Glossary

The words of coffee

269 entries, from accession to wet hulled, 228 of them condensed from the glossary of the Livre café and 41 drawn from the method sheets, the plate on regulation and the section on incoterms. Each entry says what the word refers to and why it matters; the arrow leads to the plate that develops it.

#A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y

60-kg bag: The unit of account of world trade and of ICO statistics, although the actual bag weighs 69 kg in Central America and 70 kg in Colombia. World production stands at around 170 million bags a year in the 2020s. →
AA: Kenyan size grade, for beans retained by screens 17 and 18 (6.75 to 7.2 mm), above AB and PB (peaberries). A size grade, not a cup grade, even though the market confuses them. →
Accession: An entry in a plant collection: a specific material, collected at a given place and date, under a reference number. The Panamanian Geisha descends from accession T2722. It is the basic unit of genebanks. →
Acidity: Liveliness perceived in the mouth, carried by the organic acids of the bean (citric, malic, acetic, phosphoric) and by chlorogenic acids. A sought-after quality in specialty coffee, it is distinct from the pH of the drink, which is close to 5 whatever the coffee. →
Action threshold: The level of presence of a pest beyond which treating becomes profitable. For the bugs of the coffee plant, a 1955 treatise already set it: a cloth at the foot of the tree, one shakes, counts, and treats above five bugs per tree on average. →
AeroPress: The AeroPress is a cylinder in which coffee is steeped before the infusion is pushed through a filter by a plunger, like a syringe. Invented to make a single good cup quickly, it has become an experimenting tool for hobbyists and the subject of a world championship. Other names: Aerobie AeroPress. →
Agitation: Any movement imparted to the bed or the liquid (pouring, swirling, stirring with a spoon) that evens out the contact between water and coffee and speeds up extraction. A parameter as powerful as temperature and far less controlled. →
Agtron: The reference colorimeter for measuring roast degree by near-infrared reflectance. On the gourmet scale, about 95 for a very light bean and 25 for a very dark one; the SCA has issued eight color disks based on it. →
Alkalinity: The water’s capacity to neutralize acids, carried mainly by bicarbonates, expressed in mg/L as CaCO3 equivalent. It buffers the acidity of the coffee: too high, and the cup goes flat; too low, and it turns sour. The SCA aims for 40 mg/L, with an acceptable range of 40 to 70. →
Allotetraploid: An organism with four sets of chromosomes from two species. Arabica is the only cultivated coffee plant in this case, born of a cross between an ancestor of canephora and an ancestor of eugenioides; the doubling made it fertile. →
Anaerobic fermentation: Fermentation carried out away from oxygen in a sealed tank or bag, in whole or pulped cherries. It favors lactic acid bacteria and produces fruitier, more acidic profiles; in practice the term means a SIAF. →
Antestiopsis: Variegated bugs of East Africa that pierce the berry, dissolve the endosperm and inoculate a yeast. A 1955 treatise already described a numerical intervention threshold for them. →
Anthracnose: A fungus, Glomerella cingulata, that attacks every organ and lives latent in the bark of healthy trees: it only breaks out the day the plant weakens. →
Arabica: Coffea arabica, an allotetraploid born in Ethiopia. Its genetic diversity is very low: almost everything that grows descends from a handful of plants that passed through Yemen. That poverty shows on the day an aggressor arrives. →
Aroma precursor: Aromas do not exist in the green bean. A farm produces a stock of precursors, and this stock is the ceiling for everything that will follow. →
Astringency: A tactile sensation of dryness and tightening in the mouth, not a taste: polyphenols bind to the proteins of saliva. In coffee, it comes from underripe cherries, from over-extraction or from certain chlorogenic acids. →
Baked: A defect of a roast that is too long and too flat, where the temperature stalls after first crack: the cup is hollow, without acidity, with a taste of stale bread or paper. It is attributed to a RoR that fell too low. →
Bean density: Mass per volume of green coffee, in g/L or g/mL, higher for high-altitude, slow-ripening coffees. It governs how heat is conducted: a dense bean tolerates a hotter charge. →
Beneficio: The mill, in Spanish: beneficio húmedo for the washing station, beneficio seco for the dry mill where coffee is hulled, sorted and bagged for export. →
Best-before date (DDM): Date of minimum durability, the “best before” date, not to be confused with the use-by date of perishable products. →
Bicarbonate: The HCO3- ion, mainly responsible for the alkalinity of water. It neutralizes part of the coffee’s acids and releases CO2 when heated; it is the lever that water recipes dose with sodium or potassium bicarbonate. →
Bill of lading (B/L): The maritime transport document, called connaissement in French: it proves that the coffee is on board, on what date, and gives its holder the right to claim it on arrival. It is transferred by endorsement. →
Bitterness: A basic taste carried mainly by the degradation products of chlorogenic acids during roasting (lactones, phenylindanes) and, to a minor extent, by caffeine. It increases with roast degree and with over-extraction. →
Black honey: Honey keeping 75 to 100% of the mucilage, dried in the shade over several weeks, in thick layers turned often, with a high risk of mold. The fruitiest and the closest to a natural. →
Bloom: Foamy swelling of filter coffee at the first pour, when hot water drives out the CO2 trapped by roasting. Pour two to three times the weight of the coffee and wait 30 to 45 seconds; stale coffee no longer blooms. →
Body: A tactile sensation of weight and texture of the liquid in the mouth, carried by oils, fine suspended particles and polysaccharides. A French press coffee has more body than the same coffee filtered through paper. →
Boiled coffee: Boiled coffee is made by tossing the grounds into water and bringing everything to a boil, then letting the grounds settle before pouring. It is the oldest and simplest of preparations, that of the campfire and the Scandinavian copper kettle, and the one that revealed the effect of coffee on cholesterol. Other names: camp coffee, cowboy coffee. →
Bordeaux mixture: Copper sulfate and lime, used against fungi since the late 19th century. One of the very few 1955 treatments still in use. →
Bourbon: One of the two lineages from which the vast majority of cultivated coffee descends, together with Typica; named for the island where the Yemeni material was introduced. Caturra, Tekisic and SL28 are reworked Bourbon. →
Brew ratio: The ratio between the mass of coffee and that of water or drink. About 1:15 to 1:17 for a filter (55 to 65 g per liter), 1:2 for a normal espresso (18 g for 36 g). With grind and time, one of the three levers of every recipe. →
By-product: Everything that comes out of processing without being coffee: skin, pulp, mucilage, parchment, silverskin, wastewater, spent grounds. Nearly all of the weight of a cherry ends up there; by volume, the coffee sector is a biomass industry that does not know it. →
Bypass: Water added to the drink without passing through the coffee, either after extraction to dilute a concentrate, or through a diversion in the machine. It allows a smaller coffee bed or a stronger ratio, followed by stretching the drink. →
C contract: The futures contract on arabica traded in New York. It fixes a price for a reference quality and a coffee that does not exist yet: described by objective criteria, therefore interchangeable, therefore anonymous. →
C price: The price of the arabica C contract on ICE Futures US, quoted in cents per pound (453.6 g) for a lot of 37,500 pounds, or about 250 bags of 69 kg. It is the basis of almost all contracts, to which the differential is added. →
