Roasting
Does Roast Level Affect Caffeine Content?
A 2024 university study on roast level and caffeine found the real peak sits in medium roasts, not light or dark, and that brewing method moves the needle more than ro...
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Notes from the roastery: what we buy, how we roast it, and what we have learned building coffee programs on the Gulf Coast.
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Taste
What Is Aftertaste in Coffee?
What actually causes a coffee's aftertaste, how the cupping form scores it, and why roast level and brew method change what lingers after you swallow.
Taste
What Is Chlorogenic Acid in Coffee?
Chlorogenic acid makes up a large share of green coffee. Roasting breaks down nearly 90 percent of it into lactones, quinic acid, and bitterness compounds.
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...
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 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.
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...
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...
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...
