Coffee 101

Just how many things can affect how your coffee will taste? Let us count the ways: terroir (qualities of the land/soil), farm elevation, processing techniques, when and how the coffee is picked, roasting, brewing, and, yes, the actual variety of the coffee plant. (And probably, like, a million more things!) We don’t want to get too in the botanist-like weeds here, but inspired by the release of two different varieties of coffee from the same farm a couple years ago, we thought it was apropos to at least ‘dig’ into the proverbial coffee soil and pull up some ‘dirt’ on coffee...

Every bag of our coffee has a section that says “tasting notes” followed by three descriptors, typically a fruit or two and something sugary like toffee or caramel. Though, sometimes, there is a floral note, or an adjective like sparkling. You may think, “Does it really taste like that?” The answer is actually, amazingly, yes. Coffee is full of chemical compounds that result in a world of flavors and aromas that anyone can experience with a little practice and attention. Let’s break it down. P.S. There’s a video version of this post at the bottom if that's more your speed!...

CRAFTING COFFEE BLENDS AT CREMA Let’s talk about blends.   At Crema, many of our coffees are single origin, meaning all of the beans in that bag of coffee came from one farm or small geographical area. But, some of our best-selling offerings are blends — a combination of single origin coffees — and we’d like to give them their time in the spotlight.   Blending coffees gives our green coffee buyer, Winston, the chance to be creative with how different coffees can complement each other. We love that they give us a consistent and reliable profile that tastes great...

Author's Note: This is an older blog post and we have since changed our coffee labels. But, all this info still rings true even if you won't find all of this info on our coffee bags anymore. We will always have full details for each coffee on our website! You see them every time you pick up a bag of coffee: a label with a bunch of info about the beans inside the bag. While many of the actual words are pretty straightforward, there’s a lot of meaning behind each characteristic of the coffee.  We’ll go over the basics of...