Search Results

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...

Coffee is one of the most studied beverages in human nutrition science, and the cumulative evidence from population studies covering more than a million participants converges on a remarkable finding: people who drink 2 to 3 cups of coffee per day have a mean...

Italian espresso culture is one of the most distinctive coffee traditions in the world, defined as much by the social rituals around the cup as by what is in the cup itself. Italians drink coffee differently than Americans, Northern Europeans, or anyone else ...

The Japanese kissaten is one of the most distinctive coffee traditions in the world — a centuries-old café format that prizes hand-drip precision, meditative quiet, vintage Showa-era atmosphere, and a slow, deliberate engagement with coffee that stands in del...

The Ethiopian coffee ceremony, called jebena buna in Amharic, is the oldest continuously practiced coffee tradition in the world, and it comes from the country where coffee itself was discovered. For Ethiopians, coffee is not a beverage but a sacred ritual — ...

For most Puerto Ricans of the 20th century, "café" did not mean specialty single-origin coffee from a small mountain hacienda. It meant the supermarket brand on the kitchen counter — most often Café Yaucono — measured into the cafetera each morning, brewed st...

Coffee's effect on cognition is one of the most studied phenomena in neuroscience, and the research has produced findings far more interesting than the obvious "caffeine makes you alert." Caffeine increases dopamine and acetylcholine release in the forebrain,...

Coffee processing has entered an era of unprecedented experimentation. Beyond the traditional washed, natural, and honey methods that have defined coffee production for centuries, a new generation of producers is borrowing techniques from winemaking, brewing,...