Growing up in Nairobi, it took only a 20-minute ride to visit the vast coffee farms in areas like Kiambu, Limuru, and others nearby areas. These farms were located less than 10 kilometers from the city center, many of them close to the edge of the Aberdare mountain ranges. In the mid-1990s, when I was in primary school, we were taught that Kenya was a leader in coffee and tea production, and I used to consume coffee almost daily.
Then, all of a sudden, it seemed like one scandal after another emerged—farmers were not being paid, and the industry became overrun by brokers and middlemen. This meant local farmers were cut off from selling their coffee at competitive market rates and instead had to deal with corrupt government officials and brokers.
So, what did the farmers do? Most abandoned coffee farming and converted their farms into prime real estate. Remember, these farms were near the mountain slopes, making the land highly valuable. These new houses became popular with the UN and foreign nationals from Europe and the US, who sought refuge from Nairobi’s “heat.”
As a result, more coffee farms were converted into real estate, and today these areas feature some of the most expensive properties in Kenya. For instance, $200,000 would now be considered cheap for a three-bedroom apartment.
> Most abandoned coffee farming and converted their farms into prime real estate
This is happening in Vietnam as well (2nd largest coffee producer in the world).
Coffee margins are low because there are too many farmers and too few bulk purchasers, so most fermers have either switched to higher value nuts (eg. Macadamia) or sold the land off to tourism developers who can make a "Glam-Camping" experience for Korean, Japanese, or Thai tourists.
Robusta is the primary choice across much of Asia. Vietnamese are heavy coffee consumers (so the domestic market is strong) and VNese coffee is cost-competitive in Japan and SK due to FTAs.
Furthermore, for historical reasons Robusta cultivars tend to be very popular across Asia (just like the Phin or Filter Coffee - the metal apparatus for drip coffee is part of the Colonial Era exchange across Asia - or chicory coffee mix)
It's just about money. Too many farmers entered the coffee industry in the 1990s and 2000s as it was the cash crop of choice back then, and there are a handful of larger wholesalers who cornered purchasing.
Nuts make way more money than coffee because of better margins and lower cost of inputs. A lot of this is also driven by Food Processors, as VN cornered the nut processing market (eg. most nuts from sub-Saharan countries like Côte d'Ivoire get exported to VN for processing) so there was excess capacity.
> most nuts from sub-Saharan countries like Côte d'Ivoire get exported to VN for processing
Wow, that is crazy to think about. Exporting from one developing country to another -- on the other side of the planet, no less! Why can't Côte d'Ivoire do the processing themselves? That sounds like a great business opportunity. GDP per capita is about 30% lower in Côte d'Ivoire, so labour costs might also be cheaper.
> Why can't Côte d'Ivoire do the processing themselves?
Capital.
Historically, Asian LDCs like Vietnam and Cambodia have had access to Japanese and Korean development loans and grants which allowed for businesses to build and innovate.
Most Sub-Saharan economies did not have those kinds of capital markets.
Depending on where you are in Africa, the Gulf, Turkey, India, and China have stepped in to fill the capital gap, but they tend to be much more extractive in their terms.
this was likely due to the French whose coffee was traditionally robusta from their African territories, they almost certainly introduced coffee to Vietnam when they held it.
> Most abandoned coffee farming and converted their farms into prime real estate.
So they made more money by selling their farm land, instead of being a farmer? That sounds like a good trade to me. This is pretty normal process in all highly developed countries.
Related: What do you think Silicon Valley and Los Angeles Valley looked like 100 years ago? Lots of fruit farms. Today? Housing and office buildings -- all considered prime real estate. Once farming became less valuable than the land, most farmers sold.
> Nairobi’s “heat.”
Can you explain why you put "heat" in quotes? Is this intended to be sarcastic?
> So they made more money by selling their farm land, instead of being a farmer? That sounds like a good trade to me
It's a great trade for an individual who wants to get rich. It's a potential disaster for a country whose 3rd biggest export is the thing nobody wants to do now.
> So they made more money by selling their farm land, instead of being a farmer? That sounds like a good trade to me. This is pretty normal process in all highly developed countries.
The reasons and conditions are totally different in economies like those in Africa that are setup for wealth extraction vs. America where they are setup for wealth generation. The book ‘why nations fail’ does a great job of explaining this.
The temperature in Nairobi ranges from 15°C to 28°C, and it very rarely exceeds 30°C. Theres other parts of Kenya where the temp is 35c+. In the areas where the coffee farms once thrived—now converted into prime real estate—the temperature ranges from 10°C to 25°C. These areas were originally tropical forests before being cleared for coffee farming and later developed into housing estates.
There is still significant tree cover, which helps regulate the temperature, making these areas particularly attractive to foreign nationals.
There's a place where something similar happened (for different reasons). Some of the best farming from rich soil and a pleasant climate. Farming and fruit orchards filled the valley with prosperous plant growth. But then computer people took over and silicon valley is now just high-priced real estate and no growing.
This was such a fascinating read—it really resonated with me. A few years ago, my girlfriend and I started a small coffee shop in Hanoi as a fun side project, and I was struck by the parallels between Vietnam's coffee history and the issues you outline here about Kenya.
Vietnam, like Kenya, emerged from a coffee industry shaped by colonial-era inequities. Yet through reforms, robust state support for smallholder farmers, and a focus on infrastructure, Vietnam has positioned itself as a global coffee powerhouse. While the initial focus on robusta was quantity-driven, there’s now a shift toward quality, which is helping Vietnamese coffee expand into new markets.
Kenya’s situation feels similar yet distinct. It has an unparalleled coffee heritage, and with thoughtful reforms—empowering smallholders, encouraging direct trade, and finding the right balance between quality and disease-resistant hybrids—it could reclaim its standing on the global stage.
The article beautifully captures the systemic challenges and the hope for transformation. I really believe Kenya’s coffee can rise again, stronger and fairer, just as Vietnam is starting to do. It’s inspiring to see how coffee connects people and places across the world in such unique ways!
It was the DDR who developed the modern Vietnamese coffee industry, collapsing before it could benefit.
Beginning in 1975, largely parallel with the coffee crisis in East Germany, the production of Robusta coffee began in Vietnam. Robusta plants grow faster, contain more caffeine, suit the climate of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, and lend themselves better to mechanized harvesting.
My in-laws were part of the generation of displaced Vietnamese who were resettled in the Central Highlands for coffee cultivation back in the 70s-90s, but this mass migration of ethnic Vietnamese pissed off the indigenous Jarai and other Hmong+Khmer ethnic groups, which led to a sustained insurgency and a lot of horrid human rights abuses.
The current GenSec of Vietnam (To Lam) is notable for his career as the butcher of Gia Lai during his tenure there as part of the MPS.
The standard insight is there's a difference between liking coffee, liking hanging out in a coffee shop, and running a coffee shop. Running a coffee shop is 98% HR, accounting, and customer service, and 2% coffee.
Youre right. The interesting things we learned came from visiting dozens of local producers, farmers, and villages where coffee has it roots around Vietnam. Have you had a chance to visit Vietnam and sample the egg coffee?
Coffee Machine, Right-hand Dispenser—The dispenser in all coffee
machines at Valve that holds the decaffeinated coffee beans. To the best of
our knowledge, these have never needed to be refilled. For all we know, the
beans are decorative plastic
Or any other "passion" or hobby that you try to turn into a business. You end up spending the vast majority of your time on the business, and very little on the thing you once enjoyed.
Having done something similar in India I can say it definitely was fun. What makes it fun is there are next to no regulations so you can plop down in a place one day and just sell food.
Hah, try that in Germany. You shouldn’t even be giving food a sideways glance without your permits at hand. And don’t you dare to even consider selling beer alongside your snacks.
Is it similar to the US in that in theory you need a ton of permits, but in reality everyone kinda turns a blind eye to it unless you get too big/at a big venue?
For example, in the past year I've seen a guy selling tamales from his car trunk, someone selling candy apples from a cooler on the side of the road, one person making crab boils from their house, and a ton of people doing small batch type things on FB marketplace. Most of these would violate our local cottage laws, but I've seen police officers buying the tamales for example!
I have no doubt if someone got sick they could probably win a civil case of sorts, but I don't think I've seen or heard of any kind of attempt to shut down any of this via law.
It’s one of those things that’s fine until it isn’t. Eventually some Karen or restaurateur will rat you out to the sales tax authorities.
The cop thing doesn’t really matter. They stay in their lane until they don’t. I had an uncle who was NYPD, they’d randomly (from their pov) get tasked with cracking down on random crap. Sometimes they’d give folks a heads up.
In NYC the landlords are rapacious, so it’s difficult to compete with Pedro’s Taco Truck.
