How Long Miles ensures quality, from farm to cup
Every step that coffee takes in the process from seed to cup impacts its quality. Ensuring coffee quality at every touch point has been a steep learning curve for the Long Miles Coffee team, and is something they are continuously learning to improve with every coffee harvest that comes to pass.
Robyn-Leigh van Laren is the Story Manager at Long Miles Coffee, a specialty coffee producer founded in Burundi, East Africa. Over the last three and a half years, together with the Long Miles Story Team, she has been documenting and sharing the stories of Burundian coffee farmers and their coffee.
Over to Robyn:
Every step that coffee takes in the process from seed to cup impacts its quality. Ensuring coffee quality at every touch point has been a steep learning curve for the Long Miles Coffee team, and is something they are continuously learning to improve with every coffee harvest that comes to pass.
“Could we actually produce specialty coffee in Burundi?”
When Long Miles’ co-founders, Ben and Kristy Carlson, moved to Burundi in 2011, they quickly realized that the most central place to see transformative change in the lives of coffee farmers and the quality of their coffee was at the washing station. In early 2013, the Carlsons built Bukeye, the first Long Miles Washing Station, with the underlying goal of answering the question, “Could we actually produce specialty coffee in Burundi?”
That same year, Lauren Kagori (née Rosenberg), a PhD candidate from South Africa, joined the Long Miles Team as their first Farmer Relations Officer. Kagori’s role was to understand coffee farmers' relationship to the washing station. As they began to build trust and work with the coffee farming communities around the washing station, it became clear to Kagori that farmers’ greatest challenge to coffee quality was the lack of access to inputs: fertilizer, lime, mulch, and to some degree access to loans to pay laborers to work on their farms.
“You can go to lengths investing in infrastructure at the washing station, but quality really begins on the farm,” Kagori says. “The most obvious challenge to [Long Miles] ensuring coffee quality was opening Bukeye washing station for the inaugural harvest and having no reference point or previous experience to draw from,” Kagori shares. “The team was inexperienced and lacked technical skills. They didn’t know how to hand select cherries or how to manage the pre-drying of parchment coffee, let alone guide farmers.”
By the end of their first harvest, Long Miles produced only eighty bags of coffee- just a quarter of a container. Needless to say, the coffee didn’t taste very good that year and many roasters rejected the lots upon arrival in the United States. “We learned that you don’t just engage with farmers a month or two before harvest- it’s a year-round effort”, Kagori explains.
This was a turning point for Long Miles. They had built a washing station, invested in a community of smallholder coffee growers, and grown a team of people. But there was an obvious limit to the return on their investment if they didn’t invest in bottom lines that went beyond profitability.
Tricks for ripe cherry picking
The Long Miles team came up with all sorts of innovative ideas to help guide farmers on how to improve their coffee’s quality. The first set of interns spent hours perusing local paint stores for the exact shade of red that resembled a ripened coffee cherry. The idea was to paint the bases of woven baskets that farmers generally use to collect hand-picked coffee cherries. It quickly went from baskets to dipping small wooden chips in the same red paint that farmers could easily slip in and out of their pockets to compare their ripening cherries against. Back at the washing station, a borehole was drilled so that their team could start processing coffee with clean groundwater instead of water from a nearby river.
Wooden chips painted red to compare the ripening cherries against helps farmers to improve their coffee’s quality.
“It would be remiss not to acknowledge that there is countless research, processes, and tools, like the ROEST sample roaster, used at every touchpoint along coffee’s journey, but ensuring the quality of Long Miles’ coffee really comes down to people, like ROEST. ”
Understanding the quality
Around that time, another challenge was rising, both at the farm level and on the cupping table: the Potato Taste Defect. It took a trip to visit an established coffee producer in Rwanda and interviews with Long Miles’ partner roasters to realize that Potato Taste Defect was a real issue- not just in Burundi, but in neighboring coffee-growing countries too. That’s how the Long Miles Coffee Scouts came to be.
Antestia bug - the insect linked to the Potato Taste Defect.
Led by Epaphras Ndikumana, Social and Environmental Impact Leader at Long Miles, the Coffee Scouts guide partner farmers through the cherry picking process on their farms while also scouting for and removing any antestia bugs (the insect linked to the Potato Taste Defect). The Coffee Scouts also encourage farmers to practice floating cherries at home and then again at the washing stations. Standing side-by-side with farmers at the washing stations, the Scouts help to hand-sort their cherries for ripeness and visible defects. Back on the farm, they distribute indigenous and shade trees to partner coffee farmers, encouraging them to plant green manures to improve soil health, mitigate climate change and the productivity of their coffee trees. The Coffee Scouts have been pivotal in improving the quality of Burundi coffee, and the Potato Taste Defect has since become increasingly less common on our cupping tables.
