Learning resources for specialty coffee professionals and enthusiasts including glossaries, guides, articles, eBooks and more covering different aspects of the specialty coffee supply chain.
"In many cases, a roaster will make choices about heat application based on final, intended use. An espresso roast will differ significantly from a drip roast based on known effects on the final flavor profile. Not long ago at the Crown office, Jen, Evan, and I were speculating about what choices might be made specifically during the roast that affect a coffee’s solubility. We regularly brew and take measurements of extraction percentages of our Crown Jewel selections, and occasionally theorize about why one particular roast seems to extract differently than a second roast of the same coffee. Could roasting styles be quantified in terms of time, temperature, extraction percentage, and TDS?"
Read"Once a coffee cherry is picked from the branch, every step it takes until it’s brewed is a desperate act of preservation, a struggle against the entropy that will inevitably degrade the dying seed. In a perfect world, short distances traveled in stable environments would contribute to that preservation… but the coffee drinking world isn’t confined to the tropical climes in which the tree thrives."
Read"We have been observing and collecting data in Santa Elena as part of the Catracha Quality Project to improve upon green coffee processing strategies. (See related Catracha articles here). But once the coffee is ready to ship from Honduras, we cannot ride along in the container as it makes its ocean journey to Oakland, California. We expect the conditions to be harsh and accordingly have elected to ship Catracha coffee in GrainPro at an additional cost of about 5 cents per pound."
Read"When the Catracha Quality Project began, Catracha organizers encouraged producers to focus on the quality of the coffee by selecting ripe cherry. In the Royal Blog last week, Arvin Juan presented a post-harvest process map, the result of two years of observing practices and interviewing producers. It’s a visual tool for identifying best practices with producers in Santa Elena (if you haven’t been following this project, here is a good place to start)."
Read"For the last several weeks, members of the Catracha Quality Project have been presenting results of a data survey conducted during the 2016 harvest season in Santa Elena, Honduras. To go back and read some of that work — which includes detailed process maps and an analysis of correlation between cherry selection and cup score — I suggest beginning here."
Read""When we started the Catracha Quality Project (CQP), our first goal was to create a map to visualize how the Catracha producers were processing coffee from cherry to dried parchment. Over the last two harvests in Santa Elena, we interviewed producers and observed their practices to create a post-harvest process map. This map outlines current practices and is a visual tool for identifying best practices with producers in Santa Elena."
Read"One of my favorite things about coffee is the potential for a multitude of experiences and opinions. No two people experience a coffee the same way, and while leaders in the industry are working on developing a common language, there are still so many important individual nuances to tasting."
Read"In what might be a foolhardy attempt to correlate two of coffee’s most complicated concepts, I’ve dedicated a significant portion of the past few months to examining the relationship between the water activity of green coffee and the Maillard reaction during roasting. It’s something my colleague Jen Apodaca and I often discuss when analyzing coffees for Royal’s Crown Jewel lineup: Does water activity affect roasting style? Our colleague over at Red Fox Coffee Merchants, Joel Edwards, has written a bit about it, too. Ironically, of the three major reasons you might measure a coffee’s water activity, deciding on a roasting style is probably the least important."
Read"Curiosity is among my favorite human instincts. It drives innovation, encourages thinking outside the box, and is spurred by such a simple question a two-year-old can ask it: “Why?” Of course, answering the why – whether in life in general or coffee in particular – is never as easy as asking. But we need curiosity in the coffee industry, whether we are producers, roasters, baristas, or consumers. It can spur improvements in processing methods, motivate new brewing and roasting equipment, or even reshape the supply chain."
Read"Sugar is not a common topic of conversation in specialty coffee – at least, not in the ‘one lump or two?’ sense. While focusing on how to improve the taste and quality of our product, we’ve forgotten that the vast majority of coffee consumers take their coffee with cream and sugar. Without the support of these sweetened coffee drinkers, our industry wouldn’t be where it is today."
Read"Despite the fact that coffee comes equipped with a natural insecticide (caffeine), it is still susceptible to sporadic insect infestation. Royal Coffee experienced a pest-related incident that affected thousands of pounds of green coffee over the summer of 2017. The treatment required freezing green coffee, and we thought to ourselves, as we are wont to do, “Why not turn this into an opportunity to experiment?”"
Read"It all started with a pretty benign suggestion. Bob Fulmer mentioned the long history of Alfred Klein and coffees from Finca San Carlos to me in passing, and dropped a line introducing us. What followed, over the course of a few weeks, was an exchange totaling over 5000 words and eventually filling numerous blog posts (you can check out Part I, Part II, and Part III. I hope to have more in the future)."
