Brewing
What Is the Coffee to Water Ratio?
The three ratios we start from at Inheritance, why drip runs stronger than pour over, and what to change first when the cup tastes sour, bitter or thin.
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
Taste
What Is Malic Acid in Coffee?
Malic acid is really in the cup, and measured against its own detection threshold there is usually too little of it to pick out. Where it comes from, why it got the ap...
Taste
Why Does Coffee Smell Like Coffee?
Green coffee barely smells of anything. Roasting builds the whole aroma from scratch, and it does it along four unrelated chemical routes. Which precursor becomes whic...
Roasting
What Makes Roasted Coffee Brown?
The browning reaction needs a sugar and an amino acid, and what it leaves behind is not caramel. What is actually in a green coffee seed, what survives the roast, and ...
Roasting
Why Is Decaf Coffee Harder to Roast?
Decaf is harder to roast because the seed was processed a second time before it reached you, and that pass took density and structure out of it. Royal Coffee and Sweet...
Brewing
Does Ground Coffee Go Stale Faster Than Whole Bean?
Eight pages rank for this question and their shelf-life numbers disagree by roughly a factor of six. Here is the mechanism that actually governs it, so you can work ou...
Roasting
How Long Should Coffee Rest After Roasting?
Eight sources publish eight different rest windows, from 12 hours to past two weeks, and three of them blame roast level while disagreeing about which direction it run...
Brewing
Does a Finer Grind Make Coffee Stronger?
Grinding finer moves flavor, not concentration. What strength and extraction actually measure, why the extraction curve peaks, and the dial that makes a cup stronger.
Taste
What Do Coffee Tasting Notes Mean?
A tasting note is not an ingredient list. It is a set of words a roaster picked after tasting the coffee, drawn from a vocabulary somebody wrote down in advance, and i...
Origins
What Is Direct Trade Coffee?
Nobody certifies direct trade, and every page on the subject tells you to ask a roaster. We're one, we buy through importing partners, and we publish what we paid per ...
Origins
What Is a Quaker in Coffee?
Every sort between the tree and your kitchen is aimed at the unripe seed, and the pale bean in your bag got past all six of them. That makes it the one piece of eviden...
Taste
What Is a Coffee Cupping Score?
A cup score is the arithmetic total of a scorecard, and the SCA replaced its scorecard in 2024. Here is what the number is actually measured against, and what our own ...
Origins
How Is Decaf Coffee Made?
Four commercial methods remove caffeine from green coffee, and they differ only in what does the pulling. Here is what each one does, and the residual limit the field ...
