Specialty coffee prints a great deal on a bag and explains none of it. Here is what each word means and what it tells you about the cup. Start anywhere. None of it needs memorizing.
Ripe cherry, picked. Everything on the label starts here.
Country and region
On the bag: Honduras
Coffee is a crop, and like wine grapes it tastes of the place it grew. Soil, rainfall, altitude, and the varieties that do well locally combine into flavors that recur reliably enough that experienced drinkers can often guess a country from the cup.
Coffee grows between the tropics and essentially nowhere else. Ours comes from Honduras, Ethiopia, Colombia.
Some rough tendencies. Ethiopian coffees lean floral and tea-like with citrus acidity. Colombian and Honduran coffees lean toward caramel, chocolate, and nuts, with rounder body. Treat those as starting points. A single farm can defy its whole country.
Region matters as much as country, which is why our coffee pages name it. Comayagua, Honduras tells you more than "Honduras" alone, the way Napa tells you more than California.
Cherries ripen unevenly on the same branch
The farm, or the lot
On the bag: El Mirador, and on its page Finca El Mirador · Santa Lucía Estate
A lot is a batch of coffee kept separate from everything else through picking, processing, and shipping. It might be one farm, one field on that farm, or one day of harvest brought to a collection point by many smallholders.
Keeping a lot separate costs money, so it only happens when the coffee is worth the trouble. Commodity coffee is blended until it has no address. A named lot is a roaster telling you where the coffee came from and inviting you to hold them to it.
Picked by hand, ripe only, one pass at a time
Varietal
On its page: Red Bourbon, Typica
The botanical variety of the plant, which is to coffee what Cabernet Sauvignon is to wine. Nearly all specialty coffee is one species, Coffea arabica, and within it are dozens of varieties that taste meaningfully different.
Bourbon, Typica
The old classics. Sweet, balanced, dependable.
Caturra, Castillo
Workhorses, bred for yield and disease resistance.
Pacamara
A large-beaned cross with unusual, wine-like intensity.
Gesha
The famous one. Intensely floral, and priced accordingly.
Landrace, heirloom
Ethiopian shorthand for indigenous local varieties, some known only by number, growing there for centuries.
Varietal sets the ceiling. Growing, processing, and roasting decide how close the coffee gets to it.
Process
On the bag: Washed
Coffee grows as a fruit, usually called a cherry, and the bean is the seed inside. Process means how the fruit was taken off the seed after picking. It changes flavor more than anything else short of the roast, which makes it the most useful word on the bag.
1. The fruit
One cherry, usually two seeds inside it.
2. The seed
The fruit comes off, by machine or by fermentation.
3. Drying
Down to about 11 percent moisture, then it can travel.
Inside a cherry
Skin
Fruit
Mucilage, the sticky layer
Parchment, a papery husk
Seed, usually two of them
Every process is a decision about how many of those layers come off before the seed is dried, and how long the rest stay on.
A shortcut while you find your feet. Choose washed if you like tea, clarity, and a clean finish. Choose natural or anaerobic if you like big fruit and want to be surprised.
Decaf is a separate step rather than a fruit process. Ours uses ethyl acetate derived from fermented sugarcane, a compound that occurs naturally in fruit. It bonds to the caffeine and draws it out, gently enough that the coffee keeps its character.
MASL means meters above sea level. Higher is colder, and cold slows the cherry down. A slow-ripening cherry spends longer building sugars and acids and produces a denser bean with more to say. Around 1,200 meters is where specialty begins, and anything above 1,800 is high. Our highest-grown coffee is Ethiopia Dogo Sodu at 1,800 – 2,200 MASL.
1,2001,5001,8002,1002,400
1,800 – 2,200Ethiopia Dogo Sodu1,750Colombia Sugarcane Decaf1,650Honduras El Mirador, Honduras El Mirador Dark, Honduras Pacamara
Meters above sea level. Higher is colder, and a cherry that ripens slowly builds more sugar and a denser bean.
Altitude is not a score. It is a growing condition that rewards the farmer who has it, and steep cold hillsides cost more to work.
Roast level
On the bag: Medium Roast
Green coffee has almost no flavor. Roasting creates it, and how far the roast goes decides how much of the cup belongs to the coffee and how much belongs to the roast.
Darker is not stronger, and it is not more caffeine. Both of those come from how you brew.
Since "medium" means something different at every roastery, we print a measured number too. That is the Agtron scale, which has its own page.
Tasting notes
On the bag: Brown Sugar · Almond · Hazelnut
The most misread line on any bag. Nothing has been added. There is no hazelnut in the hazelnut coffee. These are the flavors the roaster found in the cup, named by reaching for the nearest familiar thing.
Treat them as a direction rather than a promise. Palates differ, and putting words to a taste takes practice. If a coffee tastes like brown sugar to you and the bag says almond, you are not wrong.
The batch number
Stamped on the bag: a code like A064
Every bag is stamped by hand with the number of the roast it came from. Type it into our batch lookup and you get the record for that exact roast.
Roasted on
The actual date. Coffee is best from a few days after roasting to about a month after, so this is the freshness date that matters, not a best-before printed a year out.
Agtron
An instrument reading of how dark the roast went, where higher is lighter. It turns "medium" from an opinion into a number. The scale is explained here.
Development
How much of the roast happened after the beans audibly cracked. Too little tastes sour and grassy, too much flattens into roast. It is the number that shows whether the roast was under control.
Very few roasters publish this. We do, for every batch.
Weight, and whole bean
On the bag: 12 oz / 340 g
Every bag we sell is 12 oz / 340 g of whole beans. We do not grind to order, because ground coffee goes stale in days while whole beans hold for weeks. A burr grinder is the biggest upgrade available to a home brewer, ahead of any machine.
Once you have the beans, our brew guides cover ratio and grind size for the common methods.
Where to start
If all of this is new, ignore it and start here instead. Pick a washed coffee at a medium roast. It is the most forgiving combination there is and a fair baseline for everything else. From our lineup that is Honduras El Mirador. For the other end of the range try Honduras Pacamara. The difference lands in the first sip. Good decaf is real, and Colombia Sugarcane Decaf is ours.
Buy small, drink it fresh, and notice which ones you reach for again. That is the whole method.