Read"Hang up your hats and tie up those high horses, the great caffeine debate can be put to rest. All roasts are created equal. That’s right. Under normal circumstances an 8oz cup of light roast has about the same amount of caffeine as the same serving of dark roast."
Read"Last month I spent a few weeks playing with the rate of extraction, and came up with some interesting findings. Notably, I learned that the majority of extraction happens within the first 90 seconds of brewing; by that point most of the solids that are going to wash out of the coffee bean and into the brew already have. This experiment also drove home the importance of sensory analysis to dialing and brewing; relying on a refractometer will not give much indication of how delicious the cup of coffee is."
Read"With the emergence of scientific manuals like the SCA’s Water Quality Handbook and the Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood and Christopher Hendon collaboration Water for Coffee, baristas and roasters are more aware than ever of the critical role of water in coffee quality. Here at the Crown, we’re less interested in prescribing a formula than we are experimenting with possibilities… so we’ve recently been tinkering with water and investigating what kinds of flavors might spring up. Before heading downstream in Part II of this two-part series, which will dive into sensory data, Part I will solidify some H2O basics, and get to the source of our brewing possibilities. We’ll also look at some practical methods for testing and preparing your water."
Read"In the first half of this series, we took a shallow dive into the deep pool of information on the chemistry and composition of water, while exploring what kinds of options coffee professionals have at their disposal for conditioning that water. In Part II, I’d like to focus on the sensory data collected specifically at the Crown, and what kinds of conclusions we can make about water formulas and coffee flavor."
Read"One of the numerous variables identified for altering the strength and flavor of a brewed coffee is the grinder’s setting, which affects the particle size and shape of ground coffee, with dramatic implications for the flavor profile of a coffee beverage. The size and shape of ground coffee particles directly corresponds to the available surface area for interaction with water during brewing, a key consideration in the final total dissolved solids (TDS) in the brew and the extraction percentage of the spent grounds. Grind settings can also impact variables such as the rate of staling or degassing of the coffee."
Read"Over here at The Crown, we taste a lot of coffee–so much that we probably spit out more than we swallow (can you believe that?). Between slurps, we describe each coffee in as much detail as possible. We are encouraged to be creative and specific, which sometimes produces grandiloquent and/or superfluous language to delineate our subjective experience of the coffee. Every week, as part of our Crown Jewel analysis, we brew the same coffee and alter one variable (e.g. brew device, grind size, water temperature). We then taste the two side-by-side and list our flavor notes for samples A and B. After numerous cuppings and several of these CJ analyses, I witnessed how we tend to generate completely different flavor notes for the same coffee. For A we may write “Apple, Caramel, and Cardamom”, while for B write “Orange, Melon, and Milk Chocolate.”"
Read"Some Important Math to Help You Mix Waters of Different TDS Tasting Room Director Sandra Elisa Loofbourow and I recently ran into a difficult problem to solve at the Crown, and wanted to share some of the work it took to figure out how to mix two different waters to achieve a desired concentration and volume. Our problem started with needing a specific water formula for an event."
Read"It’s no secret that I love a good density reading. In terms of ease of measurement and how much it can tell you about your green coffee, the metric is unmatched. I’m also a giant nerd for amateur data sleuthing, and looking back over many years of Crown Jewel data recently led me to wonder a little about how precise and repeatable our practices are. I decided to compare four measurement techniques, using five coffees at varying densities, and see if I could find anything meaningful."
Read"Coffee is a highly complex compound. With roughly 200 volatile compounds in green coffee and roasted expressing upwards of 1,000, there are so many factors at play that can alter the sensory experience of the final cup. The consumer-facing side of the coffee industry may roll its eyes at flavor notes like apricot, sweet pear and lemon, but these flavor notes are in fact not entirely subjective. Flavors are correlated to the sensory experience associated with certain molecules: tartaric acid to berries, citric acid to lemons, esters to florals and so on."
Read"Between the months of December 2022 and June 2023, The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab & Tasting Room designed and carried out a research project to investigate what sensory changes might be observed in green coffees that have been frozen in commonly available packaging types: Ziploc and vacuum sealed. We stored, roasted and cupped three coffees over six months and compared them with a control sample stored in GrainPro packaging in a climate-controlled room set to between 20 and 22.2 degrees C (68 and 72 degrees F)."
Read"A few years ago I weighed in on the Royal blog on caffeine in coffee, and its relationship to roast degree. I’m pleased to say that some very smart folks at Berry College and Drexel University have published a paper in Scientific Reports recently that sets the record straight, and I’m thrilled that Royal Coffee proudly contributed coffee to the research."
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