Tim Wendelboe: climate crisis will make coffee more exclusive – 05/31/2023 – Café na Prensa

The increase in the planet’s temperature will make quality coffees increasingly inaccessible. This is because cultivation requires specific climatic conditions, usually in high altitude places with a milder climate.

That’s what it says to coffee in the press Tim Wendelboe, Norwegian considered by many to be the best barista (coffee specialist) in the world. In a video call interview, Wendelboe talked about the environment, terroir, plans for Brazil and more.

One of the first winners of the World Barista Championship, which annually elects the best professional in the area, Wendelboe has been described by the Financial Times newspaper as the René Redzepi of cafes – in reference to the chef at Noma, a restaurant voted the best in the world five times according to the The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

“The highest quality coffees will be harder to come by in the future because they normally grow high up in the mountains. The hotter it gets, the higher you have to go to get to the same climates,” says Wendelboe.

He claims that the climate crisis should accentuate inequality in consumption. “There will still be cheap coffee, like commodity coffees. Maybe these qualities will get even worse, maybe not. But I think that higher quality coffees will become more expensive and more exclusive”.

Wendelboe says, however, that people still don’t care much about issues like sustainability, transparency and fair trade in the coffee production chain. “I think most consumers still don’t care about that, to be honest. For example, if you look at most of the coffee that’s being sold around the world, it’s not traceable,” he says.

NO PLANS FOR BRAZIL

Tim owns a renowned coffee shop in Oslo, where he serves very high quality light roast drinks with fruity notes. With a sober atmosphere and few tables, the place is visited by locals and tourists from all over the world. Discover the space in the image gallery below.

Currently, however, anyone who goes to the Tim Wendelboe Espresso Bar will not find any Brazilian coffee on the menu. This, however, is not a demerit of Brazilian coffee.

“I know you have fantastic coffees in Brazil. But in general they have more notes of chocolate and nuts. And that used to be very popular in Norway. But the trend now is more towards very fruity and high acidity coffees like you find in Kenya and Ethiopia,” says Wendelboe.

Furthermore, he says that the biggest coffee companies in Norway buy good Brazilian beans, which can be easily found in supermarkets. So when the consumer decides to buy a more expensive product, he usually prefers to look for coffees with different flavors than those he finds in traditional markets.

Despite this, Wendelboe, who has already bought Brazilian coffees, says he is open to purchasing beans from Brazil again in the future, although there is still no concrete plan in this regard.

“Right now we really don’t have the capacity to start buying from more sources. We’re still filling containers from where we already buy from.”

In addition to not selling Brazilian beans, currently Wendelboe’s e-commerce, which sends roasted coffee to almost the entire planet, also does not deliver in Brazil.

“Unfortunately, there are some customs barriers in Brazil that make it a little difficult. We used to sell to Brazil, but some changes a few years ago made it difficult. Packages were stopped at customs and did not go through. So we decided to stop, for now. But I hope that in the future we can sell again”.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF FERMENTED COFFEE

Asked about fermented coffees, a trend that has been increasingly highlighted, the barista smiles and says: “It’s not my cup of tea”.

Technically, all coffee undergoes some type of fermentation. But what we are referring to here are hyper-fermented coffees, that is, coffees that have undergone an induced fermentation process, with the aim of adding new flavors that were not originally present in that grain.

He explains why he turned his nose up at the trend. “I think there are two sides to this. I think it’s great if a farmer can add value to his product by brewing coffee in certain ways. And if he can find a customer willing to pay more for coffee because of that, perfect, great. There’s always a market for it, so that’s fine,” he says.

“But personally, I find it a little uninteresting and not very pleasant to drink because the flavor of the fermentation is more or less the same, whether it’s coffee from Brazil, Kenya or Ethiopia. If you ferment the coffee a lot, you just feel the I like the brew, you don’t taste anything else. That flavor is the same for me regardless of the origin, so you kind of take away some of the originality of the coffee.”

In other words, fermentation annihilates the terroir of the coffee. And, yes, coffee has torroir, in Tim’s opinion. “We often drink coffee from the producers we buy from and some of them have the exact same seeds planted but grown in different parts of Honduras, for example. And even with the same seeds, they taste completely different.”

COFFEE WITH CHEESE?

A curious thing about the Tim Wendelboe Espresso Bar in Oslo is that no food is served there. Drinks only (coffee and derivatives, of course). Despite this, the barista understands harmonization, as he has already developed the coffee program at the Noma restaurant, in Copanhage.

He claims, however, that he prefers to drink black coffee, but that cheeses, in general, are good accompaniments. “There are different cheeses, of course, and lots of different coffees. So it’s a really fun exercise to try different cheeses with a coffee or different coffees with the same cheese.”

He even mentioned a “fantastic” harmonized tasting he had in Brazil, prepared by barista Isabela Raposeiras, from Coffee Lab, a school/cafeteria located in the Pinheiros district of São Paulo.

BEST COFFEE I HAD THIS YEAR

At the end of the conversation, Café na Prensa asked what the best coffee Tim had had this year. “Wow, that’s a good question. I drink so many great coffees throughout the year. It’s not always accessible. Sometimes it’s just a small sample.”

After thinking a little, he responds, without modesty, that maybe it was a coffee grown on his own farm, in Colombia, whose sample he recently tried. “It tasted really good. It was an Ethiopian variety grown in Colombia, very floral, fruity and pleasant.”

And he concludes: “For me, quality is more than just the taste. It’s also knowing how it was cultivated. Meeting the farmers, seeing the improvement of coffee in the region. This really gives me pleasure to taste”.

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