Washed? Natural? “Silky body, long finish”??
One bite-size lesson per coffee, and pretty soon the back of a bag reads like a story instead
of a riddle — and you’ll know exactly which coffees were made for you.
30 words decoded1 very good wine analogy0 snobbery
Do one with your morning coffee, or binge the lot. Your progress saves itself
(on this device) — tick them off and earn the world’s most caffeinated diploma.
0 of 11 done
🎓 Fluent in coffee. The bags don’t stand a chance — go claim a victory brew below.
1Lesson 1 of 11
First, a confession: coffee is a fruit.
The “bean” you grind is actually a seed — the pip inside a small,
sweet fruit called a coffee cherry. Everything on this page flows from that one fact.
Tap the layers to meet the fruit you’ve been drinking all along.
Skin (exocarp)
Thin, red-when-ripe, and tastes like a mild cherry crossed with lychee. Dried, it gets sold as a tea called cascara — so yes, you can drink the packaging.
Pulp (the fruit)
Sweet, sticky fruit flesh. In a natural process the seed dries inside all of this for weeks. In a washed process it’s stripped off within hours. Remember that — it’s the whole next chapter.
Mucilage (the sticky bit)
A slippery, sugar-rich layer hugging the seed. Honey processing is named after how sticky this layer gets while drying — no actual honey involved (it’s miel in Spanish).
Parchment (pergamino)
A papery protective shell around each seed. It gets milled off before export — and its flaky cousin, chaff, floats around our roastery like confetti.
The seed (your coffee)
Two per cherry, flat sides facing — unless the cherry grows a single round one, which we call a peaberry (roughly 5–10% of cherries; fans swear they roast more evenly).
Processing is everything that happens between the ripe cherry and the dry green seed
in the sack. It answers one question: how do you get the fruit off the seed — and how long do you
let the seed sit in that sweet, fermenting fruit before it dries? That decision matters as much as
where the coffee grew. Which brings us to the wine…
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Quick check
Get 3 right to pass — slip up and you just keep going.
2Lesson 2 of 11
Washed vs natural: the wine thing.
Here’s the shortcut baristas use with people who’d rather enjoy coffee than study it.
Naturals are your reds. Washed coffees are your whites. Honeys are the rosé.
Pick a glass.
← less fruit contactmore fruit contact →
Washed = white wine
Ripe, juicy, refreshing. Clean and bright — the coffee itself, nothing extra.
Pulp it. Skin and fruit come off within hours of picking.
Ferment briefly. 12–48 hours in tanks, just to loosen the sticky mucilage.
Wash it clean. Hence the name.
Dry it in its parchment jacket — that papery shell from lesson one — in the sun for one to two weeks. (The parchment comes off later, at the mill.)
Like a white, the juice is separated from the fruit early — so you taste the
variety and the place, with crystal clarity. Think florals, citrus, tea-like elegance,
lively acidity.
The in-betweener. Sweeter than a washed, tidier than a natural.
Pulp the skin off — like a washed.
But keep the sticky mucilage on — like a natural.
Dry it sticky for one to three weeks. No washing step.
Choose your shade: white → yellow → red → black honey = less → more fruit left on.
Exactly like rosé, it lives on a slider between the two worlds — a splash of
fruit contact buys syrupy sweetness and body while staying composed. Caramel, brown sugar,
stone fruit, silky texture.
Full-bodied, sweet, rich — the biggest personality in the room.
Do almost nothing. Whole cherries go straight onto drying beds — skin, fruit and all.
Dry slowly for three to four weeks, raked constantly so nothing spoils.
The seed marinates in concentrating fruit sugar the entire time.
Hull off the dried fruit to reveal the seed.
Red wine ferments with the grape skins on — naturals are the same move:
maximum fruit contact, wild fermentation. The result is berries, jam, chocolate-covered fruit,
heavy body, soft acidity, sometimes a gloriously boozy edge.
