A bag of specialty coffee carries seven or eight lines of data, and they all answer one question: is this coffee for you or not. The origin says where it grew, the altitude and the variety say what kind of bean it is, the process says how it was dried and how much sweetness it carries, the tasting notes say what to expect, and the roast date says whether it is still alive.
The line that causes the most confusion is the tasting notes, so we will clear it out of the way straight away: nobody puts mango inside the coffee. Those words are descriptors of what a taster recognised in the cup, and learning to read them is the shortest road out of buying at random.
We roast these coffees and we sell them, so you have every right to read us with a hand on your wallet. Which is why, in the section on labels that say nothing, the same measure lands on ours, at the points where they come up short.
A real label, read line by line
This is what is printed on the bag of our Yemen Khawlani Odaini, in English, in lower case, with nothing taken out.
- region: khawlani, sa'ada
- finca producer: ali and faisal marwan
- altitude: 1800 / 2000 mt
- variety: odaini
- processing: natural
- aromatic profile: berry, honey, mango, chocolate, butter
Five lines of data and one of flavours, and you can read every one of them off the bag with nobody standing in between. From here we take one field at a time and see what it tells you, and above all what you do with it.
Origin: why the region matters more than the country
The name of a country on its own says little, because inside one country sit climates, soils and altitudes that have nothing in common with each other. The region is already useful: Huila in Colombia brings citric acidity and cleanliness, Sidamo in Ethiopia brings flowers and yellow stone fruit, Tarrazú in Costa Rica brings sweetness and structure. When a label gives you only Brazil, or only Colombia, that coffee almost certainly comes from lots mixed together, and mixing is precisely how the differences between one harvest and the next get erased.
On the Khawlani bag the region is Sa'ada, in the north of Yemen, and the area is Khawlani. Those two lines let you go and find the place on a map, and that is exactly the point: an origin you can verify is worth more than an adjective.
Producer and altitude: the two lines you can check
The producer field is the easiest of all to judge, because either there is a name on it or there is not. Ali and Faisal Marwan on the Yemen bags, Cafetales Maspalomas for our Gran Canaria, the Familia Facussé of the Santuario Project for the Costa Rica: people and companies that exist and can be looked up. The word finca on that line is Spanish for farm, and it has settled on coffee labels from origins that have never spoken a word of Spanish, this Yemeni one included.
Altitude tells you instead what happened to the bean while it was growing. The higher you go, the lower the temperatures, the more slowly the cherry ripens: the bean comes out dense, with sugars and acids more concentrated, which is why coffees grown high up read as more complex and more lively in the cup. Our Sidamo Finca Habesha sits between 2,000 and 2,150 metres, the Kilembé at 1,800, the Honduras between 1,300 and 1,700.
The rule has a crack in it, though, and the crack is in our own range. Our Alt Zero grows in Gran Canaria at sea level, altitude zero, and gives pear, winter apple, cocoa and lemongrass in the cup: a profile you would never expect from reading the altitude alone. The story of the coffee that breaks the rule is in a specialty coffee that grows at sea level. Altitude is a strong clue rather than a verdict.
Variety: what changes between Caturra, Bourbon, Typica and heirloom
The variety is the cultivar of the plant, and it works the way grape varieties work. Typica and Bourbon are the two historic arabica varieties, elegant and sweet, with low yields. Caturra is a natural mutation of Bourbon, more compact and more productive, and you find it across Central America: on our Kilembé it sits alongside Typica, and it stands alone on both Gran Canaria coffees. Heirloom covers the native Ethiopian varieties, so numerous in the country coffee came from that they have never been classified one by one: it is what you read on our Sidamo, and it explains that floral profile no other origin really imitates.
Then there are the varieties that move the price. The Pink Bourbon of our Colombia La Primavera is sought after in the specialty world for its aromatic elegance and its sweetness, and the Odaini of Yemen is a local variety grown for centuries in a country where farming today is an act of stubbornness. When the variety is missing from a label altogether, it is almost always missing because the lot holds several of them at once.
Process: washed, natural and honey, and how each one tastes
The process is the field that changes the flavour most, and happily it comes down to three words.
Washed means the pulp is taken off before drying: the bean is left clean, and the cup arrives with sharp acidity, transparency and the character of the ground with nothing in front of it. It is the process of the Kilembé and the Sidamo. Natural means the cherry dries whole, with the pulp still attached: the sugars of the fruit move into the bean and the cup gives body, ripe fruit and dense sweetness. It is the process of the Khawlani and of our Honduras. Honey sits in between, and the name comes from the sticky mucilage left on the bean: the Costa Rica Tres Milagros keeps 60 per cent of it and stays on raised beds for twenty or twenty-two days, and the result is cocoa and maple syrup on one side, grape and watermelon on the other.
If the process is printed on the bag, you already know a great deal about how the cup will go. If it is missing, all you are left with is the photograph on the packaging.