Café de olla: Mexican pot coffee is boiled with cinnamon and raw cane sugar in an earthenware pot, then served strained into small clay mugs. It is a sweet, spiced decoction meant to be shared, and the vessel gave it its name. Other names: café de olla. →
Caffeine: A molecule the plant deposits in its leaves and seeds to discourage whatever eats them, and in its nectar to keep pollinators coming back. That it wakes us up is, for the coffee plant, a side effect. 0.9 to 1.5% of dry weight in arabica. →
Canephora: Coffea canephora, the second cultivated species: vigorous, productive at low altitude, richer in caffeine and CGAs, lower in sugars. Through the Timor Hybrid, it supplied the rust resistance of modern arabicas. →
Capsule: The capsule encloses a dose of ground coffee in a sealed cup through which the machine forces hot water under pressure, then ejects it after use. It eliminates the grinder, the weighing and the tamping, and brought espresso into homes and offices. Other names: pod, Nespresso. →
Caramelization: What sugar does alone under heat: it melts, browns and becomes caramel, with no nitrogen compound involved. Together with the Maillard reaction, one of the two great families of reactions that create color and part of the aromas in the roaster. →
Carbonic maceration: A term from winemaking (Beaujolais): whole, uncrushed grapes in a tank saturated with CO2, where fermentation starts inside the intact berries. Applied to coffee, it is the most misused word in the vocabulary: it often stands for any closed tank, with or without added gas. →
Cascara: An infusion of the dried pulp of the cherry. Presented as recent, it has been drunk for a very long time in Yemen under the name qishr. Its trade runs up against regulations that do not know where to file it. →
Case hardening: Hardening of the outer shell: when drying is too fast, the surface of the bean dries and seals while the core stays moist; the water can no longer get out, and the imbalance is paid for later with cracks at hulling and poor keeping quality. →
Catimor: Not a variety, a family: all the materials descended from Caturra crossed with the Timor Hybrid, which can differ greatly from one another. →
Caturra: A natural mutation of Bourbon that appeared in Brazil in the 1910s, dwarf and compact. Nobody made it: someone noticed an odd tree and propagated it. →
Certification: A specification verified by a third party, which entitles the holder to a premium or to access to a market. Organic is a European Union law, Regulation (EU) 2018/848, which reserves the word; Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance and 4C are private standards. It certifies conformity, not a cup, and its cost falls first on the producer. → What the law says: Labels and certifications: the law and the contract
Certified stocks: Coffee physically deposited in a warehouse approved by the exchange, graded by its experts and deliverable against a C contract. Certified stocks, tracked daily, are among the indicators the market watches most closely. →
Channeling: Preferential paths that water carves through a poorly distributed or poorly tamped coffee bed. The water rushes through them, over-extracts their edges and leaves the rest under-extracted, giving a cup that is both bitter and sour. The major defect of espresso. →
Charge temperature: Temperature of the drum at the moment the green coffee is poured in. It sets the energy available for the first third of the cycle and is adjusted according to the mass, density and moisture of the lot. →
Chemex: A funnel and a carafe blown from a single piece of glass, a thick paper folded into a cone, a groove to let the air out: the Chemex is a laboratory instrument that moved into the kitchen. It makes a several-cup filter coffee, served in the very vessel it dripped into. Other names: Chemex Coffeemaker, Chemex carafe. →
Chlorine: A disinfectant in public water supplies, present at a few tenths of a mg/L, which alters aromas and corrodes machines. An activated carbon filter removes it; the SCA requires zero chlorine in brewing water. →
Chlorogenic acids: CGAs, as the trade calls them. They carry a large share of the bitterness, the acidity and the antioxidant power. Canephora contains more of them than arabica, which accumulates more sugar. →
Chromosome: One of the long, distinct fragments among which an organism’s genetic material is divided, like the volumes of a work. Their number is stable within a species: 22 in most coffee plants, 44 in arabica. →
CIF: Cost, insurance and freight: the seller pays the freight and the insurance to the named port of arrival, but the risk passes to the buyer as soon as the coffee is on board, at departure. →
Clean cup: A cup free of any defect and of any foreign note, from the attack to the finish. A criterion of the 2004 cupping form, kept in the CVA; it is not a positive quality but the absence of a negative. →
Cliquage (pulsed micro-oxygenation): A term from winemaking: injection of oxygen in bursts. In an MOX protocol for coffee, ten minutes of exposure every six hours between the twelfth and the seventy-second hour, with oxygen held between 5 and 10% and pH between 4.0 and 3.8. →
Clone: A plant obtained by vegetative propagation, cuttings or somatic embryogenesis, genetically identical to the mother plant. The only way to multiply an F1 hybrid or a selected canephora without segregation. →
Cloth filter: A bag of cloth or flannel stretched above the pot, the grounds inside, the water poured over: it is the first filter in the history of coffee, two centuries before paper. It survives in Japanese coffee shops, where it gives a thick, velvety cup. Other names: fustian bag, muslin bag. →
Co-fermentation: Adding to the tank an ingredient foreign to the lot: fruits, organic acids, spices, hops, or mosto. An inventory by Roast Magazine (2023) lists them. Contested, it led Cup of Excellence to set a zero tolerance for outside ingredients in 2023. →
COE: Cup of Excellence: a competition created in Brazil in 1999, now run by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, in which national and then international juries score lots blind; those above 86 points are sold at online auction. Its 2023 rules ban any foreign addition in fermentation. →
Coffee bed: The layer of ground coffee that the water passes through in percolation. Its depth, homogeneity and compaction determine the flow and the evenness of extraction; a flat bed after espresso is the sign of a uniform extraction. →
Coffee berry borer: Hypothenemus hampei, the most feared pest. The female bores into the cherry and lays her eggs inside; the males never leave it. The wet process kills it, the dry process multiplies it. →
Coffee berry disease: A form of anthracnose that attacks the berries. Long thought to be a mere variant, its agent is now known to be a distinct species. →
Coffee cherry: The name of the fruit of the coffee plant, by analogy of shape and color; botanically a drupe. It normally contains two seeds pressed against each other by their flat side. →
Coffee wilt disease: A fungal disease of the vessels: the fungus clogs the plumbing and the tree dies of thirst in moist soil. Fusarium xylarioides, resurgent in Uganda in 1993. →
Cold brew: Extraction with cold or tempered water, by immersion, over 8 to 24 hours. Slower, it extracts fewer acids and bitter compounds and gives a soft, low-acid drink, very different from a hot coffee that has been cooled. → The method sheet: Cold brew
Cold drip: Cold drip lets cold water fall, drop after drop, onto a bed of ground coffee and collects a concentrated extract beneath. It is a percolation, like filter coffee, but so slow that it is counted in hours. Other names: Kyoto-style drip. →
Contact time: The length of time during which water and coffee are in contact: a few dozen seconds in espresso, 2 to 4 minutes in filter, hours in cold brew. Together with temperature and grind, it governs extraction. →