One Ethiopian farm can process identical cherries two ways and sell you two different coffees:
Washed lot
jasmine · bergamot · lemon · tea-like
vs
Natural lot
blueberry jam · strawberry · red wine
Same farm, same harvest, same trees. That swing is often bigger than the gap between two grape varieties — which is why the process is printed on every one of our bags.
The barista move
“What kind of wine do you enjoy — something rich and full-bodied, or something juicy and refreshing?”
That one question is how we point people at the right shelf. Rich red drinker? Start with a natural. Crisp white fan? A washed coffee will feel like home. Rosé all day? The honeys are waiting.
You’ll get the full quiz treatment at the end of this page.
Why the analogy genuinely works (for the curious)
It’s more than a cute sales line — the mechanism rhymes. In both drinks the master flavour lever is
how much contact the good bit has with the fruit and skins during fermentation. Wine people even
use the same phrase coffee people do: skin contact.
Red wine ferments with the skins on → colour, body, grip. Naturals dry inside the whole fruit → body, jam, funk.
White wine is pressed off the skins early → crisp and clean. Washed coffees lose the fruit within hours → clarity and brightness.
Rosé gets a brief kiss of skin contact. Honeys keep some sticky fruit on while drying. Same dial, different drink.
Both are fermented products: microbes turn fruit sugar into the fruity aromatic compounds (esters) you smell in the glass and the cup.
Where it breaks down (so you can defend it at a dinner party): with wine you drink the fermented
fruit itself. With coffee, we bin the fruit and roast the seed at around 200°C — every wine-like note
in your cup is a delicious second-hand echo that had to survive a roast. Also: nobody is getting tipsy on a
natural Ethiopia. The “boozy” is an aroma, not a unit of alcohol.
The wild aisle (the pét-nat of coffee)
Past the classics sits the experimental shelf — coffee’s answer to the natural-wine bar. Sealed tanks,
borrowed winemaking tricks, and flavours that make you double-check the bag.
Anaerobic
Fermented in sealed, oxygen-free tanks. Turns the fruit dial to eleven: tropical candy, brown spice, wildly aromatic.
Carbonic maceration
Whole cherries in a CO₂-flooded tank — lifted straight from Beaujolais winemaking. It won the 2015 World Barista Championship and kicked off this whole era.
Lactic
Ferments tuned toward lactic-acid bacteria — creamy, yoghurt-and-cream textures. Dessert in a cup.
Co-ferment & infused
Real fruit, spices or special yeasts join the ferment. Thrilling to some, controversial to purists — exactly like pét-nat.
Myth-buster: it’s the microbes, not the tank
“Anaerobic” is a bit of a misnomer — all fermentation is anaerobic (that’s just how
yeast and bacteria work, with or without a sealed tank). The flavour magic isn’t the lack of oxygen; it’s
which microbes get to run the show. Washed lots tend to be bacteria-led (cleaner), naturals
yeast-led (fruitier) — and a skilled producer can steer either.
So a sealed tank on its own guarantees nothing. That’s also why two “anaerobic naturals” can taste
worlds apart — and why we taste every lot rather than trusting the label. (Hat-tip to the fermentation
scientists making this case loudly right now.)
Words you may have spotted on our own shelves: Natural Anaerobic, Lactic Honey, Carbonic Decaf, Monsooned, Co-ferment Passionfruit. Now you know what they’re bragging about. You’ll find them under Something special on the coffee page.
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Quick check
Get 3 right to pass — slip up and you just keep going.
That’s the winemaking side. Next up: the grape itself.
3Lesson 3 of 11
Varieties: the grape behind the cup.
Wine has Chardonnay, Pinot and Riesling. Coffee has Bourbon, Gesha and SL28 — same idea,
same species, wildly different personalities. The variety sets the ceiling of what a coffee can taste
like; farm, process and roast decide how much of it lands in your cup.
Arabica ≈ fine wine grapes
Nuanced, aromatic, grown slow at altitude — the source of virtually all specialty coffee, and everything we roast.
Robusta ≈ the hardy hybrids
Tough, heavy-cropping, twice the caffeine, blunter in the cup. The workhorse of instant coffee.
