January 01, 2021
What is the aroma of coffee? Is aroma and flavour the same? Aroma is one of the primary coffee qualities denoting a coffee's flavour along with body, acidity, sweetness, bitterness, and aftertaste. A coffee's aroma is one of the main categories used by professional coffee tasters (cuppers) to judge the quality of a coffee.
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December 15, 2020
So, how do you evaluate the flavours of a coffee? Tasting something and being able to describe it analytically is both difficult and requires specific experience; that’s why it tends to be a little bit scary for many at the beginning.
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December 01, 2020
Everyone loves crema in a coffee. But how does it form? Beautiful crema. For a long, long time the appearance and quality of crema were the defining characteristics with which the quality of an espresso was judged. Traditionally, the perfect crema is a deep, reddish hazelnut colour that will hold a teaspoon of sugar for several seconds.
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November 15, 2020
What does it mean that coffee has strength? Is it going to knock me out? Because there is no standard that provides coffee strength guidance, this term has been widely misunderstood, used in very different contexts and, as a result, it creates confusion amongst many.
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November 01, 2020
So, is acidity in coffee good or bad? Well… it depends. There are good and bad acids where taste is concerned. Though there are many sources of acidity in coffee, it is only a mildly acidic beverage, with a pH of around 5, as compared to the pH of 2 in wine.
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October 15, 2020
Water 💧 is the quiet and elusive partner of coffee. You need it to make coffee and it can change the flavour of it depending on the subtle differences in water composition. Recently, there has been a resurrection of research around the water composition and the quality of coffee. 👩🏽🔬 A key notion to take on board is that good tasting water does not necessarily mean good tasting coffee. For example, the bicarbonate content that makes a branded bottled water very smooth water to drink is basically responsible for removing acidity and sweetness in coffee.
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October 15, 2020
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October 01, 2020
The extraction of the coffee is at the core of any brewing or coffee-making process. When water passes through the coffee, it extracts some of the compounds and flavours and leaves some behind. It is the surprising complexity of this process that gives us so much of an intrigue as well as frustration when making coffee.
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September 15, 2020
There are endless flavour notes to coffee. You can practice observing these through a coffee tasting technique called coffee cupping. In order to achieve the most consistent results, the “cupper” (which could be you) needs to follow very specific but simple procedures:
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September 01, 2020
After picking the ripe coffee cherries collected from the Coffea plant, the coffee beans are extracted by using a specific processing method. As already said in our last blog, there are 3 main processing methods: washed (or wet) process; dry (or natural) process and honey (or semi-dry) process.
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August 15, 2020
After picking the ripe coffee cherries collected from the Coffea plant, the coffee beans are extracted by using a specific processing method. There are 3 main processing methods: washed (or wet) process; dry (or natural) process and honey (or semi-dry) process. The washed process is the one that dominates the world of specialty coffee.
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August 01, 2020
There are two Coffea (coffee) species that make up nearly all the coffee grown for consumer consumption; these are Coffea Robusta and Coffea Arabica. We have discussed the latter in our last blog, so let's focus on the Robusta coffee bean today.
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