeast company approached me to test their catalog of yeast strains on coffee and cacao fermentations. I was happily working in wine with no thoughts on coffee at all (I was not even a consumer at the time), but the opportunity to travel and apply my winemaking knowledge to a new industry was appealing. I fell in love with the industry when I realized I could be useful. I realized I could contribute by closing the knowledge gap between how producers were processing their coffee and the flavors in the cup.
If you weren't a coffee lover or professional what would you have done instead?
I loved working in wine, and somedays when the future of coffee seems so bleak, I remind myself that I could go back to making wine. But if I could go back to high school, I would have loved to study filmmaking. I’m drawn to the story telling aspect and attention to detail.
What is your favourite coffee beverage ?
I have not yet found a love for espresso or espresso based beverages. My go-to is a drip, preferably v60 made at home. There are many incredible baristas, but I enjoy the meditative process of making my own cup of coffee. For me, the ritual of making it myself adds to the drinking experience. Even thought I’m not a trained barista, and I do not believe I make the best cup of coffee, I still prefer my own cup of coffee to one made by anyone else.
In fact, I have trouble metabolizing caffeine, so I don’t drink coffee everyday, but I still enjoy making it and some days I make it for my partner and don’t drink any myself.
What do you see as the major challenges facing the coffee industry?
One challenge I keep coming up against is a lack of academic rigor. In my experience the industry attracts passionate individuals but that is not supported with equal academic or technical training.
I think another major challenge the coffee industry is not wanting to reconcile that coffee is a fundamentally colonial product. We can dress it up in all the romance and theatre we want, but at its core it was set up as a colonial structure and we continue to uphold it to this day.
One tip to improve the coffee industry ?
A lot of my work recently is focusing on building a better vocabulary for processing practices and questioning how much we are borrowing from beer and wine industry without a deep understanding of what the terms refer to and how the can be applied to coffee. I think the words we use matter and if we don’t build a solid vocabulary we will not have solid foundations. I would like the coffee industry to stop trying to compare coffee to wine so much and let coffee be coffee.
We think comparing it to wine is a way to add reverence but it’s erasure. Coffee has it’s own history and identity and we shouldn’t be trying to make it be something else.
What is your favourite quote ?
“The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth” Niels Bohr, Danish physicist
“No story lives unless someone wants to listen ”