Coyote: Name given in Latin America to the intermediary who buys coffee at the roadside, often as cherry and for cash, from producers who cannot wait. Decried for his prices, he provides a liquidity that nobody else offers. →
Crema: Reddish foam on the surface of espresso, an emulsion of carbon dioxide, oils and solids. It bears witness to the freshness of the coffee and to the pressure, not to the quality of the cup: a canephora produces more than an arabica. →
CSDDD: Directive (EU) 2024/1760 on corporate sustainability due diligence, amended in 2026: it now covers only very large companies. →
CSRD: Directive (EU) 2022/2464 on corporate sustainability reporting, narrowed in 2025 and 2026: it now covers only very large companies. →
Cultivar: A contraction of cultivated variety, the more honest of the two words: a set of plants homogeneous and stable enough to be named. See Variety, where these two conditions are not always met. →
Cup defect: In the vocabulary of cupping, a taint is a foreign note that is perceptible but does not make the cup undrinkable, a fault a note that disqualifies it: moldy, phenol, fermented, potato. A single cup out of five is enough to bring a lot down. →
Cupping: Standardized professional tasting. A human measurement, standardized as far as possible. The SCA reference protocol changed on November 5, 2024. → The method sheet: The tasting cup
CVA: Coffee Value Assessment: the SCA evaluation system, introduced in 2023 and made the reference on November 5, 2024, which replaces the single score out of 100 with four distinct components: physical, descriptive, affective and extrinsic (origin, variety, process, certifications). The affective component is still scored, but it no longer absorbs the rest. →
CYP1A2: The gene for the liver enzyme that breaks down caffeine; depending on its version, one is a fast or a slow metabolizer. Two people drinking the same coffee do not live through the same evening. →
Defect count: The number of defects in three hundred grams of green coffee. With screen size, one of the two physical criteria that decide the price of the bulk of coffee, before any tasting. →
Degassing: Progressive release of the CO2 trapped in the roasted bean, on the order of 1% of its mass. Much of it escapes in the first days, almost all of it in a few minutes once ground; it causes the bloom and hinders the extraction of a coffee that is too fresh. →
DGAL: The French Directorate General for Food (Direction générale de l’alimentation), in the Ministry of Agriculture: it checks food safety, including in a roasting workshop, since the single inspection regime of 2023-2024. →
DGCCRF: The French consumer protection and fraud control authority (Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes), in the Ministry of the Economy: it checks the fairness of the label, sales denominations and fraud. →
Differential: The gap added to the New York price to arrive at the price of an actual coffee: origin, quality, availability, certifications, relationship. The consumer never encounters this word; it is where everything is decided. →
Diploid: An organism with two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent: the ordinary case, and that of almost all coffee plants. Arabica × canephora crosses before the Timor Hybrid gave diploid plants, therefore sterile and without offspring. →
Direct trade: A purchase announced as direct between a roaster and a producer, popularized in the mid-2000s by a few American roasters. No shared definition, no third-party audit: each brand sets its own criteria, when it publishes any. →
Disease triangle: A capable pathogen, a susceptible plant, favorable conditions. None of the three sides is fixed, and two depend on our decisions. →
Diterpenes: Compounds of the fat fraction of the bean, of which cafestol and kahweol are the two main ones, about a fifth of the lipids. Retained by the paper filter, they pass into boiled or French press coffees, hence their place in the debates about cholesterol. →
Domatia: Small cavities in the axils of the veins, on the underside of coffee leaves. Treatises describe them as an identification feature without attributing any established function to them. →
Double fermentation: Classic Kenyan process: two short fermentations separated by a wash, then a wash in a channel and a soak of 12 to 24 hours in clean water, which is no longer a fermentation; what is held to be one of the sources of the cleanness of Kenyan coffees. →
Drip coffee maker: A machine heats the water, spreads it over a bed of grounds in a filter, and the coffee drips into a carafe: it is gravity percolation, automated. At home as at the counter, where it goes by the name batch brew, brewing “by the batch,” it serves the same filter coffee to dozens of cups. Other names: batch brew, filter coffee machine. →
Drupe: A fruit with soft flesh and a hard stone, like the cherry, the olive, the peach. The fruit of the coffee plant is one. →
Dry process: Spread the whole cherry in the sun and wait. The oldest, the least water-hungry, fruitier, and it leaves the borer time to finish its cycle. →
Drying: The step that takes the coffee from more than 50% water to 10 to 12%, in one to two weeks for a washed, two to four for a natural. Too fast and it is case hardening, too slow and it is molds and stinkers. →
DTR: Development Time Ratio: the share of the cycle time elapsed after first crack. Popularized by Scott Rao, the common rule aims for 20 to 25% for a filter coffee, though this figure has no value as a standard. →
Endosperm: The nutritive reserve of the seed, meant to feed the young plant. It is exactly what we roast. →
Espresso: A drink obtained by forcing hot water at about 9 bar through 7 to 20 g of finely ground coffee, in 20 to 30 seconds, for a ratio close to 1:2. Concentrated and topped with crema, it was born in Italy in the early 20th century. → The method sheet: Espresso
EUDR: Regulation (EU) 2023/1115 against imported deforestation, in force since June 29, 2023: coffee, with six other commodities, can enter the Union only if it comes from plots not deforested after December 31, 2020. Only the operator, who places the coffee on the Union market for the first time, geolocates the plots and files a due diligence statement; the downstream operator and the trader keep the references of their suppliers and customers. Planned for the end of 2024, application was postponed to the end of 2025, then to December 30, 2026, and to June 30, 2027 for micro and small enterprises; coffee extracts come under it on December 30, 2027. → What the law says: Sustainability and due diligence: deforestation, reporting, vigilance
Eugenioides: Coffea eugenioides, an East African species with small beans low in caffeine; one of the two parents of arabica, the one that likes it cool. →
Ex-warehouse: Sale of coffee already landed, in a warehouse in the consuming country, which changes hands at the warehouse door. A trade usage, not an Incoterm. →
Excelsa: A coffee plant close to liberica, cultivated then abandoned, long classed as a mere dewevrei variety of it and reinstated as a distinct species by a genomic study in 2025. It takes some ten years to come into production and gives a heterogeneous harvest. →
Extraction: The share of the mass of the ground coffee that has passed into solution in the drink, as a percentage (extraction yield). Between 18 and 22%, the cup is judged balanced in the SCA standard; below it, sour and hollow (underextraction); above it, bitter and astringent (overextraction). The soluble maximum is around 30%. →
F1 hybrid: A cross between two very different parents, of remarkable vigor, but whose seeds segregate: it cannot be reproduced by sowing, it has to be cloned. →
Fairtrade Minimum Price: Floor guaranteed by the label when the market falls below it, to which are added a premium paid to the cooperative and a supplement for organic. The amounts are set by Fairtrade International and were revised on July 15, 2026, for contracts signed from December 1, 2026. →
