Let's talk about estate coffees & the fourth wave!

It seems that in various trade journals and newspapers there is a big deal being made about estate coffees and the "third wave" coffee movement. However, what exactly is an estate, and why do producers and roasters tout their product as "estate" coffee? Michael

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When I started in the coffee business over 25 years ago, I purchased coffee from five estates. Those estates were on the island of Java, and were owned and controlled by the Dutch. Way, way back when sailing ships were the main source of transportation and commerce, the Dutch controlled some of the Indonesian islands, and all but one of the Banda Spice Islands, which was the island of Run. This island is a very small island about 1.5 miles long and .5 mile wide--it was jam-packed full of nutmeg. This island was controlled by the British, and the man that secured it for them was Nathaniel Courthope. The Dutch were so greedy at this time that they had to have that last island, so they traded it for an island called New Netherlands. Today; you may know that island, except that now it's called Manhattan!

Why would I share this story? Well, because it's a true story with several facts. Also, because I'd like to propose a Fourth Wave of Coffee, one based on facts. I like to refer to this wave as, "The Truth About Coffee."

The Measure of Estate Coffee

So what exactly is an estate coffee? It is a single farm that is kept pure in itself; bringing the cherry to parchment and most of the time milling the coffee on that farm for shipment. There are exceptions, however, when some of the estates bring their parchment to a central miller. Milling or the graining process is removing the thin brittle shell of parchment from the pit of the coffee cherry, grading it for size through a screening process, then putting the beans in a burlap bag. The majority of these large estates come from Guatemala, El Salvador and Panama.

Each acre of coffee trees produces approximately 60 quintales of coffee cherry or about 6,000-lbs. total (1 quintale = [+ or -] 100-lbs). A coffee cherry yields about 20% of its weight in roastable green coffee beans. If you do a simple calculation, you realize one acre of land produces only 1.200-lbs. of coffee beans per year, that's only eight sacks of 150-lbs.