What on earth is boutique coffee?

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Fine coffee was first proposed by Erna Knustsen, known as the "godmother of fine coffee", in the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal in 1974.

It highlights that "only in the most favorable microclimate and soil, can we grow a unique flavor of fine coffee", aiming to distinguish it from the bulk commercial coffee on the New York Futures Exchange.

Less unique regional flavor, it is not fine coffee, but reduced to general commercial beans or stale canned coffee (large canned coffee beans or powder).

Ms. Knudsen first proposed the concept of fine coffee, emphasizing the relationship between upstream growing environment and coffee quality.

Fine coffee is a trade model

Speaking of which, the most fundamental and remarkable feature of fine coffee is not directly related to the level and variety of coffee, but a trade model.

This is the logical origin of fine coffee, and everything else is derived from this, or appearance, including the level, variety and extraction method of coffee.

Traditional coffee bean trading is that after a large number of bean traders buy in the producing country, they sell to producers, large chain cafes, etc. through the international futures market. In this way, all kinds of beans mixed together, you do not know what you bought, the same bag of beans, may be mixed with more than a dozen varieties, from different environments, different processing methods of multiple origins. As for taste, there is no guarantee of the quality of such beans, even if they are freshly baked.

Fine beans, on the other hand, are coffee shops and other cooked bean producers (coffee beans are plants, raw beans cannot be eaten, we buy roasted cooked beans) directly contact coffee farmers (estates, farms), called direct trade or fair trade.

Of course, direct trade also involves many small bean traders.

An important part of direct trade is that buyers need to instruct coffee farmers how to grow, harvest, and treat coffee beans, which are all very important factors in the taste of coffee beans.

Direct trade can also bring more benefits, such as controllable quality, traceability, less intermediate links can also increase the purchase price, increase the enthusiasm of coffee farmers, but will not increase the final sales price much.

For example, intellectuals, anti-culture, blue bottles and other top boutique cafes in the world, the price is almost the same as Starbucks in the same city, but the taste is very different.

At the same time, direct trade will make buyers strive to find better quality coffee beans, find more suitable areas for growing coffee trees, and find coffee farmers with more experience and technology and more open-minded.

In this way, the quality of coffee beans naturally improved a lot, and the taste style was also guaranteed. Not only does it taste good, but it also tastes controllable.

When you like a particular flavor, you can always buy that coffee bean, although the flavor will vary with the climate of the year, but the overall style and quality are roughly the same.

This is another feature of fine coffee, and taste, quality directly related to the "origin characteristics." This is also why, after the rise of the boutique coffee wave, two extraction methods, hand-brewed single (single variety coffee beans) and SOE(single espresso coffee), began to gain popularity.

At the same time, because the quality of coffee beans has been guaranteed, espresso traditional blend beans, formula also began to stabilize. There is no need to look for new formulas in seasons like before, and quality cannot be guaranteed.

Additional items: suitable extraction method

Finally, although fine coffee has no direct relationship with extraction method, it has a great influence on the choice of extraction method.

In an era when you don't know where your beans come from, hand flushing isn't a very reliable option. So although all kinds of drip extraction methods have been around for more than a hundred years, they have hardly caught on in the past.

After the rise of fine coffee, hand flushing is popular, this is because hand flushing has unique advantages in expressing coffee flavor. It can be said that hand brewing is the extraction method that best shows the characteristics of coffee origin. At the same time, the taste of hand flushing is mild and easy for more people to accept. The price of hand-washing appliances is relatively low, which is also conducive to popularization.

However, this does not mean that fine coffee is limited to hand brewing. In fact, any extraction method can be used for fine coffee. However, the most convenient to control variables and easy to produce stable products are hand brewing and Italian semi-automatic coffee machines.

Everyone has different definitions and standards for good coffee. Expensive coffee is not necessarily fine coffee, and expensive coffee is not necessarily bad. The most important thing is to let more people get the perfect flavor of each coffee bean.