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.
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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 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.
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...
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 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
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 ...