Origins
What Is Yeast Fermentation in Coffee?
Fermenting coffee with wild microbes is the default. A growing number of producers add a chosen yeast strain on purpose, and two peer-reviewed studies measure exactly ...
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 “processing” · see all of Learn
Origins
What Is Lactic Fermentation in Coffee?
Most explanations credit Lactobacillus for a lactic-processed coffee's creamy tang. A 2019 peer-reviewed study says the real story runs through two different bacteria,...
Origins
What Is Anaerobic Fermentation in Coffee?
A 2022 study found a sealed anaerobic coffee fermentation is dominated by different microbes than the lactic acid bacteria popular coffee writing usually credits for it.
Origins
What Is Monsooned Coffee?
Producers on India's Malabar Coast hold green Arabica and Robusta in humid monsoon air for twelve weeks to six months on purpose, and two academic papers and a governm...
Origins
Does Co-Fermented Coffee Actually Taste Better?
A Colombian lab trial compared pineapple-inoculated and spontaneous coffee fermentation and found real chemical differences, and why one farm, three tasters, and an un...
Origins
Does Honey-Processed Coffee Ferment While It Dries?
A 2024 microbiology study traces exactly what takes over a honey-processed coffee bed while it dries, bacteria first, then yeast, and shows why "no fermentation tank" ...
Origins
What Is Carbonic Maceration in Coffee?
Carbonic maceration borrows wine's 'intracellular fermentation' claim, but the one peer-reviewed study on coffee cherries never actually measured it.
Origins
What Is a Coffee Cherry?
A coffee cherry has five layers around its seed and usually two of them inside. What happens to the fruit after picking is why the same shelf can hold both a washed an...
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, ...
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.
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...
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...
Origins
What Is Natural Process Coffee?
Natural process names an operation performed at origin. Four naturals on one shelf run from mango and papaya to milk chocolate and roasted almond, which is what the wo...
