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My name is Mike Jones and I'm a barista at Third Rail Coffee right by Washington Square
Park in New York City. I'm going to teach you some basic coffee-making skills.
So especially in recent years, you may have noticed that bags of coffee that you've bought
from either cafés or coffee roasters have started adding a lot more information, such
as varietal, altitude, the farm that it comes from. And so it's hard to actually know, what
does that mean? Like, how is it going to taste. There's sort of a basic category that you
can put some beans in and those are the Indonesia growing region, East Africa, and then Central/South
America. Indonesian coffees tend to be very earthy, they have this sort of very heavy
body to them. They're often used as the undertone in espresso blends. East African coffees tend
to be fruitier, livelier, kind of wine-like. And then Central/South Americans have a little
bit more base to them, some darker, deeper notes to them. Another way that coffees differ
is the processing, and there are two main ways. These are natural and wash-processed.
Wash-process is taking over a little bit more just because there's a less chance of defect
in the bean. What happens in natural is after the cherry is picked, it is simply left out
to dry with the fruit on for a certain amount of time, and this creates like really crazy
fruit flavors, but also ferment is rampant. With washed, it's cleaner, flavors are more
nuanced and balanced and more delicate. And in Central and South America, washed is sort
of the standard. Countries like Costa Rica it's actually the law. Whereas in East Africa,
Ethiopia in particular, there's such a water shortage that people are naturally processing
everything, and having defective beans. But in recent years there have been economically
feasible ways of actually doing a wash process using special machines in Ethiopia, so we've
been seeing a lot more exciting coffees come from East Africa that are cleaner, less fermented,
and just more balanced and exciting.