learn
Coffee bags tend to be covered in words that assume you already know them. Here’s what ours mean, in plain language.
How far we took the beans. A lighter roast keeps more of what the coffee already tasted like — fruit, florals, brightness. A darker roast adds flavour of its own: chocolate, caramel, a deeper and rounder cup, with less of the original fruit showing through.
Neither is better. They’re different views of the same coffee, which is exactly why we sell claro and escuro side by side.
What happened to the coffee cherry after it was picked. Coffee grows as a fruit, and the bean is the seed inside.
Natural means the whole cherry was laid out to dry in the sun with the fruit still attached, and the bean was only taken out afterwards. The fruit sugars have time to work their way in, which tends to give a sweet, heavy, rounded cup. It’s the traditional method in Brazil.
Washed means the fruit was stripped off before drying. Less of the fruit’s own sweetness carries over, and the result is usually cleaner and brighter.
The kind of coffee plant it grew from — mundo novo, yellow catuaí and so on. It works rather like grape varieties in wine: each has its own character, and most farms grow several.
Meters above sea level — how high up the coffee was grown. It’s the opaquest thing on most labels and one of the more useful.
Higher is cooler, and cooler means the cherries ripen more slowly. Slow ripening gives the bean longer to build sugars, so higher-grown coffee is usually denser, sweeter and more complex. Brazil’s growing regions are lower than much of Central America, which is part of why Brazilian coffee leans nutty and chocolatey rather than sharp and citrusy.
Not flavourings — nothing is added to the coffee. They’re what we taste in the cup, written down to give you a starting point. If you taste something different, you aren’t wrong; people genuinely differ, and so does water, grinder and brew method.
There’s more on this in how tasting notes work.