Water 💧 is the quiet and elusive partner of coffee. You need it to make coffee and it can change the flavour of it depending on the subtle differences in water composition. Recently, there has been a resurrection of research around the water composition and the quality of coffee. 👩🏽‍🔬 A key notion to take on board is that good tasting water does not necessarily mean good tasting coffee. For example, the bicarbonate content that makes a branded bottled water very smooth water to drink is basically responsible for removing acidity and sweetness in coffee.

There are endless flavour notes to coffee. You can practice observing these through a coffee tasting technique called coffee cupping. In order to achieve the most consistent results, the “cupper” (which could be you) needs to follow very specific but simple procedures: 

After picking the ripe coffee cherries collected from the Coffea plant, the coffee beans are extracted by using a specific processing method. There are 3 main processing methods: washed (or wet) process; dry (or natural) process and honey (or semi-dry) process. The washed process is the one that dominates the world of specialty coffee. 

You probably will have seen on coffee packs everywhere the phrase "100% Arabica", and wondered what it means or stands for. This is mainly intended as a sign of quality which is used as a selling point and means exactly what it says: that 100% of the coffee in the package is made from Arabica coffee beans.

Our third and final blog about our single origin coffees is on our new addition, the Indonesian Single Origin. As with the last two single origins, we did some long tasting sessions among the co-founders of Moving Beans and finally settled for the following description: cinnamon, nutmeg and chocolate. These are tastes we experienced at different times of consumption, i.e. the first impression, mid palate and the long-lasting taste.