It’s because the best tamales come out of the back trunk of a car, or a cooler behind the counter of your local Mexican bakery. It’d be a tragedy to lose those flavors.
Absolutely, they were fantastic. I was a purchaser of said tamales pretty often. It was an older guy who said his wife made a bunch each morning, so he went out to sell them each day.
Usually in the US, unless it’s a massive city, vendors selling things out of their yards/trunk are ignored. It’s when you have a permanent/semi permanent stall that things get serious. Also selling things out of your trunk opens you up to significant liability risks if someone gets sick and can find you.
Depends heavily on the city too. I think this kind of thing is more accepted in NYC and LA with big immigrant communities from countries with more informal economies, but in Seattle it gets shut down quickly.
For better or worse, Germany has a certification fetish. It ensures a baseline of trustworthiness that you _want_ to have in the food industry, but it kills wonderful things like Berlin’s “Thai park” where kiosks propped up and started selling good food.
Regulation is preferable. The Thai park was shut down because it trashed the place and competed with regulated, tax-paying food markets.
The only issue is how slow and inefficient German bureaucracy is. It wouldn’t be a problem to request compliance if it didn’t take months and waste everyone’s time as they’re trying to get off the ground.
Hah, try that in New York! I looked in to getting a coffee cart to use in peak hours because I had a passion for how I wanted the cart to look and saw the crazy lines outside Starbucks in the AM.
- 20 year wait for a cart permit.
_ Shady black market license resales from veterans (who have priority access to licenses - which is great in theory)
- If you use water you need a ‘food’ license
- Illegal to store your cart anywhere but a licensed depo that charges exhorbitant
- very high penalties for unlicensed distribution
My girlfriend manages several Airbnbs around Hanoi, and many of these buildings have ground floors designed for small businesses—something that’s very common in Vietnam. In 2019, we decided to turn the ground floors of her rental locations into coffee shops and finished setting them up just in time for December that year!
Of course, as luck would have it, COVID-19 wasn’t exactly great for either Airbnb rentals or coffee shops. Since then, we’ve both shifted focus to other projects, but we’re definitely planning to give it another shot in the future when the timing feels right!
All the vietnamese coffee that I tried in europe (even in hype shops) tasted like american “french” roast aka burnt bad coffee. Could you recommend ways to try nice coffees from vietnam?
> All the vietnamese coffee ... “french” roast aka burnt bad coffee
You're describing traditional Vietnamese coffee for ca phe sua or ca phe den, it's close to burnt coffee because the sourced coffee beans are shit so they have to roast close to charcoal that's why we have to add a lot of sugar or condensed milk.
If you want to have coffees that taste close to specialty coffee then there are some local shops that colab or have their own farms that grow quality beans, but Idk if there's exporting roasted coffees.
I've seen a Vietnamese coffee brand from Amazon with fancy branding but my bet is still shitty coffee. Then the recommended way would be traveling to Vietnam, maybe?
Robusta coffees are much more popular across Asia, and there is a preference to mix coffee with milk.
In Europe and the US, there is a preference to drink Arabica coffee neat.
Starbucks had to pivot away from coffee to tea in India for that reason, and Starbucks in Vietnam failed due to their Arabica heavy bias [0] (also, Coffee shops in VN tend to also serve an equally robust Tea menu, which Starbucks fails at)
There are some solid coffee purist shops in D3, but the average consumer prefers Highland, Phuc Long, or Trung Nguyen Legend style shops and mixed coffees.
That said, the same problem mentioned in the blog above are slowly manifesting in VN as well. My in-laws are/were coffee farmers in Gia Lai, but they and their peers have pivoted to nuts like Macadamias instead because margins are better and Coffee is too commoditized
> I've seen a Vietnamese coffee brand from Amazon with fancy branding but my bet is still shitty coffee
Yep.
VN has a good FMCG market now, but they don't really target the US for exports.
It really has gotten to the point that different coffee should be treated as different teas. Nobody expect that the different teas should taste the same. For some reason, the expectation is largely that coffee should be coffee.
And, it is mind bending for some folks to hear that I abhor the taste of arabica coffee. It is so so bad.
Claiming you dislike Arabica is a weird statement. There is a bigger diversity inside of Arabica varietals alone than in tea and wine.
So that part bends my mind.
What about arabica do you detest, specifically? What of origin, processing, roasting, and brewing differences?
Arabica produces such a varied spectrum of cups, it’s really quite head scratching to hear you write off the entire species, yet still hear you drink robusta.
Fair if you are proposing that I probably would not hate all of it? Do you pursue robusta at the same level?
For specifics, its been a while since I tried it. I can seek out some to try again, if you want. I don't think it is as extreme as the "tastes like soap" reaction that many have on cilantro, but I'm growing to think it has to be similar.
I'm one of the lucky people where any coffee is coffee for me. McDonald's, Starbucks, instant coffee, specialty coffee, cat pooped coffee? Yup, it tastes like coffee, I'm good to go.
I put cream and sometimes sugar in my coffee, so I'm surely obscuring most of the subtleties.
But to me, Starbucks still tastes terrible (burned), and Dunkin Donuts is nasty.
In recent years I've ordered my roasted coffee from coffeebeanery.com, and I've been pretty happy. I'm pretty sure all of the varieties I get are Arabica.
Indeed, robusta. It amuses me that I'm probably fine with folgers and/or whatever cheap coffee you can get when in a hotel. At home, I think death wish is the only easy way I know to buy robusta whole bean.
I have had specialty robusta (I have some green robusta in my house right now) but it has always been pretty tough to drink for me, but I don't like adding sugar or milk to my coffee most of the time.
I take my coffee neat, most of the time. Have had more lattes than otherwise lately. And, oddly, that is the only way I can take the taste of arabica coffee. :D
“Go to Vietnam” is maybe not the most practical suggestion for grabbing a cup of coffee, but that’s where I found the best Vietnamese coffee.
As others have said, Vietnamese coffee was traditionally cheaper robusta beans, tended to be lower-quality, and was dark-roasted as a result. More recently, as Vietnam has gotten wealthier, there has been a craft coffee scene developing. I had great coffee in growing regions like Da Lat and Khe Sanh, and in specialty coffee shops in Hanoi like Dream Beans.
Sounds like you got a real Vietnamese coffee. All kidding aside, my experience drinking coffee here (Vietnam) is that most of the coffee shops have bad coffee. I am not sure if it's the beans, the machines or the culture. There is, maybe, 1 in 7 coffeeshop that will do the coffee kinda okay. I don't think the locals care too much (basing on google reviews).
Either way, I'll take this over any other SEA or Asian country where it's a hassle to find coffee outside metro hotspots. Cafes and Coffee here is available everywhere and usually within a 30 seconds walk.
This is a common cliche in the hipster coffee community. The truth is darker roasts change the acid profile of coffee, and many people prefer that taste. To them, drinking a "good" coffee is like drinking a "bad" coffee with a lemon squeezed into it.
A while ago I bought a coffee machine and the gadgets that go along with it. I managed to learn how to extract coffee evenly and all that stuff, but the final product was never tasty. It always tasted like hot puke. Then I realized I liked robusta, which is used for a proper Turkish (or Bosnian or Serbian) coffee that I grew up with.
not really a cliche. that is why starbucks does it. they can cover up taste of poor beans especially when adding milk. most prefer a dark roast because corporations want to make profits and made our tastebuds lazy by force drinking it everyday. just like food with sweeteners or msg. it just kills the purpose of food as a craft. nowadays its even more the opposite there is an hipster revival of dark roast or msg hyping culture as marketing tool to sell it. but lets be homest those things are cache-misère
"poor beans": This is the first time that I heard that Starbucks has poor beans. Can you explain more? To be clear: I am not here to shill for Starbucks.
Also: What do you say about Italians drinking a cappuccino or macchiato (expresso shot with a splash of steamed milk)? From what I have seen while traveling in Italy, most Italians drink coffee at small coffee shops. Or French people drinking cafe latte?
I rarely drank coffee (or tea, although I do drink tea again, somewhat, nowadays).
I used to drink Indian-style milk tea almost daily, earlier, in school, college, and later.
So once, some years ago, when I walked into a Cafe Coffee Day [1] shop (an Indian coffee shop chain, possibly modeled on Starbucks), and after looking at the menu, ordered a macchiato. it was a pleasant surprise to find that it tasted very good. :)
(I had nothing against coffee, it was a common drink at home, growing up, the filter coffee [2] kind, but also Nescafe and Bru, just that I did not prefer it much, later.)
Like what you like, I think that is great. Some people really like dark roasted coffee. Nothing wrong with that, they aren't wrong/unsophisticated/whatever.
