Handrip Book
Country by country, what the growing region does to the cup — and how to read it off the bag before you brew.
Altitude, varietal, process, grade. Four words on a bag of specialty coffee, each one describing a decision made long before you ground anything — and each one telling you something you can act on.
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Every arabica plant on the planet descends from a forest in south-western Ethiopia. Most of that genetic diversity never left, which is why a bag from Yirgacheffe tastes like nothing else and the varietal line just says heirloom.
Blackcurrant, tomato leaf, grapefruit and an acidity that arrives like a structural element rather than a note. Kenya is the most recognisable cup in coffee, and almost none of it is an accident.
Colombia is the origin that is always in season somewhere, and the one where the varietal on the bag is a political statement as much as a botanical one.
In 2004 a farm in Boquete entered a varietal nobody wanted into a national competition and won with it. Two decades later the same varietal sets the ceiling for what a pound of coffee can sell for.
Cedar, tobacco, damp earth, almost no acidity and a body you could stand a spoon in. Sumatran coffee is the clearest proof in the atlas that processing can matter more than everything else combined.
The second-largest coffee producer on earth spent thirty years being treated as a commodity robusta supplier. The interesting part of the story is what stayed home.
