Move over, Death Wish Coffee, there’s a new kid in town, and this kid is taking over in jittery glory.
Black Insomnia, a South African coffee company with the hastag #SleepingIsCheating, is now for sale in the US, and the FDA has been watching closely.
The third wave of coffee is a term that was coined in a newsletter by the Specialty Coffee Association of America back in 2002, and essentially means that we are entering a phase of coffee production where it is becoming more artisanal and a craft coffee type of conception. We have so much control over a huge variety of coffee beans, and a wide range of places to grow them, ways to clean them and roast them, different waters to influence it just so. Coffee is entering the same arena that craft beers and micro breweries recently started dominating, and that wines have been in for quite some time.
“Decaf coffee, what the heck?”
Chances are whenever you’ve been to a restaurant and ordered a coffee, and the wait staff had the audacity to ask whether you wanted regular or decaf, you had some form of the previous statement run through your mind. Apparently for people trying to cut back on coffee (“cut back on coffee, what the heck?”), getting decaf coffee is like Nicorette.
Now, I’m going to assume by the very nature of you reading this article, that you’re a coffee drinker. And, if you’re American, you’re probably helping put a significant dent in the 400 million cups of coffee that Americans drink each and every day. And, if you’re like me, you probably think that a very small portion of those were decaffeinated cups of coffee.
We’ve been going into tons of details here on our blog about the seemingly infinite levels of intricacies that go into making the best cup of coffee you’ve ever had. There are tons of different coffee beans, each bean being grown in varying climates and elevations which produce different flavors, and it is also influenced by how it is processed. You can have a variety of coffee beans, each providing a different flavor profile, and the water used and the water extraction also influence the coffee output.
But, what we haven’t elaborated on yet, is all of the different ways to roast a bean, and what that ultimately means for your coffee. There are 5 “levels” of roasts, starting with unroasted, and moving it’s way towards more and more roasted. We’ll list the name of the roast, the roast classification, and the temperatures used to cause that roast.
Coffee roasting begins after it is cleaned/processed, but is separate from brewing it.
Generally, coffee beans are grown and processed on a farm, then sent to a roaster, and the roaster then sends it either directly to the consumer, or to a business that will sell it to the consumer.
When the green coffee beans first arrive at a roaster, then they are generally dumped into a hopper where they are screened and have the debris and other junk separated.
In large scale operations, they are…