“The activities of our social projects help partner coffee farmers to improve their agricultural practices which increases the productivity and quality of their coffee in the long run”, Ndikumana says. He has done extensive research on how to improve the productivity of Burundian farmers’ coffee trees and soil health, initiating programs like the PIP approach (translated from French as ‘Integrated Farm Plans’) and Farmer Field Schools within the farming communities that Long Miles works with in Burundi.
Ndikumana checking sugar level of the coffee cherries.
Long Miles’ Coffee and Quality Production Manager, Seth Nduwayo, adds to this by explaining that, “Our protocols, standards and communication are the most powerful tools that help us to produce quality coffee in a systemized way. We don’t only make efforts to perform well but try to make sure we perform more consistently while also aiming to improve our performance.” Ensuring coffee quality quietly continues long after harvest has ended at the dry mill. Nduwayo and the Long Miles team spend weeks at a time, following their coffee through innumerable quality steps at the mill: from hulling to grading, density sorting, handsorting, weighing, and eventually loading containers for export.
Green grading and sample roasting
On the other side of the world, David Stallings, head of Roaster and Importer Relations, ensures that coffee goes through meticulous quality steps once it reaches the Long Miles Coffee Lab in North America. He starts by measuring the water activity, performing a moisture and UV analysis of the coffee weighing and then roasting each sample using our ROEST. All the relevant physical data about each sample is documented before the process is repeated over and over again before samples are sent to their roasting partners across the globe.
During coffee season, Stallings typically processes and on ROEST around 120 samples a week: “The ROEST sample roaster may be the most perfect small-scale machine yet designed to explore the many different aspects of coffee roasting that I learned about through various roasting systems. The capability to develop profiles based on different parameters and the machine’s ability to develop coffee remarkably evenly, coupled with its ease of use and maintenance, make it an essential tool in my professional life.”
Click here to read more about how David Stallings developed the Long Miles ROEST profiles.
Preparing coffee samples for roasting. Usually 100g of green beans per sample.
Sample roasting on ROEST: during the season it is around 120 samples a week.
It's a teamwork
It would be remiss not to acknowledge that there is countless research, processes, and tools, like the ROEST sample roaster, used at every touchpoint along coffee’s journey, but ensuring the quality of Long Miles’ coffee really comes down to people, like ROEST. Each coffee farming family that Long Miles works with. By continuing to listen to their thoughts and understand their challenges and needs, they continue to put steps in place to improve the quality of their coffee. The team of Coffee Scouts, working tirelessly throughout the year guiding partner farmers on best agricultural practices. It’s every member of the Long Miles team, investing in the long-term impact of smallholder coffee farmers in East Africa and the coffee they produce.
All this before any coffee reaches your cup.
Written by Robyn-Leigh van Laren is the Story Manager at Long Miles Coffee
LMC photos curtesy of Long Miles Coffee. ROEST photos from Julianna Stallings.
Have you tried ROEST Profiles developed by Long Miles Coffee?
Learning to ROEST with Long Miles Coffee Part1
For over a decade roasting technology has evolved significantly: new roasting technology, roasting techniques,… We are even able to share roasting profiles. David Stallings from Long Miles Coffee shares his roasting journey from gas roasters and spreadsheets to today’s technology that led him to “the most perfect small-scale machine yet“. Read more in the article written by David Stallings.
For over a decade roasting technology has evolved significantly: new roasting technology, roasting techniques,… We are even able to share roasting profiles. David Stallings from Long Miles Coffee shares his roasting journey from gas roasters and spreadsheets to today’s technology that led him to “the most perfect small-scale machine yet“.
Over to David:
Long Miles Coffee is an East African Coffee producer with washing stations in Burundi. Photo credit Long Miles Coffee.
My name is David Stallings and I handle Roaster Relations for Long Miles Coffee. Long Miles is an East African coffee producer. We own two Washing Stations in Burundi, are currently in the process of building a third in that beautiful landlocked country, operate a washing station in Kirinyaga County on Mt. Kenya, and are getting ready to formally launch operations in Uganda.
