Filter Stories
By James Harper
Coffee stories with an extra shot of history and science. Filter Stories is a podcast revealing coffee’s hidden microscopic secrets, its powerful past, and how your choice of beans impacts tens of millions of people.
See the behind-the-scenes stories on Instagram @filterstoriespodcast.
If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!
See the behind-the-scenes stories on Instagram @filterstoriespodcast.
If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!
Latest episode
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Guatemala, Part 2: Who does specialty serve?
Specialty coffee changes the story for the indigenous people of Guatemala. Coffee as a tool of oppression finally offers hope....and then something a bit more complicated. This episode explores the tension between the values of the Mayan communitie… -
Guatemala, Part 1: Whose land is it anyway?
When you buy a bag of coffee labelled fifth-generation family farm, it feels like a good choice. But in Guatemala, that label might actually be a signal for a more uncomfortable truth. This episode explores how land has been understood, used, an… -
Surrogates: Anything but the coffee
What happens when coffee disappears? This is not a thought experiment! It’s happened many times in history: War, blockades, tariffs, ideology, health panics, sanctions, supply shocks. When coffee is not around, people still need something warm, … -
Mother Coffee: The history and heritage of Ethiopia's wild coffee forests
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We Built This City…On Coffee: Hamburg and the making of Europe's coffee trade
On a long walk through Hamburg, somewhere between the fish markets and giant cranes, you might stumble a giant bronze coffee bean looks like its crash landed from space. But this giant coffee bean represents a staggering fact: one in every three c… -
Introducing: Series Three of A History of Coffee
We’re back with more stories about the tiny psychoactive seed that changed the world and continues to shape our lives today. Is it possible to follow the story not just to Ethiopia, not just to a single town, but all the way back to one tree? We’ll u… -
Coffee Quality, Part 3: When the “quality” myth hits the farm
For twenty years, the 2004 cupping form profoundly shaped the specialty coffee world. But on the hillsides of coffee farms, some of the form’s byproducts have been disadvantaging producers. In this episode, we follow two producers whose lives co… -
Coffee Quality, Part 2: How “quality” became a myth
If you ask two specialty professionals what makes a high-quality coffee, you’ll likely get a surprisingly consistent answer: clean, sweet, juicy, bright. To an outsider, they would be forgiven for thinking coffee quality is universally defined. But… -
Coffee Quality, Part 1: The birth of specialty coffee flavours
For the longest time, coffees were dull and bitter. But then a small group of pioneers changed the world. In this episode, we travel back to the 1960s and ’70s to meet the trailblazers who realised coffees could taste distinctive: sweeter, brighte… -
How specialty coffee woke up to water’s role in flavour
For the longest time, the coffee community only cared about water’s impact ruining espresso machine boilers and kettles. But what about water’s impact on coffee flavour? In this episode, I tell the story of how the specialty coffee community came t…