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Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries

Coffee stories with an extra shot of history and science. Filter Stories is a podcast revealing coffee’s hidden microscopic secrets, its powerful past, and how your choice of beans impacts tens of millions of people. See the behind-the-scenes stories on Instagram @filterstoriespodcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

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Producer Toolkit: Processing, Pt 3 - Critical instruments and poisoned rivers

This episode explores how just a handful of cheap instruments can ensure quality is reproducible year-on-year, and the wastewater crisis poisoning rivers behind picture-perfect coffee farms. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes…

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Producer Toolkit: Processing, Pt 2 - Drying mistakes that ruin coffee quality

This episode explores the simple drying mistakes that compromise months of careful work, and the low-cost fixes that protect a coffee's shelf life and flavour. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes one part of the farming…

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Producer Toolkit: Processing, Pt 1 - Coffee rockstars and picking’s brutal economics

This episode explores why chasing avant-garde processing before nailing the basics is a trap for most producers, the brutal economics behind selectively picking and ways to sort coffee cherries in the wet mill. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show.…

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Producer Toolkit: Farming, Pt 3 - Starved soils and vanishing labour

This episode explores what plants really need from the soil beneath them, and the labour shortage forcing farms to rethink how the work gets done. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , it will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes one part of the farming business — agronomy,…

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Producer Toolkit: Farming, Pt 2 - Water crisis, risky genetics and cash flow crunch

This episode explores the growing water crisis in coffee farming, why farmers are drawn to risky coffee varieties and coffee farming's hidden cashflow traps. Part of The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis , this series will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes one part of the farming…

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Producer Toolkit: Farming, Pt 1 - Low harvests and profit blind spots

Welcome to The Coffee Producer Toolkit, a series made in collaboration with Lucia Solis . This series will help you understand coffee farming better than most professionals you'll meet at a trade show. Each episode takes one part of the farming business — agronomy, processing, fermentation, storage, quality, sales — and lays out what the best farms are actually doing. In this first episode, we…

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History: Guatemala’s Inconvenient Truth, Pt 2

Specialty coffee changes the story for the indigenous people of Guatemala. Coffee as a tool of oppression finally offers hope....and then something a bit more complicated. This episode explores the tension between the values of the Mayan communities who grow coffee, and the values that drive the specialty coffee movement. Many of the signals we typically look for in our coffees - super-specialty…

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History: Guatemala’s Inconvenient Truth, Pt 1

When you buy a bag of coffee labelled fifth-generation family farm, it feels like a good choice. But in Guatemala, that label might actually be a signal for a more uncomfortable truth. This episode explores how land has been understood, used, and eventually fought over in Guatemala for centuries between indigenous people, Europeans and those in-between. It’s a story of what happened immediately…

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History: Surrogates - Anything but the coffee

What happens when coffee disappears? This is not a thought experiment! It’s happened many times in history: War, blockades, tariffs, ideology, health panics, sanctions, supply shocks. When coffee is not around, people still need something warm, comforting, and familiar. And throughout history, people have reached for coffee surrogates: roasted plants and grains engineered to look like coffee…but…

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History: Ethiopia’s wild coffee forests

Most coffee is grown on vast plantations using machines, pesticides and fertilisers. But in Ethiopia, coffee grows wild in humid forests surrounded by birds. And that wild coffee matters more than most of us realise. It is the genetic ‘library’ we can turn to find new varieties to help us keep coffee thriving in the face of climate change. But the communities who live alongside them and have…

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