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Tasting Reports - Processing Method

Coffee Review has published more than 250 monthly coffee tasting reports since February 1997. The tasting reports below, featuring coffees produced by a specific processing method, appear in reverse chronological order. You may refine your search by using the key word search feature that appears in the page header. The content in tasting reports and associated reviews was correct at the time of publication but may not remain accurate over time.

Path into the coffee plantation in the highlands of Honduras

The Fate of a Classic: Washed Central America Coffees

For decades, the classic washed or wet-processed coffees of Central America and Mexico have constituted one of the world’s great go-to coffee types. Usually clean-tasting, usually sweetly-tart, with a shifting array of fruit notes – always stone fruit, typically some citrus and flowers, always notes ranging from nut and caramel to full-on dark chocolate depending on the coffee and roast. And most

September 11, 2020
Tasting Report | Reviews

Coffee Tasting Report: November 2019

Anaerobic Fermentation and Other Palate-Bending Processing Experiments

I recall that, in high school, teachers graded essays based on various conventional writing categories — grammar and diction, clarity, organization, etc. But most also gave credit for originality. Often, some friend’s paper would show weaknesses in regard to comma placement, word choice, and clear organization but attract a high grade for originality. Perhaps you could say that some of the

November 9, 2019
Tasting Report | Reviews

Hawai’i: A New Wave of Coffee Innovation

The Hawaiian Islands are known the world over for beautiful beaches, diverse microclimates, and both active and dormant volcanoes — pretty much paradise, as the cliché goes. Hawaiian culture is both uniquely American and, in many ways, happily incongruous with mainstream American culture. One island in particular, Hawai'i Island (often called the Big Island), produces the famous, widely

May 15, 2019
Tasting Report | Reviews

Natural-Process Espressos: Fruit and Chocolate Exalted

I recently led a tasting of fine coffees at a consumer event. Only one of these coffees was natural-processed, i.e., had been prepared at the mill by drying the coffee seeds or beans inside the whole fruit. The other samples were all washed coffees, processed by drying the beans after the fruit skin and flesh had been removed. The washed method is the traditional norm for fine coffee in most

August 14, 2018
Tasting Report | Reviews

Aged, Casked and Cured: Innovations in Green Coffee Conditioning

Green, unroasted coffee beans are porous and absorbent. As anyone in the industry knows from painful experience, green beans easily pick up odors from almost anything in their environment — paints stenciled on coffee bags, for example, concrete floors, petroleum residue in shipping containers, cardamom stored in the same warehouse. But where there is a problem there also may be an opportunity.

May 8, 2017
Tasting Report | Reviews

Honey coffees on raised beds in Costa Rica

Honey-Processed Coffees: Quiet Adventure

Honey coffee, honey-processing – what wonderful coffee language! It’s a language that sells (after all, most of us like honey), but it sells honestly. I can’t think of a better descriptor than “honey” for a process in which coffee beans are dried with the sticky-sweet, golden layer of fruit flesh still clinging to them, rather dried after the fruit flesh has been completely removed as it is in the

August 4, 2016
Tasting Report | Reviews

Photo of Brazil Coffee Farm

Brazil Naturals: Tradition Meets Trend

Although Coffee Review has published a number of articles over the years focusing on coffees from Brazil, we have never specifically focused on the coffee type generally called “Brazil naturals”: Brazil coffees of the Arabica species that have been dried inside the fruit rather than after the fruit has been removed (as is the case with conventional “washed” or wet-processed coffees). Brazil

May 9, 2016
Tasting Report | Reviews

Wet hulling in Sumatra - Photo courtesy of Crop to Cup Coffee

Elegant Earth: Wet-Hulled Sumatras and One Sulawesi

Wet-hulling is not an obscure Olympics sailing event nor (at least to my knowledge) a special trick in waterskiing or wakeboarding. It is a fruit removal and drying variation that contributes much of the distinct character of traditional Indonesia coffees, particularly those from Sumatra and Sulawesi. It is also practiced on other Indonesian islands, almost everywhere in Indonesia where small

April 4, 2015
Tasting Report | Reviews

Costa Rica honey raised beds

Honey and Natural Process Coffees, Central America 2014

Nine years ago I organized a panel for the Specialty Coffee Association of America called “Using Alternative Processing Methods to Create Product Differentiation: Perspectives and Opportunities.” Presented in Spanish and English, it attracted around five hundred coffee producers and roasters. The overall premise of the panel was simple: coffee is no longer a commodity beverage but a specialty

September 1, 2014
Tasting Report | Reviews

Breaking the Crust During Cupping

Dried-in-the-Fruit Refinement: Ethiopia and Yemen Naturals

At this moment I am drinking a cup of a coffee labeled “Ethiopia Amaro Natural.” It was sourced and roasted by Old Soul, an artisan baker and small-batch coffee roaster in Sacramento, California. Aficionados and regular readers of Coffee Review know that “natural” is the latest name for coffee dried inside the whole fruit, rather than after the fruit residue has been removed, as is the case with

November 11, 2013
Tasting Report | Reviews

Costa Rica Raised Beds for honey processing

Honey and Pulped Natural Coffees

“Honey” is a relatively new term describing coffee that has been dried with all or some of the sticky fruit pulp or “honey” (miel in Spanish) still adhering to the bean. Those familiar with coffee processing methods will, of course, recognize this practice as a kind of compromise between two more familiar processing methods: the dry or “natural” method, in which the beans are dried while entirely

September 3, 2012
Tasting Report | Reviews

Tasting Report: The New Naturals

Brandy and Surprises: The New Naturals

For those unfamiliar with the emerging language of fine coffee the title of this article may be a puzzler. What’s a “natural” and what makes some of these “naturals” “new”? Natural is a positive name marketing-savvy Brazilians came up with some years ago to describe coffees that until that time were called “unwashed” or “dry-processed.” These are coffees consisting of beans that were dried

November 4, 2010
Tasting Report | Reviews

Asian Palm Civet in Cage

Exotic Procedures in Far Places: Aged, Monsooned and Luwaked Coffees

This month we review two of the world's more exotic coffee types - monsooned coffees from India and aged coffees from Sumatra - together with the novelty kopi luwak, a coffee famously processed via the digestive tract of a coffee-fruit-eating mammal, and, perhaps understandably given the procedures involved, currently the world's most expensive coffee. Monsooned and aged coffees are both

December 3, 2007
Tasting Report | Reviews

Coffee Tasting Report: Straight Coffees from Africa

Berries, Wine and Chocolate (Some of the Time): Dry-Processed Coffees of Ethiopia and Yemen

Dry-processed or "natural" coffees from Yemen and Ethiopia (those coffees dried inside the fruit rather than after the fruit has been removed) are the world's original coffees - and also, in their most recent incarnation, one of the newest trends in coffee. Unfortunately, most of the exotically distinctive coffees I reviewed this month with co-cupper Miguel Meza represent the new trend rather than

November 5, 2007
Tasting Report | Reviews

Tasting Report: Ethiopia Coffees

Wet-Processed Ethiopia Coffees

An interesting trivia question to ask people is where coffee originated. Virtually everyone looks confused, and, when pressed, usually tries a Latin-American country: Colombia, say, or Brazil. Of course, Coffee arabica, the species that produces all fine coffees, originated in the highland forests of Ethiopia, in the Horn of Africa. The arabica tree, which still grows wild in the middle tier of

October 1, 1999
Tasting Report | Reviews

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