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Dec 8
25m 33s

Coffee Quality, Part 2: How “quality” be...

JAMES HARPER
About this episode
If you ask two specialty professionals what makes a high-quality coffee, you’ll likely get a surprisingly consistent answer: clean, sweet, juicy, bright. To an outsider, they would be forgiven for thinking coffee quality is universally defined.   But the truth is more sober.   In this episode, we examine how a simple cupping form helped create a universal id ... Show More
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Dec 8
Coffee Quality, Part 3: When the “quality” myth hits the farm
For twenty years, the 2004 cupping form profoundly shaped the specialty coffee world. But on the hillsides of coffee farms, some of the form’s byproducts have been disadvantaging producers. In this episode, we follow two producers whose lives collided with the myth of universal q ... Show More
30 m
Dec 8
Coffee Quality, Part 1: The birth of specialty coffee flavours
For the longest time, coffees were dull and bitter. But then a small group of pioneers changed the world. In this episode, we travel back to the 1960s and ’70s to meet the trailblazers who realised coffees could taste distinctive: sweeter, brighter, cleaner. We discover how their ... Show More
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For the longest time, the coffee community only cared about water’s impact ruining espresso machine boilers and kettles. But what about water’s impact on coffee flavour? In this episode, I tell the story of how the specialty coffee community came to understand water chemistry: th ... Show More
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