Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries

Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries

James Harper

Episodes 78
Avg. Duration 34m
Activity Moderate
Apple Rating 5.0 (97)
Since Aug 2018
Latest Episode Apr 2026

Outreach Signals

Open to Sponsors

Publishing Details

Schedule
Every 2 Weeks
Format
Episodic
Consistency
55%
Hosting
feed.podbean.com

About This Podcast

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!

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Recent Episodes

S7E5 Guatemala's Inconvenient Truth, Part 2: Who does specialty serve?

Apr 20, 2026 28m

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…

S7E4 Guatemala's Inconvenient Truth, Part 1: Whose land is it anyway?

Apr 20, 2026 43m

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…

S7E3 Surrogates: Anything but the coffee

Mar 02, 2026 46m

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…

S7E2 Mother Coffee: The history and heritage of Ethiopia's wild coffee forests

Feb 09, 2026 48m

Most coffee is grown on vast plantations using machines, pesticides and fertilisers.    But in Ethiopia, coffee grows wild in humid forests surrounded by birds.    And that wild coffee matters more…

S7E1 We Built This City…On Coffee: Hamburg and the making of Europe's coffee trade

Jan 05, 2026 50m

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…

S7 Introducing: Series Three of A History of Coffee

Dec 29, 2025 2m Trailer

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…

S6E15 Coffee Quality, Part 3: When the “quality” myth hits the farm

Dec 08, 2025 30m

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…

S6E14 Coffee Quality, Part 2: How “quality” became a myth

Dec 08, 2025 25m

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…

S6E13 Coffee Quality, Part 1: The birth of specialty coffee flavours

Dec 08, 2025 23m

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…

S6E12 How specialty coffee woke up to water’s role in flavour

Jul 28, 2025 25m

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…

S6E11 The two ingredients in water that ruin your coffee, and the ancient story behind them

Jul 28, 2025 38m

550 million years ago, earth was perfect. We had perfect water for coffee AND we were living in a vegetarian paradise!   But then Earth changed—violently. The planet shifted from a peaceful,…

S6E10 Getting great water for coffee, step-by-step. Part 2: How to measure and treat your water

Jul 14, 2025 43m

Water massively impacts your coffee’s flavours. But most of us struggle to fix our water because water science is confusing…   …until now! In this special collaboration with Lucia Solis (Making…

S6E9 Getting great water for coffee, step-by-step. Part 1: Alkalinity, hardness and why it matters

Jul 14, 2025 26m

Water massively impacts your coffee’s flavours. But most of us struggle to fix our water because water science is confusing…   …until now! In this special collaboration with Lucia Solis (Making…

S6E8 Farm to port: why specialty costs more

Jun 23, 2025 54m

Every time we open a bag of beautiful specialty coffee — like Erick Bravo’s from Finca El Chaferote in Huila, Colombia — we’re drinking something that’s been on a long journey.   And I mean long!…

S6E7 Why one Colombian farmer chose specialty, and the other walked away

Jun 09, 2025 46m

I travel to Colombia’s Huila region to answer a question that’s puzzled me for years: if specialty coffee pays more, is better for the environment, and brews tastier cups—why don’t more farmers grow…

S6E6 The hard business of selling beautiful coffee, part 2

May 19, 2025 39m

Volume. Cheap. Lame flavours. This is the traditional way of growing coffee in Brazil, and almost every farm does it this way.    But what if you wanted to produce beautiful, distinctive flavours…

S6E5 The hard business of selling beautiful coffee, part 1

May 19, 2025 29m

Volume. Cheap. Lame flavours. This is the traditional way of growing coffee in Brazil, and almost every farm does it this way.    But what if you wanted to produce beautiful, distinctive flavours…

S6E4 The Speed of Heat: How to roast more coffee, faster!

Mar 24, 2025 52m

To roast coffee faster, you need to turn up the heat….right?   No!    In this episode, we explore the three powerful methods of heat transfer that revolutionised roasting. We’ll journey from humble…

S6E3 Coffee Roasting: How baby plant food transforms into delicious coffee flavours

Mar 10, 2025 47m

A mother coffee plant gifts its baby everything it needs to grow—a green seed packed with food. But when we roast coffee, we hijack that gift and turn it into something else: flavor.   But what is…

S6E2 Fruit juice or creamy almonds? Your guide to controlling cold brew flavors

Feb 16, 2025 46m

When I started making cold brew this last year, I treated it like hot brew filter coffee. But no matter how I adjusted the grind or tweaked the brew time, I hardly got any differences in…

Frequently Asked Questions

How many episodes does Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries have?

Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries has published 78 episodes since August 2018, covering topics in Arts, Food.

Is Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries still active?

Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries is currently moderate with new episodes every 2 weeks. Average episode length is 34m.

How do I contact Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries for sponsorship or guest appearances?

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