Plot twist: Arabica is literally a natural hybrid with Robusta as a parent — coffee’s
noble species has Robusta in its bloodline.
The family tree, tap-able edition
Nearly every variety on a coffee bag is a mutation of Typica or Bourbon, a cross of the two — or a wild card straight out of Ethiopia’s forests.
The two great ancestors
Mutations & crosses
The Ethiopian wild cards
Typica the founding grape of coffee
Origin story: the original travelling Arabica — out of Yemen, through India and Indonesia to Amsterdam’s botanical gardens, then across the Americas in the 1700s. Almost every New World variety descends from a handful of Typica plants.
Tastes like: clean, sweet, mild and elegant. Refined, not showy.
Hook: beautiful in the cup, notoriously stingy on the tree — which is why farmers spent a century breeding around it.
Bourbon Typica’s sweeter sibling
Origin story: Yemeni coffee planted by the French on Bourbon Island (now Réunion) in the early 1700s, where it mutated into its own type.
Tastes like: sweeter and juicier than Typica — caramel, red fruit, rounder body. The crowd-pleasing all-rounder.
Hook: named after an island, not a whiskey — though both trace their names to the French royal House of Bourbon by completely separate routes.
Caturra Bourbon → dwarf mutation, Brazil (1910s)
Origin story: a single-gene dwarf mutation of Bourbon spotted in Brazil in the 1910s. Same plant, shrunk — easier to pick, packs into tight rows.
Tastes like: bright, clean, citrusy and lively — a touch sharper than its parent.
Hook: coffee’s compact hatchback, and the parent of a whole rust-resistant dynasty.
Mundo Novo Typica × Bourbon, found wild (1943)
Origin story: a natural Typica–Bourbon hybrid found growing wild in São Paulo in 1943 — nature doing the crossbreeding for free.
Tastes like: full-bodied, low-acid, chocolatey and nutty. Rich and comforting.
Hook: the literal “New World” — it became the backbone of Brazilian coffee, around 40% of the crop at its peak.
Catuaí Mundo Novo × Caturra (1949)
Origin story: a Brazilian lab cross of high-yielding Mundo Novo and compact Caturra.
Hook: the name is Guaraní for “very good”. Sturdy enough to hang onto its cherries in wind and rain.
Maragogipe Typica → giant mutation, Bahia
Origin story: a natural Typica mutation from Maragogipe, Brazil, that grows freakishly large beans.
Tastes like: soft, mellow and clean — understated for such a dramatic-looking bean.
Hook: the elephant bean — the largest in commercial coffee, roughly double normal size.
Pacamara Pacas × Maragogipe, El Salvador (1958)
Origin story: a deliberate cross of Pacas (a local Bourbon mutation) with the elephant-bean Maragogipe.
Tastes like: big, wild, unmistakable — herbal and floral with huge body. A love-it-or-argue-about-it cup.
Hook: a competition-circuit favourite precisely because it refuses to taste like anything else.
SL28 & SL34 Scott Labs selections, Kenya (1930s–40s)
Origin story: selected at Scott Agricultural Laboratories — SL28 from drought-tolerant stock, SL34 from French Mission Bourbon lines.
Tastes like: the definitive Kenyan cup — vivid blackcurrant, juicy tomato-like savouriness, wine-like acidity, syrupy body.
Hook: that legendary blackcurrant intensity comes partly from thirst — old, deep-rooted, water-stressed SL28 trees make the most electric cups.
Castillo & the Catimor family where Robusta sneaks back in
Origin story: crosses built on the Timor Hybrid — a natural Arabica–Robusta romance found on the island of Timor. Colombia’s Castillo (released 2005, a composite of many sister lines) is the star pupil.
Tastes like: clean, sweet, balanced — caramel and gentle fruit; the tough newer selections keep closing the gap on the fancy stuff.
Hook: Timor’s Robusta genes carry leaf-rust resistance that has saved entire coffee economies. Genetic insurance in plant form.
