About Our Coffee

The art of the blend, the soul of the bean

To say that coffee is a complex beverage is really an understatement. Coffee as an epicurean category is as nuanced as wine and requires a similar level of expertise and connoisseurship. Like wine tasting, coffee “cupping” is a fine culinary art.

In fact, coffee is so highly complex that there’s an entire science to it that spans the growing process, the roasting, the blending and the brewing. Coffee specialization demands a multidisciplinary approach that includes the fields of genetics, agronomy, botany, physics, mathematics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, engineering and physiology. And that’s just the short list. Then there are all the factors that influence the coffee “experience.”

It doesn’t just begin with the bean.

From plant to plant

It begins with the coffee plant and the growing process, the location, altitude and weather, the soil, its fertilization and cultivation. The “bean” is actually the seed or pit inside the fruit of the plant or “tree” — the coffee cherry. And to turn it into a coffee “bean,” the ripe coffee cherry must first be harvested, then separated from unripe and overripe coffee cherries, then pulped to remove the beans or seeds from the cherries. Next it is fermented to remove mucilage left from the fruit. Then the beans are dried to a particular moisture content (usually 11 to 12%) on drying patios and in mechanical dryers.

After drying, the beans are sorted in three stages to eliminate broken, undeveloped or otherwise defective beans and separate the light and less dense coffee beans from the denser, high quality beans. In addition to density sorting, the beans are separated by size and then may be color sorted before being bagged in burlap and stored in a cool, dry place prior to export.