However, roasting coffee dark does homogenize the flavor of the coffee, and you do lose more and more of what that coffee tastes like. Coffees have a ton of different flavor compounds, and no two coffees are the same. There are quality issues and processing issues though that don't help to highlight this too, so it's hard to find coffee - even from people who know how to roast - that can shine in this way.
I think everyone should try a good coffee that has some punchy flavors - I'm not saying everyone should like it. It's a fun thing and should be experienced if you're interested.
You can make this argument for all cooking. You could even substitute "light roast" for "dark roast" in the above and it would read exactly the same. Why not brew raw coffee berries?
You can indeed make a (less absolute) form of this argument for all cooking:
Overcooking and adding a lot of spices makes everything (more or less) edible. With less cooking and less spices, you can better taste the original ingredients.
When you say "cooking" here, do you *only* mean roasting coffee beans? Or do you use the term "cooking" more generally? If specific, I agree with your point. If general, I would say that cooking proteins fundamentally changes the food and makes it more digestible (meat, fish, eggs, etc.).
And cooking fundamentally changes the food because cooking is a chemical and physical reaction caused by the heat on the food being cooked. Proteins get denatured, food gets softer or harder (depending upon the amount of liquid and heat added or removed), etc.
I am not a expert on the science of cooking, these are just my casual, slightly scientific observations as a layman :)
I mean, you can agree that there's a difference between raw beef, a rare steak, medium, well done, and carbonized, right? Same deal. Some people may prefer well done and maybe even carbonized, but you have to agree that when you cook a steak that much you lose a lot of what the meat can offer.
You should try green coffee and see what you think. Some roast on the coffee does enhance the flavor, make it more soluble, etc.. "underdeveloped" is definitely a thing.
I'm sure you will agree that raw beef and a steak taste differently?
open a starbucks bean bag and smell it. I dont know one person who would say that smells good.
also french coffee is horrible mostly because it is controlled by only one group in a mafia like fashion where they rent you the coffee machine but you have to buy their beans. italians can make good coffee with old espresso machines and average beans which says more about their skills than anything else.
They are completely right. You put it in flowery words by saying it adjusts the acidity profile of the coffee. When it literally destroys a bunch of flavor compounds and replaces them with burnt notes.
I don’t follow - how do you mask a bad taste (bad coffee) with a bad taste (burned coffee)? I.e. if it’s going to taste bad then use a lighter roast, cheaper and faster anyway.
Burnt coffee taste like burnt coffee. Vietnamese drink coffee with 1/4 can of condensed milk in it.
Bad coffee beans if not roasted to charcoal state taste even worse. Argument that that most of available coffee in VN is made from pretty bad beans, so roasters have no other way to roast it to that level.
I agree. If they weren't making money, they'd go bust, so clearly someone likes the "burnt coffee". It's odd how some posters (not you!) Will act like an obvious opinion is to be taken as fact, and not acknowledge that some people like a certain taste. I mean, some people like super salty anchovies, but I abhor them, but I don't tell the anchovie lovers that they are incorrect.
I think it's because people that complain about "burnt coffee" (me) are people that take their coffee black and probably brew it at come.
Meanwhile, people that don't mind "burnt coffee" are the people that preferred coffee-based drinks from coffee shops. If I get a salted caramel mocha Frappuccino with two pumps of hazelnut - burnt beans are probably the only kind of beans I will be able to taste in that drink.
Dark roast isn't necessarily bad, quite a lot of people prefer the taste, especially if they're adding milk or other things to their drink.
But a dark roast is easier to produce, and easier to produce consistently. If you take high quality beans, and low quality beans, and roast them both to a dark level (let's say "French" or "Italian" roast), they're going to taste approximately the same. Therefore if you're producing coffee at a larger scale and want to save money, you can use cheaper beans and roast them dark to mask the imperfections that come with the cheaper beans.
There are some truly incredible coffees out there and a well-executed light or light-medium roast will bring out those flavors beautifully, but the quality starts at the coffee farm. You can't light roast a low quality coffee bean and expect those same excellent flavors.
The range is somehow (unburnt good coffee) > (burnt good coffee == burnt bad coffee) > (unburnt bad coffee).
If you are in the last box, you cannot get to the first one, but you can still move one step up by burning it. Plus you can add a lot of milk and cream and then it is almost the same anyway.
One could pretend that beans are intentionally burned, "The Vietnamese Way", regardless of the source material quality. Lighter roast would differ from batch to batch with varying not-so-good taste, but charcoal is always a charcoal.
Burnt meat tastes like burnt meat, people are familiar with it and can eat it, even it is not the greatest thing, and burnt meat tastes like burnt meat regardless of how it was in the beginning, so you could imagine that it was actually good, it just happened to be burnt. Not burnt meat has a wider range, it can taste good or bad, it's like in "dead men tell no tales" :)
Tim Wendelboe (perhaps the greatest coffee roaster) has been talking about this on his latest Q&A podcast. A rigmarole for exports plus climate change are causing issues.
I know a lot about coffee roasting and can say that your wankery meter is on point. Calling someone "likely the best coffee roaster" is like calling someone "likely the best wine maker". It's something that people reach for via wankery to get clout. It's not actually something you can asses via reasonable metrics.
He knows a lot about roasting yes, he's not anywhere near some consensus god in coffee roasting no one can touch
Everything is subjective, but the most prominent restaurant ranking is "The World's 50 Best Restaurants", which polls many chefs to get a ranking every year and does a decent job.
Roastful is trying to apply a similar methodology to coffee roasting, by polling 32 industry experts.
And, the #1 roaster in their rankings this year is Tim Wendelboe.
You can debate the method, but it's not total wankery.
Taste is indeed subjective (see what I’ll do next ;)), but even with a panel of 32 experts, this list is limited to a handful of OECD countries in their spotlight, with one exception.
I’ve tried a good number of roasters on this list, and only a few come within batting distance of Father Coffee (not to be confused with Fathers) in Johannesburg and Rosetta Roastery in Cape Town. Those two roasters, the former more experimental and the latter more traditional, are doing wonders and punching well above their weight in the South African market. Both could easily be in the top 25, and Father is surely top 5.
Seriously, if you care about coffee and find yourself in Johannesburg, go to Father and grab as many beans as you can carry.
An argument can be made for beer being above, perhaps even the peak. Unlike coffee or wine, beerwankers took something that didn't really have a high-end and then made it up. They created their own wanktopic! And for this achievement, they get comparatively little of their due social opprobrium - 'homebrew' has come to connote scrappy and hip even though it's transparent wankery of the highest order.
I'm not a linguist but I think this bit of jargon leaked into tech from ham radio, which is old enough that "homebrew" (in the sense of building your own radio set from components) referred to a still-earlier time when people actually did commonly brew their own beer at home. "homespun" retains a similar meaning in general usage.
Maybe I've misunderstood pvg upthread but I assumed "'homebrew' has come to connote scrappy and hip" was about IT/tech because it doesn't have that connotation in the actual context of beer, at least to my knowledge.
1. There's the technical wanker, who has the best tools and might roast their own beans even, but generally still drinks shite coffee.
2+3. There's the Keurig wankers and the anti-Keurig wankers, one of whom thinks they're drinking good coffee and one of whom can't stand that someone is enjoying something they don't.
4. There's the free trade wankers, who want beans from a plantation in Costa Rica owned by someone from Texas.
5. There's the roast alchemy wankers, who believe that you need to overcomplicate the roasting process as much as possible in order to eek out that 2.9% acidic roast flavor profile at exactly 203.4 degrees.
Buy good but cheap beans from a semi-local roaster, and don't let them get too old. Bam, you'll have coffee better than 99% of people.
Most local roasters really are garbage, though. Telling people to do this will make sure that people miss out on a lot of what "coffee can be" and will end up with something that is probably better than the worst of the worst coffee, but still tastes pretty awful in comparison to a great coffee roasted adequately.
"need to drink it fresh" is a red flag about the roast, usually, unless you really do prefer something fairly dark. Light roasted coffee should be let to gas off for at least a few weeks.
True. The most popular local bean in my area tastes like battery acid, but there's a roaster about 20 minutes from me who is only ~20% more expensive than Lavazza (my go to large roaster) who produces a variety of good roasts.
Not sure on the off gassing comment, I drink what I think tastes good. Espresso pretty much exclusively, lightly fruity, low acid, with a rich sip and a non-bitter aftertaste.
Coffee that isn’t acidic is realistically the weirder thing, considering what coffee is.
Decades of bad coffee have created the expectation of every coffee having to taste like low-grade coffee with all the acidity burned out of it.
Taste is subjective and you can call them snobs but they have a great point. Even if you love burnt flavors, there are far more ethical options than Lavazza.
