Coffee Appreciation

Further to the processing question it occurred to me that triple packs can be a bit misleading because it is rare for washed, honey and natural to all be a traditional processing method to a region. For example the Haru processing station that I did a triple pack from would traditionally wash and naturally process coffees but honey is only a recent experiment driven by market demand.

It’s worth knowing what processing methods are traditional to each region pre-third-wave or whatever you want to call it, as these in my experience give the best results. With many exceptions it’s like this:

South America - all washed except Brazil who wash, pulp, and naturally process their coffee. Brazil’s mostly lower acidity coffees and very high quality natural processing methods mean their naturals are very clean and don’t tend to have that characteristic ripeness. They are sometimes difficult to distinguish from washed coffees. Natural coffees from other South American nations tend to be high quality speciality lots from recently developed processing facilities designed to service the speciality market. They are often aiming for wow factor over elegance in my experience. This is a well developed market now and it would seem that natural processing is very common but it has really just been the last 15 years or so.

Central America is often washed but increasingly honey-process, largely because of environmental pressures concerning water shortages and pollution of water ways from washing stations. I love Central American honey coffees and try to have one on most of the time. Done well they’re hard to tell from washed versions but they have a more syrupy body.

East Africa - Ethiopia is traditionally washed and natural, other processes again are down to market pressures and it’s not the general way of doing things - results are often variable IMO.
Kenya is pretty much all washed, again there are other processes coming out of there but I just like to stick with the methods they’ve been doing for generations. Rwanda washed and naturals are all great, they have a very modern infrastructure since the war and speciality buyers have influenced the processing so they’re doing good things with less traditional processes in the main.

Asian coffees - I’ve never bought a huge variety of them but in Sumatra the tradition is wet-hulling which I don’t think happens anywhere else and leads to that very distinctive flavour profile and blue colour of the raw coffee. They take the parchment off the coffee before drying which normally gets left on until export with other coffees. I visited Wahana estate which had done all the r&d of all the methods and produce wet hulled, washed, honey and natural to a very high standard. Most of the rest of the producers are wet-hulled.

So if it was me I’d be getting washed coffees from Colombia, Peru and Kenya, honey coffees from El Salvador and Costa Rica, Natural coffees from Ethiopia and Brazil and wet hulled coffee from Sumatra to train myself on typical process flavours.