Why Your Water Is Ruining Your Coffee
We tested 14 different water sources with the same Colombian beans. The results were dramatic — same coffee, wildly different cups. Here's what we found and what you should do about it.
Origin visits, roasting experiments, brewing science, and honest opinions from our team.
We spent 21 days at the Konga Cooperative during the 2025 harvest season. What started as a sourcing trip turned into a masterclass in fermentation, altitude farming, and the extraordinary patience of Ethiopian coffee producers.
The cherries are picked by hand by over 1,200 smallholder farmers and delivered to the central washing station each morning before 8am. What happens next — the drying, the turning, the waiting — is where the magic of natural processing lives.
We tested 14 different water sources with the same Colombian beans. The results were dramatic — same coffee, wildly different cups. Here's what we found and what you should do about it.
A deep dive into the chemistry that happens between 160°C and 200°C and creates the hundreds of volatile compounds responsible for coffee's aroma and flavour.
Finca La Esperanza has been in the Muñoz family since 1949. We sat with Rodrigo Muñoz and his daughter Ana to understand how they've maintained quality across three generations of farming.
Rao spin vs. slow pour vs. pulse pour vs. bypass — we ran controlled tests on all nine commonly recommended pour over techniques using the same coffee and water. Some results surprised us.
The winning routine used a carbonic maceration Kenyan. We break down the techniques, the flavour profiles, and what the competition results mean for specialty coffee trends in 2026.
The specialty coffee movement is partly about flavour, but it's also about slowing down. One exceptional cup brewed with intention beats five mediocre ones consumed on autopilot.