Reviving a thirteen-year-old blog involves reading a thirteen-year-old blog. This is a humbling exercise and we recommend it to nobody.
Most of it holds up. The water piece is still right. The AeroPress interview is better than we remembered. But a few things were wrong when we published them, and since we have now republished them, the honest move is to say so in public rather than quietly fix the files and hope nobody kept a copy.
SL28 was not created in a Scottish lab
This one is our favourite, because you can see exactly how it happened.
The 2013 entry on cultivars stated that SL28 and SL34 were “created in a Scottish lab in the 1930s.” Somebody saw the letters SL, thought Scotland, and typed it up with total confidence. It then sat there for over a decade.
SL stands for Scott Laboratories — Scott Agricultural Laboratories, in Nairobi. SL28 and SL34 are Kenyan selections from a Kenyan research programme, and they are the reason Kenyan coffee tastes the way it does. Getting that wrong is not a small slip. It relocates the entire achievement about four thousand miles, to a country with no coffee production and famously little sun.
Arabica comes from Ethiopia, not Yemen
The same entry described Ethiopian heirloom varieties as “indigenous to Yemen, but now grown in Latin America.” That has the map back to front.
Arabica originates in Ethiopia. It moved outward through Yemen, which became the trading port through which the rest of the world met coffee — and which is why Yemen turns up in so many origin stories written by people who were not there. Yemen mattered enormously. It is not where the plant is from.
Things that were true then and are not true now
A separate category, and a gentler one. In 2013 we made a great deal of shipping beans 48 to 72 hours off the roast, because at the time that was a genuine competitive advantage and almost nobody was doing it. We are not able to promise that today, and so we do not. We say roasted to order, which is true, and we leave it there.
The processing entry has also simply been overtaken. In 2013 the world was washed, natural, and a bit of honey. Anaerobic fermentation and carbonic maceration were not on anyone’s radar and now they dominate the competition table. That is not an error, it is thirteen years — we have written it up separately.
Why we did not just fix them
Because a blog that has silently edited its own past is worth less than one that has not. The archive entries carry their original dates and their original arguments. Where the facts were wrong we have corrected the text and said so here, which is the arrangement every newspaper settled on a century ago for good reasons.
We were an enthusiastic coffee company writing at speed in 2013, and we got two things wrong about Kenya and Ethiopia. If that is the worst of it after thirteen years, we will take it.