Specialty coffee is on the rise globally, which is great for many of reasons. To start with, more and more people are being introduced to good, quality coffee. While humans have been doing wine tasting for centuries, we can only speak about decades with coffee (cupping emerged on the brink of this century). And oh boy, we have some catching-up to do!
Until the late 90’s, most of the world understood coffee as a commodity drink. You drank one cup when you woke up and one cup after your lunch. The taste was bitter, but you solved this with added milk, or sugar or both. And that was it - and still is for most people. God-forbid that you asked where the coffee was from or even worse, what type it was. Now we know the answer, it was a dark, over-burned blend of Arabica and Robusta from all over the world.
However, the new century brought us an exciting new movement in coffee industry (so-called third wave) that mostly emphasized the coffee quality. Coffee roasters started to buy green coffee from single origins and consumers started to understand there is more to coffee than they first thought.
Few years later, roasting equipment started to become more widely available and more and more people started to play with it.
We now have an emerging specialty coffee communities with ever so large consumer base. People discuss farms, coffee varieties, roasting profiles, farmers, brewing methods, tasting profiles,...
But...
Where is the connection between a farmer and you? How can you, dear reader, taste the coffee that enthusiastic farmer wanted you to taste? The problem, see, is this: the vast majority of the coffee you can get is being bought as green beans from farmers, and roasted by local roasters, converting them to their ideas of how coffee should taste. There is a good reason for this (apart from an economic one): coffee provides best taste for no more than couple of weeks after it’s being roasted.
Discover La Huella. Knowing your coffee is key.
