The Brew Blog

Ethiopia is where coffee comes from. Not in the soft sense — in the literal one. Coffea arabica is native to the highlands of southwestern Ethiopia.

"Single origin" is one of those phrases that has a narrow technical meaning and a wider colloquial one. Both are in active use, and they don't always line up.

The old triad of washed, natural, and honey processing has been joined by a new vocabulary: anaerobic, carbonic maceration, co-fermentation, thermal shock, lactic, yeast-inoculated.

There are, by most industry estimates, somewhere north of 10,000 coffee roasters operating in the United States.

Competition coffee is different. It's a specific, narrow, and verifiable claim: a coffee — or a roaster — that has been judged by a professional panel of judges.

The word 'curated' gets stretched thin in the coffee subscription world. Almost every service calls itself curated in some sense.