Knowledge Base
Coffee & Tea Guides
Brew better and explore more — buying guides, how-tos, and explainers for every coffee and tea ritual.
Explainer
Drought and Tea: Why the Flush Stops Instead of Shrinking
Tea is plucked continuously, so a dry spell does not damage the crop — it removes the weeks in which the crop would have grown. Inside the mechanism, from banjhi buds to the surge when the rain finally returns.
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Frost and Tea: Why the Bush Survives but the Flush Does Not
The bush is hardy and the crop is not, so a tea garden's whole frost risk lands on a few clear, still nights in spring — and on the year's earliest picking.
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Hurricanes and Coffee: When the Hillside Is the Casualty
Frost, drought and hail damage the plant. A tropical cyclone damages the place: the soil, the terraces, the track to the mill.
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Hail Damage in Coffee: Minutes of Weather, Years of Consequence
A hailstorm can flatten one coffee block and leave the farm over the ridge untouched — and what it strips off in minutes is rarely the part that matters most.
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Coffee Drought Stress: What a Dry Year Does to the Tree
A dry season rarely takes the crop on the branch. It takes the one after it, and why that happens explains how coffee flowers, why harvests alternate, and what shade and mulch can and cannot do.
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El Niño, La Niña and Coffee: One Ocean, Opposite Effects
A frost hits one country. A hailstorm hits one farm. This one reaches every producing region at once, and pushes them in opposite directions, which is why bad for coffee is the wrong summary.
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Brazil Coffee Frost: Why One Cold Night Costs Years
Growers call it geada, and the severe kind does not simply spoil a harvest, it kills wood. How a single cold night in southern Brazil reaches forward into crops that have not been grown yet, and why the reaction arrives long before anyone has walked a field.
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Shot Hole Borer: The Beetle That Farms Fungus Inside Tea
A tiny ambrosia beetle riddles tea stems with round holes and never touches the wood. What it is actually doing in there, why the damage lands on the bush's permanent frame rather than the harvest, and why its name keeps changing.
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Tea Root Disease: The Problem You Only See From Above
A tea bush that wilts overnight while its neighbours thrive is rarely a weather story. The fungi responsible live in the stumps and roots left behind when the land was cleared, and they turn one dead plant into a bare patch that widens for years.
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The Tea Green Leafhopper: Pest and Ingredient at Once
A pale green jassid stunts tea shoots and shrinks the harvest — and the same bite is courted on purpose by makers of honey-scented oolongs. How one insect became both a pest and an ingredient, and why its name is still being tidied.
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Grey Blight: The Tea Disease That Follows the Plucker
A fungal leaf disease that cannot break in on its own - so it waits for the openings that plucking, shearing and pruning cut into a tea bush every few days, for decades.
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Tea Red Spider Mite: The Pest That Arrives With Dry Weather
Most tea troubles arrive with cloud and rain. This one arrives with heat, sun and roadside dust — and works on the mature leaf nobody plucks, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed until a whole section has turned bronze.
Explainer
The Tea Mosquito Bug: Small Insect, Outsized Damage
A small bug in the genus Helopeltis feeds on the youngest tea shoots and leaves damage far bigger than itself, because the blackened lesions are the plant's own reaction rather than anything the insect ate. Here is what it is, what it does to a shoot, and how growers live with it.
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Blister Blight: The Tea Disease That Eats Only the Harvest
A fungus that can live only on soft new growth, working on a crop whose entire product is soft new growth. That overlap is what makes blister blight different from almost every other crop disease — and it is why the best growing weather is also the most dangerous.
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Stinker Beans: How One Over-Fermented Bean Takes a Whole Cup
One over-fermented seed in a sack of sound coffee can take over the cup it lands in. Why fermentation taint refuses to behave proportionally, and where sorting loses it.
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Past Crop Coffee: How Green Beans Go Flat, Papery and Woody
Past crop coffee is last season's green still sitting in store when the new harvest lands. It is the one defect made of absence rather than presence, the only one driven purely by time, and the only one a roaster can work around but never reverse.
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Ochratoxin A in Coffee: A Drying-Yard Problem, Not a Cup One
The mould-made compound that turns up in coffee, the conditions that let it form, why it hides in a handful of beans in a lot, and why sorting and roasting only take you so far.
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Rio Flavour: The Iodine Taint Some Markets Actually Want
The medicinal, iodine-like taint that specialty buyers reject and other markets buy on purpose: what causes it, why it clusters in humid drying conditions, and what it reveals about the word defect.
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Quaker Beans: The Coffee Defect You Only See After Roasting
The blond bean in a browned batch is a quaker: a seed from a cherry that never finished ripening. This explainer covers why it is invisible in green coffee, obvious after roasting, and removed by hand at the one point in the chain where it is too late to send the lot back.
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The Potato Defect: The Coffee Fault That Defeats Sorting
Every other coffee fault can be seen — a black bean is black, a mouldy bean is discoloured. This one looks exactly like the coffee around it, which is why it reaches the cup at all.
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Coffee Arbitrage: Spreads, Substitution and Relative Value
Coffee arbitrage means trading the price gaps between economically linked coffee — the Arabica-Robusta spread, calendar spreads and cash-versus-futures basis — relative-value trades that keep related prices in line rather than delivering the risk-free profit the word implies.
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Topazio: Brazil's Yellow-Fruited, High-Yield Mundo Novo Cross
Topazio is a compact, high-yielding Brazilian Arabica, commonly described as a Mundo Novo and Catuai cross and best known in yellow-fruited lines like Topazio MG 1190, prized for productivity and a sweet, balanced cup.
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Coffee Renovation and Replanting: Renewing an Aging Plantation
Coffee bushes stay highly productive for only a window of years before age, woodiness and disease erode yields — this guide explains how renovation and rehabilitation renew a declining plantation without losing all its income at once.
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Coffee Hedging: Managing Price Risk With Futures
Coffee hedging uses futures, options and price-to-be-fixed contracts to lock in buying or selling prices, protecting producers, exporters and roasters from swings in the volatile world coffee market.