Specialty coffee is about honoring every one of the many stages coffee
goes through, and all the people involved in its production. It’s about
finding the very best beans and trying to unleash their full flavor
potential at every stage of the process, from planting through to brewing.
“Specialty” is also much more than just a marketing term. There are
organized specialty coffee associations that formally track, test and set
world standards.
Among them are associations of America, Australia,
Japan and Europe that hold competitions, certification courses and
symposiums to promote and regulate any coffee being called “specialty.”
By
competitions, we’re talking world-class events with specialized categories,
like the World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship for boozy brews, with
fifteen pages of rules and regulations. It’s serious business.
Considering the long trip a coffee bean takes, and the many hands that
help get it to your kitchen, regulation can take out a lot of guesswork for
coffee-makers.
With specialty coffee, baristas know the origin and quality,
so it’s easier to predict the taste. From there they can test, taste and blend
away to bring out the most complex flavors.
The Persnickety Process of Specialty Coffee
They start by choosing beans by their origin: ensuring they know exactly
where and at what altitude the beans were grown, as the particular
geography of a place imparts flavor.
It’s the terroir concept, also used when
describing wine or some cheeses: soil and climate in partnership with both
the specific cultivar of the plant and the unique farming practices express
a particular character of place.
Specialty coffee is selectively hand-picked so that only ripe cherries are
used: these are more fragrant, smooth and mellow. Ripe beans are most
often wet processed and sorted by hand. Specialty beans can be sorted
two to three times, with any impurities like twigs or hulls removed, and
any dud beans ditched
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