What organic coffee really means.

The journey

A long trip before your first cup.

Coffee is a fruit. What we call the bean is the seed inside a coffee cherry. That fruit is picked, processed, dried, stored, bagged, shipped, stored again and finally roasted before it ends up in your kitchen.

Moisture and storage conditions that aren’t properly controlled can lead to mold, and some molds produce toxins called mycotoxins. One review of more than 3,000 coffee samples found ochratoxin A, a common mycotoxin, in over half of them.

“You wouldn’t see it, you wouldn’t smell it, you wouldn’t even taste it.”

That is the problem Gary kept coming back to: your senses can’t tell you whether those toxins are in the cup. The only way to know is to test.

Organic

A cleaner place to start.

That’s why we started at the source. Choosing organic coffee means choosing beans grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, under standards that are certified and verified. It’s a cleaner starting point.

From there, how the coffee is handled after harvest matters just as much. Organic tells you how coffee was grown. It doesn’t tell you whether anyone tested it for mold toxins or heavy metals.

“Organic coffee and coffee that’s been tested for mold, toxins and heavy metals are not the same thing.”

Heavy metals are a fair question too. Soil can naturally contain lead, cadmium and arsenic, and coffee is a plant that grows in it, so researchers have measured metals in coffee at varying levels. As Gary says, that doesn’t mean every cup contains dangerous levels. His point is simpler: do you know what’s in yours?

We wrote about how this works on the farm and in the lab in Your coffee is a crop.

The Ultimate Brew

Coffee he could drink without guessing.

Gary has spent years telling people to test what goes into their bodies. Then he picked up the bag of coffee he’d been drinking every morning and turned it around. It told him where the coffee came from and what roast it was. It didn’t say whether anyone had tested it.

So he made the coffee he was looking for. The Ultimate Brew is USDA Organic, 100% Arabica from Tolima, Colombia, grown at high elevation, washed and sun-dried, in Medium Roast, Dark Roast and Espresso. Then we tested it.

Don’t guess

Don’t guess. Test.

Every bag has a QR code. Scan it and you can read the lab results for that lot yourself. Coffee is agriculture, so it comes in lots: we source a lot, roast it, test it and then release it, and the next lot goes through the same process before it goes out.

Gary doesn’t want you to take our word for it, and he says so in the video. He wants you to ask any coffee the same three questions, ours included. Tomorrow morning, look at your bag:

1. 01

   Mold toxins

   Has it been tested for mold toxins?

2. 02

   Heavy metals

   Has it been tested for heavy metals?

3. 03

   The results

   Can you actually see them?

If the answer is yes, keep drinking it. If it’s “I have no idea,” then tomorrow you’ll know something you didn’t know today. See what we test for, or watch the video again.