I was never a coffee drinker at all until I spent a month in Kenya 6 years ago helping a startup get off the ground (ex CTO/CEO lived in Nairobi at the time). I tried the local coffee as was customary (when in Rome...) and because the Kenyans were SO passionate about their local coffee.
I was floored. I got completely hooked, and to this day have not found quality Kenyan coffee here in the USA. The coffee in Kenya is incredible, puts the crap Americans pay $$$ for at Starbucks to absolute shame.
I haven't had the chance to have coffee in Kenya, but I would note that most serious coffee places in the US also "puts the crap Americans pay $$$ for at Starbucks to absolute shame."
A high quality roast, a decent grinder and a pour-over will make home brewed coffee that is not even recognizable next to the swill they sell at Starbucks. To be fair though, at Starbucks' scale it neigh impossible to produce consistent flavor with the quality of curated small batch coffee.
As an occasional home roaster: the darker the roast the more the coffee loses the flavors related to the character of the original bean and the more they take on the flavor of the roasting process.
One of the major advantages of home roasting is that you can get premium beans from small farms (for relatively cheap as well!), this offers flavors and quality that are only available to small coffee shops simply because their aren't enough beans produced for a nationwide chain to offer to all their shops.
However, if you're getting high-quality, single origin beans it's much better to aim for a lighter roast since you will be tasting the (often even fruity) flavor of the original bean. This is also why small, high-end coffee shops tend to favor lighter roasts.
But even if you're a regional chain, you will likely struggle to provide consistent flavor from small batches so you'll, at the very least, work with larger farms. At the scale of Starbucks you're going to have trouble sourcing anything from a single farm, and you also want year over year consistency. Often small coffee shops pride themselves on short term offerings, because they're appealing to an audience that understands and values this. However the average Starbucks consumer not only wants a coffee in Alabama to taste the same as Seattle, but they want coffee in 2025 to taste like they remember from 2015.
The only way to achieve this level of consistency and such a scale is to create extremely dark roasts.
edit: there are also, of course, flavor related and cultural reasons to choose darker roasts. Italians, for example, tend to favor darker roasts for espresso (in part because they can create blends using varieties like robusta beans, that under a light roast have a 'rubbery' taste, but can add boldness when mixed in with a dark roasted espresso blend).
I don’t get the desire for consistently bad. Think about with fruit—-yes it’s disappointing to bite into a cantaloupe from the same supermarket that last week you had a sublime one from and find it tasteless. But if you told me I could fix the inconsistency by always getting ones that tasted bad, I’d say you were nuts.
I think instead it has to do with the percentage of their clients that add sweeteners, perhaps the bitterness is better somehow as the base of a sugary drink.
Where are you looking for coffee? Lots of "good roasters" (i.e. ones that have managed to sustain a market for their single origin offerings) will have Kenyan coffees. Of course if you don't live in a major with retail locations then you'll have to purchase online.
Give Dorothea Coffee a call [1]. Selfishly, I'm be curious to see how their Kenyan stacks up against what you've had: I recently had a batch of their Kenya Nyeri that was excellent to my taste … but I don't drink Kenyan that often, so had little to compare it against.
I got this coffee in, and it's pretty "roasty" for sure - it is a lighter roast but has a ton of roast flavors in the coffee. It isn't bad but there are a lot of coffees you can buy that don't have those flavors: https://minmaxcoffee.com/roasted-coffee/
Color me surprised you actually tried it! Thank you for reporting back, and giving them a shot.
Sorry to hear it didn't work out. They do so well with Ethiopian, Colombian, Rwandan (which is where my palette is dialed—berry, tea, honey, citrus), I assumed their treatment of the Kenyan beans was representative.
Do you have a source of Kenyan beans that tells the story of what Kenyan is like at its best? I'd love to try!
> the crap Americans pay $$$ for at Starbucks to absolute shame.
It isn't really about the coffee, specifically, for the lion's share, and this can be said about many consumer goods. It's convenience, a cultivated flavor profile (think McDonald's fries), nostalgia, consistency, the small socialization … and generally a combo of a few of these things.
None of these are inherent to Starbucks, but they've captured a demographic that only needs to be captured once to be captured for life.
So: people paying $$$ for Starbucks aren't really paying for coffee at all, and wouldn't want a superior coffee if you gave it to them in a better environment at half price.
This guy is making Kenya out to be difficult/unequitable, but I'm not aware of any country whose coffee production is equitable. Farmers get paid peanuts and struggle from year to year, and international trade is a boon for the buyer and an existential crisis for the seller (well, for the producer, but the poor seller sometimes misses a BMW payment)
I wonder what the long term solutions to these kinds of problems are in East Africa and similar contexts.
The remnants of colonialism continue to produce winners and losers economically, with the winners stuck in local maxima where they extract value from the people, but the people themselves see only marginal benefit, and development is stuck at a snail's pace.
As with seemingly everything in life, the incentives for the different players really don't line up. Consumers lose, producers lose, and only a select few middlemen win anything at all.
All of our problems are caused by our not prioritizing compassion in our systems' designs and implementations, including how our economic transactions are structured and performed.
Compassion is the root of all virtue, and the balm for all vice. With a greater attention to compassion, every member of the chain of persons that grow, pick, process, market, sell, and even own Kenya coffee will help contribute to a better, fairer, and less deleterious to the Earth, system of farm-to-table.
Being compassionate includes being honest in one's business dealings, as well as not being greedy for exhorbitant profit. It also endures that everyone in the pipeline is actually performing a useful service, not just being an unnecessary middleman adding needless cost and other encumbrances.
And, of course, the Kenyan system was set up by the English Empire, so its parasitic pattern of worming its way into the fabric of all economic transactions is baked into their system. Yes, it's going to be difficult to extricate that selfishness from their system, but it's difficult for every culture to rid itself of the parasitism of selfishness in our societal systems. Note that ALL our current systems have that oft-dominant component present in them, causing waste and grief for all but the callous owners.
In our every endeavor, compassion is the only guaranteed path forward that has no intrinsic negative elements or effects, only difficulties due to our idioticly selfish inertias -- selfishly callous disregard being the opposite of compassionate service to the whole's well-being.
I admire where your heart is at, it’s wonderful to see that empathy has a large role in your life. Although I encourage you to look deeper at where compassion comes from. There are people in my family who believe being gay will commit your afterlife to eternal torture, and it is their compassion that compels them to act in intolerance of people’s choice to love.
Empathy and compassion are social virtues, however if you bake it into the underlying governmental systems, you can end up in situations where those who are in control get to decide which type of “compassion” to enforce.
It is truly sad, my friend, that you have to deal with misguided people who believe their religiosity is enough to countermand the Greatest Command(ment): "To love God with all your being, and then to love your neighbor as yourself."
Your family's views are unequivocally wrong. Acting upon homosexual desires, like all other choices we make, is a personal choice; so long as no one is being forced to do anything, and the object of one's desire is sexually mature (each society must define that, itself, but let them be adults, respect their choices, and help them understand the situation), there is no sin there that I know of, except for, perhaps, a bit of greedy waste of sexual energy, but that is ubiquitous, AFAICT.
No, what makes a person deserving of hell is to disregard the happiness of others, or to even cruelly create unhappiness via oppression. We are to love one another, not judge them for their personal choices. Besides, it looks to me like many, or perhaps most, gay folks were born that way, in the same way we understand the biology of trans folks' brains likely differ in ways that are counter to "normal" sexually dimorphic structures (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class from Stanford). Regardless, one's sexuality (and gender identification) is one's own business, so long as what we do is consensual with other adult participants.
No one is truly practicing religion if universal compassion is not the teaching or the goal. Of course, liars and hypocrites and the willfully ignorant say otherwise, but what they say doesn't count for sh_t. You can identify them because, beyond their ebullient, self-satisfied faces of perceived self-superiority, they are deeply unhappy and very likely to have no power over their own demons. Such is the fate of the cruel hypocrites. When we sow unhappiness, that is what we reap.
I disagree with your last paragraph, though. There is only one kind of compassion: gentle, kind, and respectful (at least to some extent), and it is not any one religion's purview to determine it. It is a human potential, and a human requirement, required for our personal and societal evolution towards peace and happiness, each and every one of us. Anyone who tells you "their" compassion is special or solely of one path or another is just another over-confident fool who has been deceived into believing their false sense of self-superiority. That way is the way of the oppressors, the tyrants, and their followers who cause so much mischief and misery in this world.
But, no, there is no compulsion in religion, so it should never be baked into any govt, but we can and should bake fairness in regulations regarding taxes, income reporting, and even minimum and maximum wages, so that the whole of society is, if not benefitting, at least not harmed by their commerce. No company can operate without either the consent of the state or this world's entire cultural and technological apparatus. We can at least ensure that their profit is not wholly destructive.
