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.
Tagged “tasting notes” · see all of Learn
Taste
Why Does Coffee Taste Like Fruit When Nothing Fruity Was Added?
Why does coffee taste like fruit when nothing fruity is in the cup? The answer is retronasal smell, the mechanism most tasting notes never actually explain.
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
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.
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.
