Origins
What Is the Timor Hybrid?
One 1920s arabica-robusta cross gave coffee its rust resistance. The genetics behind Catimor, Sarchimor, and two coffees on our own shelf, explained.
Learn
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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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 ...
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...
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...
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...
Origins
What Is Ethiopian Coffee?
The region on an Ethiopian label is a trading habit that outlived its system. Four specifications decide the cup instead, and a good listing publishes all of them.
Origins
What Is Kenyan Coffee?
Kenya's grading letters measure the bean, not the cup. Here is how the country description holds up against one bag we actually bought, published notes and all.
Origins
What Is Brazilian Coffee?
Brazil grows more coffee than anyone else, which is why the word on the bag spans a wider range of quality than any other origin. Two reputations, both honestly report...
Origins
What Is Peruvian Coffee?
Peru is planted to older trees than almost anywhere else, and that single fact runs through everything: the yields, the rust, the organic certification, and the price ...
Origins
What Is El Salvador Coffee?
El Salvador built its name on washed Bourbon. What the country plants and dries now has moved further than the guides describing it, and our own lot is the proof.
