Others — A–Z

Processing (18)

• African drying beds — Waist-high mesh tables that hold drying coffee off the ground so air can move underneath it. The cheapest piece of equipment in specialty coffee and one of the few that reliably shows up in the cup.
• Anaerobic fermentation — Fermenting coffee inside a sealed container so almost no air gets in. It is not a fourth processing method — it is a knob producers turn on top of washed, honey or natural, and it is where most of the loud experimental coffee of the last decade comes from.
• Caffeine — The bitter alkaloid the coffee plant makes to poison insects — how much of it is in a bean, how much reaches a cup, what it does to a taster, and why almost every number attached to it is a range rather than a figure.
• Carbonic maceration — A wine technique borrowed by coffee — whole, un-pulped cherries sealed in a carbon-dioxide-filled tank so each fruit ferments from the inside out, still in its skin. It is the strictest cousin of anaerobic fermentation, and the two words are used loosely enough that a bag may mean either.
• Coffee fermentation — The stage after picking where microbes eat the sugary fruit layer around the coffee seed. Every coffee ferments whether the producer plans it or not — the whole art is deciding how much air the microbes get, how warm they run, and how long they work. Aerobic, anaerobic and carbonic maceration are three settings on that one dial.
• Decaffeination — How caffeine is taken out of green coffee before it is ever roasted — the water-only Swiss Water route, the ethyl acetate (EA) solvent route, and the supercritical CO₂ route — and what each one costs the cup.
• Dry milling — The last thing that happens to coffee before it leaves the country — a shed full of machines cracks the dried shell off the seed, then sizes, weighs, photographs and hand-picks the beans until what is left is clean enough to sell. Every processing method, from natural to washed, ends here.
• Honey process — The middle road between washed and natural coffee — the fruit skin comes off, but the sticky layer underneath stays on the seed while it dries. No honey involved.
• Monsooned Malabar — The Indian process that leaves already-dried green coffee out in the monsoon for three to four months on purpose — swelling the beans, bleaching them pale gold and stripping out nearly all the acidity. It is a legally protected regional product, not a variety, and it began as an attempt to recreate what a slow sea voyage used to do by accident.
• Mucilage — The sticky, sugary gel glued to the coffee seed once the fruit skin comes off. It is roughly nine-tenths water, its dry matter is mostly sugar, and the decision of what to do with it is what separates washed, honey and natural coffee. Everywhere it is washed away it becomes a pollution problem.
• Natural process — The oldest way of making coffee — the whole cherry is dried in the sun with the fruit still on the seed, then cracked open weeks later. It gives the heaviest fruit flavour of any method, and it is the hardest one to not ruin.
• Pu’er tea — The Chinese tea that is deliberately fermented by microbes after picking and then aged for years like wine — legally tied to four areas of Yunnan, sold in pressed cakes, and the closest thing the drinks world has to a working answer to the question specialty coffee keeps asking about fermentation, aging and vintage.
• Pulped natural — Brazil’s own way of preparing coffee — the cherry skin is peeled off by machine and the seed goes straight out to dry with its sticky fruit layer still on. It was invented to dry coffee faster and lose less of it, not to chase flavour.
• Selective picking — Sending pickers back through the same trees again and again to take only the ripe cherries — the single most expensive quality decision on a coffee farm, and the one that only pays if somebody downstream is buying on taste.
• Thermal shock processing — A Colombian post-harvest technique where coffee is washed in hot water and then immediately in cold water at the end of fermentation. Producers call it “bean sealing” — the idea is to stop the ferment dead and trap the aromas it made. It is a finishing step bolted onto anaerobic fermentation, not a processing method of its own.
• Washed process — The method that strips every scrap of fruit off the coffee seed before it is dried, so what you taste is the seed and the place rather than the fruit. It is the default for specialty coffee almost everywhere except Brazil, and it costs water.
• Washing station — The shed with a pulper, a set of tanks and a field of drying beds where hundreds of smallholders’ cherry becomes one sellable lot. In origins built on tiny farms, the station rather than the farm is the name on the bag — and the place quality is made or lost.
• Wet hulling — The Indonesian processing method — giling basah, “wet grinding” — that cracks the papery shell off the coffee seed while it is still soft and half-wet, months earlier than anywhere else. It is why Sumatran coffee tastes earthy, low-acid and heavy-bodied, and the one case where hulling is a flavour decision rather than a cleaning step.

Roasting (4)

• Coffee roasting — What actually happens when green coffee is cooked — the two audible cracks that mark the milestones, what light, medium and dark really mean, and why no standards body has yet defined any of those three words.
• Coffee roasting profiles — The line on a roaster’s screen — bean temperature plotted against time — and the handful of numbers on it that decide whether the same coffee tastes the same twice.
• Maillard reaction — The browning chemistry that turns a green seed brown and builds most of coffee’s aroma — what actually reacts, the temperature window it runs in, why it is not caramelization, and which of the numbers you see quoted are actually settled.
• Sample roasting — The tiny test roast that decides whether a container of green coffee gets bought — why it is deliberately bland, the 8-to-12-minute rule, and the 8-to-24-hour wait before anyone is allowed to taste it.