Farmgate price: The price at the farm gate: what the producer actually receives at the farm, in cherry or parchment, before any processing, transport and margin. It is the only figure that tells what coffee earns for whoever grows it, and the one least often published. →
FCA: Free carrier: the seller hands the coffee, cleared for export, to the carrier chosen by the buyer; the risk passes at that moment. →
Fermaestro: An instrument developed by Cenicafé in Colombia: a perforated truncated cone filled with fermenting coffee and plunged into the tank; as the mucilage breaks down, the level sinks to a mark that says it is time to wash. Fermentation times drop from up to 72 hours to 11 to 20 hours, with a claimed accuracy of 97.1%. →
Fermentation: The step after pulping, whose historical purpose is mechanical: loosening the mucilage that sticks. But while it loosens, it works on the aroma precursors. Researchers still call it a black box. →
Fermentation pH: The simplest indicator of how a fermentation is going: the mucilage starts at about 5.5 to 6 and drops, under the effect of the acids produced, to 4.0 to 4.5, the value at which many producers wash. A drop below 3.8 heralds a vinegary taste. →
FIC Regulation: Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 on food information to consumers, which sets the mentions of the label; called INCO in French. →
Fines: Very small particles, often under 100 microns, produced by any grinder in addition to the target size. They extract quickly, migrate into the bed and can clog it; their proportion distinguishes a good grinder from a bad one. →
First crack: An audible cracking, at about 195 to 205 °C bean temperature, when the accumulated water vapor and CO2 burst the internal structure of the bean, which swells and pales. It marks the start of development and the reference point of every profile. →
Flavor wheel: A circular diagram that organizes coffee descriptors from the general to the particular. The 2016 version by the SCA and World Coffee Research rests on a sensory lexicon of 110 attributes, each tied to a reference product. →
FOB: Free on board: the seller delivers the coffee on board the vessel designated by the buyer, at the named port of shipment. Transport to the port, export clearance and loading are at the seller’s expense; once the coffee is on board, the risk and the sea freight are the buyer’s. It is the term of most green coffee contracts. →
French press: The French press steeps the grounds in all of the water, then separates the drink from the grounds by pushing a metal mesh down to the bottom of the vessel. It is an immersion without paper: everything that passes through the mesh, oils and fines included, ends up in the cup. Other names: press pot, cafetière. →
Geisha: One word for several materials. The Panamanian lineage descends from a specific accession linked to Ethiopian collections; the name is protected by nothing. →
Gene: A passage of the genetic text that controls a trait: fruit color, the tree’s habit, the ability to resist an aggressor. To say that a plant carries a resistance gene is to say that this passage exists and that it is transmissible. →
Genebank: For coffee, not a freezer but living trees, watered, pruned, replaced, because the seed tolerates neither complete drying nor freezing. A yearly running cost rather than a vault. →
Genetic bottleneck: When a population restarts from very few individuals, it carries only what they carried. The rest no longer exists. This has happened to cultivated coffee several times in a row. →
Genome: The whole of an organism’s genetic material, all chromosomes included. To sequence it is to read the order of its letters; a genome alone says little, it speaks when compared with another. Those of canephora (2014) and of arabica (2014, then a reference version in 2020-2022) have been published. →
Genotyping: Targeted reading of a set of markers to identify a plant or check the conformity of a variety. This is how we discover that a lot sold under one name contains a share of plants that do not match it. →
GH: General or total hardness (General Hardness): the sum of calcium and magnesium ions. Often measured in German degrees, 1 °dH being 17.85 mg/L of CaCO3, or in French degrees, 1 °f being 10 mg/L. →
Giling basah: Indonesian name for wet hulled: hulling of the parchment on a coffee still at 30 to 35% moisture, then finishing the drying of the naked bean. The green coffee takes on a blue-green tint and the cup a heavy, earthy, low-acid profile, typical of Sumatra. →
Glomerule: A small group of flowers inserted at the same point. In the coffee plant, eight to fifteen white flowers per leaf axil, opening early in the morning and scented with jasmine, so that the whole branch looks sheathed in white. →
Grind: The reduction of the bean to particles, whose size governs the surface offered to the water and the resistance to flow. Fine for espresso, medium for filter, coarse for immersion; evenness matters as much as average size. →
HACCP: English acronym for hazard analysis and critical control points: the method that every food business operator applies to its procedures (Regulation (EC) 852/2004, Article 5). →
Hardness: The water’s content of calcium and magnesium, expressed in mg/L as CaCO3 equivalent. These ions attach to aromatic compounds and increase extraction; the SCA aims for 68 mg/L, within a range of 50 to 175. It has no direct link with alkalinity, with which it is often confused. →
Heirloom: On Ethiopian coffees, neither false nor dishonest, but empty: unidentified local material, presented as a feature when it is an admission that no characterization has been done. →
Hemileia vastatrix: The rust fungus, named by Berkeley and Broome during the Ceylon epidemic. An obligate parasite, never eliminated anywhere, it has got around every resistance set against it. →
Heterosis: Hybrid vigor: the superiority of an F1 hybrid over both its parents in growth, yield and robustness. This is what Central American F1s exploit, at the price of multiplication by cuttings or embryogenesis. →
Honey: The skin is removed, and part of the mucilage is left to dry on the parchment. Not a compromise between washed and natural: a third thing, with its own compounds. →
Hot-air roasting: A process in which the coffee is carried and heated by a stream of air (fluid bed), without contact with hot metal: convective heat, short cycles, less scorching. The drum also transmits heat by conduction and radiation. →
Hulling: Removal of the parchment (washed coffee) or of the whole dry husk (natural coffee) at the dry mill, before sorting and export. It is done on a dry bean at 10 to 12% moisture, except in wet hulled. →
Hybrid: The product of a cross between two different parents. Between species, the offspring is often sterile, but far less so in plants than in mammals: a doubling of the chromosome number is sometimes enough to make it fertile, which is the very story of arabica. →
ICE: Intercontinental Exchange, the New York exchange that has hosted the arabica C contract since 2007, heir to the New York Coffee Exchange founded in 1882. Canephora is traded in London on ICE Futures Europe. →
ICO: The International Coffee Organization, created in London in 1963 to administer the International Coffee Agreement. It produces a large part of the world statistics on production, exports and consumption. →
Immersion: An extraction mode in which the coffee bathes in all of the water for a given time: French press, cupping, cold brew, Clever. The concentration of the liquid rises, then plateaus as equilibrium sets in, which makes the method forgiving. →
Immersion dripper: The conical valve dripper steeps the grounds in a paper filter closed by a valve, then releases the drink through the paper when it is opened. It combines the contact time chosen in immersion with the clean cup of filter coffee. Other names: Clever Dripper, Clever Coffee Dripper. →
