What is fine coffee?

What is specialty coffee?

What counts as fine coffee?

What is the taste of fine coffee?

Being asked too much, there is an impulse to talk to everyone, so I will write freely and talk about cognitive fine coffee.

As early as 1974, SCAA founder has given a definition of fine coffee, not repeated here, but the core of fine coffee is the taste of the region, so what is the most important factor affecting the taste of coffee region? This question has to go back to the plantation to answer, we buy coffee to a plantation, mainly look at three links: first, natural conditions, second, planting varieties, third, processing, because they affect the coffee in the most fundamental regional taste.

From the recent 10 years, C.O.E competition of fine coffee, really rely on planting conditions to win coffee is rare. Although each C.O.E. award-winning coffee is highlighted in its introduction, if you look a little wider, coffee grown in exactly similar plantation conditions next to those famous award-winning beans is not on the list.

There is a limit to how much variety can contribute to making excellent coffee. Of course, Geisha in Panama is a typical example of coffee variety creating a myth in fine coffee, but apart from it, we have never seen an event where coffee varieties alone can become excellent fine coffee.

And the way of dealing with it has become the main factor in creating myths in the past decade. It is not surprising that the most difficult thing to change in an environment suitable for growing coffee is the natural conditions of the plantation, and coffee varieties also need a long time to cultivate to form a stable commercial yield. Coffee processing methods and technical levels will affect the regional taste of coffee to the greatest extent, and it is also the link with the least investment and the fastest effect.

Therefore, the same growing environmental conditions, the same coffee varieties and different levels of coffee processing, and the same level of coffee processing, make the coffee in the plantation present a very different taste differentiation, and the competition between plantations has developed into a competition at the level of coffee processing.