When one buys coffee, one is generally buying a blend of coffee beans from different origins. This is often beneficial for the producer, as it can bring down costs by being able to throw in a cheaper bean to the blend. Also often times, skilled blenders can achieve fantastic tasting blends.

So a blend is a combination of different single origin beans. So if you buy a single origin bag of beans, those beans came from the same crop from the same region, from the same farm. Drinking coffee from one single origin of beans is similar to wine in that, next years crop from the same farm will taste different, depending on the weather conditions etc.

Dry Processed

What is the opposite of dry processed? Anybody? That’s right, wet processed. Generally coffee is wet processed. In the most simple terms, when one wet processes coffee, the fruit of the coffee berry is washed off with water and then dried. With dry processing, each bean has the fruit picked off by hand and then it’s dried in then sun. Often a dry processed bean has more hints of a citrus, fruit, or even wine taste. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Ethiopian

Well, the coffee is um…..from Ethiopia, you know….in Africa. Its pretty much agreed that this happens to be the birthplace of coffee. The way the Ethiopians often drink their coffee is interesting, it’s fairly ceremonial and communal. More on that here.

Sidamo

Sidaomo was a province in the southern part of Ethiopia. It’s no longer a province, but the area is still a hub for coffee plantations.

So yeah, I like my coffee. This isn’t going to turn into a coffee blog. There are people with much more knowledge that happen to be better writers than me out there with real coffee blogs and coffee sites. One of my favorites happens to be CoffeeGeek.

This article was reprinted with permission of the author, Matt Hancock, from the blog woahmatt.com

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