Beginnings of roasting logs
I first learned to roast coffee in 2008. I recently came across some computer spreadsheets with profiles from those early days and, in truth, was pleasantly surprised by my early efforts in coffee roasting. Why were these notes in the form of spreadsheets? Because these were the days before the ubiquitous use of data logging software. A small handful of vanguard and more technologically advanced specialty roasters had developed their own software to automatically log roast data. The rest of us were left to do the best we could with notebooks, spreadsheets, and other forms of manual data logging. The spreadsheets I recently stumbled upon had temperature data points recorded every 30 seconds of the roast. From there I made graphs of the profiles in Microsoft Excel in order to have a visual representation of the roasts. My employer at the time thought I was a fool, saying that one only needed to look at the bean temperature every two minutes or so in order to produce consistent results.
“Learning to use the ROEST sample roaster has put a point on so many of the techniques and theories which I have developed and thought over as a coffee roaster this past decade-plus.”
Missing knowledge
Similar to how many baristas were trained in the earlier days of specialty coffee, roasting was taught to me in terms and technique that straddled the line between craft and science. While many would still argue that this is the case (I, myself, admit some partial truth to this sentiment), I believe that many of us see now, with better tools and techniques for evaluating and controlling roasts, that what we chalked up to craft previously, was really the inability to produce consistent roasts through lack of knowledge and nascent tools. In some ways, learning to use the ROEST sample roaster has put a point on so many of the techniques and theories which I have developed and thought over as a coffee roaster this past decade-plus.
David Stallings, responsible for Roaster Relations at LMC, is truly enjoying roasting on his ROEST sample roaster. Photo credit Long Miles Coffee.
The older the better - or not at all
Like many who have been in specialty coffee for a decade or more, I learned to roast on a traditional drum roaster. For the first chunk of my roasting career, fluid bed and/or hot air roasters were relegated to low-quality and/or smaller roasting operations. Nearly every up-and-coming roasting company that I knew around 2008-2010 was focused on obtaining or singing the praises of traditional drum roasters - the mindset in those days frequently being ‘the older the better.’ While many are still roasting on these machines (and in some cases to very good effect), the rise of fluid bed and/or hybrid hot air/drum machines has been undeniable. This is especially true for roasters looking to perfect very light and yet fully-developed roast profiles.
I feel fortunate to have had an education and roasting evolution that has spanned a number of machines and machine-types. The evolution of my roasting knowledge has not been linear, starting with traditional drum roasters and moving to fluid bed/ hybrid hot air/ drum machines. Different machine types have informed each other and the knowledge I have garnered on one machine has been applicable to others and vice versa. The ROEST sample roaster may be the most perfect small-scale machine yet designed to explore the many different aspects of coffee roasting that I learned about through various different roasting systems. The capability to develop profiles based on different parameters and the machine’s ability to develop coffee remarkably evenly, coupled with its ease of use and maintenance, make it an essential tool in my professional life.
Sample of Natural coffee by Long Miles Coffee from Heza hills. Photo: Long Miles Coffee.
In 2020 Long Miles Coffee started to roast their samples on ROEST sample roaster. Photo: Long Miles Coffee.
Profile Development
With any new machine there is always a period during which one needs to find their footing, so to speak. I have even found this to be true when roasting on different machines of identical make and model. This is true for any number of reasons:
stack height
proximity of tall buildings to stacks that may cause negative or positive pressure in the stack
probe type
probe age (and cleanliness)
exact probe placement
gas pressure and consistency, etc.
As such, I never expect my initial roasts to be particularly fruitful. That said, I do expect them to tell me much about the machine.
Interested in Profile Development? Read on our blog: Developing roast profiles with Matt Winton.
ease of learning through SAMPLE ROASTER
One aspect of technology’s increasing influence in coffee that I am particularly excited about is roast profile sharing. Though there are obvious implications for this feature that I can and will touch on later, I also greatly appreciate the effect this has when it comes to flattening the learning curve associated with a new machine. By knowing how others (including the manufacturer themselves) like to utilize the piece of equipment, I am -firstly- given a rapid glimpse into the norms and standards for the equipment and -secondly, and more importantly- I am able to greatly shorten the aforementioned period of finding my footing.
Upon getting the ROEST sample roaster up and running for the first time, I decided to run a few profiles that were readily available to me. Among these were roasting profiles designed by the team at Roest, profiles designed by Tim Wendelboe, and profiles designed by the team at Nordic Approach. Having names I trust and respect back not only the sample roaster I was about to roast on, but even the profiles I was about to run made for a welcome level of faith in the process.
