Origins
What Is a Coffee Landrace?
A landrace isn't wild coffee and it isn't a named variety like SL-28. It's a crop population farmers keep reselecting without a formal breeding program, and it's what ...
Learn
Notes from the roastery: what we buy, how we roast it, and what we have learned building coffee programs on the Gulf Coast.
Tagged “explainer” · see all of Learn
Brewing
What Is Immersion Coffee Brewing?
A French press, cold brew and a cupping bowl all work the same way: the coffee and all the water sit together until you separate them. What that changes, and what it d...
Origins
Is Robusta a Different Species of Coffee?
Robusta is not a variety of arabica. It is Coffea canephora, a separate species with half the chromosomes and a different way of making seed, and it is also one of ara...
Origins
What Is a Coffee Varietal?
A varietal is the kind of coffee plant the seed came from. The harder question is what that name is standing in for, because the same line on a bag can hold a named se...
Origins
What Is Mucilage in Coffee?
Mucilage is the coffee cherry's sticky inner layer, and it is 84 percent water over a pectin gel rather than the sugar coating everyone describes. What it is made of, ...
Roasting
Why Are My Coffee Beans Oily?
The oil on a dark bean was inside the seed all along. What pushes it out, and why a sheen tells you how long the coffee has been sitting rather than how it was roasted.
Origins
Why Is High-Altitude Coffee Better?
Growing higher raises the sugar in a coffee seed by a large, measurable amount. Elevation is standing in for temperature, and the grade on the bag certifies the farm r...
Origins
Why Does Natural Process Coffee Taste Fruity?
Three of the naturals on our shelf share one processing record and taste nothing alike. The reason is that almost none of the fruit's own flavor crosses into the seed.
Origins
How Does Green Coffee Get to the United States?
Three documents travel with a lot of green coffee on its way into the country, and one of them has an 8-hour deadline. What the route is, and how long it takes.
Brewing
Does Water Affect How Coffee Tastes?
The same coffee tastes different on two different waters, and the number behind the difference is alkalinity, not hardness. We went to Pensacola's own utility report t...
Taste
What Is Body in Coffee?
Body is what a coffee feels like rather than what it tastes like, and it is almost never thickness. Here is what the measurements actually show, and the two levers tha...
Taste
What Is Astringency in Coffee?
The dry, puckering finish in a cup is not a taste at all. Here is the mechanism, the compounds roasting builds, and what to change at the brewer.
Roasting
What Is Coffee Chaff?
The papery flecks in your cooling tray are silverskin, the one layer of the coffee fruit that travels all the way from the farm to the roastery. Here is what it is mad...
