The popularity of gourmet coffee allows us to obtain more detailed planting and production information of coffee beans. These information usually accompanies the sale of coffee beans and is printed on the label of the packaging bag! Bean varieties, processing methods, and flavor descriptions are all easy to understand, only the origin information of coffee beans makes people a little confused: sometimes it is the producing area, sometimes it is the estate, or it is the processing plant, or the cooperative… What are the differences between them?
Coffee producing areas
The producing area is the one that is best understood! It is divided into large producing areas and small producing areas. Large producing areas are like Colombia, Ethiopia, Panama, etc., these are the names of the countries where the coffee is produced! Under the large producing areas, there will also be subdivided into many small producing areas, like the frequently heard Yirgacheffe, Sidamo are the small producing areas under Ethiopia! Or Huilan, Cauca are the small producing areas under Colombia!
The reason for this distinction is mainly because: not only there are different climates between countries that lead to different flavors, but also there will be different taste differences between each small producing area. After all, the interval between most producing areas will have a distance of hundreds of kilometers, and the taste grown will naturally be different! Like Yirgacheffe, Guge, these producing areas are separated out alone because the coffee produced in this producing area has a very unique taste! Then, to be further subdivided, it is the estate, processing plant, and cooperative!
Coffee processing plant
The raw coffee beans before being processed are a fruit with peel and flesh, and the so-called coffee processing plant is a place to centralize the surrounding coffee fruits and process them uniformly.
The reason why processing plants come into being is that the processing of coffee fruits requires higher requirements for the site and equipment, and high requirements mean that the money that must be spent will also be high! For some backward areas of coffee farmers, this is simply impossible. After all, the money earned from selling beans is not enough to buy machines! So, coffee farmers can only sell the fruits they grow to nearby processing plants.
But this will lead to a problem: the price of the fruit will be affected, and these influences will inevitably be negative. There is also a middleman in the coffee industry to make the price difference, like the intermediaries in the transportation link, they travel back and forth between the coffee farmers and the processing plants, buying the coffee fruits from the coffee farmers at a lower price, and then selling them to the processing plants at a higher price.
In addition, there are many ways to reduce the income of coffee farmers! So, if you want to avoid the middleman and reduce the loss of price, the best way is to “unite and establish a place for coffee fruit processing”. And this has led to the birth of the “cooperative”!
Coffee cooperative
When coffee farmers unite, raise funds to buy machines and sites, and build cooperatives, they can centralize and uniformly process the coffee fruits they grow, without letting the middlemen make the price difference!
Then, these beans processed through the cooperative will be named after the cooperative for unified sales. There is a well-known bean in the Yirgacheffe producing area called “Guodiding”, and its name is taken from the name of the Guodiding cooperative! Other names like Woka, Kongga, etc. are the names of the beans sold under the name of the cooperative~
Coffee estate
The coffee estate is a private and scaled coffee planting and production farm. We can try to imagine it as the villa area of the rich people. After all, the first requirement for the estate owner to be able to establish the estate is to have sufficient funds (rich!). Only in this way can they buy large pieces of land to grow coffee, as well as supporting facilities to process coffee fresh fruits!
The estate owner can freely control the focus or direction of planting and processing, and can also try various novel planting and processing methods ~ Because in these aspects, they will not be limited! And it is more difficult for cooperatives and processing plants to open up new directions. The reasons for the difficulty are obvious, that is, the cost of trial and error is really too much for coffee farmers, and a car crash may ruin a year’s hard work and income!
In addition to production, sales, materials and other issues, the estate owner can also handle it! Because they are the manufacturer of the production source themselves, they grow, process themselves, find the green bean merchants, and sell themselves! A series of processes are like a duck to water.
And if certain results are achieved in the production or supply process, there will definitely be more green bean merchants to come to the door to buy coffee beans at a high price! And these overflowing profits are all privately owned! Like the Emerald Estate, Guagua Guo Estate, and Hartman Estate that we often hear about are the best among them!
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