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.
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
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, ...
Origins
Why Is Coffee Still So Expensive?
Green coffee has come down hard from its 2025 record and the shelf price has not followed. What drove the spike, why retail lags, and how specialty lots are actually p...
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.
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...
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...