Gesha Ethiopian forest → Panama superstardom
Origin story: collected from Ethiopia’s Gori Gesha forest in the 1930s, planted in Panama in the 1960s for rust resistance — then it won Best of Panama in 2004 and became the most famous coffee on earth.
Tastes like: jasmine, bergamot, peach, tea-like delicacy. The “champagne of coffee”.
Hook: at the 2025 Best of Panama auction a washed Gesha sold for US$30,204 per kilogram. (You’ll also see it spelt “Geisha” — both spellings trace back to the 1930s paperwork.)
Ethiopian landraces the motherland of all Arabica
Origin story: not one variety but thousands of wild and semi-wild types that evolved across Ethiopia’s forests over millennia — estimates run from 6,000 to over 15,000.
Tastes like: floral and tea-like when washed; blueberry jam when natural. Endlessly varied.
Hook: when a bag says “heirloom”, it’s a polite shrug — nobody has finished counting them.
Pink Bourbon the identity-crisis coffee
Origin story: a salmon-pink-cherried coffee that rose to fame in Huila, Colombia — assumed for years to be a red × yellow Bourbon cross.
Tastes like: pink lemonade, honeysuckle, jasmine — suspiciously like a washed Ethiopian…
Hook: DNA testing revealed it isn’t a Bourbon at all — it’s genetically an Ethiopian landrace wearing a Bourbon’s name. The cup was telling the truth all along.
Riesling person?→Washed Kenyan SL28 — electric acidity with a just-sweet tension.
Cab Sav loyalist?→Kenyan SL28 again — it literally tastes of blackcurrant with a firm backbone.
Pinot Noir romantic?→Gesha — perfume and elegance over power.
Shiraz by the fire?→Natural Brazil — big body, ripe dark fruit, chocolate, soft acidity.
Oaked Chardonnay?→Pacamara or a honey Bourbon — round, textural, stone-fruit sweet.
Same variety. Three worlds.
Variety sets the ceiling — terroir (the taste of the place it grew: soil, altitude, climate) decides what actually gets built. Take one washed Gesha
and grow it in three places (a real cupping that happened in a Melbourne roastery recently):
California, USA
Insanely floral, tropical, bright. Around $500 a kilo — roughly a $50 cup in a café.
Canary Islands, Spain
Gentler, refined, almost surreal in texture. Same variety, totally different voice.
Copenhagen, Denmark
Grown indoors as a research project — too cold outside for coffee. Not commercially viable. Yet.
Same grape, different vineyard, different wine. Now the big question:
Would you pay $50 for one cup, just to experience it?
Spotted on our shelves lately: Gesha, Pink Bourbon, Wush Wush, Sudan Rume, Chiroso, SL28, Caturra, Typica…
Every bag lists its variety — next time, you’ll know exactly what the label is promising.
Meet the rare ones under Something special.
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Quick check
Get 3 right to pass — slip up and you just keep going.
Fruit, ferment, grape — you know what built the flavour. Now let’s learn the words for it.
4Lesson 4 of 11
The lingo: 30 flip-cards.
Every word a café has ever thrown at you, decoded. Tap a card to flip it.
No lingo found — try another word. Or invent one, that’s how half of these started.
Get 3 right to pass — slip up and you just keep going.
Thirty words richer. Now put them to work — let’s taste like a judge.
5Lesson 5 of 11
How to taste like a judge.
World Barista Championship judges don’t wing it — they follow a structure, and it works on any coffee:
espresso, plunger, or the mug you forgot on the bench. Four steps. Ninety seconds. No lab coat.
The pro warm-up (espresso only)
Judges stir the espresso three times, front to back, right to the bottom — it separates into
layers as it sits. Then take at least two sips. Our home version: first sip for taste, second sip for feel.
1
Find the big three
Ignore the fancy stuff. First sip, listen for three voices — sweetness, acidity
(that’s brightness, not sourness), bitterness (a dark cocoa edge). Rate each one low, medium or
high. Try it — slide what you taste:
Balanced — the three voices are singing together.
