I haven't been on here in a while and felt the need to remedy that. I do have a blog that I've started for the roastery (which also needs to be posted on soon) and I plan to start posting those blogs here for you guys to see. If you want to see what's already there, you can head on over to http://cuptocup.wordpress.com. I'll put one of my first posts here for you to get an idea of what it's about. Hope you enjoy!

This is the first of what I hope to be several articles attempting to educate the confused but budding coffee enthusiast. I'll answer questions or discuss coffee topics that can be confusing or just make general offerings for you to add to your coffee encyclopedia. With that being said, let's get right into the first topic!

What is all that stuff after the name of the country where the coffee is from?

I'm glad you asked. If you look at the coffee offerings page of our site or other coffee sites, you find coffee from various countries. After the name of the country, you'll also see more words that may or may not make sense like, Guatemala San Pedro, Tanzania Peaberry, Ethiopia Natural Sidamo Gerbichu Lela. This extra stuff is a way of providing more information about the coffee than just the country.

If you were going to buy a nice bottle of wine, would you pay big bucks for one that simply said California on the side? Of course not. You might want to know what vineyard it came from, or what type of grape, or whatever else it is wine people want to know about wine. This is the same idea behind this extra information on the coffee.

For example a coffee might provide you with the specific region in the country where the coffee was from. Guatemalan San Pedro tells you that the coffee is from Guatemala and grown in the San Pedro area. The coffee is actually Guatemalan San Pedro La Laguna. Laguna translates as lake and refers to the well known Lake Atitlan. So just in case you might be thinking of a different San Pedro, it lets you know which one.

Other information you might get is something related to the bean itself, whether that be a specific varietal of coffee plant (French Missional Varietal) or something about the shape or size of the bean (Tanzania Peaberry, Kenya AA). Note: varietal and peaberry are terms we'll go over in future posts.

You can also find out how the coffee was processed, that is, how it got from sitting on the plant to being ready to be roasted. These are terms like natural processed, pulped natural, and washed.

There are other things sometimes listed as well such as the name of the farm, or a name given to the coffee.

Sometimes only one bit of information is provided, but othertimes you get all sorts of information, like our Columbia Huila Los Naranjos de San Agustin which breaks down like this; Columbia (country) Huila (region) Los Naranjos de San Agustin (name of the collective of coffee growers).

Go through our coffees and see if you can figure out what means what.

I hope you enjoyed the first coffee jargon . I'll try to add posts regularly so that the learning experience can continue. Peace.