Q&A: Miguel Meza

By Kim Westerman

Miguel Meza is a highly regarded green buyer, a renowned cupper, and an award-winning roaster. He founded Paradise Coffee Roasters, based in Minnesota, with his family in 2002. Since 2008, he has been living in Hawaii working with coffee at the farm level to better understand coffee quality and using this experience to help growers around the world improve their coffee.

He also founded Isla Custom Coffees, based in Pahala, Hawaii, which provides specialty Hawaiian and international coffees to roasters worldwide. Miguel travels to several countries each year to source and develop coffees for Paradise as well as manages Black Rock Farm in Kona and Hawaiian Kopelani Paradise Farm and mill in Puna, Hawaii.

STiR: What’s your coffee story?

Meza: I started drinking coffee at 13, introduced really by my parents’ subscription to Gevalia. I was very attracted to the many places coffee was grown and how they all tasted different and was curious to understand better why they tasted different. After visiting Seattle in the mid-90s and experiencing cafés there, I started frequenting cafés near me and applied at the local shop once I turned 16, once a week for several weeks until they finally hired me. From that point on, I knew I wanted to work in coffee. I had read in books about coffee cuppers and buyers tasting hundreds of coffees and traveling to origins to secure supply. That’s what I wanted to do, as well as learn to roast coffee.

There weren’t many jobs available for coffee roasters or training or knowledge being shared back then. To get into all of those things, I started Paradise Coffee Roasters in 2002 with my family. I was 19 and began learning to roast and buy coffee from trial and error.

STiR: You’re a farmer, a green buyer, and a roaster. How do these three different roles play out in your company, Paradise Coffee Roasters?

Meza: Well, I wouldn’t really call myself a farmer. I help to manage a couple of small farms, but my experience in this area is quite limited. I mostly focus on the post-harvest aspect of coffee, the handling of coffee from cherry to its roasted stage. I process cherry from farms I help manage and a couple others I source from on the Big Island on a small mill to sell exclusively through Paradise.

I also spend a good amount of time working with producers in Thailand, Taiwan, and Ecuador, teaching them what I’ve learned from processing here in Hawaii to make coffees for us and for their local and export specialty coffee markets. I do the production roasting for now at our Hawaii facility and then advise remotely on roasting at our Minneapolis roastery. Our machine is setup on Cropster, and I receive production-roasted samples weekly, along with samples we are considering for purchase. Lots of cupping to be done for all three roles.

STiR: As a green buyer, what do you look for in a specialty coffee?

Meza: First and foremost, cleanliness, freshness, and balance in the cup. If a coffee cups great but is several months old already or has a lot of physical defects, high moisture content, or inconsistent cups, it’s not something I’m likely to purchase no matter how impressive in the cup. From living and working at origin over the past 12 years, I’m very sensitive to aging in coffee and, as a result, also try to source coffees as fresh from harvest as possible. Ideally, I don’t want to be roasting most coffees more than 6-9 month from harvest. When a coffee was harvested is always a question I have before purchase.

STiR: You also do a lot of work with rare coffees that most consumers have had little exposure to. What’s the draw there?

Meza: I like to travel, I like to explore, and I like to offer things interesting and different from others. You can find great Ethiopias, Colombias, El Salvadors, etc., from hundreds of roasters. But how many places are you going to find unusual varieties from places like Jamaica’s Blue Mountains or Thailand? Or historically famous origins such as St. Helena and Reunion Island, and specialty coffee of other coffea species: eugenioides, canephora, liberica, and others?

I don’t see the point in doing the same thing many others already do well. I prefer to spend my time focusing on the things that, if I don’t do, then no one else is likely to, at least for a quite a while. There are companies that focus on rare coffees, but not necessarily with any attention to those also being good or distinctive specialty-grade coffees. So, I think there is an opportunity here to be a source for that intersection of rare and specialty.

I also like doing it for educational purposes. I firmly believe that specialty coffee is a process and excellent coffees can be developed anywhere coffee can be grown. I like to highlight this fact by showing that some origins people have never even heard of can produce coffees that may be as good or better than some more renowned origins.

STiR: In your travels to various coffee origins all over the world, what are you learning about efforts to fight climate change? What countries or farmers have the most creative approaches? For whom might the climate crisis prove too great to overcome?

Meza: A couple things I have noticed: In many areas, the harvest season was traditionally dry, and coffee is dried on patios or screens without covers. But in recent years, weather patterns have been very unreliable, and I’ve seen a number of farmers create greenhouse drying buildings or build plastic covers for their drying racks. Another thing some growers are noticing is that coffee planted under shade is faring much better than coffee in the sun during extreme weather events that have become more frequent, whether that be heat, frost, or heavy rain.

