Over the past year I’ve written extensively about coffee brewing – both in our newsletter and here on the blog – with an emphasis on how you can take tried and true professional barista principles and make better coffee at home. In this article we’re going to take a look at brewing methods, but in case you’ve missed out on previous topics, or would like a refresher, here are some great posts you may want to check out:

Understanding Coffee Processing Methods
A Starting Point on Coffee Varieties
A Deep Dive into Extraction
Demystifying the Coffee-to-Water Ratio
Manual Brewing and You
How Grind Impacts Brewing and Flavor
Smell, Taste and Feel: Coffee Sensory

Okay, back to brewing methods. Here’s something I’m asked all the time from home baristas. What’s the best coffee maker for me? And my answer is always the same. Just ditch your setup and buy coffee from me. Done. There you have it.

No, but seriously, coffee should be enjoyable, and how you choose to brew is a deeply personal decision that depends on several factors. Do you have much time? Much patience? Do you favor big body over clarity and nuance? Will you be traveling much? Entertaining a group? Are you an evil genius with an unlimited budget?

Follow along as we outline the six primary brewing styles, their relative strengths and weaknesses and some thoughts I have on selecting the right brewing method for you.

You see a friend at the cafe with a cup of golden sunshine. Ah, Shelly’s a tea drinker, you think. That’s about right, she’s so smart and relaxed and witty. So you sonder over to your tea-loving friend and inquire, “Hey, Shelly, what’s in the cup?” Shelly, with a sly grin, replies, “It’s chemistry.” “Chemistry?” you ask, with puzzled amusement, “I thought that was an oolong.” She draws closer as not to disturb the mocha sippers and the cafe au lait drinkers nearby. “Yeah,” she says, “it’s veritably steeped in it.” You both have a good chuckle because word play suits you and you’re smitten by her sophisticated humor.

Okay, that either elicited a slight smile or I’ve already lost you, which means the remaining text may not totally be what you’re looking for. And that’s okay! Each post here isn’t for everyone all the time. But if you stay with me we’re going to have a look into a topic that I find fascinating – the chemistry of tea. It’s my hope that by sharing this information we can better understand what’s happening in our cup, how that impacts the flavor of tea and how to make informed decisions about what you’re drinking next.

Ricardo Perez is a remarkable producer from Costa Rica’s West Valley region who’s gained acclaimed for the quality of his coffee as well as his role in ushering in a new era of production methods in Costa Rican coffee. As one of the pioneers of the “micro-milling revolution,” Ricardo was among the earliest and best examples of producers breaking out of the cooperative model to produce world-class coffees that he could independently process on his small farm.

I haven’t owned an actual alarm clock in ages, but I had one in my room as a child. It was a curious little box with a couple buttons on top. Simple, right? It just tells the time and you can set it to beep when you want to wake up or whatever. Then one day I had this notion that to better understand the alarm clock I needed to take it apart and study it (study what, exactly, I had no idea). With a few screws loosened and some cracking of its plastic enclosure, I discovered what was once so simple became impossibly complicated. Wires! Like, a circuit board or something! I stabbed and prodded and bent. When all was said and done, I realized 1) simple things can become incredibly complicated under scrutiny, and 2) I no longer had a working alarm clock.

And it’s like that with coffee. Such a simple thing, that bean. A toasted seed from nature’s bounty. But as we explore coffee, as with life, complexities are revealed to us and what was once so simple is now more a mystery than when we began. In the following “explainer” I want to examine the subject of variety. If you read until the end, it’s possible you may have more questions than before you started.

C’est la vie.

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Back for a third year, we’re excited to share with you this beautifully vibrant and sweet Kenyan coffee. Kanda comes from the estate of Amos Ndatakiura, who runs his family farm on roughly 5 acres in the Kirinyaga area of central Kenya near Mount Kenya. On this small estate also lies Amos’ home and his processing facility, where his family conducts all of the coffee milling and processing themselves.

Most Kenyan coffee comes from either cooperatives, which can contain hundreds to thousands of farmers, or from very large estates. And more often than not, these coffees will contain a blend of coffee varieties, namely SL 28, SL 34 and Ruiru 11. On the Ndatakiura farm, Amos and his family grow chiefly the SL 28 variety. It’s very rare to find a coffee from such a specific terroir that features exclusively a single variety such as Kanda.

I mention this because Kanda hits on a topic that coffee enthusiasts (myself included) find particularly appealing: drinking coffee that isolates the flavors and nuance of a very specific location, variety and moment in time. The work and energy the Ndatakiura family put into their coffee is very apparent. Kanda is super clean, with notes of fresh orange juice, cinnamon and plum and such a balanced structure. Kanda comes to us from our roasting partners at Madcap Coffee, and we expect to carry this coffee for a short time over the summer.

