In the last year, my street finally had a third wave coffee shop open. They serve very high quality roasts. I love having them down the street. One day, I was short on beans, so I dropped in. The only beans they had left were from Black & White Coffee Roasters from Raleigh, North Carolina, a company started by two U.S. barista champions. More specifically, the only beans they had were from Esteban Zamora, a grower in Costa Rica. More specifically still, these beans were described as “cinnamon anaerobic”. The barista talked about their funky flavor, but the only funkiness I noticed immediately was the $38 (!!!!) price. “You get more beans,” the Gen Z barista reassured me, meaning 12 ounces instead of 10, certainly unaware beans used to be sold in 16 oz packages.

At home, I could not believe the intense cinnamon aroma, which carried over into the brewed coffee. I could not believe it. I had not had coffee this different in years, perhaps since the first time I tried a pour over. I felt a whole new world of coffee opening up, one of bean flavor profiles I had no idea existed. Red pilled, if you will. It turns out there is a whole new world of coffee, or at least a trend, and it is one I do not want part of.

You see, “Everything but the cascara (coffee cherry skin) is added to GrainPro bags and combined with 1 kg of cinnamon powder for every 46 kg of coffee cherries. This mixture is left to ferment in an anaerobic environment for six days before finally being moved to concrete patios to begin drying.” (All coffee beans ferment after harvest, and there is wide variety in the type of fermenting performed.) The cinnamon flavor comes from cinnamon, not the bean.

Intrigued, I bought another bag, beans from Colombia from a grower by the name of Brayan Alvear. Fortunately, they were “only” $28 for a 12oz bag since I bought direct from the Black and White. These beans also tasted unlike any other coffee ever put on my tongue, like orange and watermelon in fact. You see, the “whole coffee cherries are co-fermented with ground, dehydrated fruit: citrus fruits, in the case of Rocket Flower, and (at the risk of stating the obvious) watermelon, in the case of the latter.” The organ and watermelon flavor comes from orange and watermelon, not the bean.

This is not coffee! It is a cheap, though expensive, trick. The coffee bean is a complex fruit that has a terroir, a complexity of flavor that varies by a thousand different factors. The best coffee beans, the ones that normally cost $25+ for 12 ounces, are supposed to have the most expressive flavors. The most coffee flavor, if you will. Instead, high quality beans are now being cut with loads of non-coffee flavors because … trends?

Imagine a vat of grapes with watermelon thrown in. Picture casks of fermenting wine doused in cinnamon. No producer would think to do that, because no wine buyer wants to taste watermelon, cinnamon, or any other flavor not from the grape. Imagine a Ferrari tuned to sound like a Honda Civic, a Rolls Royce with its seats covered in cloth. Ocean front property where the views face the road. Courtside seats, except it’s the food court. None of this exists because no one would produce it because no one would buy it. Yet somehow the same desecration is performed to world-class coffee, and we are supposed to accept it. I do not.

If you do not want to taste coffee with your coffee, then douse it with flavored syrups after fermenting, roasting, and brewing. At least then you are honest. But to overwhelm the coffee flavor of expensive beans is an affront to good taste and tasting good.