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The Oficina de Cafés de Puerto Rico (OCPR) is the government office that regulates, protects, and develops Puerto Rico's coffee industry. Created by Law 78-2019 and housed within the Administración para el Desarrollo de Empresas Agropecuarias (ADEA) of the Pu...

Café Finca Cialitos is a single-estate Puerto Rican coffee from the mountain town of Ciales. Founded in 1999 as a family-owned coffee farm, the operation is run by Joaquín Pastor González — an agronomist, certified Q-grader, and the man who often serves you c...

Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance on Earth, and the active compound that has made coffee the world's second-most-traded commodity. It works by blocking adenosine receptors in the brain — preventing the chemical signal that tells you ...

The grinder is the single most important piece of equipment in any coffee setup. A great coffee bean ground unevenly will produce a worse cup than an average bean ground precisely. The reason is extraction: water pulls flavor out of coffee at a rate that depe...

Coffee is 98 percent water. The other 2 percent — the dissolved coffee compounds — depends entirely on what was in that water before brewing started. Water with the wrong mineral content will under-extract or over-extract the same beans on the same equipment ...

The most overlooked fact about caffeine is that it disrupts sleep even when you fall asleep just fine. Caffeine has a half-life of five to six hours in most adults, meaning a cup at 3 PM still has a quarter of its dose active at 3 AM. The disruption is not al...

An espresso machine is the most complicated piece of equipment in the home coffee world. The price range spans from a few hundred dollars for a basic single-boiler to twenty thousand dollars for a commercial flagship. The architectural differences between mac...

Hacienda Tres Picachos sits in the Saliente sector of Jayuya, in the geographic center of Puerto Rico, where three towering mountain peaks gave the farm its name — "Three Peaks." The same family has run the hacienda for more than forty years, producing one of...

Latte art is mostly not talent. It is the predictable consequence of two skills: steaming silky microfoam, and pouring it with controlled motion at the right height into espresso of the right consistency. Most beginners try to learn the pour first and struggl...

Cupping is the standardized procedure professional coffee buyers, roasters, and Q-graders use to evaluate the quality of coffee. The protocol — codified by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) — is followed identically in cupping rooms from Ethiopia to Colo...

For decades, the conventional medical advice was that people with heart concerns should avoid coffee. The advice was wrong. The current peer-reviewed evidence — including more than thirty years of large prospective cohort studies, meta-analyses spanning more ...

Pour over coffee is the dominant manual brewing method in modern specialty coffee. The technique looks simple — pour hot water over ground coffee in a paper filter — but the variables compound: brewer geometry, filter thickness, grind size, water temperature,...

Cafe Cuatro Sombras opened its Old San Juan microroaster in February 2011, becoming the first dedicated micro-roastery and coffeehouse in the historic district. The coffee served is single-origin from Hacienda Santa Clara in Yauco — a 175-year-old farm in the...

Café Lareño sits at kilometer 40 of Carretera 128, in the La Torre sector of Lares — high in the northwestern mountains of Puerto Rico, in the heartland of the 1868 Grito de Lares coffee revolution. The hacienda has produced traditional roasted Puerto Rican c...

A coffee scale is the single most important piece of equipment in any serious coffee setup — more important than the machine, more important than the grinder, more important than the beans themselves. Without a scale you are guessing the dose, guessing the yi...

A great drip coffee maker is the most underappreciated machine in specialty coffee. While the espresso community spends thousands of dollars chasing the perfect shot and the pour-over crowd fusses over kettle technique and pour patterns, the drip coffee maker...

Coffee extraction is the only food preparation in everyday life that has been rigorously characterized by industrial science, and the mathematics that define it are simpler than most people expect. Two numbers — Total Dissolved Solids and Extraction Yield — d...

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, after reviewing decades of research on caffeine consumption during pregnancy, recommends limiting caffeine intake to less than 200 milligrams per day — roughly the amount in one 12-ounce cup of coffee o...