> Besides, it looks to me like many, or perhaps most, gay folks were born that way, in the same way we understand the biology of trans folks' brains likely differ in ways that are counter to "normal" sexually dimorphic structures
Interestingly, those earlier studies claiming to show that brains of the trans-identifying are atypical for their sex didn't control for sexuality, and many used exclusively homosexual cohorts.
So the findings were actually brain differences relating to homosexuality - later studies that controlled for sexuality (including same-sex and opposite-sex attracted transsexuals in the study population) couldn't replicate the earlier results relating to sexually dimorphic brain structures.
Instead, researchers found functional differences in brain regions relating to body perception, similar to what is seen in body dysmorphic disorder patients.
> (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class at Stanford).
There is a video where he discusses this, albeit without properly citing any studies, but his description of the research is out of date. Probably it's an old recording.
Yes, my understanding of Dr. Sapolsky's work comes from rather old videos he did, so, sure, I don't doubt that what you're saying is probably true, but I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'm going to have to rely upon the expertise of others to validate any claims/results. Thanks for your explication.
Regardless, what is important is (IMHO) that our notions of how genderish traits can mix and match in different individuals in ways that don't match our classical notions of gender. The best result of that would be recognizing that we have to take each person as they are, and let them be their happiest self, by their measure.
At the end of the day, however a person justifies it, respectful, kind, gentle-as-possible compassion is the best policy for us all, to everyone, always. It is always our choice.
>>There are people in my family who believe being gay will commit your afterlife to eternal torture, and it is their compassion that compels them to act in intolerance of people’s choice to love.
All you should have to do in cases like this is tell them you simply do not believe in the things they do and to not press it again.
If they continue, things are obviously not coming from a place of compassion – they’re just selfish intolerant assholes.
The problem is capitalism cannot function without an underclass, and while each capitalist country itself harbors an underclass that is brutally exploited, the countries themselves also become effectively an underclass too on the global stage, specifically the global south or the "developing world." Many of these countries are being exploited in one way or another, either by way of shady finance dealings that saddle them with untenable debt, which they must satisfy by selling their resources to western corpos at rock bottom prices, or via trade deals that inherently favor the western nations. The only countries I'm aware of that managed to avoid this trap in a big way were South Korea, which effectively created incubators for their home industries to grow in without needing to contend with the world market until they were in a fit state to do so, and China, which effectively is one giant state-run corporation.
The rest get fed to global capitalism in one way or another, the ways varying, but the outcome being pretty consistent: they're broke, they're in debt, and despite oftentimes being quite rich in resources, remain both of those things.
While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work. Capitalism may need an unskilled class of workers to work, but paying them like crap is not necessary as we’ve seen here in the US and seemed to have forgotten over the generations.
> While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work
That was a temporary blip because the underclass had been temporarily exported to a bombed-out Europe that was unable to meet its production needs, giving the US a huge market and very little manufacturing competition. Then came the Nixon shock, stagflation, and Reagan.
>While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work
Black latino and asian people bought homes too you know. Thats what redlining was about: minorities and poor people were buying homes too close for comfort to the wealthy white people.
Literally the only thing every layman you're gonna ask knows about real estate is "location location location" which is exactly why redlining was harmful and has led to poverty that is measured in generations. Yes, racial minorities did buy homes (at a lesser rate than whites, and in worse places to buy homes) in redlined neighborhoods, with the added and so obvious it feels ridiculous I need to say it caveat that: the homes in redlined neighborhoods were worth substantially less, which not only meant they had a harder time being financed by colored applicants, and an easier one being financed by white ones for the purposes of rent extraction, but also meant even for the ones that did manage to buy, that the property was then worth substantially less when passed on to their children.
And, that's assuming that the neighborhood in question didn't get bulldozed for a freeway by Robert Moses or any of the dozens of urban planners that used eminent domain to rat fuck minority homeowners out of the meager scraps they had managed to acquire.
And, that's only racial minorities, that's not even going into women who thanks to being largely un-banked and the presumptions that finance was simply over their pretty little heads, and of course that their jobs were chronically underpaid if they even could get them, would be laughed out of a bank entirely if they tried to buy a home.
So like, was it ONLY white men buying homes? Nah. But it was predominantly white men buying all the homes you would actually want to buy and if you weren't a white man, you had an objectively, measurable harder time doing it.
I mean, that's just late stage capitalism. Growth is required, every revenue stream must have all slack taken out of it. Any money left in the market is inefficiency which capitalism inherently rewards those who can remove inefficiencies. A perfectly balanced market means that every exploitable dollar is, in fact, exploited, which means the poors can't have anything. Whatever money must be paid to them must be then recouped.
And if you think you're safe in the middle class, it was predicted that and would seem to be bearing out as correct that once capitalism has largely completed exploiting the underclass, it can't simply stop exploiting. The next class up becomes the underclass. Then the next. Then the next until we're all broke save for the rich on top, at which point the entire arrangement stalls, money stops flowing, and the system collapses into anarchy.
The project of neoliberalism is difficult to fully articulate, but a major component at least is the "taming" of capitalist economic systems so as to make them sustainable. This project succeeded for a good amount of time, but that was also predicated on having nations to exploit, and room to grow markets. As those things become less true the entire system seems less stable overall. I mean personally I've witnessed three "once in a lifetime" economic crashes so far, and we're looking to be winding up for another one with the incoming administration and their bonkers non-understanding of tariffs.
You forget that there is value in having moneyed consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more money than you could poor consumers. Arguably when you empower a doctors and lawyers class driving bmws and buying flights to aspen, they are spending proportionally more of their money in the economy than the billionaire class ahead of them that would have sat on this money if they extracted it by now and dumped it into gold bonds and land or something stupid like that instead of something that generates actual economic activity. And if you had them so poor they could barely afford food then there would be no BMW and no Aspen.
I don't disagree with you in the slightest, but I'm not in charge here, and our current batch of elites in power seem content to coast out the collapse, pocketing every dollar they can as the world crumbles around them. I don't personally think it's a good long term plan, and to be fair, numerous economists and even billionaires have come out saying that the world is not in a good way. But they still use their power to maintain the status quo and not foster badly needed change, so it's difficult to assess to what degree this is legitimate thought on their part, or simply saying what they know will sound good as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts of wealth.
The solutions here aren't arcane magic or anything: Money needs to leave the rich, and get to the working class to re-stabilize consumer habits. But since the Reagan era's slashing of all manner of corporate regulations, the system seems either incapable or unwilling to let that happen, no matter how much of an imminent threat it presents to that system. So we go on and circle the drain.
> as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts of wealth
It truly is, too.
I do appreciate the tropes of "It is the year 4,000 BC, and you are immortal, the pyramids are being built. You make $10,000 a day, tax-free, and spend none of it..."
But even that is hard to digest.
I'm in my mid-40s. If I tell my friends, "Someone gave you a million dollars a day, every single day since you've been born. And yet, there are multiple people out there with ten times more money than you," it becomes more digestible.
> You forget that there is value in having moneyed consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more money than you could poor consumers.
With increased financializarion and abstraction of tradable assets - the capital class no longer has to worry about "goods" or "customers" (in as much as they may be indicators of bad stocks with a dim future). Services are the future: as far as they are concerned, the amount of profits available in housing or healthcare may be infinite, of you need the chart to go up, increase the price of the cancer drugs in your portfolio.
Most countries have national healthcare systems which have pricing power over "cancer drugs". When those are expensive it's they're because genuinely very expensive to make, and increasingly they're personalized because every cancer is different.
While it's true that these systems are a holdover from colonialism, it's also true that Kenya has been an independent country for over 50 years with sovereignty and agency over internal affairs like how the coffee market works. I feel at some point the blame needs to be shifted accordingly.
I thought the same when reading the article. All those rent-seeking policies that constrain the productivity of Kenya are not forever etched in stone. They aren’t fate. The government could change them. Blaming people who haven’t been around for many generations seems like excuses at this point.
You are arguing against people's religious beliefs about why the world looks like it does. Logic or reason will not be of any use. No matter what bad things happens in the coming one hundred or one thousand years, it will never be the fault of the people that the religion has designated as holy victims, and it will always be the fault of the people that the religion has designated as evil oppressors.
> with sovereignty and agency over internal affairs like how the coffee market works
Kenya had sovereignty in production, but not in capital - which is what was needed to climb up the value chain.
Historically, Kenya's largest capital market has been the UK, and as such Kenya's administration was unable to break the oligopoly of coffee purchasers who were British-Kenyan dual nationals and descendants of British settlers.
The same kind of land reforms that former colonies like Indonesia, Vietnam, India, etc were able to drive did not happen in Kenya.
Now corporations from those former colonies are gobbling up land and production in Kenya and other African nations, but domestic African (excluding South Africa) continue to remain on the back foot.
The article (if I'm reading it right) is placing the blame on how the government of Kenya restricts its coffee market (e.g. only allowing a small number of export licenses). It's about internal laws. The government of Kenya has the agency to change these.
Over 60 years, actually. The coffee industry is regulated the way it is in Kenya because the current government wants it to work that way, not because of "colonialism."
Some countries in Africa are certainly "stuck" but Kenya is actually doing pretty well overall [1]. Per capita GDP is about where South Korea was in 1969, or India in 2018, and Kenya's economy has been growing pretty steadily since one-party rule ended circa 2002.
Economic reforms and cutting down bureaucracy are certainly part of the solution, but "just wait a bit longer" is too. If things continue progressing as they currently are, Nairobi will look a lot more like Seoul by mid-century.
"Over half a million Kenyan smallholder farmers are farming coffee. But they only produce 2 to 3 kilograms of cherry per tree on average, while there is a potential of over 30 kilograms per tree. This low productivity, coupled with low prices and high costs for labour and fertilizer, make it extremely difficult for smallholder farmers to mitigate or adapt to climate change, invest in good practices, access markets and attract competitive prices. And in the end, the whole coffee value chain in Kenya is at risk."
Perversely enough, consolidation of production into 'big agra' and mechanized might be the best play to disrupt the existing system for something more efficient and less stagnant. There are myriad paths to get to said endpoint however, not all of them equal. I don't expect said path to go well for smallholders by definition, though even though the survivors would no longer qualify as smallholders for one reason or the other.
Winners and losers I must note are the result of any system, even in ones of very high equity or even or especially a 'null system'.
"the remnants of colonialism" include the ability to participate in world markets which create markets for local products. If Kenyans grew coffee (ignoring the fact that Kenyans growing coffee was itself a remnant of colonialism) just for the Kenyan market, the coffee sector in Kenya would be a tiny part of the local economy.
The reason New York City is the biggest city in the US is because when the Erie Canal was built, the agricultural riches of the Midwest had a route to world markets. Where you have a major seaport, you also need major banks and major insurance companies to smooth out the financial needs of traders and shippers, providing the funds right away back to the farmers, instead of them waiting till the voyages were complete. (without the Erie Canal, New Orleans would have become the largest city in the US)
Yes, there is a lot of money in trading, banking, etc. At every step of the transaction pyramid, a %age is added to the price, and the %age fees charged on that go up accordingly. But that measures the true value of the product at each stage; if you have a cheaper way of getting the same product to the same stage cheaper, the (supposed) riches will be yours.
The socialist instinct ("anybody getting rich must be cheating") unfortunately obscures the real problem ("monopolists and cartels controlling supply and setting prices are the true enemies of the people") which hinders solving it; by putting capitalism in your gunsights, you make enemies out of natural allies.
The hard truth is that the combination of institutions that are the remnants of colonialism have a lot to do with unprecedented improvement in material well-being all over the world, over the last 400 years or so.
It is not pleasant to think about it in these terms; but it does seem like some of the greatest improvements in general human welfare have their roots in relatively ungenerous undertakings by methodical, reasonable, self-interested actors. The Romans roads and the Pax Romana, and the profound legacy of Roman law, were not the result of a benevolent desire to help everyone in the world and save them from evil.
> the combination of institutions that are the remnants of colonialism have a lot to do with unprecedented improvement in material well-being all over the world, over the last 400 years or so.
Can you provide some examples and resources to back up this hard truth?
Population sizes are one way to get an intuition for the extent of the change. There was considerable improvement in agricultural productivity over the last 400 years.
Another way to get an intuition for it is the prevalence of various conveniencies of life. For example, I believe about two thirds of households in the world have refrigerators. About 12% of the world's households have cars. These and many other material benefits are possessed by regular people today but would have been out of reach 400 years ago to any member of the European nobility or, as Adam Smith puts it, "...an African king, the master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.". (In his time, Smith was commenting on how remarkable it was that an English workman could have pots and pans made of metal and a window made of glass.)
> Another way to get an intuition for it is the prevalence of various conveniencies of life.
But all these things were invented after colonialism of most colonial countries.
And they are prevalent in uncolonized countries in roughly the same ratios as colonized countries. Arguably the uncolonized (China being the main one) have more than the colonized (India being the main one)
When exactly did colonialism end, in your view? The British Empire was pretty substantial until the forties. The refrigerator and automobile were both invented well before that.
It is not strictly correct to say China was uncolonized. I suppose parts of it were not.
Global trade has, indeed, brought everything everywhere; but the present operation of global trade -- the norms used, the international bodies involved, even the weights and measures -- are all the result of power projection by western, colonial powers and prudent adaptation by other countries. Even China's legal system is an adaptation of a western legal system (the civil law). The prevalence of certain institutions is something we take for granted today but does have its roots in colonialism.
While civil institutions were spread to colonies by colonialism, they were adopted by uncolonized countries also. Countries can adopt beneficial things without being taken over and having their resources and wealth extracted.
The same way Americans adopted civil rights from countries which had them earlier on. Europeans who banned slavery earlier than Americans did not need to invade America and extract its resources to bring them out of being a slave-owning polity.
This year's Nobel economics prize was for this topic. Although, they did sort of just give it to Acemoglu because he's so productive you can't not give it to him.
> So, if the paper has so many problems, why did it prove so influential? First, because it utilized cutting-edge techniques at the time (instrumental variables was a new thing back in the 2000s), and because it used novel datasets and clever inference to answer a big-picture question. While “the conditions of colonization determined the institutional quality of colonies” is not a new idea (in fact, Marxist Karl Kautsky came up with a similar idea in 1907), treating it in a formal and empiric manner like this was fairly novel in the 2000s.
So it seems like the answer is not resoundingly clear at all, but the novel methods and analysis was worth the prize, not the perceived veracity of the claims.
Anyways, the topic is about how colonial powers set up institutions in colonized countries, and different types of institutions lead to different types of economic outcomes (inclusive vs extractive). But consider China and India. The former has no colonial institutions, having never been colonized. But both are growing at similar places with similar GDP growth rates (China being slightly ahead). So the idea that only a colonial power could build such institutions, thus all the negatives are outweighed. I don't buy that at this moment. I'm open to learning more though.
> The hard truth is that the combination of institutions that are the remnants of colonialism have a lot to do with unprecedented improvement in material well-being all over the world, over the last 400 years or so.
It has a lot to do with the unprecedented improvement in material well-being in certain parts of the world, namely the colonizer nations and a handful of successful colonized ones. The majority of former-colony states are still struggling, most with the luxuries, many with the essentials, a few with even managing a stable state.
The hard truth is the people in the developed world have only had it as good as they do because so many in the developing one have gone without to a frankly criminal degree for far too long. And they continue to be exploited. If you don't believe me look the shipbreaking yards where barefoot Bangladeshi work with plasma cutters to hack up ships beached there, or the electronic scrap heaps where people set fire to piles of e-waste to salvage the metals within, on and on. There are hundreds if not thousands of these examples where the West continues dominating the global south in clear, unmistakable ways, and precious few where the relationship goes the other way.
As someone who has written extensively on this topic, both on the internet and not, it is frankly just offensive to see this viewpoint shared as though it's serious. Colonialism benefited colonial nations, because of course it did. It wouldn't have been done if it wasn't beneficial. To the colonized it represents an entire category of scars: some on their infrastructure, some on their economies, a lot on the places in which they live, a few on their actual bodies to this day, and many simply as a gigantic, unforgettable one across their collective souls.
As far as I understand it, pretty much every part of the world is wealthier, with larger populations, better medical care, more plentiful food, better tools, &c, &c. Even places that are very poor -- many of the developing countries, for example -- have considerably more resources than they did in times past.
One way to gain an intuition for the extent of the change is to consider population sizes. India in 1600 had about a tenth of its present population. To have a population so much larger, agricultural productivity in India, as well as in the rest of the world, had to increase a great deal in the intervening years.
Another way is to consider the spread of various conveniencies of life -- refrigerators, motor bikes, microwaves, automobiles -- and affordances they enable. Relatively few people in Bangladesh own motor vehicles, but many of them find work in commercial enterprises that are only possible because of the way that commercial trucks open up the interior to world markets. Something like 12% of the world's population has cars today, and that number is steadily increasing. I am not totally certain of this figure, but I believe about two thirds of households in the world have refrigerators.
The benefits of modernization are spread very unevenly amongst the world's peoples today (and we must acknowledge that another example I offered, of the Pax Romana, conferred many advantages specifically to the Romans) but it is hard to argue that there has not been a tremendous benefit worldwide as a result of changes brought about mostly by colonial powers over the last 400 years or so. The thing to consider is not what life in Bangladesh is like, relative to life in the Denmark (or the UK, &c), but what life in Bangladesh was like 400 years ago.