STiR: Your roasting company, Paradise, is one of the most highly regarded in the US. What is the secret to your longstanding success?

Meza: A combination of consistency and constant evolution. Our blends still maintain similar cup profiles that they’ve had for years, and we continue to offer a diversity of roast styles from light to dark, although we never have done anything at the extreme ends of the spectrum either way. We have also tried to stay at the forefront of quality innovations with single-origin coffees at the same time.

We were among the first roasters in the US roasting mostly in a lighter style and featuring single-origin coffees for espresso 15-plus years ago, purchasing in early auctions from COE and Best of Panama, and among the first to feature the then-new ripe cherry naturals starting to come out of Ethiopia at that time. We still try to offer what represents the current and future innovations: processing, new varieties, new origins. I think that keeps things exciting for customers.

STiR: Who are your customers, and what are their primary interests and values where coffee is concerned?

Meza: Our core business is online retail and has been since we started. Many of our customers are home espresso enthusiasts. Most are very concerned about freshness of the coffee. Likely as a result of the coffees we offer, we have cultivated a customer base for single-origin coffees that is quite adventurous in its tastes. Our customers like trying new coffees not only from us but from many roasters. So, we try to keep our offerings rotating frequently.

STiR: What is the most compelling origin for you, currently?

Meza: Thailand. I’ve been traveling there and working with growers for several years now. There have been massive increases in the quality and diversity of coffees there. The combination of a strong local café scene with young farmers who can cup and roast and are experimenting with processing of every conceivable style and very aware of the innovations and quality of coffees around the world represents where specialty coffee is heading in the years to come, with more internal demand and catering to the tastes of internal markets just as much as toward exports.

STiR: You’re also renowned for coffee processing experiments. Tell us about how you came to embrace an experimental approach and what you’re working on these days.

Meza: I guess it has always been my approach to coffee. Whether roasting or processing, I’m constantly experimenting and seeing what works and what doesn’t, and continually refining things. Ten years ago, that meant applying processing styles that were then newer, like naturals and honeys, to coffees in Hawaii and other regions, as well as experimenting with styles of processing from other regions of the world like Kenya and Sumatra. For a time, I felt I had optimized these different processes as much as could be done and there wasn’t much left to experiment with. In the last five years or so, there has started to be a lot more scientific research on the biology of fermentation and ways to control it in ways we’ve never understood before, which is exciting and leaves a lot of directions to explore.

We can create flavor profiles that are different with some newly developed methods, and, in many cases, create overall improvement on traditional styles. A lot of what I have spent my time on over the last three years is using wine yeasts in fermentation with washed, naturals, and honeys, and more recently taking the best of those results and combining them with anaerobic fermentations. Temperature control of fermentation and inoculation with other organisms, such as lactic acid bacteria, are other areas I’d like to pursue in the near future.

STiR: What is your most spectacular coffee failure, and what did you learn from it?

Meza: One notable story is also part of how I ultimately ended up in Hawaii. In 2007, two farms from the Ka’u region in Hawaii placed in the top 10 of then-SCAA’s Coffee Of The Year cupping competition. I ended up purchasing the sixth-ranked coffee — and quite a lot of it — 10 bags, I believe, of expensive coffee. I thought surely a coffee from a region in Hawaii no one had heard of before that was ranked among the best coffees in the world would be a hit.

It was a great coffee, held its own on tables of Panama geishas, auction-lot Kenyas and COE coffees we had at the time. But it didn’t sell nearly as well as I’d hoped. It took a couple of years to move it all. With higher-priced coffee, especially, I’m a lot more cautious these days. I try to order a little less than I think we can sell and, for single-origin and rare coffees, we have subscription programs that feature rotating coffees, so it’s easier to calculate the minimum we can sell of a coffee.

Most coffees I mention to some of our wholesale clients, as well, to gauge interest. While that Ka’u coffee didn’t receive the press or customer response I would have expected, back then it did make a big impression on me and, as a result of that coffee, I ended up moving to Hawaii a year later to work with coffee farms and get a better understanding of coffee quality on the origin side of things.

STiR: What is your vision for the future of specialty coffee?

Meza: I hope to see it expand — to more growing origins and more species. I’ve always been a big believer and supporter of specialty robusta, and I hope to see the same kind of attention to detail given to arabica applied to robusta, as well, at both the farm and research levels. We really haven’t even scratched the surface of what the quality potential or flavor profiles possible with this species are, as it’s always just been written off.

The reality is that robusta and introgressed hybrids using some robusta parentage have to be the future of coffee as environmental conditions change in growing area around the world. The less prejudice we hold against non-arabica varieties, and the more work we do now developing their potential, the better the coffee we drink is going to be 20-50 years from now.