by Sarah Charles for Age of Coffee

In 2024, four coffees were disqualified from the Best of Panama competition, one of specialty coffee’s most prestigious showcases, for being co-fermented. The Specialty Coffee Association of Panama called the practice deceptive, accused the producers of using “foreign additives,” “with the intent to score higher and win,” and found the four coffees to be “altered from their natural DNA expression.” George Howell, one of the founding fathers of the specialty movement, has called co-fermentation a new age of flavored coffee, recently sharing his view on a podcast that those who engage in this practice are trying to alter the coffee’s flavors by adding new ones.

Meanwhile, nobody is disqualifying alcoholic beverages.

Bourbon, for example, is fermented, aged in new charred oak barrels specifically chosen to impart vanilla, caramel, and oak flavors into the liquid. The barrel, far from being a neutral vessel, is a flavour delivery mechanism. The char is regulated, deliberate, and fundamental to what bourbon tastes like. Bourbon is in fact celebrated for these added flavors. 

Distillers compete on the depth and complexity of barrel-imparted notes. Nobody calls it cheating or deceptive, and – as far as I know – nobody has accused Jim Beam of adulterating its natural DNA expression.

So why the double standard? 

What co-fermentation actually is

Co-fermentation involves adding an organic substrate, typically fresh fruit pulp, must, or juice, to the coffee during fermentation. The fruit interacts with the coffee cherry’s sugars and microorganisms, producing flavor compounds that wouldn’t develop from coffee alone. The intervention and alteration are undeniable.

But when you process coffee using a washed process, aren’t you also intervening and altering – in fact arguably removing flavors in pursuit of a “clean” finish?

The question here isn’t about whether co-fermentation changes the coffee. And the controversy is not really about whether the flavors are pleasant, but about whether they are legitimate. That’s where the bourbon comparison becomes instructive, because the logic used to condemn co-ferments would, applied consistently, condemn a great deal of what the drinks world does without a second thought or controversy.

Wine aged in new oak acquires vanilla and toast notes from the barrel. Whisky finished in sherry casks picks up dried fruit and spice. Beer brewed with fruit additions, a practice as old as Belgian lambic, is considered artisanal, as long as additions aren’t synthetic. Champagne has dosage, a mixture of cane sugar and wine, added before corking. These are all interventions and they are all, in the strictest sense, the introduction of flavour from outside the primary ingredient. Yet none of them carry the stigma that specialty coffee has attached to a co-ferment.

The purity ideology

The specialty coffee movement was built on a specific and genuinely valuable idea: that great coffee, processed well and roasted carefully, needs nothing added. That the flavors of a high-altitude Yirgacheffe, for example, are inherent to the plant and the place that produced it. In wine language, this is the concept of terroir – and it’s also closely tied to the farmer’s knowledge and work.

This is a beautiful idea that attributes the vast majority of coffee’s qualities to its origin, something that the industry and market overwhelmingly do not. It is also, in the hands of its most ardent defenders, a purity ideology – and those can quickly become coercive and restrictive.

Historian Augustine Sedgewick, in his study work Coffeeland, observed that using botanical references as flavor descriptors gives the false impression that these are naturally occurring results. But coffee processing, from post-harvest handling through fermentation, drying, milling, and roasting, is a series of carefully planned human interventions and transformations. The “blueberry” in a natural Ethiopian is not simply there – it is the product of decisions: how long the cherry ferments, at what temperature, under what conditions, with what intention. 

And here is the irony of the are-co-ferments-legitimate-and-truly-specialty-coffee debate: washed coffee, the purists’ gold standard, is itself an intervention, and a significant one. Washed processing involves depulping the cherry, removing the mucilage through fermentation or mechanical scrubbing, and washing the bean with water before drying. It produces a “cleaner,” “brighter” cup because it is a more controlled removal of the fruit’s influence. 

The washed process may claim to reveal what coffee naturally tastes like, but in fact it produces a specific flavor profile through a specific set of deliberate choices. Calling it pure and calling a co-ferment impure is a statement about preference, not nature.

According to a recent post by specialty coffee professionals, “process names are marketing terms meant to differentiate coffees.”

The same movement that designates “natural” and “washed” as processing categories has developed an unspoken hierarchy in which washed is implicitly cleaner, more honest, and more worthy of serious attention. It’s funny that the category named “natural” is the one considered lesser-than by those who consider intervention impure. Language also speaks volumes. “Clean” and “bright” are commonly assigned to washed coffees, whereas “boozy” and “funky” are tied to naturals. Even “natural” is a correction: naturally-processed coffees are sometimes referred to as “unwashed.” All these choices arguably lean towards a manipulation of perception, with connotations of purity and cleanliness associated with a movement’s preferred processing standard. 

Among a certain cohort of specialty buyers and roasters, washed is not just a preference; it is a moral position. A clean cup is a pure cup, a light roast is the correct roast, and the cupping score is the objective truth. It seems worth considering whether every time a specialty roaster writes “notes of jasmine and peach” on a bag of washed coffee, they are participating in the same construction of naturalness that they accuse co-fermenters of undermining. 

Is this preference dressed as principle? And has the specialty industry simply been doing it long enough that it now mistakes one for the other?

Rules and regulations

Bourbon’s flavor interventions are legitimate because they are strictly regulated. To call a whiskey bourbon, the producer must meet every requirement in Title 27 of the US Code of Federal Regulations: at least 51% corn in the mash bill, fermentation and distillation within specific parameters, aged in new charred oak barrels, no additives of any kind in the final product. The barrel is effectively part of the defined production process. The rules are clear and publicly available. They are also consistently enforced.

When it comes to co-fermentation, there are no agreed definitions – yet – distinguishing co-fermentation from infusion from flavored coffee. The terms are used interchangeably, and producers are not always transparent about their methods. The competition bodies that have tried to draw lines, like Best of Panama and the SCA, have done so without any agreed standard for what they are drawing lines around. The World Barista Championship only permitted co-fermented coffees in competition in 2023, without defining them.

The issue seems to be less about whether co-fermentation is a legitimate practice, and more about the fact that the industry has no framework for it. 

What specialty coffee struggles to say

The co-fermentation debate is, at its core, a debate about who gets to decide what good coffee tastes like; and specialty coffee has always had a complicated relationship with that question. The movement was born as a corrective to commercial mediocrity like dark roasts designed to mask defects, commodity blends with no traceable origin, or even most horrifying for the purists – syrups added to coffee to make it palatable. The rejection of those things was both principled and necessary – arguably for consumers, and definitely for producers, who were able to capture more value.

But the space between corrective and ideological standard is a long jump. And if one of the goals of the specialty coffee movement is for producers to have the opportunity to capture more value from their crop, don’t co-ferments achieve that?

The specialty industry has become remarkably good at making preference the standard and then defending it as though it were objective.

A washed Kenyan cupping at 88 is worthy of serious attention, but a watermelon co-ferment cupping at 90 is suspect. Bourbon drinkers do not have this problem. The drink is better for the intervention – or at least different, and allowed to be different, without anyone calling it a fraud.

Coffee could learn something from that. The argument here is not to abandon standards of quality or to deny that origin matters. It is to develop a framework that distinguishes between deceptive practice and deliberate flavor development, to regulate co-fermentation rather than outlaw it by default, and to allow the category to expand without every expansion being treated as a betrayal of the faith.

I personally am not crazy about co-ferments – at least not after the third sip. But I can hold the space that this remains a preference. Preference is not principle, and “I don’t like it” has never been the same thing as “it shouldn’t exist.”