Tasting notes: nobody puts mango inside the coffee
This is the line that gets read worst of all, because it looks like a promise while it is a description. When our Khawlani says berry, honey, mango, chocolate and butter, it means the person who tasted it recognised those families of aroma inside the cup. Nothing has been added: those molecules come out of the variety, the ground, the process and the roast, and they are the same ones you meet in the actual fruit.
The right way to use them is to look for the family instead of the single word. If you like sweet, reassuring flavours, aim at notes like chocolate, caramel, hazelnut and dried fruit. If you like a lively, perfumed cup, look for citrus, flowers, yellow stone fruit, red berries. Nobody tastes mango on the first sip, and that is perfectly fine: what you catch at the start is the direction, sweet or acidic, dense or light, and that is already enough to choose the next coffee.
Roast level and roast date: the two lines that say whether the coffee is alive
The roast level tells you how much the roaster chose to let the origin speak. A light or medium roast keeps the acidity and the aromas of the place in view, a dark one brings forward the flavours born inside the roasting drum. On our single origins we work light and medium precisely so we do not cover the work done on the farm.
The roast date is the most valuable information on the whole label, because it is the only one that moves. It tells you where in its aromatic life you are drinking that coffee, and it has to be read together with the way you keep it at home: air, light, heat and damp work against you every day, and the real windows are in the guide to storing coffee.
Body, acidity and intensity: what the dots are for
The filled dots out of five that you find on our product sheets are a quick translation of what happens in the mouth. Body is how much the coffee fills and stays, from light as tea to thick as chocolate. Acidity is the liveliness, the citric lift that pulls the cup upright, and it deserves to be read as a virtue rather than a fault. Intensity is how much all of it together makes itself felt.
They exist so you can compare two coffees in two seconds. Genoa has body five out of five and acidity two, so it is round, full and soft. The Sidamo has body three and acidity four, so it is lighter and more alive. The same craft pointed in two opposite directions, and the choice between them says more about you than about them.
What a label that says nothing means, and it applies to us too
Now the measure, applied to everybody. If a bag carries only a distant best before and no roast date, that piece of data is missing for a reason, and the reason is usually that the coffee was produced long before it reached your hands. If the tasting notes are generic, intense and enveloping flavour, rich aroma, they have never been through a structured tasting: they are adjectives, and adjectives cannot be verified. If the process is missing, or the region is missing, that lot almost certainly comes from parcels mixed together.
The same measure lands on us, and there are three points where we fail it. On the Golden Huila and the Honduras, at the producer line, we currently write small producers instead of a name, because that name has not been given to us yet: we are asking for it, and until it arrives we will not invent it. On the Brazil Arara we have no altitude confirmed by the supplier, so that line stays empty rather than filling itself with a plausible number. And the dots for body, acidity and intensity sit today on the product pages and on the labels of the blends, but not yet on the single origin labels, where they belong. If you notice all that, you are behaving exactly the way somebody buying coffee should behave.
How to use all this to buy the right coffee for you
The sequence is short. Start from the tasting notes and choose the family you already love, sweet and chocolatey or fruity and floral. Look at the process, which confirms the direction: natural and honey push towards dense sweetness, washed towards cleanliness and acidity. Check the roast date. Only at the end read altitude, variety and producer, which are the context and the guarantee.
Then there is your brewing method, which decides the last piece. If you make coffee on a moka pot, the aluminium stovetop brewer that sits on the hob in most Italian kitchens, you need a profile that stands up to an unforgiving method, and how to choose one is in the moka done properly, with specialty coffee. If you are learning filter, where the notes on the label come through more than in any other method, start from your first V60 extraction, step by step. And if a word on the bag still refuses to make sense, the rest of the picture is in specialty and supermarket coffee, what actually changes.
Questions and answers
Are the tasting notes on a coffee bag added flavourings?
No, and on a specialty coffee they never are. They are descriptors of what the taster recognises in the cup, and they come from the variety, the ground, the process and the roast. There is nothing inside a bag of whole bean coffee except coffee.
What do washed, natural and honey mean on a coffee bag?
Washed means the pulp was taken off before drying, and it gives a clean, acidic cup. Natural means the cherry dried whole, and it gives body, ripe fruit and sweetness. Honey sits in between, with part of the mucilage left on the bean, and it gives dense sweetness with a touch of freshness.
What does altitude tell you on a coffee label?
The higher it is, the more slowly the cherry ripened and the denser the bean came out, with more concentrated aromatics. It is a good clue to complexity rather than a guarantee: our Alt Zero grows at sea level and is a specialty coffee by every measure.
What is the first thing to look at on a bag of coffee?
The roast date, because it is the only information that moves with time. Straight after it, the tasting notes, which tell you whether that coffee resembles what you already like.
All that small print is the only piece of transparency a bag of coffee can offer you, and it is why we print it in full on every coffee we roast, including the points where it leaves us exposed. We roast in Albenga in front of whoever walks in, and a label you can check does the same job as a roaster standing in plain view.
Our single origins, with origin, variety, process and notes in plain sight: try reading three of them in a row, and you will choose the fourth without thinking about it.