Balance doesn’t mean all equal — it means harmonious. A high-acid coffee is still
balanced if there’s enough sweetness holding its hand.
2
Go broad, then narrow
Don’t hunt the exact flavour straight away — start with the neighbourhood, then knock on doors.
(This is exactly how our flavour wheel works: general at the centre, specific at the rim.)
Now narrow it down…
3
Feel it: weight, texture, finish
Second sip. This one isn’t about flavour at all — it’s how the coffee physically feels.
Judges call it tactile, and they check three things:
Weight
How heavy it sits on your palate. Wine again: a Pinot Noir floats, a Shiraz lands. Milk works too — skim vs full cream.
Texture
The kind of feel. Tap a word:
Smooth and fine — slips over the tongue like satin.
Finish
Everything after you swallow. How long does it last — and is what lingers clean (fresh, invites the next sip) or drying? That puckery, sandpaper feel is astringency — think walnut skin.
Judge wisdom: these are neutral words, not compliments. “Heavy” isn’t
better than “light” — and intensity is not quality. An ashtray lingers too.
4
Ask: “is it balanced?” — then score it
The final judge question: do sweetness, acidity and bitterness work together? Then finish with the
actual WBC quality scale. Imagine a café served you this cup — which word fits?
Good — you’d happily order it again tomorrow.
Use “extraordinary” sparingly. Judges do. And remember: describing a coffee
accurately and deciding whether it’s good are two different skills — do both and you’re
tasting like a judge.
Bonus round: acidity is not battery acid
The most misunderstood word in coffee. “Bright acidity” isn’t a sourness warning — it’s the zing,
the same lift a squeeze of lime gives a curry. Without it coffee tastes flat, like lemonade that’s lost its fizz.
Different acids even taste like different fruits:
green apple — crisp, clean, Granny Smith snap. Many Colombians.
Tartaric
grape — winey and a little sophisticated.
Phosphoric
the cola acid — often credited for why great Kenyans taste almost fizzy.
So “bright, malic acidity” on a bag translates to: this coffee has a lively green-apple snap. Not sour. Alive.
Acetic
the vinegar one — winey and a little funky. It’s behind that boozy edge in naturals and anaerobics (lovely in balance, rank in excess).
Chlorogenic
the grassy, green one. A good roast burns most of it off — taste it and the coffee was probably under-developed. That’s your “why is this so grassy?” culprit.
The 80% secret: flavour is mostly smell
Your tongue only does five tastes — sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami. Everything else you call
“flavour” (blueberry, jasmine, caramel) arrives through your nose, from the back, as you
swallow. Pros call it retronasal smell, and it’s roughly 80% of the experience.
Don’t believe it? Try the party trick:
Train your palate at home this week
You don’t need fancy kit — just your kitchen. This is exactly how Q-graders — coffee’s certified professional tasters — build their senses:
Isolate the tastes. Three glasses of water: one with a spoon of sugar, one with a pinch of citric acid (or lemon), one with a little salt. Sip each and notice where on your tongue it lights up. Now you’ve got reference points.
Feel “body”. Tomato juice, then the same juice cut 50/50 with water. That’s heavy vs light body, made obvious.
Build aroma memory. Smell your spice rack, one jar at a time — crush a coriander seed, sniff cinnamon, cocoa, jasmine tea. Name what it reminds you of. That personal memory is what you’ll reach for in the cup.
Taste side by side. Two or three coffees at once beats one alone every time — contrast is the fastest teacher.
And the advice every champion repeats: don’t chase “blackcurrant”.
“Kinda fruity” is a real, useful tasting note. Start broad, get specific only when it comes to you.
Want the full dictionary? There’s a wheel for that too.
Flavours live on flavour wheels (including ours) — but
acidity, mouthfeel and aftertaste have their own official vocabulary: the Coffee Character Wheel,
a world-first developed right here in Australia by Southern Cross University with AgriFutures Australia. It splits
mouthfeel into body (the heaviness) and texture (the feel), catalogues the acidity types, and gives
aftertaste its own set of words — designed to sit alongside the SCA flavour wheel so you can describe the
entire experience, not just the flavours.
