Extraordinary Coffee

Our coffees are naturally sweet, and we scour the planet to buy the sweetest coffees we can find. Some coffees have honeyed sweetness; others evoke molasses or maple syrup; still others, brown sugar or caramel. We know you may choose to enjoy them with a few drops of milk or a spoonful of sugar, but we want them to be sweet enough that you don’t have to.

Our coffees often evoke fruit flavors, not because we add anything artificial to them, but because the coffee seed we roast comes from a small round fruit. We call that fruit a coffee cherry because it usually ripens to a crimson color, although it may also be yellow and in some cases orange or pink. Whatever
the color, a ripe coffee cherry shares the same organic acids as the fresh fruit we love to eat: the citric acid of limes, malic acid of peaches, and tartaric acid of blackberries can all be found in a coffee cherry.

And our very best coffees balance the sweetness and acidity of elegant floral notes layered on crisp fruit flavors with a satisfying mouthfeel and a lingering finish.

Great coffee is not the result of chance. Extraordinary coffee is created by design, at the hands of dedicated professionals around the world who collaborate in a shared, and uncompromising, commitment to quality.

In our Coffeebars in five American cities, our highly trained baristas fine-tune each coffee on the menu every morning to create an experience that is truly extraordinary. The coffees they serve are tirelessly evaluated at our Roasting Works and in our laboratories by roasters and quality-control professionals as
part of a process of continuous evaluation and improvement.

But the quality of our coffees is mostly determined by the farming, harvesting, and processing practices of the people who grow them in the 14 countries in which we collaborate where we source our coffee. This is why we have been traveling to coffee’s origins for more than 20 years: to better understand how extraordinary coffee is made, literally from the ground up. And the key to unlocking coffee quality lies in understanding genetics, environment, and management—which coffee is being grown, where, and how.

We weigh coffee genetics heavily in our purchasing decisions, and it’s why we put information about coffee varieties on each of our bags. Variety can have an outsize influence on flavor.

Nearly all specialty coffee belongs to the Arabica species. Scientists have used genetic research tools to discover that all Arabica coffee can be traced back to just a single plant that grew more than 10,000 years ago in East Africa, most likely in the forests of southwestern Ethiopia.

Since then, coffee genetics have evolved greatly through a combination of accident, adaptation, and active human management to encompass thousands of varieties, but only a few dozen of these are cultivated and traded on a significant scale. And not all of them are created equal. Some varieties routinely produce beautiful cups of coffee almost effortlessly, while others most decidedly do not.

Most of the coffees Intelligentsia buys are from the Bourbon and Typica lineages. They are two of the oldest, and noblest, branches on the Arabica family tree, and they have been producing reliably sweet and delicious coffees for centuries. Coffee fruit, widely referred to as "cherry,” grows on what are commonly
called trees but are actually technically shrubs.

Over time, distinct versions of each variety have prevailed in different origins through processes of natural mutation, human selection, and active promotion by local and national authorities. In Central Africa, for example, the local Bourbon selection, Mayaguez, is most common, while in nearby Kenya, it may be SL-28 or SL-34. In the Americas, the traditional Bourbons are outnumbered today by Caturra, a shorter, more compact version of the towering Bourbon that evolved through natural mutation.

The coffees we find most exciting tend to be the ones that can trace their connection to Ethiopia’s primal coffee forests with the straightest line, beginning with the fabled Gesha variety, whose signature tropical fruit sweetness and floral perfume have helped a generation of coffee growers and drinkers around the world to appreciate how important genetics can be for flavor.

Where a coffee is being grown can influence flavor as much as what type of coffee is being grown, or even more. Think of terroir in the wine world, including factors like soil, climate, and temperature. And not every variety is suitable for every growing environment. The interplay between what a particular variety of coffee needs to thrive, and what a specific growing environment can offer to nourish it, is a key determinant of quality. Just as you may prize the cool winds and bands of limestone in the soils surrounding the mythic French wine region of Chablis, coffee has terroir, too!

Dozens of variables related to the physical place in which coffee is grown have impacts large and small on its flavor. Farm elevation, soil type, temperature range, rainfall, exposure to sunlight, shade, relative humidity, slope, wind, orientation—all these affect the development of the coffee fruit and the flavor of our coffee. We highlight farm elevation specifically with our single-origin releases because it can be a useful proxy for the quality potential of a coffee to be extraordinary. The cool temperatures at higher elevations stress the coffee plant, slowing its metabolism and lengthening the cherry maturation process, which can concentrate sugars and create more complex flavors. But planting the right variety, in the right location, is
still no guarantee that potential will be realized. That’s up to the grower.

