The story of koji’s usage can be found in the cultural organization and development of civilization in Asia and the emergence of koji precedes human’s discovery of coffee by some nine or ten millennia.

Koji fermentation is a unique kind of process. Rather than producing alcohol or carbon dioxide or organic acids, koji has the ability to transform its substrate differently than yeast or bacteria. Depending on the fermentation conditions, koji produces varying ratios of both amino acids like glutamate as well as amylase enzyme, which can saccharify the starches in something like rice, making them available for fermentation by yeast into sake. The ratios at which each metabolic byproduct is produced depends on the strain of koji as well as temperature.

Koji in Coffee

This project started from an ongoing work between Koichi Higuchi (Higuchi Matsunosuke Shoten Co.), a Japanese producer of koji spores and Christopher Feran, renown coffee consultant using koji as a way to manipulate the flavor of coffee by inoculating and growing different strains of koji on green coffee—generated unconventional and unusual cup profiles.

They then partnered up with the finish barista champion Kaapo Paavolainen and the Bayter brothers from El Vergel to scale up this project.

Koji serves as a processing agent—saccharifying polysaccharides and complex starches to make them available for secondary fermentation by other microbes as well as enzymatic processes within the coffee itself, while also producing glutamates that improve cup structure. No koji spores would end up in the final cup.

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