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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Nepalese Coffee: A Young, High-Altitude Himalayan Origin
Nepalese coffee is arabica grown on steep Himalayan terraces between roughly 800 and 1,600 meters, north of the classic coffee belt. Its districts, unusually late harvest, cooperative wet mills and honest limits, explained.
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Ivory Coast Coffee: The Robusta Giant That Cocoa Shrank
Ivory Coast coffee is almost entirely low-grown robusta, and the origin's long decline is best explained by land use rather than weather: cocoa took the hectares.
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Cameroon Coffee: Two Species, Two Landscapes
Cameroon is one of Africa's clearest two-species origins: arabica on the volcanic western highlands, robusta in the lowlands below. Here is what each side grows.
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Zimbabwean Coffee: Collapse and Rebuilding in the Eastern Highlands
Zimbabwe grows washed arabica in the Eastern Highlands around Chipinge, and today produces a small fraction of what it did at its peak. Here is where it grows, what it tastes like, and why the coffee reaching specialty buyers now comes from smallholder groups rather than estates.
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Malawian Coffee: Misuku Hills and an Outsized Variety Cabinet
Malawi grows very little coffee, but its smallholder sector keeps an unusually wide set of arabica varieties, Geisha among them. Here are the regions, altitudes and cup.
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Amazonas Coffee: Peru's Quiet Northern Fine-Cup Pocket
Amazonas is a cloud-covered Andean department of northern Peru, not the rainforest basin. Its small coffee sector has built a reputation on processing care and floral, sweet cups.
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Cusco Coffee: The Remote High Valleys of Southern Peru
Cusco coffee is sweet, chocolatey washed Arabica from the steep valleys of La Convencion, north of the city and past Machu Picchu. Remoteness shapes everything about it, and Machu Picchu coffee is a place name, not a grade.
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Junin Coffee: Chanchamayo, Satipo and Peru's Historic Central Zone
Junin coffee comes from the Chanchamayo and Satipo valleys of central Peru: creamy, caramel-sweet and dark-fruited. A guide to Peru's oldest coffee zone, the rust reckoning that reshaped it, and what grows there now.
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San Martin Coffee: Peru's High-Volume Amazonian Slope
San Martin is one of Peru's largest coffee departments by volume: lower, wetter, and built on cooperative organization and certification rather than micro-lots.
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Cajamarca Coffee: Peru's Northern Specialty Heartland
Cajamarca coffee is washed Arabica from northern Peru's Jaen and San Ignacio provinces — the origin that repeatedly tops Peru's quality competitions with lots from tiny farms.
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The Coffee Drying Phase: From Turning Point to Yellowing
The first stage of a roast drives the free moisture out of green coffee. What happens between the turning point and yellowing, and what goes wrong at each extreme.
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Coffee Blending: How Roasters Actually Build a Blend
Blending is a design job, not a mixture. How roasters set a flavor target, assign component roles, test ratios, choose pre-roast or post-roast, and hold a profile all year.
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Coffee Sample Roasting: How Green Coffee Gets Evaluated
Sample roasting is a small, deliberately neutral roast that lets the green coffee be judged rather than the roast. Here is how it works, and why it should not taste good.
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Coffee Batch Size: Why Roast Profiles Do Not Transfer
Coffee batch size is the green mass charged against a roaster's rated capacity, and it rewrites the roast. Here is why a profile never transfers between sizes.
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Coffee Airflow in Roasting: What the Fan Actually Does
Airflow is the hot air pulled through the roasting chamber: the roaster's main lever between conduction and convection, and how chaff and smoke leave the drum.
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Tekisic Coffee Variety: El Salvador's Improved Bourbon
Tekisic is an improved Bourbon selected in El Salvador over three decades for yield without losing the cup. It has no rust resistance — and stays planted anyway.
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Cuscatleco Coffee Variety: El Salvador's Rust-Resistant Sarchimor
Cuscatleco is El Salvador's rust-resistant Sarchimor from the T-5296 line. Here is its contested pedigree, its field behaviour, and the epidemic that made it matter.
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Ouro Verde Coffee Variety: A Compact Brazilian Arabica Cultivar
IAC Ouro Verde is a compact Brazilian arabica bred from Catuaí Amarelo and Mundo Novo. Its short internodes and dense canopy exist to make mechanised dense planting work.
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Rubi Coffee Variety: Brazil's Mundo Novo x Catuai Workhorse
Rubi MG 1192 is a Brazilian commercial arabica selected from Mundo Novo x Catuai material for vigour, yield and adaptability rather than disease resistance. Here is what the plant is, what its number means, and how it compares.
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Tupi Coffee Variety: Brazil's Rust-Resistant Sarchimor Dwarf
Tupi is a dwarf Brazilian arabica from the Sarchimor line, bred by IAC for leaf-rust resistance in a plant compact enough for dense, mechanised planting.
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Roast Weight Loss in Coffee: Shrinkage Bands and How to Track It
Every batch of coffee leaves the roaster lighter than it went in — here is what that mass loss is made of, the percentage bands to expect by roast level, and why it is one of the simplest quality-control signals a roaster owns.
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Cooling Coffee After Roasting: Why the Last Minutes Matter
Coffee leaving the roaster still carries enough stored heat to keep cooking itself, which is why how fast — and how — you cool it quietly decides how the cup tastes.
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Drop Temperature in Coffee Roasting: What the Number Really Means
Drop temperature is the bean-probe reading at which a roaster ends the batch — a timestamp for when you stopped, not a measurement of what you actually made.
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Turning Point in Coffee Roasting: Charge Temperature Explained
The turning point is the thermal minimum early in a roast, and reading it tells you whether your charge temperature and batch size actually matched the machine.