Even with the potential for a coffee’s quality already baked into a plant’s DNA, and most environmental variables determined by nature one nature, one very important piece remains in unlocking a coffee’s potential quality: the grower. A grower’s level of obsession with quality is what separates coffees that are merely good from those that are truly great, or genuinely extraordinary.

Everything a grower does in the care and feeding of their coffee throughout its life cycle affects how that coffee will taste, beginning with the seeds they choose when it is time to plant new coffee, years before the first flowering, and ending with the way that coffee is processed and readied for market—with countless critical steps in between. As with environmental factors, some management practices have more
impact on quality than others.

Management practices can generally be divided into three categories: production, harvest, and post-production post-harvest. At every step along the way, quality can be preserved, amplified, created, or destroyed due to management. The partners we choose to work with have demonstrated a willingness and ability to manage their coffee in ways that consistently produce extraordinary results. It’s the people at
the farms, growers organizations, and washing stations who bring the coffee to the finish line.

• Production practices are agronomic and encompass everything that happens to coffee before the fruit is separated from the plant. It starts with the farm plan, the way growers turn the germ of an idea for a farm into reality. There is a lot of work to do before the first coffee seed is planted: terracing land, plotting the coffee rows, preparing the soil, planting shade trees (and clearing some along the way). Once the stage is set, production begins when a coffee seed is selected, ends with the harvest, and includes everything in between. Coffee farming involves actively managing earth, wind, and fire: the soils from which coffee draws water and nutrients, the wind that aids in pollination (but can threaten the delicate coffee flower if it is too strong), and the shade that regulates the sunlight coffee plants need for photosynthesis. It involves months of care and feeding of the coffee plant itself: weeding, pruning, fertilization, pest management, and, in some cases, irrigation. All of this work is repeated every year, to ensure plant vigor and healthy fruit for a single annual harvest season.
• Harvest marks the transition between the production and post-production post-harvest phases—the moment the fruit is separated from the plant—and it is among the most critical practices where quality is concerned. Coffee is a non-climacteric fruit—a technical term that suggests it does not ripen off the branch. This is a
  trait it shares with many other fruits, including grapes, strawberries, citrus, and the cherry after which the coffee fruit is named. That means the point at which coffee is harvested is critical to unlocking the fruit’s potential sweetness. It is not uncommon for our farmer partners to carry scientific instruments with them to the field to take measurements of the sugar content of their coffee cherry and ensure they are harvesting at peak ripeness. Because, in the end, even the most thorough production practices and meticulous post-
  production processing can’t save a coffee that has been harvested before its time.
• Post-harvest refers to everything that happens after the coffee cherry is separated from the plant. There are different roads a grower can choose to travel in the post-production phase, but all share the same starting point and destination: each begins with fresh cherry and ends with dried seed
  (commonly referred to as green coffee). The route a grower chooses to travel between these two points produces radically different flavors from the same coffee. There are three groups of processes for separating the seed from the fruit pulp and cherry skin that surround it: natural, washed, and honey. Regardless of which of the three processes a coffee producer chooses, they must also choose a way to dry the coffee. As with processing, there are three dominant drying technologies. The first two—patios and waist-high drying beds—are rustic, relying on the heat of the sun. The third is simple and has not changed radically since it was developed in the late nineteenth century: mechanical dryers fired by gas, wood, or coffee parchment removed in the hulling process.
  Over the past generation, however, growers have become increasingly experimental in their post-production processes. Growers obsessed with quality have modified these three basic approaches to create countless variations of washed, natural, and honey coffee to produce distinctive flavor profiles. And they have embraced a dizzying array of approaches to drying as research has confirmed the importance of
  the drying process in determining how good a coffee can be and how long a coffee can be good. Long overlooked by the trade as simply a means to an end, we now know that the way a coffee is dried can have a profound impact on coffee’s flavor and longevity. These innovations draw from winemaking, craft brewing, and other culinary and agro-industrial disciplines to achieve greater consistency, distinctive flavor profiles, or, in the best cases, both. Novel processing methods involve commercial and local yeasts, anaerobic processing, and carbonic maceration. New approaches may involve new drying facility designs, or modern practices like active management of airflow, drying coffee under differing levels of shade, and even drying under blue shade filters to control coffee’s exposure to ultraviolet light.
  Despite the proliferation of processing and drying practices in recent years, there are certain common denominators among growers producing extraordinary coffees. In our experience, most share three traits. They are experimental in their approach, testing new practices on a small scale and patiently improving
  them through small refinements until they are scaled up or phased out. They are rigorous and ordered in their execution, meticulously and consistently applying proven practices, and documenting everything. And they are tireless in their manual sorting, picking only ripe fruit and sorting out imperfect coffee every step of the way to ensure they are bringing the very best of harvest to market.