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Specialty coffee industry pioneer Sherri M. Johns
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Sherri Johns leads cupping camp in Bangkok for the Specialty Coffee Association of Thailand.
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Sherri Johns leads cupping camp in Bangkok for the Specialty Coffee Association of Thailand.
Specialty coffee industry pioneer Sherri M. Johns and her company, WholeCup Coffee Consulting, have led or advised coffee competitions, shows, projects, and businesses around the world during the past four decades, including the Gems of Araku Coffee Excellence initiative, which supports regenerative farming in tribal areas of Andhra Pradesh state in southeastern India.
Johns started pulling shots while in college in San Francisco in 1976, at the first on-campus espresso bar in the United States. Soon she was acing local competitions and running cafes. She helped lead the expansion of Starbucks during its early years. She helped stage the World Barista Championship in cities around the world during its early years.
What follows is an excerpt of an interview that will appear in the August/September 2022 issue of STiR Coffee and Tea magazine.
What has been the biggest change in the global coffee culture since you started out in the late 1970s?
The quality has improved and become broader in reach. To be sure, you did have some amazing coffee served back then. In cities like San Francisco, there were a few small roasters doing a good job, buying good quality, doing single-origin coffees. But it was rare. Nowadays, in dozens of countries around the world, it's easy to find quality coffee. You can choose a coffee from a particular region, a particular farm — sometimes even which side of the mountain it's grown on.
When did the culture of specialty coffee catch fire?
It was the late 1990s, when Starbucks brought it to the mainstream and globalized awareness. They really helped introduce the concept of specialty coffee, so that people got comfortable going into a cafe, and spending, say, five or six bucks for a cup of coffee.
That opened the market for lots of people. As customers became more acclimated to specialty coffee and could taste the difference, some of them started to seek out the independents — these cafes that are striving to offer an experience like fine dining.
What defines a specialty coffee?
First: how it's processed, whether it's clean and sweet. And how it represents a taste of place. That's not just the terroir — it also represents each set of hands that touches the coffee. The people that pick the ripe coffee cherries, the people that pulp the coffee, removing the fruit from the seed. Then, how people are drying and fermenting it. Is it a wash process, a honey process, a natural process? How is that coffee milled, sorted, graded? And what about the packaging? How is it exported. Is it in a shipping container that held cardamom before, or a clean, sanitary container? Where and how is it stored? How is roasted? What does the barista decide to do with it? It goes through about 20 sets of hands, and any of those can make a difference in the chain of quality.
I do a lot of training and working with baristas, and I tell them that they can break that chain of quality and negate everything that's gone before. It's up to that last set of hands that touches the cup of coffee. It's the barista's responsibility to pay attention and respect all the work that's gone before, and to do a good job of it. That way, customers enjoy it and want to come back and pay for it again. In the end, it's that final step of quality that ensures the sustainability of those farms.
What are your favorite coffee origins?
There are great coffees to be had in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica. But I've always liked to help the underdogs, the ones that don't have the big coffee boards. The hidden gems. So, I've done a lot of work in Burundi, Rwanda, India, Thailand, Honduras. I love Bolivia, too.