Potato in Coffee

When reading that headline, your first reaction might be: Why would I want to put potato in my coffee? Fair question for sure and actually you don’t have to. Neither are we going to give you any recipes for that. Instead we’re going to talk a little bit about what is known as the potato defect. This particular case is a result of bacterial infection of the coffee fruit and seed. It normally happens after being bitten by the insect called Antestia that carries the specific bacteria. This defect is characterized by very strong smell of fresh potato peels and is detectable by it in ground or brewed coffee. It is very hard if not impossible to detect it in a green or roasted beans, so it can rather easily end up in the rest of the bunch.

There are some ways that producer can use for preventing damaged beans ending up with the good ones but it takes a lot of work and doesn’t guarantee that they get them all. One of the ways is to inspect the cherries for the signs of damage and discard the bad ones. Another possibility is to use pre-pulping floating tanks where defected cherries are separated from the quality ones.

This defect has occurred quite a lot with the coffee that is coming from Rwanda and East-Africa, so addressing this problem has a high priority there. In addition to the previously mentioned ways of preventing it, they are also using insect control and densimetric sorting. Some people say that it is having an effect and there has been less potato in their coffee recently thanks to those strategies.