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The Old Yauco Coffee Estates: Corsican Merchants, Coffee Mills and the 1899 Collapse
Photo: Historic American Engineering Record / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Yauco is remembered as Puerto Rico's coffee town, but it was never the island's largest coffee producer. In 1887, by the United States War Department's own survey, Yauco had 4,400 ...
The Puerto Rican Coffee Diaspora: From the Island to the Mainland
Puerto Ricans who had just arrived by plane from Puerto Rico, at Newark Airport, New Jersey, on 29 April 1947, waiting to be taken on to New York. Photo: Dick DeMarsica, New York World-Telegram & Sun / Library of Congress, no known restrictions. More people of...
The Oficina de Cafés de Puerto Rico: How the Island Regulates, Protects, and Develops Its Coffee Industry
The Oficina de Cafés de Puerto Rico is an office of Puerto Rico's Department of Agriculture, created to bring the Department's work on coffee planting, growing and harvesting under one body. It was created by Law 78 of 27 July 2019, codified at 5 L.P.R.A. § 32...
Café Finca Cialitos: Q-Grader Joaquín Pastor and the Single-Estate Coffee of Ciales
Photo: Finca del Café / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...
Caffeine: How It Works in the Human Body
This article covers what happens to caffeine after you drink it: how it is absorbed, how it acts in the brain, how the liver clears it, why people react differently, and the intake levels that health authorities have assessed. What is in the cup before you dri...
Coffee Grinders: Burr vs Blade — The Complete Buying Guide
Photo: Joe Mabel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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: w...
Water Chemistry for Coffee Brewing: The Complete Guide
Photo: nameless 3791 / Unsplash, Unsplash License. Summary Water makes up most of a cup of coffee, and what is dissolved in it affects how coffee extracts and tastes. The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) publishes a water standard for brewed coffee, with tar...
Coffee and Sleep: The 6-Hour Rule and the Science of Caffeine Timing
A photograph titled "Sleep". Photo: Di_An_h / Unsplash, Unsplash License. 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...
Espresso Machines: Lever, Heat-Exchanger, Dual-Boiler — The Complete Buying Guide
Photo: Zoshua Colah / Unsplash, Unsplash License. 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 fl...
Hacienda Tres Picachos: A Family Coffee Farm in Jayuya
Hacienda Tres Picachos is a family-run coffee farm in barrio Saliente, in the mountain municipality of Jayuya, Puerto Rico. The family grows, processes and packs its own coffee, sold under the Tres Picachos name, and the farm receives visitors at its coffee sh...
Milk Steaming and Latte Art: The Complete Beginner's Guide
Photo: Maxstein5 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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. Mos...
Cupping Coffee at Home: Equipment, Method and Building a Palate
Two spoons dipped into a cupping bowl. Photo: Nathan Dumlao / Unsplash, Unsplash License. Cupping is the method the coffee trade uses to taste and assess coffee, and it can be done at home. This article covers the home version: what you need, how to run a sess...
Coffee and Heart Health: What 30 Years of Research Actually Says
Photo: Frederick Shaw / Unsplash, Unsplash License. This article reports published research. It is not medical advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to start, stop, increase or reduce coffee consumption. If you have an arrhythmia, high blood pressure, ...
Pour Over Pouring Techniques: V60, Kalita Wave, and Chemex Mastered
Photo: Indigo.udm / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0. 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,...
Cuatro Sombras and Hacienda Santa Clara: San Juan's Specialty Coffee Pioneer
Photo: Andreea Munteanu / Unsplash, Unsplash License. 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 Hacie...
Café Lareño: The Lares Family Hacienda and the Quiet Coffee of the Northwest Mountains
Photo: Norma Arbelo Irizarry / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5. 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 revolutio...
Coffee Scales: Why Weighing Coffee Matters
A portafilter of ground coffee resting on a digital scale, the display reading 18.7. Photo: Maksim Goncharenok / Pexels, Pexels License. A coffee scale weighs coffee and water precisely enough, and quickly enough, to repeat a good cup. This article explains wh...
Drip Coffee Makers: How Automatic Brewers Work and What Makes a Good One
A drawing of an automatic drip coffee maker, with its filter basket above a glass carafe of brewed coffee. Image: cactus cowboy / Wikimedia Commons, CC0. An automatic drip coffee maker heats water, sprays or drips it over ground coffee in a filter, and lets th...