Carlsen Zachary - The new rules for coffee: a modern guide for everyone

1 | Rules for Coffee Around the World

RULE 1

Coffee is a fruit.

Your favorite cup of coffee started life looking more like what you might bake in a pie than what you might brew in a cup.

The roasted coffee product we grind, brew, and consume begins life as the seed inside a piece of fruit. The genus of flowering plant Coffea produces sweet red fruit, commonly called coffee cherries. The seed of that fruitthe so-called bean, which grows in the middle of the pulpy cherry like a tiny cherry pitis what we process, export across the planet, roast, brew, and serve as a delicious, stimulating beverage. Your favorite cup of coffee started life looking more like what you might bake in a pie than what you might brew in a cup.

Coffea is a member of the taxonomical family Rubiaceae , a family of small trees and flowering shrubs. There are several species of coffee, but for our purposes well outline the two that are most commonly grown for coffee drinking: Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora . Arabica is what high-end, flavor-focused coffee has been built around, and indeed, the tagline 100 percent arabica is still used to denote quality (although at really good cafes, this is naturally assumed and doesnt need to be shouted out). Arabica is fussy, prone to disease, difficult to manage, dangerously overplanted as a monocropand capable of producing absolutely incredible cups of coffee.

Canephora is better known as robusta, its taxonomic nom de brew. Robusta is hearty, fights off disease remarkably well, is comparatively easy to grow, has twice the caffeine of arabica, and is somewhat less deliciousit has traditionally evoked the flavor profile of burnt rubber. That dark, automotive turpentine note you get in traditional Italian espresso? Thats robusta. But in the spirit of this book, we should note that there are some new rules for robusta being written right now, as coffee agronomists and experts push the boundaries for improving cup quality in robusta around the world. Right now arabica is the specialty industry standard for high-quality coffee, but in another ten years, who knows?

Just like wine grapes, arabica or robusta plants have their own typicity and genetic diversity. Arabica can self-pollinate, and is capable of genetic mutation; in high-end coffee, more and more attention is being paid to the characteristics of different varieties of arabica plants in particular. Some major varieties of arabica include Bourbon, Typica, Caturra, and Pacamara, but there are multitudes of cultivars. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir have different flavor profiles and grow better in different conditions, and of course have their fan clubs. So do coffee varieties, and coffee drinkers can now fall in love with Geisha, which tends to have notes of floral jasmine; Pache, a mutation of the Typica variety first discovered in Guatemala; and even Wush Wush, a rare coffee variety first discovered (or perhaps first cultivated?) in Ethiopia, but growing happily today in Colombia as well.

Regardless, youre talking about a piece of fruit with seeds inside.

Coffee-Growing Regions, Typical Processing Style, and Flavor Notes

Coffee is a hearty shrub that can survive in a variety of environmentsand can make for a wonderful houseplant! But the finest coffees are cultivated in the Tropics, the areas that hug the equator between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. Tropical climates and high elevations are perfect growing conditions for top-quality coffee. There are outliers and there are places where lower-grade coffees thrive, but the coffee grown in East Africa, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific are where most of the top-scoring coffee is grown, and thats much of what youll find at todays high-end cafes.

We used to think of coffee flavor characteristics as being inherently tied to the world map, a concept popularized by Starbucks with its Coffee Passport program in the 1990s. Today this notion is antiquated; while there are general flavor characteristics for coffees grown in Kenya and Brazil and everywhere else, modern coffee farms have access to an ever-growing amount of information on growing, processing, and drying styles, which affect flavor far more than any national border does. As exporting becomes more transparent and easier to trace, coffee flavor characteristics can now be seen as a matter of microclimates and farm-specific conditions and practices, and should not be generalized. No two Kenyan or Brazilian coffee artisans do their thing the same way.

COFFEE GROWING COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD