Coffee is a beverage that is easily identified, though often misunderstood. You might think of it as “bitter”, “bright”, or “earthy”, but one thing that coffee drinkers can almost always agree upon is that they get pleasure from it in some way whether it be an aroma, flavor, a jolt of caffeine, or even simply nostalgia. The love of coffee encompasses the globe, and since we all see it in a different context it is sometimes difficult to express why one coffee is enjoyable and another is not.
Coffee is often compared to wine by industry professionals to help give a reference point in understanding how it has a wide range of possibilities. Often the first question to be asked about wine is “white or red?” This is the simplest distinguishing character in wine, and it is almost universally understood.
Similarly, it is quite common when selecting a coffee to ask “light, medium, or dark roast?” This very basic decision is often thought to be the primary distinction in flavor, and in certain cases this is true (especially with darker roasts). Unfortunately the roast level distinction has no universal standard, with huge variance from product to product and company to company. Because of this variance one of our core goals at Roast Ratings is to identify and describe all coffees by actual flavor character.
If coffee were a uniform and unchanging product we would have a pretty simple job as coffee professionals. However, much like any harvested crop around the world, there is a wide range of quality potential in coffee. Because it begins its life as the seed of a cherry on a tree, and must be cared for all the way until it reaches your lips in the form of a drink there is the potential for variance, as well as some pretty big challenges in delivering the best cup to you, the coffee drinker time after time.
The following slides showcase many of the challenges that are faced on the professional side of the industry as coffee journeys to your taste buds.
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- Varietal. Just like pinot noir or cabernet wines, coffee varieties like “bourbon” or “SL-28” each have distinct flavor character. Photo by Cafe Imports
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- Growing elevation. Higher quality beans come from higher areas and tend to be more dense and bright. The beans develop more slowly, giving more time for sugar production in the cherry
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- Climate and Environment. Temperature, soil, and rainfall can all affect a coffee’s potential
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- Ripeness. A dark red color is usually considered the ideal ripeness for picking, and often the cherries will ripen at different times making it more difficult to harvest
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- Harvesting. A lot of coffee around the world is picked by hand, and those cherries each has only 2 beans inside
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- Processing. Coffee processing entails removing the fruit and cleaning the bean so it can be roasted. This picture shows the first step in the “washed process”, removing the beans from the fruit skin
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- Drying. The coffee must be dried to preserve it for export and storage. Workers rake and turn the beans regularly to ensure they are dried evenly
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- An alternative method is to dry the fruit onto the beans and remove it all later. This is difficult to do well and takes longer to finish. The cherries are yellow in this picture
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- Storage. After the beans are dried, they are packed for export. This storage may be the only barrier between the elements and the coffee until it is roasted, so a plastic liner can help preserve it
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- Shipping. Almost all coffee in the world is shipped to countries where it will be consumed via containers. These can be subject to customs delays, in extreme cases sitting in the sun for months
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- Roasting is its own art. Once the raw materials have made it to the roasting company, they must have the skill and care to bring out its best characteristics
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- Freshness. Flavor character tends to flatten and become stale or bland over time. Preserving or delivering the ideal freshness takes strong logistics from a roaster
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- Grinding. Getting an ideal grind particle for your brew has a big impact on flavor. Professionals go to great lengths to “dial in” their grind, but at home it can take a little trial and error
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- Brewing. The ground beans must be brewed properly to extract the full flavor. No pressure baristas, if you mess it up now everything that happened before this point will be a shadow of its potential
All of this variation and challenge is being identified and refined over time. We are seeing this with other industries as well, and it is truly an exciting time to learn about food products in general. Regardless of the depths of knowledge that some people go to for what they consume, the goal should be the same: to have something tasty.
