Knowledge Base
Coffee & Tea Guides
Brew better and explore more — buying guides, how-tos, and explainers for every coffee and tea ritual.
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Coffee Cooperatives: How Farmers Pool to Reach the Market
Coffee cooperatives let smallholder farmers pool cherries to process, export and negotiate together — how they are structured and where they fall short.
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Coffee Sorting: How Defects Are Removed From Green Coffee
Coffee sorting separates hulled green coffee by size, density and colour and removes defective beans, turning a milled harvest into a clean, gradeable lot.
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Coffee Hulling: Removing Parchment at the Dry Mill
Coffee hulling is the dry-mill step that strips dried parchment or cherry husk off the green bean before export - how hullers work and why it decides grade.
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Coffee Intercropping: Growing Coffee With Other Crops
Coffee intercropping means growing coffee with shade trees, bananas, fruit and vines instead of a bare monoculture — its benefits, trade-offs and companions.
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Coffee Mulching: Why Growers Cover the Soil
Coffee mulching covers the soil around trees to hold moisture, smother weeds, curb erosion and rebuild soil. Benefits, materials, application and trade-offs.
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Coffee Fertilization: Feeding the Tree for Yield and Quality
Coffee fertilization replaces nutrients a heavy harvest strips from soil. Learn key nutrients, deficiency signs, feeding timing, and organic vs synthetic.
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Coffee Root Rot: Armillaria, Rosellinia and Soil Fungi
Coffee root rot is a group of soil fungi — Armillaria, Rosellinia and brown root rot — that kill trees in spreading patches. Learn the signs and control.
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Coffee Mealybug: Sap-Sucking Pests, Sooty Mould and Ants
The coffee mealybug (Planococcus spp.) drains sap, breeds sooty mould and is tended by ants — learn its damage and the famous Kenya biocontrol story.
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White Stem Borer: The Beetle That Rings Coffee Trees
The white stem borer (Xylotrechus quadripes) is a longhorn beetle whose larvae tunnel arabica trunks until the tree is ring-barked and dies.
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Black Twig Borer: The Ambrosia Beetle That Kills Coffee Branches
The black twig borer (Xylosandrus compactus) is a 1.5 mm ambrosia beetle that bores into coffee twigs and farms a fungus that wilts and kills the branch above.
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Coffee Anthracnose: Colletotrichum on Berries and Branches
Coffee anthracnose is a group of Colletotrichum diseases that sink dark lesions into cherries and kill twigs. Here is how to spot and control it.
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Brown Eye Spot in Coffee: Cercospora, Causes and Control
Brown eye spot (Cercospora coffeicola) makes grey-centred, yellow-haloed leaf lesions and blotched cherries on stressed coffee — how to spot and manage it.
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Antestia Bug: The Pest Behind Coffee's Potato Taste Defect
East Africa's most notorious coffee pest, the antestia bug punctures cherries and triggers the dreaded potato taste defect. Here's how growers fight back.
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Coffee Parchment (Pergamino): What It Is and Why It Matters
Coffee parchment (pergamino) is the papery endocarp sealing each coffee seed. Where it sits in the cherry, why coffee rests in parchment, and how it is hulled.
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The Coffee Plant Lifecycle: From Seed to Harvest
A stage-by-stage guide to the coffee plant lifecycle, from seed and the soldier stage through nursery, flowering, and cherry ripening to decades of harvest.
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Specialty vs Commodity Coffee: What's the Difference?
Specialty coffee is scored 80+ on the SCA scale, traceable, and sold on quality; commodity coffee is bulk-graded and priced off the C-market.
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Coffee Pruning: Stumping, Capping and Renewal
Coffee pruning renews a tree's productive wood and holds it at a pickable height — how single-stem, multi-stem, capping, bending and stumping systems work.
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Heirloom Coffee: Ethiopia's Landrace Varieties Explained
On an Ethiopian coffee bag, "heirloom" stands in for thousands of undocumented indigenous landrace arabica varieties. Here's what the term really means.
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Coffee Nematodes: The Hidden Root Pests Explained
Coffee nematodes are microscopic roundworms that attack coffee roots, cutting yield while masquerading as a nutrient problem. How to spot and control them.
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IHCAFE 90 Coffee Variety: Honduras's Rust-Resistant Catimor
IHCAFE 90 is a rust-resistant Catimor arabica bred by Honduras's coffee institute around 1990 — Timor Hybrid x Caturra, high yield, fading rust resistance.
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The Coffee Price Crisis: Why Farmers Earn So Little
The coffee price crisis is the recurring gap between the global commodity price and what it costs to grow coffee. Here is why it keeps happening and who pays.
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Coffee Leaf Miner: Lifecycle, Damage and Management
The coffee leaf miner is a tiny moth whose larvae tunnel inside coffee leaves, cutting photosynthesis and yield — its lifecycle, damage and management.
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Valle del Cauca Coffee: Colombia's Western Region
Valle del Cauca coffee grows on western Colombia's Andean slopes near the Eje Cafetero. Explore its altitude, harvests, varieties and sweet, balanced cup.
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Coffee Mucilage: The Sticky Layer That Shapes Flavor
Coffee mucilage is the sugar-rich pectin layer between pulp and parchment, and how producers treat it in processing shapes a coffee's sweetness and body.