Making Coffee with Lucia Solis

…was top notch. Every coffee marketer and copy writer should HAVE to listen to this discussion. And more arts and crafts at SCA, please.

To answer my title, I don’t know. I first heard of Lucia’s work in 2017 from Heleanna in Ethiopia. And it took me 6 years to listen to episode 1 ! The podcast is both very relatable, even while trying to make concepts I find fairly challenging more accessible. Lucia seems to really want people to get it, and I think that’s what makes someone a good teacher. Some of this is very provocative and makes a listener like me spin off different ideas, even opposing ones or to want to add something else to an issue I find missing … and to me that’s really the hallmark of good “content”. It activates the listener, provokes you to think about the ideas in to respond. and Lucia accommodates this dialogue through her Patreon dialogues where people can submit questions or be involved in a informal conversation. If you have an interest in coffee, in sensory science, or chemistry, I think you can approach this podcast from many directions and find it enriching. The way Lucia talks, shares information and opinion, and brings up her own experiences that can_or even contradict and complicate other parts of the message, only enrich the listening experience for me. I see another review where somebody criticizes this exact point, the fact she was a late comer to Coffee, and it was not that appealing to her, or that her podcast isn’t “sterile “ enough?!? . Well, I find those all to be the strong points of her work that she doesn’t generously shares here, and I suppose some reviews nullify themselves by their own choice of words. Lol.

Lucia has consistently delivered not just information about the world of coffee processing but she ushers the listener into actually understanding the landscape of this important topic and creates at the kind of feeling all of us in coffee want to create in those we serve - deep appreciation for coffee and thirst to know more.

I could update this later; trying hard to give it an honest listen… Show should be retitled to “Coffee VS. Wine” I came for research-based, neutral, and sterile information, but starting off, the first six episodes have me convinced she is just upset that coffee isn’t wine and does not have the same highly privileged and europeanized history as wine. Even considering her background in wine and fermentation from this lens, It feels as though she attempts to have a neutral tone while using language that implies otherwise; that, even given the history of coffee as an agricultural crop, it should be different and is therefore “wrong” instead of ONLY talking about the way it is and what can be done to improve it(many of which issues are already being confronted and addressed in the small ways that they can be over time) Going on about childhood in a household that had an espresso machine and her many travels to places trying hotel coffee and how it “shouldn’t be good”? sounds so very privileged, especially considering she’s implying that this is not something she came to out of interest or passion, but rather something she forced herself and/or was forced into for work. The whole tone just has me wondering, “why don’t you go back to wine?!”