Knowledge Base
Coffee & Tea Guides
Brew better and explore more — buying guides, how-tos, and explainers for every coffee and tea ritual.
Explainer
Coffee Seed Certification: How a Variety Stays Itself
A mislabelled coffee seedling is not discovered in a season — it is discovered years later, when a block planted for rust resistance gets rust. Inside the chain of custody that is supposed to stop that happening.
Explainer
The Coffee Genome: Why Arabica Carries Two Sets of Instructions
Arabica keeps two complete sets of genetic instructions side by side; robusta keeps one. That single structural fact is why arabica breeding runs in decades, and it shapes everything reading the genome has since made possible.
Explainer
The Origin of Arabica Coffee: One Ancient Hybrid Event
Arabica is not an ancient standalone species — it is the offspring of two other coffees that crossed naturally in the African highlands long before farming. How one hybridization made the species, and why the narrow start it created still shapes every farm that grows it.
Explainer
How Many Coffee Species Are There? Roughly 130, and Only Two Matter
The genus Coffea holds roughly 130 described species, a number that keeps climbing. Almost all of them have never been farmed, and the reason is a narrow set of traits that a wild plant has to pass before it can become a crop.
Explainer
Mauritiana Coffee: The Wild Coffea Species of Reunion
Coffea mauritiana is a wild coffee species endemic to Reunion and Mauritius, known locally as cafe marron. It is not Bourbon, not Bourbon pointu, and not a variety of arabica at all.
Explainer
Anthonyi Coffee: The Self-Fertile Species Breeders Watch
A wild Central African species described only in the late 2000s, notable for one thing: unlike almost every other diploid coffee, it accepts its own pollen - and that quietly rewrites what a plant breeder is able to do.
Explainer
Coffea Congensis: The River Coffee Species Behind Congusta
A wild Coffea species of the Congo river basin, adapted to ground that floods for part of every year, and the parent behind the robusta crosses known as Congusta. What congensis actually is, why the boundary with canephora is still argued over, and why almost nobody drinks it.
Explainer
Charrieriana Coffee: The Species That Never Makes Caffeine
A wild Coffea species from one patch of Cameroonian forest, described in 2008, whose seeds are reported to contain essentially no caffeine at all. Why that is not the same thing as decaf.
Explainer
Coffee Export Documents: What Travels With the Container
A green coffee shipment is followed across the ocean by a document set, and each document answers a different question for a different authority. What each one is, who issues it, and why a contradiction between two of them strands more containers than any missing form.
Explainer
Togo Coffee: The One-Region Robusta Origin of the Plateaux
Togo grows robusta in a single upland zone in the south-west, where coffee and cocoa share the same plots, the same shade and the same buyers. What that one-region, two-crop reality means for volumes, quality and traceability.
Explainer
Ghanaian Coffee: The Origin Cocoa Crowded Out
Ghana grows coffee, almost entirely robusta, in the western forest belt and the Volta highlands. It grows very little of it, and the reason is institutional rather than agricultural.
Explainer
Coffea Racemosa: The Fast, Low-Caffeine Coffee Species Nobody Grows
Coffea racemosa ripens fast, survives drought by dropping its leaves and carries little caffeine without decaffeination. So why is it nowhere? The honest economics of coffee’s most over-hyped outlier species.
Explainer
Stenophylla Coffee: The Species That Came Back
A West African coffee species written off a century ago for its low yields, missing from the wild record for decades, and now the plant a warming coffee industry is most curious about — with the hype carefully separated from the evidence.
Explainer
Eugenioides Coffee: Arabica's Parent Species, Not a Variety
One of arabica's two parent species, native to the East African highlands, grown deliberately on only a handful of farms and poured mostly on competition stages — and why almost none of your arabica-variety intuitions survive contact with it.
Explainer
Mokka: The Tiny-Bean Coffee Variety, Not the Drink
Mokka is a dwarf arabica whose seeds are so small they are routinely mistaken for defects or peaberries. Here is what that one trait costs at the mill and in the roaster.
Explainer
Venecia Coffee Variety: Costa Rica's Late-Ripening Selection
Venecia is a dwarf Costa Rican selection that ripens weeks later than Caturra so a farm can pick after the rains, not during them. Its record is thin and partly contradictory, and that tells you how variety registers really work.
Explainer
Sigararutang: The Coffee Variety Named ‘Pay the Debt’
Sigararutang dominates smallholder arabica planting in northern Sumatra, and its Batak name is usually translated as “pay the debt.” It spread because it bears early and fruits almost continuously — a liquidity property, not a cupping one — and that trade-off shapes every lot.
Explainer
Andungsari: The Arabica Indonesia Bred for Itself
Andungsari is one of the few arabicas Indonesia selected and released for itself, out of the national coffee and cocoa research institute in East Java. What the record actually supports about its lineage, its rust rating and where it grows.
Explainer
Araponga MG1: The Brazilian Coffee Variety That Isn't a Sarchimor
Araponga MG1 is a rust-resistant Brazilian arabica from the EPAMIG programme, named for a mountain municipality in eastern Minas Gerais. Two things everyone repeats about it do not survive the record: it is not a Sarchimor, and it is not tall.
Explainer
Catiguá MG: Brazil's Rust-Resistant Family, Number by Number
Catiguá is not one variety but three numbered Brazilian cultivars from a single 1980 cross, and only MG2 really left the research plots. What the record documents, what it leaves thin, and why calling Catiguá a Sarchimor is wrong.
Explainer
Bourbon Mayaguez Coffee Variety: BM139 and BM71 Explained
Bourbon Mayaguez is not one plant but a pair of numbered Bourbon selections, BM139 and BM71, that dominate planting in Rwanda and Burundi. The number is a nursery accession code, not a brand — and it says nothing about cup quality.
Explainer
Mibirizi Coffee Variety: The Great Lakes Typica Surprise
Mibirizi is one of the two old workhorse selections behind Great Lakes coffee, named for a mission area in south-western Rwanda. It has been sold under the Bourbon umbrella for generations, but the genetic classification puts it somewhere else entirely.
Explainer
Muyinga Coffee: Inside Burundi's Lower, Drier North-East
Burundi's north-east sits east of the Congo-Nile crest, not on it. Muyinga is where you can see exactly what altitude and infrastructure buy a Burundian lot.
Explainer
Kirimiro Coffee: Inside Burundi's Central Plateau Region
Kirimiro is Burundi's central-plateau coffee zone around Gitega — and it is a natural region, not a province. Here is what that distinction actually tells you, and what the plateau does to the cup.