Making Coffee with Lucia Solis

56 minutes 58 seconds

The Coffee Producer Toolkit #6: Quality Control

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In this sixth episode, we give you a practical manual to judge your own coffee quality, so you can negotiate with buyers on a level playing field.

We start with the simplest step of all: drinking your own coffee. We cover how to brew and taste it, how to build a catalogue of its flavours, and why tasting your neighbours' coffees in a monthly tasting club gives you negotiating power.

Then we look at sample roasting, and why a producer's goal is consistency rather than the perfect roast. With help from Thompson Owen of Sweet Maria's, we go from roasting in a pan, to a $30 popcorn popper, to top-end sample roasters, and lay out the basics of a consistent roast: weight, moisture loss, time and your own senses.

We spend a good part of the episode on water, the most overlooked factor in how your coffee tastes on the cupping table. We start with a blind test at World of Coffee Geneva, where the same coffee tasted completely different just by changing the water. Then we explain alkalinity, how to test it with an inexpensive drip kit and what range to aim for, and we compare the options for getting good water on your farm: bottled water, distilled water with mineral sachets, under-sink filtration, and a full system that matches what your buyers use.

And we finish with grading. How to use the Coffee Value Assessment to describe your coffee in the same language as your buyers and why you should always get more than one independent opinion on your quality.

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is the podcast that helps you run a more profitable coffee farm.

Hosted by coffee journalist James Harper (Filter Stories podcast) and fermentation specialist Lucia Solis (Making Coffee with Lucia Solis podcast), it's built for farmers who want to run their farm like the business it is.

Over two years we interviewed 50+ producers and experts across 20 countries. Each episode takes one part of the business — agronomy, processing, fermentation, storage, quality, sales — and lays out what the best farms are doing.

Related podcast episodes:

James:

People mentioned in the episode:

Karla Boza — Jacinta Y Su Cafe, San Benito, El Salvador
Paulino Quintero — Huila, Colombia
Jesús Antonio Chala — Finca El Silencio, Colombia
Thompson Owen — Sweet Maria's Coffee, USA
Lahari Balireddi — ASG Coffee, Kenya
Manuel Barsallo — Agrícola Geisha, Panama
Lawrence — BWT

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Cover Art: Nick Hafner

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12 October 2026, 7:00 am

1 hour 9 minutes

The Coffee Producer Toolkit #5: Price

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In this fifth episode, we give you a practical guide to pricing your coffee to ensure your farm is economically sustainable in the long term.
We start by showing you how the “C” price is actually set, and why it is not what your coffee is worth.

Next, we show you how to calculate your cost of production and the common challenges producers will face doing this for the first time. We then look at how high above your cost of production. We cover where to find what coffees like yours are really selling for: asking other producers, asking roasters for their spot price lists, V-Hub and the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide. We also explain why spot prices are only a starting point, and how producers add a 15 to 20% premium by offering consistency, trust and a relationship.

And we finish with negotiation. We explain why many roasters would pay more but have never been asked, and how cultural values of humility and harmony can hold you back. We show you a tool for communicating with buyers from different cultures, what to ask for when a buyer won't move on price, and how to charge for investments a buyer asks you to make.

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is the podcast that helps you run a more profitable coffee farm. Hosted by coffee journalist James Harper (Filter Stories podcast) and fermentation specialist Lucia Solis (Making Coffee with Lucia Solis podcast), it's built for farmers who want to run their farm like the business it is.
Over two years we interviewed 50+ producers and experts across 20 countries. Each episode takes one part of the business — agronomy, processing, fermentation, storage, quality, sales — and lays out what the best farms are doing.

Related podcast episodes:

Lucia:

#64: "What Kind of Coffee Lover am I? How Much am I Willing to Pay for a Cup of Coffee?"

James:

Filter Stories: The Hard Business of Selling Beautiful Coffee

Follow us through our newsletters and Social media:

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Lucia Instagram

James’ Filter Stories Instagram

People mentioned in the episode:

Resources:

Cover Art: Nick Hafner

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is made possible by these leading coffee organisations:

Support the show

28 September 2026, 8:00 am

58 minutes 48 seconds

The Coffee Producer Toolkit #4: Marketing & Sales

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In this fourth episode, we give you a practical guide to finding buyers and selling your coffee into the specialty market.

And we finish with the sales conversation itself: the questions to ask in your first five minutes with a buyer, and how to handle the rejection that's coming, because it is coming.

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is the podcast that helps you run a more profitable coffee farm.

Hosted by coffee journalist James Harper (Filter Stories podcast) and fermentation specialist Lucia Solis (Making Coffee with Lucia Solis podcast), it's built for farmers who want to run their farm like the business it is.

Related podcast episodes:

Lucia:

James:

Filter Stories: The Hard Business of Selling Beautiful Coffee

Follow us through our newsletters and Social media:

Lucia’s Newsletter

James’s Newsletter

Lucia Instagram

James’ Filter Stories Instagram

People mentioned in the episode:

Resources:

Cover Art: Nick Hafner

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is made possible by these leading coffee organisations:

Support the show

14 September 2026, 6:00 am

1 hour 7 minutes

The Coffee Producer Toolkit #3: Fermentation

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In this third episode, we give you a practical manual to take control of your fermentations and improve your farm's profitability.

We start with the basics — what is actually happening inside your tank, where the microbes come from, and why your coffee is going to ferment whether you want it to or not.

Then we go through five ways commercial microbes can make you money: consistency batch to batch, long fermentations you can run safely, lifting the score of your worst cherries rather than your best, clearing bottlenecks in your wet mill, and extending your coffee's shelf life.

We cover what a well-run fermentation actually looks like — the cleaning, the monitoring, the record-keeping — with a step-by-step blue-barrel protocol for smaller farms and guidance on when to move to tanks. We also look at the investment sums needed for commercial yeasts and how to justify them.

And we finish with the difficult questions — the environmental worries, whether using a starter culture is the same as adulterating your coffee, and how to talk about all of this with buyers who may view commercial microbes with suspicion.

Related podcast episodes:

Lucia:

James:

Filter Stories - Coffee Quality, Part 1: The birth of specialty coffee flavours

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Cover Art: Nick Hafner

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is made possible by these leading coffee organisations:

Support the show

24 August 2026, 11:00 am

1 hour 6 minutes

The Coffee Producer Toolkit #2: Processing

In this second episode, we show you how to stop losing coffee to a badly calibrated pulper, why chasing 100% ripe cherries is actually costing you money, the $480 fix that lets a small farm sort cherries perfectly well, how to keep your coffee under 40°C during drying without spending a fortune, why a mechanical dryer isn't the villain everyone says it is, the cheap instruments that will deliver consistent quality across harvests, and ways to treat your wastewater.

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is the podcast that helps you run a more profitable coffee farm.

Hosted by coffee journalist James Harper (Filter Stories podcast) and fermentation specialist Lucia Solis (Making Coffee with Lucia Solis podcast), it's built for farmers who want to run their farm like the business it is.

Over two years we interviewed 50+ producers and experts across 20 countries. Each episode takes one part of the business — agronomy, processing, fermentation, storage, quality, sales — and lays out what the best farms are doing.

Related podcast episodes:

Lucia:

James:

Filter Stories: Why One Colombian Farmer Chose Specialty, and the Other Walked Away

Follow us through our newsletters and Social media:

Lucia’s Newsletter

James’s Newsletter

Lucia Instagram

James’ Filter Stories Instagram

People mentioned in the episode:

Resources:

Lucia's Favorite Tools:

Cover Art: Nick Hafner

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is made possible by these leading coffee organisations:

Support the show

10 August 2026, 11:00 am

1 hour 6 minutes

The Coffee Producer Toolkit #1: Farming

The Coffee Producer Toolkit is the podcast that can help you run a more profitable coffee farm.

Hosted by coffee journalist James Harper (Filter Stories podcast) and fermentation specialist Lucia Solis (Making Coffee with Lucia Solis podcast), it's built for farmers who want to run their farm like the business it is.

Over two years we interviewed 50+ producers and experts across 20 countries. Each episode takes one part of the business — agronomy, processing, fermentation, storage, quality, sales — and lays out what the best farms are doing.

In this first episode, we show you how you can benchmark your farm against the two numbers that matter, protect your flowering without paying for irrigation, avoid the exotic variety trap that's costing farmers their harvests, stop wasting money on fertilizer your soil doesn't need, and save weeks of labor a year with tools that cost less than $50.

Follow us on Instagram - Lucia (@lluciasolis) - James (@filterstoriespodcast) and tag us in an Instagram story.

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Cover Art Designed by Nick Hafner

Related Podcasts:

Lucia:

#79: Farm First: Lalo Perez on Long-Term Coffee Health

James:

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27 July 2026, 2:00 pm

45 minutes 31 seconds

#81: Nobody Wants to Pick Coffee

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16 July 2026, 11:00 am

35 minutes 55 seconds

#80: How Microbiology Can Explain Beginner's Luck

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Check out our YouTube videos

#63: Terroir for Busy People

Dirty Jobs Hawaiian Coffee Clip

Support the show on Patreon to join our live Discord hangouts, and get access to research papers, transcripts and videos.

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30 June 2026, 12:00 am

1 hour 39 minutes

#79: Farm First: Lalo Perez on Long-Term Coffee Health

Lalo's substack page

Ikaria Coffee (Lalo's farm + roasted coffee)

Biofilia (agronomic consultancy)

Support the show on Patreon to join our live Discord hangouts, and get access to research papers, transcripts and videos.

And if you don't want to commit, show your support here with a one time contribution: PayPal

Sign up for the newsletter to hear about the next episode, FTC dates, and coffee releases.

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6 April 2026, 11:00 am

44 minutes 41 seconds

#78: What Is Specialty Coffee? And Who Gets To Define It?

If you would like to watch our YouTube video on "What is specialty coffee"

You can watch that here.

If you are a roaster and are interested in participating in the Fermentation Project with James Hoffmann, click here -> For Roasters: Buy Fermentation Kit

Listers Movie (bird watching) it's beautiful, I highly recommend this.

Email info.luxiacoffee@gmail if you would like to discuss Pluribus or Listers Movie in our Discord server.

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18 March 2026, 6:00 pm

30 minutes 49 seconds

#77: The Most Challenging Harvest We've Had

Roasterkat IG Reel about rain.

YouTube version of the Q&A portion

James Hoffmann Healthy Coffee Video

The 2025/2026 Harvest has not gone according to plan.

Nick and I have found ourselves with some down time and therefore have put together this casual, end of year update on how the season is going so far. Spoiler alert: not well.

I've combined a harvest update with listener questions about fermentation.

Questions featured in this episode are:

Are all coffees that are not anaerobic, aerobic?
Am I aware of any efforts to design yeasts for Robusta?
Do I think producers should create terms that further describe processing?
How can you more precisely measure fermentation process with whole cherries?
What's the most eco-friendly way to treat waste water and effluent?

Email info.luxiacoffee@gmail if you would like to discuss Plur1bus.

Support the show on Patreon to join our live Discord hangouts, and get access to research papers, transcripts and videos.

And if you don't want to commit, show your support here with a one time contribution: PayPal

Sign up for the newsletter for behind the scenes pictures.

Cover Art by: Nick Hafner
Intro song: Elijah Bisbee
Support the show

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24 December 2025, 6:00 pm