Specialty coffee refers to high-quality coffee that is sourced, roasted and brewed for the focus and goal of exeptional flavours, When drinking regular coffee you can be left with a fairly unpleseant after taste. Conversely, Specialty coffee means guaranteed quality through all stages of production by following specific conditions and proccessing methods.
Coffee Origin
Coffee begins as fruit on a coffee plant. The coffee plant will flower and produce a cherry. These cherrys usually have 2 seeds in that are the raw form of coffee beans. There are four types of coffee plant these are called Arabica, Robusta, Liberica and Exelca. However Arabica makes up around 60% of the worlds coffee and rubusta 30%.
Coffee proccessing
Coffee is usally harvested two ways by hand or by machine. It then can be proccessed using numerous different techniques such as washed, natural and fermented. Once the cherry has been picked it will be either stripped of its fruit and left to dry this is called washed coffee or it will be dried with the fruit intact and stripped later this is called natural. Other methods include fermented and Honey processing aswell as other experimental techniques put into practice.
Coffee Roasting
Coffee roasting is the proccess of heating coffee up in a revolving drum and trying to control numerous variables to extract different flavour from coffee. The coffee roaster will attempt to extract natural flavour notes of the coffee, this is called a roast profile
Specialty Coffee Brewing
Brewing coffee is often regarded as an integral aspect of specialty coffee. While specialty coffee is identified as such prior to brewing, whether you're buying it from a cafe or preparing it at home, certain practices are associated with specialty coffee. These practices entail precise measurement of coffee dosage and grind size, along with meticulous control of various brewing variables, all aimed at attaining the finest quality coffee.
Coffee-To-Water-Ratio
Coffee-to-Water ratio is important metric when measuring how much water you have to how much ground coffee to use. Usually its referred to as 1 to x or 1:x. The 1 is a gram of coffee and the x is the grams of coffee to use. We use ratio and not a recipe as when we use a recipe its a fixed number and we might not want to brew the set amount of coffee. With ratios we can adjust to the amount of coffee we want to brew for. For example we could have a 1:17 ratio so for every gram of coffee we use 17grams of coffee.
Optimal-Water-temperature
When it comes to making the perfect cup of coffee balancing all these different factors including water temperature is important. However when brewing an overlooked variable is the temperature of the water when brewing. Water temperature is essential when brewing coffee as it affects the rate of extraction. The hotter the water the quicker it extracts different compounds such as oils acids and caffeine. However when the water is hot it is difficult to control the rate of extraction. This will lead to over extraction making also very bitter as the heat will strip away the oxygen. According to the national coffee association, the ideal water temperature for extraction is 195-205°F a little below boiling. This works ac-cross most brewing methods such as pour over and french press. More on this will be covered below.