The Europeans do not have it as good as they do -- and, more generally, the world is not so much better off materially -- as a result of simply transferring well-being from one place to another. There were no automobiles, refrigerators, &c, to steal from other countries 400 years. The path to modernity involved real changes in human productivity that allowed for a genuine net benefit.
> scars: some on their infrastructure, some on their economies, a lot on the places in which they live, a few on their actual bodies
Can you identify some of the most significant negative consequences of colonization that remain today? Things that wouldn't have happened if those people had engaged in global trade themselves while still being self-governing. As I understood it, the legacies were mostly good - especially government institutions and united nationhood instead of separate enemy tribes.
Poverty isn't necessarily exploitation. The situation of Bangladesh would not be improved if every wealthier nation was suddenly sucked into the sea. In fact, the situation of Bangladesh would become considerably worse.
Bangladesh has grown rapidly by selling clothing to rich countries, and through the work of NGOs. Supposing we put a forcible stop to this "exploitation" by placing sanctions on Bangladesh, so no one can trade with it, and kicking out all of the NGOs. Bangladesh becomes much poorer.
>Colonialism benefited colonial nations, because of course it did. It wouldn't have been done if it wasn't beneficial.
According to an old European history textbook I read: Once you take into account the costs of conquest, infrastructure, and administration, plus the opportunity for colonial administrators to take a cut on the sly (since the monarch was thousands of miles away), colonies weren't profitable on net. Supposedly the Brits did colonialism first, and other European countries followed in Britain's footsteps because "that's what an industrialized nation does".
Do you believe Putin's invasion of Ukraine makes economic sense? I don't think that's what motivates him.
The invention of the map might be the deadliest invention in history. To paraphrase Carl Sagan: "Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could momentarily color a small additional part of their map with their nation's color."
>unprecedented improvement in material well-being in certain parts of the world, namely the colonizer nations
Compare a per capita GDP ranking of European countries:
The top 10 per capita wealthiest countries in Europe, from Wikipedia, are: Luxembourg, Ireland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, San Marino, Iceland, Belgium, Austria.
The top 10 largest European colonial empires, based on my skim, belonged to: Britain, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium.
> Once you take into account the costs of conquest, infrastructure, and administration, plus the opportunity for colonial administrators to take a cut on the sly (since the monarch was thousands of miles away), colonies weren't profitable on net.
Yes, colonialism was not profitable. They did it because we hadn't invented modernity yet so we didn't know how to be profitable.
One reason "Britain" (the UK) exists is that Scotland tried to get into colonialism, bankrupted themselves, and had to sell themselves to England.
Generally speaking, getting a lot of resources is actually bad for your economy because it outstrips your ability to develop value-added businesses and institutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
> Compare a per capita GDP ranking of European countries:
You're arguing with a Maoist (or someone who's been listening to them.) One thing about these people is that they believe Finland and Ireland are colonizers, because they just think all European countries are the same.
My favorite thing on the internet is when people confidently state what other people's opinions are and are wrong.
FWIW, Mao had some good ideas, and some crazy ones. Like most historical figures, really, but even then I wouldn't take being called a Maoist an insult. That said, no proper leftist of any stripe would call Ireland a colonizer nation. They may have attempted it, but the subsequent ratfucking on the part of Great Britain ever since then and their continued existence inside the geopolitical abusive relationship that is the United Kingdom brings them far closer, ethically, to the Congo than to Britain. Lest we forget fun times like the Great Famine, or as the Irish call it, "that time Britain took all the fucking food." Or, more accurately the landlords did, the handling of which is one of Mao's better ideas.
Yay - I can't wait for Pax Sinica to do away with the inefficiencies of democracy if it means more suffering humans will be uplifted. A brief period of reeducation is worth the amazing infrastructure and getting things done. The end will justify the means, right? /s
There's something unsettling about the might makes right amd post-hoc justifications dor colonialism. Especially considering the colonialists did not have those "noble" goals in mind. No one lauds Google the way they laud the British empire, yet the same exploitation vs. public benefit arguments apply.
No one is saying it is right; but we shouldn't draw the wrong lessons from the Roman Empire or many other cases of institutional development. Being brutal and taking from others is not something that distinguished the Romans from other people (nor did it distinguish the colonial Europeans).
To dismiss the Romans, the colonials, &c, as of no benefit, however, is to deny reality. The Roman roads were genuinely of value to peoples besides the Romans. Perhaps the Chinese, to, will create institutions and a scope of activity that is of value to peoples outside of China. Probably not in Asia...
> To dismiss the Romans, the colonials, &c, as of no benefit, however, is to deny reality.
At no point did I dismiss the knowledge-transfer as being of no benefit. The point I was making is that it is very easy to be on a high horse and say "It was worth it" when you were not on the sharp end of the stick. By reframing the set-up with China as the imperial power, I hope to show the readers that the cost of "upliftment" might be something the unwilling subjects may consider culturally valuable (like democracy)[1]. Such one-dimensional analysis is intellectually lazy.
1. Imperialism has been dissected many times over the centuries, in fiction and otherwise, but it bears repeating.
> Is it really arguing in good faith to put hypotheticals side by side, on an equal footing, with evidence?
Is it arguing in good faith to consider other perspectives outside of our own? Yes it is, and I consider the reverse to be in bad faith.
While I don't fully agree with Kant, I find the Universability of an approach to be a good filter for identifying not-okay actions that are justified by the perpetrators - sometimes me (a.k.a. the Silver Rule: "Don't do to unto others what you don't want to be done unto you")
My high school history teacher would share historical accounts and encourage us to analyze the authors motivations and biases.
Also the fact that everyone alive today is so as a result of either being on the winning side of colonialism or from their ancestors otherwise clubbing somebody else over the head.
> Also the fact that everyone alive today is so as a result of either being on the winning side of colonialism or from their ancestors otherwise clubbing somebody else over the head.
That's a poor justification for it, though, and I don't want to live in a society that goes out of its way to view itself as Hobbesian.
You have to work with the world as it is, not as you'd wish it to work (especially that it likely couldn't possibly work that way anyway). "State of nature" sucks, because nature sucks. All the nice and good things come from building systems, social or otherwise, on top of the natural state of things - systems that work with our natural inclinations, instead of pretending they don't exist.
Right but nature doesn't suck. You make humans sound incapable of cooperation when this evidently isn't true. In this world uncooperative behavior is mostly a choice. Particularly in the west.
> To the extent humans fail at cooperation, that's nature at work. When we cooperate, we defy nature.
Well that seems a little silly, no? Humans are social creatures; cooperation is just as natural as any other human behavior (including fallibility). It seems almost a little christian in its doomful profession that humans are only our worst attributes.
Peace and love is all well and good until your crops have failed for the third year in a row. Your food stores are empty. You killed and ate all of the livestock last season because there was nothing left to feed them. There's nothing wild to hunt. Your village has resorted to eating anything it can scavenge, even if it's inedible or even poisonous. People are gnawing on their fingers.
And it's like this for your village and your neighboring village and their neighboring village and so on.
Tell me about it when your neighboring villages' adult men are charging down the hill at you, filthy, starving, crazed and screaming at the top of their lungs, axes in hand.
Surviving industrial level mass-enslavement is now considered the winning side of colonialism or you still don't consider native Americans and African descendants as people?
When colonizers first arrived in the Americas, ritualistic human sacrifice was common practice and contact between different tribes meant violence and death.
Also the African slave trade largely existed off the back of tribes conquering each other and selling the losers into slavery, which is also commonly how slavery works back into antiquity. The alternative to being sold into slavery is that they kill you.
Except the middlemen in this case have continued through from the colonial period, with seemingly little competition since. And it's also mandated that you can sell only through the middlemen and not independently, and you start to wonder if they're just bribing politicians to keep the system rigged in their favour.
It may be surprising for you, but it's very rare for it to be legal.
It's also almost never persecuted either, for obvious reasons. But totalitarian governments are usually not confident enough to officialize their money-movements. They usually claim to fight corruption with all their might.
Do you think by "remnants of colonialism" the OP meant "capitalism"? It's plain to me that he did not. I read it as him meaning an extensive bureaucracy designed to control the subject population is still in place and causing the price of the good to rise while the actual people who produce and innovate the product are left out of sharing in the windfall.
You say colonialism opened up Kenya to the global market. But nearly every country in the world, the colonized and the uncolonized, is now part of the global market, so it is not true that Kenya would not be part of the global market today without it.
The global market we have today is the result of an ordering of things that is a remnant of colonialism -- I think that is what fsckboy is referring to. It could have happened another way; but the particular one we have happened this way.
