Today I watched a bonus Q&A between Lucia Solis and Roaster Kat, and something in it stayed with me longer than I expected.
Not a technique.
Not a fermentation trick.
Not a new term to add to the mental shelf.
What stuck was how calmly they dismantled the idea that coffee language is precise, regulated, or even particularly reliable.
“Double washed.”
“Anaerobic.”
“Carbonic maceration.”
They point out, almost casually, that most of these terms aren’t governed by anything formal. They can mean different things in different countries, different facilities, even different conversations. The words sound technical, but the certainty we attach to them is mostly imagined.
That landed uncomfortably close to home.
The illusion of certainty
Like many people learning coffee seriously for the first time, I initially assumed that if I learned the right words, I’d understand what was happening. That labels, terms, and categories were solid ground. That if something was named clearly enough, it must also be defined clearly.
What this conversation exposed,very gently, is that much of coffee language exists to describe outcomes after the fact, not to guarantee them beforehand.
Processing terms often describe intent, or environment, or marketing preference more than they describe a fixed method. They’re not lies, but they’re also not contracts.
And once you see that, you start noticing the same pattern everywhere else in coffee.
Processing, roasting, tasting, same pattern, different stage
Listening to Lucia talk about processing decisions, what stood out wasn’t creativity or experimentation. It was constraint.
She chooses washed coffees because of where she is, the water available, the facilities she works in, and the need for consistency. She inoculates not because it’s fashionable, but because it reduces risk. She keeps fermentations short not to chase flavour extremes, but because predictability matters.
Time, she admits, is often decided by labour and workflow rather than flavour goals.
That honesty feels rare.
And it mirrors something I’ve been learning on the roasting side: It seems that a lot of what we like to frame as flavour decisions are actually system decisions. Equipment, airflow, batch size, environment, available attention. The coffee responds to those whether we narrate them or not.
Complexity doesn’t create clarity
One of the strongest warnings in the conversation is aimed at beginners: doing too much, too fast, with too many variables.
Too many experiments.
Too many changes at once.
Too little record-keeping.
At the end of the season, you might have something that tastes good, but no idea why.
That resonated strongly with me, because it echoes the anxiety phase of learning anything complex. When uncertainty feels uncomfortable, adding more knobs to turn can feel like progress. In reality, it often just buries the signal.
What they argue for instead is almost boring:
- One variable at a time
- Simple observations
- Notes written by humans
- Repetition across seasons
It’s not anti-science. It’s applied science.
Tools don’t replace attention
I also appreciated how little emphasis they put on equipment. A notebook, a pen, environmental observations, and tasting notes are presented as sufficient foundations. A pH meter and thermometer are helpful additions, not because they give answers, but because they help track behaviour over time.
There’s a quiet rejection here of measurement theatre. Numbers are useful when they explain change, not when they become something to worship.
That’s a theme I keep bumping into in roasting too. Curves, crack timestamps, targets, useful as references, dangerous as anchors.
Learning takes longer than we want
Perhaps the most grounding part of the conversation is the acceptance that learning flavour outcomes can take years. Not weeks. Not a few batches.
Sometimes two full seasons:
- Process
- Dry
- Roast
- Cup
- Get feedback
- Try again
And even then, you may discover that what you don’t like has a perfectly valid audience elsewhere.
Every coffee has a home.
That’s a reassuring thought if you let it be one.
What I’m taking forward
This conversation didn’t teach me how to process coffee. It clarified how I want to think about coffee.
I’m becoming more comfortable with:
- Asking “what do you mean?” instead of assuming
- Letting words describe, not decide
- Trusting outcomes more than explanations
- Repeating what works without needing to justify it with language
Coffee feels less stressful when it stops being about naming things correctly and starts being about noticing what stops changing.
That, for me, is where learning actually settles.
Acknowledgement:
This reflection was prompted by a bonus Q&A between Lucia Solis and Roaster Kat. Their conversation focuses on coffee processing, fermentation language, and the gap between terminology and practice.