Bonus from the same research: Australian-grown coffee has its own terroir — panels found it
sweeter, nuttier and fruitier than imported beans, likely thanks to our cooler growing regions.
Get 3 right to pass — slip up and you just keep going.
You can taste like a judge. Now let’s bust what the roast does — and doesn’t do.
6Lesson 6 of 11
Roast myths, busted.
Myth 1: “Espresso roast” means espresso only
Nope — it’s a roast style, not a rule. Brew it however you like: espresso, filter, moka
pot, AeroPress. We roast our espresso style a touch darker — “more developed”, in roaster-speak —
to caramelise the sugars into smooth chocolatey, nutty flavours that cut beautifully through milk.
Filter roasts run lighter to spotlight acidity, florals and origin character — happiest black.
Why does the developed stuff love milk so much? That’s a Milk school story — next lesson.
It’s not a rule, it’s a serving suggestion — with a kiln.
Myth 2: strong = dark = more caffeine
Three different things. Drag the roast and watch what actually happens:
Medium
Roasty punch (what most people call “strength”)
Origin character & sweetness
Caffeine
Caffeine barely moves with roast level — it’s driven by dose and species
(Robusta carries roughly double Arabica’s). A “strong” dark roast can hold less caffeine than
your bright light roast. “Strength” on our bags means flavour intensity, not buzz.
Bonus myth: fresher is always better
Fresh-roasted beans are still degassing — releasing CO₂ that fights the brew. Rest them
and they hit a peak-flavour window. But here’s the twist most people miss: that window moves with the
roast. Compare:
Day 0–3Resting. Patience.
Day 4–15Peak flavour. Go.
Day 16–20Still lovely.
Day 21+Politely fading.
Day 0–14Resting. Seriously.
Day 15–52Peak flavour — tops out around day 35.
Day 53–69Still lovely.
Day 70+Politely fading.
Denser, lighter roasts trap their CO₂ far longer — some of our Nordic ultra-light
Signature Series coffees genuinely peak a month after roasting. Every coffee is different, which is why each
of our product pages plots its own peak-flavour curve instead of guessing. Check the bag, check the curve.
Get 3 right to pass — slip up and you just keep going.
Roast sets the character — and most Aussie cups finish with milk. Milk school’s next.
7Lesson 7 of 11
Milk school.
Milk temperature matters more than most people realise. Milk sugars taste sweetest around
55–65°C — go much past that and you trade sweetness and silk for
scald and a burnt tongue. Slide the thermometer:
62°CDairy sweet spot
Lactose sweetness peaks right here and the microfoam goes silky. This is flat-white country.
Why milk loves espresso roasts
Milk’s sweetness, fat and protein soften acidity and highlight caramel. That’s why the “developed”
espresso roasts from last lesson — chocolatey, nutty — cut through a flat white so well, and why a
delicate light filter roast can taste sharp in milk. It wasn’t built for it.
Storage cheat sheet
Dairy: 1–5°C. Cold milk textures better — it gives you more runway to stretch the foam. Alt milks: unopened shelf-stable cartons are happy in the cupboard (5–20°C)
— but once opened, into the fridge they go, same as dairy. They texture best in the
low-to-mid 50s, a touch cooler than dairy. 20–40°C is no-man’s land: too warm to store, too cold to serve.
Get 3 right to pass — slip up and you just keep going.
Milk mastered. The last metre of flavour is the barista’s five levers — into the lab.
8Lesson 8 of 11
The dial-in lab.
Dialling in espresso shouldn’t feel like guesswork. Five levers control the cup — pull one and
watch what usually happens to the balance. This is the map baristas carry in their heads.
Brightness (acidity)
Flavour punch
Aftertaste
Body
Finer grind = water fights harder through the puck, so more gets extracted. Expect more punch and body — push too far and it turns bitter and drying.
