Small batch · Lexington, South Carolina
Start here: coffee is a fruit.
Most people have never been told that. It is the single fact that explains why one coffee tastes of tangerine and another of cocoa, and why the stuff in the red can tastes like neither. This page is the short course.
One
The bean is the pit.
A coffee tree grows fruit. Small, round, and when ripe, bright red. Inside each cherry, under the skin and the sweet pulp, sit two seeds pressed flat against each other.
Those seeds are the beans. Everything you taste in a cup started as a fruit growing on a hillside, and the way that fruit was handled in the four weeks after it was picked matters as much as anything that happens in a roaster.
Roughly one cherry in twenty produces a single round seed instead of two flat ones. That is a peaberry, and it is sorted out and sold separately.
Two
What happens to the fruit decides half the flavour.
Before a bean is ever roasted, someone has to get it out of the cherry. How they do it changes the cup more than most people would believe.
Fruit off first
Pulp stripped, the sticky mucilage fermented and rinsed away, then dried. The cleanest read on the coffee itself. Bright, defined, and where citrus and floral notes usually come from. RION and HONING are both washed.
Dried in the fruit
The whole cherry is dried before hulling, so the seed sits in its own sugars for weeks. Heavier, sweeter, and much more obviously fruity. Blueberry and strawberry notes in coffee almost always mean a natural.
Somewhere between
Skin off, some or all of the mucilage left on to dry. Splits the difference: more body and sweetness than a washed, more clarity than a natural.
The Sumatran way
Hulled while still damp, a method particular to Indonesia. Low acidity, heavy body, savoury and cedar-like. If you have ever wondered why Sumatra tastes nothing like Colombia, this is most of the answer.
That dome of bubbles is carbon dioxide leaving. Only fresh coffee does it.The bloom · the first thirty seconds of a brew
Three
Coffee tastes of fruit, flowers, nuts and cocoa. All of it is really in there.
None of it is added. No flavouring, no syrup. These are compounds already in the seed, brought out or buried depending on where it grew, how the fruit was handled, and how far the roast went. Pick a family.
Fruity
- Comes from
- Find it in
Four
Coffee does not have to taste burnt to be strong.
Strength is how much coffee ended up dissolved in the water. That is set by your ratio, by grind, and by time. It is not set by how dark the roast is.
Dark roast tastes like roast. Push far enough and you are tasting carbon rather than coffee, and whatever the farm spent three years producing is gone. A lot of people have decided they like strong coffee when what they were actually handed was scorched coffee.
Two more worth knowing. Your kettle cannot burn coffee: roasting happens near 220°C and water tops out at 100°C, so a burnt taste came out of the roaster, not your kitchen.
And roast level barely moves caffeine. If you want a stronger cup, use more coffee. If you want a darker flavour, buy a darker roast. They are two different dials.
Where a roast lands
Drag to move through the roast.
Five
Cupping, and why anyone bothers.
Cupping is how the trade tastes coffee. It is not a tasting room ritual for show, it is a controlled test, and it is the only honest way to compare one coffee against another or one roast against the last.
Fix everything but the coffee
Same grind, same dose, same water, same temperature, same four minutes. Every sample gets identical treatment so the only thing that can differ is the coffee in the bowl.
Smell it dry
Nose in the grounds before any water. The dry aroma tells you things the cup will not, and it is the first place a stale or a baked roast gives itself away.
Break the crust
The grounds float and form a crust. At four minutes you push it back with a spoon and inhale as it collapses. That is the single most concentrated smell coffee ever produces.
Slurp, and keep tasting
Skim the foam, then taste off a spoon with an unapologetic slurp to spray it across the whole palate. Then again, and again, as it cools. Coffee changes character all the way down to room temperature and the sweetness usually arrives late.
Every batch that leaves here has been cupped against the profile it was supposed to hit. That is how a roast gets called locked, and it is why a bag bought in March should taste like the same coffee in August.
Six
Why this and not the bag off the shelf.
Nothing against the big roasters. They solved a genuinely hard problem, which is putting acceptable coffee within reach of everyone, everywhere, all year. The trade-offs that let them do it are the trade-offs a small roastery does not have to make.
A dark roast is also a very effective way to make different lots taste the same. That is a feature when you are filling a million bags a week. It is a waste when you only have one farm's coffee in front of you.
Seven
What is on the roaster.
Three permanent coffees, a blend, a rotating slot and a decaf. Deliberately few. Every one of them is dialled in one variable at a time until the cup is right, and then that curve becomes the spec.
RION
El Salvador · Las Lomas
- Process
- Varietal
- Roast
Tasting notes come from cupping here, on this equipment, three to four days off roast. Where a supplier's notes describe a different roast level than the one we run, they are not borrowed.
per batch
on RION
and cupped
to a shelf life
Eight
The roast date is the number that matters.
Coffee does not spoil, it flattens. The window opens a couple of days after roast once the carbon dioxide has calmed down, and starts closing around three weeks as the aromatics go. By the time a coffee tastes flat there is nothing a grinder or a kettle can do about it.
Every bag here is stamped by hand with the day it came off the cooling tray, and the roast log for each coffee is public, down to the curve it was pulled from.
The name
Blue granite is the state stone of South Carolina.
Cut at Rion in Fairfield County and shipped into buildings well outside the Carolinas. Solid, even-grained, and it takes a finish most stone will not hold. That seemed like the right thing to name a roastery after.
The best way to learn coffee is to drink two of them side by side.
Whole bean, small batch, roast dated, shipped within South Carolina.