Incoterm: A three-letter term defined by the International Chamber of Commerce (eleven in the 2020 edition) which sets, in a sales contract, where the risk passes from the seller to the buyer and who pays for each step of the transport. It says nothing about the price. →
Instant coffee: Instant coffee is coffee that has already been brewed, from which the factory has removed the water: all that remains is to put it back. Preparation comes down to a spoonful and a cup of water, and all the know-how has moved to the manufacturing side. Other names: soluble coffee, dried coffee extract. →
Integrated pest management (IPM): One does not treat because a pest is present, but because it exceeds the level at which it costs more than the treatment; below that, it is tolerated and its predators are spared. Spread in the 1960s, the idea is already described with a numerical threshold in a French treatise of 1955. →
International Coffee Agreement: A series of agreements between producing and consuming countries, the first in 1962, that set export quotas to keep prices up. The breakdown of July 1989 sent prices tumbling and opened the era of the free market. →
Introgression: The lasting entry of the genetic material of one species into another. In resistant arabicas, it covers 7 to 11% of the genome and brings in more than just resistance. →
IUCN Red List: The grid of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, from least concern to critically endangered. Applied to the genus Coffea in 2019: 75 of the 124 species then known are threatened, or 60%. The genus has had 130 since 2021 and the new ones have not been assessed, so the rate is a floor. →
Japanese-style iced coffee: Japanese-style iced coffee is a hot filter brew dripped directly onto ice: the water that the brew lacks is supplied by the melting ice cubes. The extraction stays hot and the coffee is drunk cold right away. Other names: flash brew, Japanese iced coffee. →
Kalita Wave: A flat bottom pierced by three small holes and a fluted paper filter that barely touches the wall: the Kalita Wave spreads the coffee in a shallow bed. It is the flat-bottomed answer to the cone of the V60, for a more even extraction from one layer to the next. Other names: Wave, Kalita flat-bottom filter holder. →
Karlsbad coffee maker: A coffee maker made entirely of porcelain, whose filter is a slotted porcelain grid, with no paper or metal, topped by a water distributor. It is the filter coffee of Viennese and Bohemian households, poured by hand into a set that also serves as the carafe. Other names: Karlsbader Kanne, Bohemian coffee maker. →
KH: Carbonate hardness or temporary hardness (Karbonathärte), that is, the share of hardness associated with bicarbonates: in practice the alkalinity measurement read on aquarium test strips. The part that precipitates as scale when heated. →
Kopi tubruk: In Indonesia, the simplest coffee is made in the very glass it is drunk from: boiling water is poured onto the ground coffee, often already sweetened, and the grounds are left to settle. It is an infusion with no filter or equipment, that of street stalls, which gives a strong cup and leaves a layer of grounds at the bottom that is not drunk. Other names: kopi tubruk. →
Kuku kambing (goat’s hoof): Goat’s hoof, in Indonesian: a hoof-shaped slit on the bean, caused by partial crushing of the still-soft bean in wet hulling. The characteristic defect of wet hulled. →
Landrace: A local variety: a population cultivated locally for a long time, adapted to its environment by farmers’ selection and by chance, with no breeding program or formal description. Ethiopian coffees sold as heirloom are, for the most part, landraces. →
Latent period: The period during which a fungus is established without symptoms. For rust, twelve to eighteen days. The leaf looks healthy; it no longer is. →
Leaf rust: Disease caused by Hemileia vastatrix: orange powder under the leaves, defoliation, end of fruiting. The spore does not require humid air but liquid water on the leaf, rain or dew, which explains why the same fungus is harmless one year and devastating the next. →
Liberica: A large-fruited species promoted in the 19th century because arabica was dying; sunk by its yield, useful as a rootstock against nematodes. →
Lineage: A descent, a thread of filiation. To say that the world grows two lineages, Typica and Bourbon, means that almost all trees go back to two starting points, not that they carry two names. →
Lipids: Seven to seventeen percent of dry weight. They carry the body and part of the aromas, and are the family most fragile in storage. →
Living Income Reference Price: Price calculated by Fairtrade and others so that a producer household of a given size and yield reaches a decent income. It most often greatly exceeds market prices. →
Locus: The precise position of a gene or a marker on a chromosome. Breeders map the loci of resistance or quality in order to track them in the laboratory instead of waiting for the tree to express the trait. →
Maillard reaction: The reaction that browns bread and meat: sugars and nitrogen compounds under heat, brown color and hundreds of aroma molecules. In the roaster, the same chemistry, not an analogy. →
Maragogipe: A natural mutation of Typica with an oversized bean and a miserable yield. Neither crossed nor manufactured. →
Marker-assisted selection (MAS): Sorting the descendants of a cross on their DNA rather than their appearance, to keep only those that carry the desired genes. It shortens by several years programs that last twenty or thirty. →
Mechanical demucilager: A machine that tears off the mucilage by rubbing pulped beans against each other and against a grid, with very little water, without fermentation. The “mechanically washed” coffee that comes out has a more neutral cup than a fermented washed one. →
Mechanical drying: A rotary or static hot-air dryer (guardiola, silo), used alone or to finish a drying begun in the sun. The air temperature is capped at around 40 °C for parchment, since the embryo cannot tolerate more. →
Melitta filter: A perforated filter holder, a sheet of porous paper, hot water poured over: the coffee passes through the paper, the grounds stay in it. It is the most widespread way of making filter coffee, and its current form, the cone with a slotted bottom, dates from the Melitta patents of 1936 and 1937. Other names: paper coffee filter, conical filter holder. →
Microlot: A small volume set apart to be sold separately, often at auction. Describing the coffee market by a microlot is like describing the automobile by a collector’s car. →
Milk drinks: Milk drinks combine coffee with heated milk, often foamed by the steam of the espresso machine. The milk does not simply soften: its proteins bind to some of the compounds in the coffee, and its foam changes the way the cup is drunk. Other names: café au lait, cappuccino. →
Mocha: Port of Yemen on the Red Sea through which coffee passed before its worldwide spread, hence the name of the coffee it shipped. The word later came to mean a drink, a coffee pot, a chocolate flavor; it first meant a place and a monopoly. →
Moisture content: The water content of green coffee, as a percentage of mass: the target window at drying is 10 to 12%, with ISO 6673 setting the method. Too moist, the coffee molds; too dry, it breaks and ages quickly. Not to be confused with water activity. →
Molecular marker: A detectable DNA sequence, associated with a trait, that makes it possible to know from the seedling stage whether a plant carries a resistance gene or an introgression, without waiting years. The basis of marker-assisted selection. →
Monsooned coffee: Coffee from the Malabar coast (India), protected by a geographical indication: dry coffee of grade A or AA is spread in layers of 10 to 15 cm in sheds open to the monsoon winds, rises back to 14-15% moisture in about ten days, then undergoes 12 to 16 weeks of repeated rebagging. It turns straw yellow and ends between 13 and 14.5% moisture. →