What cuts the summer heat better than an iced-cold lemonade? How about our latest concoction, a green tea lemonade made from cold brewed Kukicha Japanese green tea and fresh-squeezed lemons? It’s a tangy summer refreshment that we’ve lovingly dubbed Hey Arnold!

Hey Arnold! is a throwback reminiscent of the classic Arnold Palmer, but even more reminiscent of living with your grandparents in an inner-city boarding house and palling around with your buddy Gerald and protagonist/love-interest Helga. It’s the perfect drink for cooling off on a summer day, or navigating big-city life as a 9-year-old. You don’t technically have to live with your grandparents or be in fourth grade to enjoy a Hey Arnold!, but you can!

The Hey Arnold! features organic Kukicha tea (also available on our tea menu, btw) that was cold brewed to perfection. Kukicha is renown for its rich texture, creamy sweetness and tangy finish. It’s an ideal complement to fresh lemon juice and a pinch of organic cane sugar. Hey Arnold! is available for a limited time.

Throughout the week I field a good number of coffee-related questions. Many of those questions, in fact, serve as the starting point for issues we address here on the blog. It’s a joy to have a platform to explore often misunderstood or mystifying coffee conundrums. But there remain numerous questions that either a) I haven’t gotten around to addressing in this space, or b) don’t justify the kind of lengthy response as other topics. What follows are some of the most common – or interesting – questions that I’m asked and my attempt at a succinct and direct answer.

Here we go – in no particular order:

How much caffeine is in coffee?

Okay, so there are a few factors at play, like how the coffee was roasted, what elevation it was grown at or the given parameters of how it was brewed. But as a general rule, assume that a cup of brewed coffee has roughly 16g of caffeine for every 1oz of coffee. That puts a 12oz cup of coffee at 195mg of caffeine. What comes as a surprise to a lot of folks is that decaffeinated coffee is not uncaffeinated coffee. So the same 12 oz cup of decaf – depending on the process used to remove caffeine – commonly contains around 5mg of caffeine. Then there’s espresso. There are still several factors to consider here, but assume that every ounce of espresso you drink contains 50mg of caffeine. So while the amount of caffeine is definitely more concentrated in espresso, the overall total is higher in a cup of black coffee. You can read more here, here and here.

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As I mentioned elsewhere on the blog, it’s Party time! We’ll carry other natural-process coffees throughout the year, but few garner the enthusiasm of folks in the shop as Party, a natural processed Ethiopian coffee. It’s a pleasantly fruity coffee that’s very sweet with a syrupy body. A lot of what excites our staff and our guests can be attributed to the way Party, and other “natural” coffees, is processed. So it’s a fitting time to jump into the topic of processing methods to understand how critical they can be to the flavor of coffee.

First, let’s first remember that coffee is a fruit. So to understand its processing methods it’s helpful to think about the parts of that fruit. As a whole, this tropical fruit is referred to as a cherry. There’s an outer layer of skin, followed by a layer of mucilage. Then, there’s a thin layer of parchment that surrounds the seeds. We call these seeds “beans” because they resemble, uh, beans. But for the sake of clarity we’ll refer to them as seeds throughout this article.

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Nothing sets the stage for this coffee better than its bright pink packaging and celebratory name. Party was first debuted in the summer of 2018 to absolutely rave reviews by our guests, and now it’s back for a limited time. Each season, our roasting partner Madcap Coffee selects a “natural process” coffee from Southern Ethiopia to feature under the Party label. This region of Ethiopia is a prime location for natural process coffees (more on that in the section below), which, at their best, are wildly fruity, full-bodied and fun.

This year’s Party was selected from Kayon Mountain Estate in Shakisso, Guji. In the cup, look for ripe blackberries, bright green grape, cantaloupe and maple syrup. It’s available now on our pour over menu, and will make a regular appearance as our daily featured espresso.

The latest addition to our tea menu is Bamboo Shu, a remarkable ripe puer tea that was hand roasted inside a stick of fragrant bamboo. The result is a lovely aromatic experience and a tea with a rich, milky flavor and a taste reminiscent of fresh biscuits. But there’s a lot to unpack here. Like, what the heck is puer, and ripe puer? All you really need to know is that you should drink it, because you’ll love it. But read on and we’ll break a few things down.

What is puer? Or Puerh, or Pu-erh and do you say “Poo Air?”

Yeah, kind of, I mean, I don’t think of it as Poo Air but that gets you close to the pronunciation. Puer is a style of fermented dark tea that is produced in Yunnan Province, China. It is a tea type with huge variance in taste, depending upon the style, region, age or storage, among other factors. Notably, can be aged for years and years and years while new character develops.

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