The argument goes -- and I think there is a lot to this argument -- that using "remnants of colonialism" to refer only to, for example, an extensive bureaucracy that excludes people who produce much of its proceeds is misleading, because other extensive institutions that are also remnants of colonialism are an important part of commerce, law and order, and public welfare all over the world.
Why do you think there's a lot to this argument? Genuinely curious.
Who said police, courts, etc. are not remnants of colonialism? Also, what is the relevance of that to this discussion about coffee selling and the problems in the Kenyan coffee market?
You'd have to be foolish or blind to not see how the ditribution of wealth in our current world closely follows what it was under colonialism. Sorry, but colonialism was a net negative for Kenyans and many other.
Kenyans can't fight the "monopolies" and "cartels", indirectly funded by western actors to keep exploiting their cheap labor to cultivate coffee. The large coffee market you speak of is not elevating the average man, stuck in a lobor-intensive and severly underpaid activity, benefiting a global system of exploitation.
I agree in general, however when you actually interact with these places you soon realise that the markets are completely skewed by corrupt practices of various kinds (not just cash bribery). I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to Kenya or anywhere else in East Africa but it’s obvious how things work after just a short time there.
What’s described in the article is a situation where the government has introduced export licensing and endorsed a coop system that effectively cements organizations in their current positions in the market.
It’s not just governments that do this, commercial interests do too by acting as gatekeepers.
I am by no means “putting capitalism in my gunsights” here - however it’s clear that one of the issues is corrupt and poor regulation. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be regulation, but that it should aim at stimulating a fair market where honest traders are able to transact freely and dishonesty is punished.
> The socialist instinct ("anybody getting rich must be cheating") unfortunately obscures the real problem ("monopolists and cartels controlling supply and setting prices are the true enemies of the people") which hinders solving it; by putting capitalism in your gunsights, you make enemies out of natural allies.
I think this gets a little muddied in The Discourse, because tons of pro-market anti-monopolist and anti-cartel[1] policies (like, you know, any preference for more trust-busting than the post-late-'70s neutered version) get painted as socialism in, especially, the US, simply because it's regulation and since the rise of Chicago-school jurisprudence and legislative influence, the fall of anti-capture and money-influence-mitigating regulation of media over several decades, and generally the ascendance of the Reagan-associated neoliberal outlook across all of mainstream American economic politics until very recently, regulation is the enemy of capitalism in many folks' minds, even when it's (god this is frustrating) laser-focused on making markets freer in the sense of their function, not the sense of "less-regulated".
The result is that people who simply think "barely-regulated markets" aren't fix-everything magic fairy dust that can't possibly be improved by a couple more laws and enforcement mechanisms, or even in a some cases by flat out replacement by a government program, find themselves rhetorically connected to nationalize-much-of-the-means-of-production Marxism-curious socialists (besides not being so removed from Nordic-style democratic-socialists to begin with)
[1] frankly, I find it convenient in certain company to shorthand "shitty tending-toward-captured markets, sacrificing efficiency and human decency for the comfort of a few" as "capitalism" given the actual outcomes and evident tendencies of systems the leaders of which emphasize and tout how capitalist they are, and the frequent expressed and revealed preferences of folks who like to promote themselves as particularly capitalistic, for the same reason it's kinda fair to regard communism as authoritarian and anti-democratic in practice, but I'll gladly entertain other usage for the sake of conversation.
These days anti-trust measures tend to be framed in terms of increasing competition rather than market freeness. Which does make some sense. Hard to argue with increasing competition unless you're Peter Thiel.
Increasing competition is increasing freedom to participate in a market, which is the kind of market freedom that matters when it comes to "free markets".
The identification of "freedom of market participants to do whatever they want" as being the "free" in "free markets" is exactly the problem here, in my view—and I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice (among others, chief among them being "please don't notice I snuck in a couple sketchy axioms and 'as we all know's at the beginning, so that you accept the hundred pages of 'reasoning' based on them that follow") promoted by figures in some allegedly-intellectual circles, to make themselves useful to those who find that kind of thing beneficial, and so to personally gain from being professional BS peddlers.
(I'm not correcting you, here, just adding on—I'd guess we basically agree on at least the first, and most directly relevant to your post, sentence of the above)
> I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice
I'm only learning about the history of economics myself. It seems a lot of people interpret Adam Smith as advocating against any government intervention, even in the case of price-fixing. For example: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/misreadin...
I'm not convinced that it's deliberate. You can draw a parallel with free speech: is it about letting anyone say whatever they want, however loudly, as much as they want? Or is it about ensuring that everyone has a voice, i.e. preventing the loud people from drowning out or otherwise intimidating the quiet ones. You could well argue for the latter, but many people in the West assume it means the former.
> Increasing competition is increasing freedom to participate in a market, which is the kind of market freedom that matters when it comes to "free markets".
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's about making sure you can be competitive, and you as a particular business don't have an inherent right to be competitive. Instead it's a collective right to have access to competition.
A right to participate in a reasonable way does not go far enough in many markets.
Sure, but when the uber-wealthy capitalists make the laws, avoid paying the taxes that support the entire system, and then greedily take as much as possible for their own selves without regard to the well-being of the workers or the Earth, the parasite is overwhelming the host.
As always, compassion is the answer to all our problems, even the thorny one of finding out how to fairly reward those who innovate, while preventing them from devastating the Earth and her peoples while they do so.
And, above all, we must not let the wealthy and their attorneys make the effing laws or elect our leaders. That's always a nightmare receipe for a bad system, and here we are.
Sounds like they need a futures market. This allows producers to sell their crop to traders earlier so they don’t have to wait for final export. In addition more law and order to protect those markets from the mills that are skimming.
Government is restricting export licenses (only nine are issued), effectively creating an oligopoly/cartel leading to a chain of grift and lack of transparency all the way down.
As a retail customer who wants to by beans blindly in an unknown roastery you could safely choose kenya. Often it would have higher quality when others.
It's 99% corruption and stupidity. The system is pretty convoluted, with multiple layers of middlemen taking a cut before the coffee reaches the international market. The auction system with multiple middlemen and commissions complicates the supply chain, reduces transparency, and delays payments to farmers, discouraging investments in quality. Marketing agents paying allowances to cooperative board members to secure business is a form of corruption that undermines fair trade practices and leads to quality neglect. Despite buyers paying premiums for quality, improvements in processing facilities aren't being made. So, even if farmers are trying to produce high-quality coffee, the facilities might not be up to par to handle it properly. The absence of direct relationships between buyers and farmers makes it difficult to hold anybody accountable for quality. The discontinuation of traditional processing methods like double washing, likely due to reduced volumes, may be contributing to quality decline. High financing costs and delayed payments make it challenging for farmers to maintain high-quality standards. The lack of reforms in the coffee export system perpetuates the current problematic structure. It's 99% corruption and stupidity.
SEY is a roaster that's pushing back on these things, in addition to having fantastic coffee. They have a very detailed breakdown of costs and value-add at every step along the way from farm to roaster.
Basically, it boils down to a change of process. His theory is that the "special" taste of Kenyan coffee was due to the "secondary fermentation" step, which is actually a trick to free up drying space faster:
> In Kenya, this meant the introduction of the “double washed” or “double fermented” style of coffee many buyers are familiar with. Coffee would be fermented dry for 12-24 hours, washed, and then sent to a holding tank where it would be soaked in clean, cool water for up to an additional 24 hours or longer (the so-called “secondary fermentation”).
Since production has decreased, drying space is now more available, so the coffee now spends a much longer time there, and double fermentation (which is of course an additional step and requires additional effort, driving up costs) has all but disappeared, so the coffee now tastes different:
> I noted that some changes were made to the way the coffee was processed. Because drying space was no longer in short supply—except perhaps for a short while at peak harvest—the holding pens weren’t in use anymore. The coffee went on the beds and stayed there. And of course, because in Kenya’s export system a coffee must first pass through a dry mill before auction and export, this means that unlike other countries—where coffee can be stored in parchment to homogenize or stabilize prior to final sale, it’s removed from its protective layer months before shipping and stored in warehouses without climate control dotting Nairobi.
If it doesn’t stabilize during drying—like in a holding pen—it would be more susceptible to fade, a phenomenon I have observed in the samples I’d tasted and Kenyan coffees I’d hoped to enjoy from other roasters.
And then there was the fermentation: the factories I bought from no longer practiced Kenya’s signature “secondary fermentation” or soak—and they insisted that they weren’t the only ones who’d given up the practice. I looked around, and—they were right.
...and, last but not least, due to the "colonial" system, with only a few exporters raking in the profits and the individual producers not getting a fair share (and having no alternative but to sell to the oligopoly), they're not really incentivized to improve quality.