Mosto (fermented cherry juice): Juice or pulp of coffee cherries, recycled into the fermentation tank, sometimes up to 30 to 50% of the volume. Because it comes from the coffee itself, Cup of Excellence allows it while banning every other addition. →
MOX (micro-oxygenation): Micro-oxygenation, borrowed from winemaking, which contrasts it with macro-oxygenation: small, fractional and controlled additions of oxygen to a mass in fermentation. A Colombian protocol describes a target of 5 to 8% oxygen, 20 to 24 °C and a pH that falls from 4.2 to 4.0, to gain complexity and reduce astringency. →
MRL (maximum residue limit): The maximum residue limit: the amount of a pesticide residue that a product may contain. For coffee, it applies to green coffee (product code 0620000). →
Mucilage: The sweet, sticky flesh that surrounds the parchment. It sticks, it has to be removed: fermentation was born of this mechanical constraint. →
Mutation: A copying error. Several of the most widespread varieties come from this: a tree, an accident, someone who noticed it. →
Natural: Commercial name of the dry process: the whole cherry dried in the sun, fruit around the seed. Slow, sparing of water, fruitier and more prone to fermentation accidents. →
Neapolitan flip coffee pot: The water is heated in the bottom, the pot is flipped, and the hot water flows back down through the compact grounds between two metal filters. The Neapolitan is the flip-over coffee pot: a gravity filter that starts with boiling. Other names: cuccumella, caffettiera napoletana. →
Nematode: A microscopic soil worm that penetrates the roots without leaving a specific symptom; the tree turns yellow and one concludes there is a fertilizer problem. The pest that nobody talks about. →
Nitro cold brew: Nitro cold brew is a cold infusion charged with nitrogen and drawn from a tap like an Irish stout, with its cascade of bubbles and its tight collar of foam. The gas hardly changes what is in the cup; it changes the way it is drunk. Other names: nitro, nitro coffee. →
Obligate parasite: A fungus unable to live on dead matter, which needs a living plant. Each spore must find a leaf before it dies: this is what makes it vulnerable, and what forces it to travel constantly. Hemileia vastatrix is one. →
Ochratoxin A: Toxin from storage molds. The reason water activity is monitored long after the farm has finished its work. → What the law says: Safety and contaminants: the thresholds, and who measures
Orthonasal: Perception of odors through the nostrils, by sniffing. The break in cupping, where the crust is broken with a spoon while leaning over the cup, is an orthonasal evaluation; tasting is retronasal. →
OTA: Abbreviation of ochratoxin A, the mold toxin that the Union limits in roasted and instant coffee, not in green. See Ochratoxin A. →
Outright price: A firm price, fixed between buyer and seller independently of the futures market: the figure will no longer move. The opposite of the PTBF contract. →
Overextraction: Excessive extraction, beyond about 22%: bitterness, astringency, dryness. Corrected by a coarser grind, a shorter time or less hot water. →
Pacamara: A Salvadoran cross of Pacas and Maragogipe: enormous beans, cups judged exceptional, unstable offspring. The word variety applies to it without one of its conditions being met. →
Parchment: The hard, straw-colored covering that protects the seed, the endocarp. Coffee travels in this form for a good part of the work on the farm. →
Patio: A hard drying area, concrete or brick, where coffee in parchment or in cherry is spread in thin layers and raked several times a day. The most widespread way of drying, particularly in Brazil and Central America. →
Peaberry: When one of the two ovules aborts, the other takes the whole place alone and becomes round. Called caracoli in French. It is sorted out because a round seed does not heat like a flat one in the roaster. →
Percolation: An extraction mode in which water passes through the coffee bed and flows out: manual filter, filter machine, espresso. Fresh water constantly replaces the water that has become loaded, hence a more efficient extraction but one more sensitive to flow and to the homogeneity of the bed. →
Percolator: In the pump percolator, the water boils at the bottom of a pot, rises through a central tube and falls back onto a basket of coffee, which it passes through before going back down, and the cycle starts again until the desired color is reached. It is the coffee maker of 20th-century America, and one of the most criticized. Other names: American percolator, pump coffee maker. →
Pest: An animal that eats, bores or stings the plant: insect, worm, mite. To be distinguished from a disease, caused by an organism settled in the tissues. The boundary is sharp in words and porous in fact, since an insect can itself inoculate a fungus. →
PGI: Protected geographical indication: an origin name registered by the Union, which requires at least one production step to take place in the defined area (Regulation (EU) 2024/1143, Article 46). The protected designation of origin, PDO, requires all of them. →
Phenolic: A cup defect with medicinal, chemical or iodine notes, called phenolic. It is attributed to microbial contamination during drying or storage; the Brazilian “rio” taste, due to 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, is the best-documented case. →
Ploidy: The number of sets of chromosomes of an organism: diploid at two, tetraploid at four. The difference in ploidy between arabica (44 chromosomes) and the other coffee plants (22) is the barrier that only the Timor Hybrid has crossed naturally. →
Population: A group of individuals of the same species living in the same place and reproducing among themselves more than with the rest of the world. The wild arabicas of a forest in southwestern Ethiopia form one, with no commercial name and carrying a diversity that the cultivated plant no longer has. →
Portable lever espresso maker: Portable levers are espresso presses with no pump or electricity: hot water is poured above a puck of coffee, and it is arm strength, multiplied by a lever, that makes the pressure. They take up the principle of the lever machines found behind a bar to make espresso at home or while traveling. Other names: manual espresso press, Flair. →
Potato taste defect (PTD): A defect of coffees from the Great Lakes region (Rwanda, Burundi, eastern Congo): a distinct smell of raw potato, due to 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine. It is linked to bites from Antestiopsis bugs and to bacteria, invisible at sorting and revealed on grinding, bean by bean. →
Pound: The pound of English-speaking countries, 453.6 g, the unit in which the C price and most differentials are quoted. 100 cents per pound is equivalent to 2.20 dollars per kilo. →
ppm as CaCO3: The common unit of water reports: calcium, magnesium or bicarbonate is converted into the mass of calcium carbonate that would have the same effect, which makes it possible to add up different ions. 100 mg/L of CaCO3 corresponds to 40 mg/L of calcium ions. →
Pre-infusion: Wetting of the coffee bed at low pressure or low flow before the main extraction, to drive out the gas, saturate the grounds and limit channeling. On an espresso machine, a few seconds at reduced pressure. →
Propagation by cuttings: Vegetative propagation by rooting a fragment of stem. Common in canephora, whose clones are spread this way, and more delicate in arabica. →
PTBF: Price to be fixed: the differential is agreed and the locking of the price is put off until later. Legitimate, and a bet in disguise. →
Pulping: Removal of the skin and part of the flesh of the cherry, in the hours following harvest, in the washed or honey process. The first processing step, and the one that produces the largest volume of by-products in the whole chain. →
Pure line: Material that has become homogeneous and stable through repeated self-pollination, generally five or six generations (F5, F6) after a cross. Fixing a variety means going that far, which takes twenty to thirty years in the coffee plant. →
