Porca Food

As most readers know, Yemen is the oldest continuously cultivated coffee in the world. The Coffea arabica tree originated in Ethiopia but was first systematically cultivated and commercialized in Yemen starting in about 1500. Until European colonists got into the game about 200 years later, Yemen produced virtually all of the coffee drunk in the world.

And, surprisingly, however, much coffee production practices changed as coffee spread from Yemen to the rest of the world, Yemen has stayed with its original, ancient methods. Most Yemen coffees today are still produced almost exactly as they have been for hundreds of years: The coffee fruit is picked and laid out to dry on rooftops, the dried fruit husks are split open with millstones, and the beans are winnowed and cleaned by hand. Until recently, the only changes in … Read more

While some people in the specialty coffee industry still refer to the “classic Central America cup,” effectively lumping together the diverse coffee-producing countries of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica, it is more the trend now to make increasingly fine distinctions among these origins in terms of varieties, processing, and cup profiles specific to each. Single-origin coffees are the primary driver of sales in the specialty market, and this month, we look at the coffees of Guatemala, something we haven’t done in report format since 2013.

When Coffee Review editor Kenneth Davids surveyed the landscape of Guatemala coffees more than 20 years ago, the themes that emerged were growing region, roast level, and the efforts of Anacafe, the Guatemalan Coffee Association founded in 1960, to frame the country as … Read more

Each year, the Coffee Review team publishes an espresso report, for which we invite roasters to submit coffees on a specific theme. In typical years, we partner with an independent lab or roaster here in the San Francisco Bay Area and taste the espressos with at least one outside cupper and a barista or two dialing in and pulling shot after shot. But this year is certainly not typical. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to skip last year’s espresso report altogether, and while we’re slowly getting back to in-person tasting in our own lab (after more than a year of remote work), we aren’t quite ready to collaborate more broadly. So, my colleague Jason Sarley and I pulled up our bootstraps and methodically evaluated in our own lab the 58 submissions we received — 29 from U.S. roasters and 29 … Read more

While so much in the world of coffee gets “curiouser and curiouser” each year, to echo the protagonist of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland — from increasingly complex, mysteriously named green coffee processing methods to new hybrid varieties of Arabica born of necessity to respond to climate change — specialty coffee is a living entity, its success defined by an ability to adapt, both to consumer desires and geo-political realities. So, it’s refreshing, literally and metaphorically, to find that the ready-to-drink (RTD) market of cold black coffee, unadulterated by sugar or other additives, is — well, simple — or at least aspires to simplicity. Because simplicity is clearly not the coffee norm, these days. And yet, it suits the primary aim of each and every roaster we spoke with who submitted an RTD coffee for our July report: to achieve … Read more