Fruit salad stimulant, as a treat
So when you make coffee, you start with a cherry, remove the pit, end up with a green bean, and then ship that to a roaster. Between the removal of the cherry and the shipment, though, you can also ferment the coffee, which increases its shelf life, de-acidifies it, and makes it a little easier on your body. Most coffee skips this step, some does not, and now here we are.
Co-fermented coffees are what happens when you ferment the coffee with a bunch of other fruit in the bath. This increases the sugar content (making it nicer for microorganisms) while also heavily imparting the flavor of the fruit on the coffee.
The consequence is, in short, a party trick. If you’ve ever been to a fancy molecular gastronomy restaurant where they show you one thing and it tastes, radically, like another, you know roughly what I mean. The cup looks like coffee and tastes like fruit juice. Like, actual fruit juice.
So far I’ve seen co-ferments with lychee, watermelon, clementine, and strawberries, but ostensibly any fruit will work. The first time I ever had a co-ferment – at, of course, the best coffee shop in Chicago – it blew my brains out, completely changing my expectations around what coffee should be, and I’ve been reckoning with it ever since.
I feel so many ways about all of this. The immediate reaction is one of thunderstruck wonder, the sort of thing that I wish I could show all of my friends and talk about into the night. The purist in me rebels, though, saying no, that’s not coffee, there’s a line in the sand and it’s been crossed. If I dislike flavored coffee drinks so much, then why am I freaking out about brown watermelon juice?
And then I think about the long term here, the way in which I have engaged with coffee over two decades, and remember: wait, this is a party trick. Truly how many watermelon co-ferments am I going to tolerate before I get bored with all of this? Am I going to be a snob for watermelon co-ferments now? Will I make a power ranking of them? Will I have a favorite co-fermentable fruit?
So the idea is nice, and you should try one of these, if only just to talk about it. But once you’re done with the weird stuff, remember that there are more subtle frontiers to explore in coffee – and the terrain there is infinite.