Pyrazines: A family of volatile compounds formed during roasting, responsible for roasted, hazelnut and earthy notes. One particular pyrazine, not from roasting, makes the potato defect. →
Pyrolysis: Thermal decomposition of the matter of the bean, without oxygen, at the high temperatures at the end of the cycle: it produces smoke, bitter compounds and part of the burnt taste of dark roasts. →
Q Grader: A taster certified by the Coffee Quality Institute, a program launched in 2004, to score a coffee according to a common protocol, which makes a score comparable from one country to another. The framework was rebuilt around the Coffee Value Assessment in 2024-2025, which obliges holders to recertify. →
Quaker: A bean that stays pale and matte after roasting because it came from an immature cherry or one empty of sugars. Invisible when sorting green coffee, it comes out of the roaster and gives peanut and paper notes. →
Race (physiological race): Within a fungus, groups that are distinguished by the plants they can attack. A variety is never resistant in the absolute. →
Raised bed: A raised drying table with a mesh bottom, on which the coffee dries in a thin layer with air on both sides. Drying is more even than on the ground, with no contact with the soil; widespread in East Africa, then adopted elsewhere. →
RASFF: The Union’s rapid alert system for food and feed: the authorities of the Member States notify there a dangerous product found on their market or at their border. The notifications are public. →
Recalcitrant seed: A seed that tolerates neither strong drying nor freezing. Coffee is in the intermediate group; cryopreservation of its embryos works but covers no entire collection. →
Red honey: Honey keeping about half of the mucilage and dried more slowly, sometimes in partial shade. Two bags labeled red honey may follow different logics: partial mechanical removal for one, full mucilage and slowed drying for the other. →
Refractometer: An instrument that measures the concentration of a solution by the deflection of light. Calibrated for coffee, it gives the TDS of the drink in a few seconds; its spread in the 2010s shifted preparation from taste to numbers. →
Retronasal: The route by which volatile molecules reach the olfactory epithelium from the back of the throat, when one swallows or exhales. It is what carries most of what we call the taste of coffee; the tongue detects only sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami. →
Reverse osmosis: Filtration under pressure through a membrane that retains almost all ions, giving a nearly pure water that is then remineralized to order. The basis of the water recipes of laboratories and of many coffee bars. →
Rioy: A medicinal, iodine-like taste, typical of some slowly dried Brazilian natural coffees, due to trichloroanisole produced by microorganisms. A defect here, it is part of the profile sought by some Middle Eastern markets. →
Roast loss: Difference in weight between green and roasted coffee, water and organic matter evaporated: 12 to 15% for a light roast, up to 20% and more for a dark one. A roaster monitors it to reproduce a profile. →
Roast profile: The curve of bean temperature over time, with its settings of heat, air and drum speed. Reproducing a profile means reproducing a cup; monitoring software records it second by second. →
Robusta: A variety of Coffea canephora: the Congolese group, SG1 and SG2. Trade has extended this name to the whole species, and thus designates a set by one of its parts. This atlas keeps Robusta for the variety and canephora for the species. →
RoR: Rate of Rise: the speed at which the bean temperature rises, in °C per minute, read on the roaster’s probe. It often peaks around 15 to 20 °C/min early in the cycle and must decline steadily; a plateau or a rebound (crash, flick) signals a poorly run roast. →
Sarchimor: Like Catimor, a family of materials descended from the Timor Hybrid, here via Villa Sarchi. Two plants under this name can differ. →
Scale: A deposit of calcium carbonate formed when a hard, alkaline water is heated. It clogs the boilers of espresso machines; that is why water recommendations aim for a compromise between extraction and scaling. →
Scorching: A bean burned on the surface by too hot a contact with the drum, typically a charge that is too high or a flame that is too strong at the start: dark marks on the faces, a smoky, acrid taste. Tipping, the burning of the tips of the bean, is its cousin. →
Score: The score of a cupping out of a hundred: an average of human judgments that decides considerable differences in value on a small fraction of the world volume. Dismantled in 2024 in favor of the Coffee Value Assessment. →
Screen size: Bean size, measured with ISO screens from screen 10 (4 mm) to screen 20 (8 mm). A screen leaves no room for dispute; a palate does. →
Second crack: A drier, more closely spaced cracking at about 225 to 230 °C, when the cell walls give way and the oils migrate to the surface. Beyond it, we are in dark roasts where origin fades behind the burnt taste. →
Segregation: Dispersion of a plant’s offspring into individuals different from one another instead of resembling the parent, a consequence of the shuffling at each seed. This is what rules out sowing an F1 hybrid and what makes the work of fixing a variety so long. →
Selection: A choice made by someone within existing material: spotting the trees that produce or resist better, sowing their seeds, starting over for years. Nothing is invented, one sorts what was already there. →
Self-incompatibility: A mechanism that prevents a plant from being fertilized by its own pollen. In canephora, it forces cross-pollination and rules out any fixed variety: mixtures of compatible clones are planted. →
Self-pollination: Fertilization of a flower by its own pollen. Arabica is about 90% self-pollinating, hence varieties that stay stable when grown from seed; canephora is self-incompatible and must be fertilized by another plant, hence its diversity and its clones. →
Sensory Lexicon: The World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon (2016, revised 2017), which defines each attribute of coffee by a tangible reference and an intensity, so that two panels describe the same thing with the same words. The basis of the current flavor wheel. →
Sequencing: Reading the order of the bases of a genome. Canephora was sequenced in 2014, arabica the same year and then as a complete reference in 2020-2022; these genomes confirmed the hybrid origin of arabica and dated its bottleneck. →
SH1 to SH9: The nine rust resistance genes identified in the coffee plant: SH1, SH2, SH4 and SH5 in Ethiopian arabicas, SH3 in liberica, SH6 to SH9 in canephora, which entered arabica through the Timor Hybrid. Each race of the fungus gets around certain combinations of them. →
SHB / SHG: Strictly Hard Bean (Guatemala, Costa Rica) and Strictly High Grown (Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador): altitude grades, above about 1,350 m for the first and 1,200 m for the second. Altitude slows ripening and densifies the bean. →
SIAF: Self-induced anaerobic fermentation. In a closed tank, it is not an injected gas that drives out the oxygen but the microorganisms that consume it and saturate the medium with CO2. It is what the “anaerobic” label almost always covers. →
Silverskin: A thin membrane stuck to the seed, which flies off during roasting. The only by-product that forms in a consuming country, along with the spent grounds. →
Siphon: The siphon pushes hot water up from a lower bulb into an upper bulb where the coffee waits, then, when the heat is removed, lets cooling draw the infusion down through a filter. It is a physics apparatus turned coffee maker, chosen for the spectacle as much as for a hot, clean cup. Other names: vacuum coffee maker, glass-bulb coffee maker. →