The centre line is your base recipe. These are rules of thumb, not laws — every coffee bends
them a little, which is exactly why “dialling in” is a verb. Sour and quitting early? Usually
under-extracted. Bitter and drying? Usually over. Change one thing at a time.
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Quick check
Get 3 right to pass — slip up and you just keep going.
Dialled in? Then let’s learn to tell when a cup’s gone wrong — and whose fault it is.
9Lesson 9 of 11
Is it off? Spot a bad cup.
Here’s the secret the pros know: when a coffee tastes bad, it’s usually not your fault
— and it’s rarely the bean’s fault either. Something went wrong on the way to the cup. Learn these
tells and you’ll never blame yourself for a duff servo coffee again.
What’s the cup doing? Tap the symptom:
Likely culprit:
The fix:
These are the usual suspects — not a full diagnosis. But nine times out of ten,
a “bad” coffee is one of these, and none of them mean coffee isn’t for you.
The two big ones, in plain English
You met this dial in the lab — here’s what missing it tastes like.
Over-extracted: water pulled too much out of the grounds — harsh, hollow,
drying, ashy. Usually too fine, too hot, or the batch brew sat for hours going “stewed”.
Under-extracted: water didn’t pull enough — sour, salty, thin, and it
quits early. Usually too coarse, too cool, or rushed.
Almost every espresso fault lives on this one dial. Sour? Go finer/hotter/longer.
Harsh? Go coarser/cooler/shorter. Change one thing at a time.
Channelling: the sneaky one
Water finds a crack in the coffee puck and races through it. That channel over-extracts
while everything around it under-extracts — so you taste sour and bitter in
the same sip, with a drying, astringent edge — that walnut-skin feel from the tasting lesson, back for a bad reason.
It’s a prep problem, not a bean problem — usually an uneven tamp or an
unprepped puck. The fix lives in technique, not the recipe.
The triangulation test
This is the actual game world cup-tasting champions play. Three cups
— two are identical, one is different. Can your palate pick the odd one out? Round 1.
Two of these coffees are the same. Trust your gut — tap the different one.
0 correct in a row. It gets harder each round — just like the real thing, where the finalists are three coffees from the same country, one region apart.
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Quick check
Get 3 right to pass — slip up and you just keep going.
You can spot the faults and speak the lingo. One big idea left before your final exam.
10Lesson 10 of 11
Every coffee has a home.
The most liberating idea in coffee judging: whether a coffee is good and whether you
like it are two different questions.
Championship judges score against a target — is it sweet, balanced, clean, true to what it’s meant to be?
— not against their personal taste. A judge who hates ultra-bright Kenyans can still hand one an
“excellent”. And you’re allowed to adore a coffee a judge would shrug at. Nobody can score your own mouth.
That funky natural that tastes like strawberry wine? Not everyone’s cup — but it’s someone’s
favourite coffee of all time. The mellow chocolatey blend judges would call simple? It’s the daily backbone of a
million happy mornings. A coffee being “not for you” is a matchmaking problem, not a quality problem.
“Hmm, not for me… but it’s well made, it’s clean,
and someone is going to love it.”
And this is why the descriptors on our bags are a promise, not poetry. “Blackcurrant, roasted
almond, silky body” is us communicating what’s in the cup so you can find your home coffee faster. Love juicy
and bright? Chase the fruit words. Want comfort in a mug? Chase chocolate, caramel, nuts. The words are there so you
never have to buy blind.
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Quick check
Get 3 right to pass — slip up and you just keep going.
And now — let’s find your coffee.
11Lesson 11 of 11 · the finale
What’s your coffee palate?
Five questions. No wrong answers. A shelf full of right ones.
🏁 Photo finish — two palates live in you. Both shelves are yours:
You’re a Fireside Red. 🍷
Full-bodied, sweet, generous — you want naturals: berries, jam, chocolate-covered
everything. Start in the Bold & Full-bodied end and look for Natural under Process.
Anaerobics, co-ferments, carbonic everything — the wild aisle was built for you.
Check the “Something special” shelf and anything marked Wild & Experimental.