Brewing (18)

• 4:6 method — Tetsu Kasuya’s pour-over recipe — split the brew water 40% and 60%, and use the first half to set sweetness against acidity and the second half to set strength. The most copied hand-brew method in specialty coffee.
• AeroPress — The plunger-style manual coffee maker invented by Alan Adler in 2005 — a chamber, a rubber-sealed plunger and a paper filter that push a short immersion brew through in under a minute — and the fan-led device behind the World AeroPress Championship.
• Brew ratio — How much coffee against how much water — the one recipe number that decides how strong a cup comes out, written as 1:16 for filter or 2:1 for espresso.
• Chorreador — Costa Rica’s traditional coffee brewer — a cotton sock hung from a wooden stand, with hot water poured through it so the coffee drips into the cup below.
• Coffee freshness and degassing — Why coffee straight out of the roaster brews badly, what the carbon dioxide leaving the beans actually does to your cup, how long roasters say to wait before drinking, and why none of those day counts is a standard.
• Coffee grinding — Breaking roasted beans into particles — the single biggest dial on how fast coffee extracts, why finer means faster, and why an even grind matters more than the number on the dial.
• Cold brew coffee — Coffee extracted in cool water over 12 to 24 hours instead of hot water over minutes — usually brewed as a concentrate, filtered, and served diluted over ice.
• Espresso — The small, concentrated coffee made by forcing hot water through a packed bed of fine grounds at around nine bar — a method of preparation, not a bean or a roast, and the base every café milk drink is built on.
• Extraction science — The measurement layer under modern brewing — how a light-bending gadget turns a cup into a strength number, how that number is estimated rather than measured, and how far you can trust it.
• Extraction yield — How much of the ground coffee you actually dissolved — the percentage of the dry bean that ended up in the drink, and why almost everyone aims for 18 to 22 percent.
• Flat white — The espresso-and-milk drink that Australia and New Zealand both claim to have invented — a double shot under a thin skin of microfoam, and the only café drink of the last fifty years to become a worldwide standard from outside Italy.
• Iced coffee — Coffee served cold — in specialty usage, coffee brewed hot and then chilled, either in the fridge or straight onto ice, as distinct from cold brew’s day-long cold steep.
• Latte art — The craft of pouring textured milk into espresso to draw a picture in the foam — how the milk is steamed into microfoam, how the pattern is poured or etched, and where the technique came from.
• Nel drip — Japanese hand-brewed coffee poured through a reusable flannel cloth bag instead of a paper filter — the kissaten method that lets the coffee oils through and produces an unusually thick, smooth cup.
• Pour-over brewing — Hand-poured filter coffee — hot water sent through a bed of grounds in a paper filter, using cone brewers like the Hario V60, the hourglass Chemex or the flat-bottomed Kalita Wave.
• Siphon brewing — The two-globe glass brewer that pushes water up with steam pressure and sucks the coffee back down as it cools — a nineteenth-century European invention that survives mainly in Japan.
• Total dissolved solids — The number that tells you how strong a coffee is — how much of the bean actually ended up dissolved in the cup, and how much mineral was in the water to begin with.
• Water for brewing coffee — The minerals in your water decide how much flavour comes out of the coffee and how it tastes when it gets there — hardness pulls flavour out, alkalinity cancels acidity, and chlorine ruins everything.

Everything else (11)

• Barista — The person behind the coffee counter — what the job is, how you get into it with no qualifications, what training and certification exist, what it pays, and how a low-wage service role became specialty coffee’s most visible craft.
• Barista Hustle — The Australian online coffee school founded by Matt Perger in 2015 — a newsletter that turned into the industry’s best-known digital classroom, and into a public reckoning in 2020.
• Coffee packaging — The bag a roasted coffee lives in — what the little plastic button on the front actually does, why foil is in there, what nitrogen flushing is for, and why the shelf-life numbers printed on packaging tell you much less than the roast date.
• Coffee Quality Institute — The nonprofit behind the Q Grader certification, the industry’s standard for trained coffee graders.
• Coffee Review — The Berkeley review publication that has been scoring coffees out of 100 since 1997 — where the 100-point coffee score most drinkers recognise came from, who does the tasting, and the $375 submission fee a reader should know about before quoting a score.
• International Institute of Coffee Tasters — An Italian non-profit founded in 1993 to put coffee tasting — especially espresso — on a scientific footing, and the body behind the International Coffee Tasting medal competition.
• Kono — The Japanese equipment maker trading as Coffee Syphon Co., Ltd., whose KONO brand covers vacuum siphons, the Meimon cone dripper and its own coffee beans — the second name, alongside Hario, behind Japan’s standard brewers.
• Nitrogen packaging — Blowing nitrogen through a coffee bag before sealing it, to push the oxygen out — what the process is, the residual-oxygen number the industry works to, how capsules push it further, and why nearly everything written about it comes from companies selling gas equipment.
• Quantify CVA — An iOS and Android app for filling in SCA Coffee Value Assessment forms with several evaluators at once — one of the two digital CVA platforms the SCA named in July 2026.
• Terroir — The idea that where and how a coffee is grown is tasted in the cup — what the word borrowed from wine actually covers in coffee (altitude, climate, soil, variety, farming and even processing), how researchers propose to measure it by cupping, and where the evidence is solid versus where it is still marketing.
• Third wave coffee — The name the trade gave itself around 2000 for treating coffee as a named agricultural product rather than a commodity drink — where the phrase came from, who built it, and why the date is disputed.