SL28: A Kenyan selection of the 1930s from Bourbon material, renowned for its cup and become the East African reference. Despite this reputation as an exception, it comes from the same narrow genetic stock as almost all cultivated coffee. →
Somatic embryogenesis: A laboratory technique that regenerates whole plants from leaf fragments grown in vitro. It makes it possible to produce true-to-type copies of an F1 hybrid by the million, which seed does not allow. →
Specialty: The segment defined for twenty years by the threshold of 80 points. It fills magazines and competitions, not cups: a small fraction of the world volume. →
Species: Two individuals belong to the same species if they can produce offspring that are themselves fertile. The criterion concerns the next generation, not resemblance, and it is porous in plants, where crossings between species are frequent: arabica is the product of one. →
Spore: What a fungus makes in order to spread: the equivalent of a seed, infinitely smaller and more numerous, invisible alone and forming a colored powder in mass. It does not move by itself: wind, water, animals, tools, and above all humans carry it. →
Stenophylla: A West African coffee plant with black fruits, cultivated then forgotten, rediscovered in Sierra Leone in December 2018 in the form of a single plant at Kasewe. It grows at an annual average of 26 °C. →
Stinker: An isolated, over-fermented bean with a vinegary, putrid taste. Invisible at sorting, sometimes a few units in an entire bag, it is enough to contaminate a cup. It is born of drying that is too slow or of a fermentation that got out of hand. →
Stoma: A minuscule opening through which the leaf exchanges its gases with the air. It is the entry door of rust: without a wound, the tube emitted by the germinated spore looks for a stoma and enters it. →
Strecker degradation: Degradation of amino acids by compounds from the Maillard reaction, which produces fragrant aldehydes (malty, chocolaty, floral). A sub-branch of the roaster’s brown chemistry, often cited along with it. →
Sucrose: The main sugar of the green bean, consumed by roasting. A coffee is not sweet because it contained sugar: it is what it is because heat made something else of it. →
TDS (brew strength): Concentration of dissolved solids in the cup, as a percentage of mass: 1.15 to 1.35% for a filter according to the SCA, 8 to 12% for an espresso. It is measured with a refractometer and makes it possible, knowing the masses, to calculate the extraction. →
TDS (total dissolved solids): Total dissolved solids, in mg/L or ppm, measured by conductivity. An overall figure that does not say which ions are present: two waters at 150 ppm can give very different coffees. The SCA recommends 75 to 250 mg/L, with a target of 150. →
Tetraploid: An organism with four sets of chromosomes. The Timor Hybrid has 44, exactly like arabica, and it is this doubling that made it possible to cross them and bring its resistance down into the cultivated varieties. →
Thermal shock: A sudden transfer of a mass of coffee from hot water to cold water, for example 40 °C then 10 °C at the final wash, supposed to stop fermentation dead and lock in the profile. A Colombian practice with no published scientific basis. →
Timor Hybrid: A spontaneous arabica × canephora cross discovered on Timor in the 1920s. Exceptional because it is tetraploid and fertile, hence usable in breeding; it brought resistance, and canephora into the cup. →
Tipping: Localized burning of the ends of the bean, black dots at both tips, caused by excess heat at the moment when the bean, still moist, cannot evacuate its steam fast enough. A sign of a charge that is too hot. →
Triangle test: A test in which three cups are served, two of them identical, and the taster is asked to find the odd one out. Used to certify tasters and to check that a difference in process is really perceptible. →
Trigonelline: An alkaloid of the green bean, about 1% in arabica and 0.7% in canephora, which breaks down in roasting into niacin and fragrant pyridines. One of the reasons for vitamin B3 in the cup. →
Turkish coffee: Turkish coffee is prepared in a small long-handled pot where very fine powder, water and sugar heat together until a foam rises. It is served unfiltered: the grounds settle at the bottom of the cup, and it is the only major method in which almost everything the powder has given up is drunk. Other names: cezve, ibrik. →
Turning point: The moment when the temperature probe, which had been falling since the cold coffee was introduced into the hot drum, starts rising again, generally one to two minutes after the charge. The true zero of the profile. →
Typica: The other founding lineage: the material that left Yemen, passed through European botanical gardens, then crossed the Atlantic. →
Underextraction: Insufficient extraction: too few compounds dissolved, often under 18%. A sour, salty, hollow cup with a short finish. Corrected by grinding finer, lengthening the time or raising the temperature. →
V60: A cone opened at sixty degrees, a single large hole, spiral ribs: the Hario V60 leaves almost all control of the flow rate to the pour. It is the reference tool for specialty manual filter coffee. Other names: Hario V60, V60 cone. →
Variety: In theory, a homogeneous and stable set. In practice, the word can designate a stable thing, an unstable thing, an entire family, or a set in which one plant in seven does not resemble the others. It is nonetheless sold as a guarantee. →
Vietnamese phin filter: A small perforated metal chamber, a press set on top of the grounds, a lid: the phin, a Vietnamese word taken from the French “filtre,” sits on the glass and lets a very concentrated coffee fall drop by drop. It is the ordinary coffee tool in Vietnam, served black or over sweetened condensed milk. Other names: phin, cà phê phin. →
Volatile and nonvolatile compounds: Two populations of molecules: the volatiles evaporate and rise to the nose, that is aroma; the nonvolatiles stay in the liquid and make the body, acidity, bitterness, astringency and length. Research has chased the first and neglected the second. →
Washed process: Pulp, ferment, wash, dry. The process that uses the most water, gives cleaner and more acidic coffees, and kills the borer along the way. →
Water activity: Not the moisture content: the water actually available to microorganisms in the bean. It decides whether molds, and therefore ochratoxin A, can appear in storage. →
Water pH: A measure of acidity, 7 being neutral. The SCA wants it between 6.5 and 7.5, but it matters less than alkalinity: a water at pH 8 and low alkalinity buffers less than a water at pH 7.2 rich in bicarbonate. →
Wet hulled: The Indonesian process: the parchment is hulled while the bean is still moist. An answer to a climate where drying would take weeks and to a cash flow that cannot wait. →
White honey: Honey in which only about 10% of the mucilage is left on the parchment, the rest removed mechanically, with fast drying in the sun. The closest to a washed. These percentages are standardized by no body. →
Yeast inoculation: Seeding the tank with a selected strain (Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Pichia, Torulaspora) to steer fermentation instead of leaving it to the spontaneous flora. Allowed by Cup of Excellence, which treats a yeast as a microorganism, not as an ingredient. →
Yellow honey: Honey keeping on the order of 25% of the mucilage, dried in the sun in a thin layer in one to two weeks. An order of magnitude of commercial usage, variable from one source to another. →

Coffee regulationCoffee regulation · section 08Sustainability and due diligence: deforestation, reporting, vigilanceFor the first time, a text asks coffee to prove where it grew.Coffee regulation · section 09Labels and certifications: the law and the contract“Organic” is a Union law: a regulation, control bodies approved by the State, an electronic certificate for every operator and…

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