I clearly remember a natural Ethiopian coffee I had in 2017. It was so fruity with amazing blueberry flavors that it changed how I thought about coffee. Today, I wonder if that same coffee would even stand out among all the experimental fermentations producing flavors like Blue Jolly Rancher and strawberry yogurt.
That's both the excitement and the challenge of modern coffee processing. We're in an arms race of flavor innovation, where producers push fermentation to extremes that would've been unthinkable a decade ago. Standing in Rodin Villatoro's mill in Guatemala, watching him load cherries into anaerobic tanks with the precision of a scientist, I realized we're witnessing coffee's transformation in real time.
Some of these experiments fail spectacularly. Others create coffees so unusual that they divide even specialty coffee lovers. But that's exactly why this moment in coffee is so thrilling—we're discovering what's possible when tradition meets innovation.
