Hacea's Green Coffee Column: November
Those tiny little coffee beans are called Peaberries.
LISTEN!
Transcript below.
Topic: What’s the deal with those tiny coffee seeds called peaberries?
Coffee Smarter Expert: Jared Hales, Hacea Coffee Source
Connect: www.haceacoffee.com • @haceacoffeesource on Instagram
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Peaberries have no relation to Mr. Peabody, the cartoon dog. I had no idea it has been revitalized for the modern era, rather the quaint time we refer to as 2014.
A natural mutation in the coffee plant where only one seed develops in a coffee cherry.
Creates a rounded seed instead of a flat-sided seed.
Peaberries are often sorted out. Depending on perspective, they are either defects or prized mutations.
In theory, a peaberry received all the nutrients a coffee plant would have given two seeds.
In Jared’s experience, peaberry doesn’t seem to have an inherent advantage in quality, but it isn’t a disadvantage in terms of creating taste, either. There may be some marketing at play.
Coffee beans get ranked by size.
The size, or more importantly, the density of a coffee bean, matters greatly during the roasting process. This makes sorting green coffee prior to sale more important. Roasting coffees with different densities will lead to different times when a coffee seed hits the first crack or is roasted to the level desired. Different-sized green beans in a roast lead to inconsistent roasts and flavors in the final brew.
If you’re small, an import partner, like Hacea Coffee Source, can fill some holes for you. Hacea Coffee Source is developing a tool for sourcing by season and creating a target for coffee arrivals.
Contact Jared@haceacoffee.com directly to access the green coffee ordering tool!
Full interview dialogue below.
HACEA COFFEE SOURCE ONLINE
Online! Click to shop green coffee on haceacoffee.com
Cup coffee with Jared at Hacea Coffee Source. Hacea regularly offers educational sessions on Tasting, Roasting, and Brewing coffee at their Anaheim, CA cupping studio. Click the button to check out their upcoming classes:
INTERVIEW*
R!WC: If I could go back in time and start the Roast! West Coast program over, I would start by saying, Hey Jared, do you want to talk about green coffee?
That's what I would do. Yeah, uh, so I'm glad you're here now, but if I could go back in time, that's how I would use my time travel abilities.
Jared: I'm honored.
R!WC: Welcome back. You're here for another talking session on the Hacea Coffee Source Green Coffee Column, which we post every month on RoastWestCoast.com.
I steal a lot of information from you off of HaceaCoffee.com, where you and your brother post all kinds of stuff about green coffee and cupping and tasting, and it's great. That's how I learned a lot of things—by reading on HaceCoffee.com.
Jared: That's cool.
R!WC: You're back to talk a little bit about green coffee with us this month. What are we learning about today?
Jared: Thanks for having me, Ryan.
Today, something that a lot of people ask about is peaberries. What are peaberries? Are they a good thing?
R!WC: It's that little cartoon dog, isn't it? Oh, no, that's Peabody. My bad.
Jared: We're talking about green coffee peaberries that are roasted, right?
Pea berries are a natural mutation in the coffee plant when only one seed develops inside of a coffee cherry.
So, normally, two seeds are developing inside of each of those cherries, which is why you see, in most coffee beans, one side is almost flat, and the other side is rounded.
Those flat sides sit with a second seed kind of flat side to flat side,
and the rounded sides are on the outside where the skin would be, right?
R!WC: Yeah, I'm going to share a diagram of that on the website. If you're listening or reading, you'll see a picture of that [online].
Jared: That would be helpful. I'm describing with my hands, too, which I realize is not going to be very helpful here. So, a diagram is perfect.
The peaberry is when only one seed develops rather than two. What ends up happening is the seed is almost completely rounded—if you were to draw a line through the center of it. It doesn't have the one flat side that's required [when two seeds] share space within the cherry. It's just like a rounded seed.
R!WC: Because essentially, there's not another seed pushing on it in the middle, flattening it out. It can kind of just grow into the shape of a BB or something else.
Jared: Yeah, exactly.
R!WC: The shape of the cherry, the natural shape of the cherry.
Jared: Right. Rather than almost being split in half, it's just one. Now, after coffee is dried and ready to ship and everything, it gets sorted. It gets sorted by bean size. It gets sorted by density, among other things. And peaberries are obviously a really unique shape. They usually are sorted out and separated from the rest of the coffee.
For various reasons, people prefer peaberries or avoid them. Historically, bigger beans are more desirable in green coffee. I don't really agree with that statement.
A lot of times, the middle-sized beans tend to taste best, in my experience, for whatever reason. By filtering the coffee by size, the peaberries essentially always end up at the bottom because of their small size.
By being so small, they can be considered undesirable as being like the smallest bean size. It can even be considered a grade. In some countries, the grade for bean size might be like A, B, C, and peaberry. A being the largest, right?
But on the other end, they could be really desirable because the theory is it's not sharing all of the nutrition in the fruit with another seed.
So one seed gets all of the nutrition of that [would normally be split between] each berry, right? In theory, it would taste better by having full access to the whole cherry.
Now, I've tasted a lot of peaberries separated out, and I can say that there's really no rule. I've tasted peaberries alongside other coffees from the same farms that taste better or worse or the same.
I've tasted it all.
From my experience from just blind-cupping coffee, peaberry really does not seem to have an inherent advantage in quality. In fact, a lot of times, I see producers...or large groups or co-ops or exporters—not necessarily producers—they try to pitch the Peaberry as something that you should pay more for without really spending the attention or the time and care on developing the coffee.
And so a lot of times, the peaberry gets offered from lower quality supply chains, in my experience, and it actually doesn't cup as well. But again, I don't think it has anything to do with the peaberry itself as much as the practices that went into producing it.
R!WC: You mentioned something that I think we're going to get into in the future because I'm already thinking of a hundred questions about it. You mentioned that they, in some places, rank the size of the bean, which is honestly not something I've ever really thought of.
So I wanted to just, before we go today, follow that up with when a coffee harvest is picked and completed...
I don't think I really thought about how there's going to be coffee beans from the same batch (or harvest) that are all different sizes. You mentioned the sorting process.
Are those [beans] then packaged and sold as green coffee in a relatively uniform size? Bag-A would be kind of all the same bag, you know, the next bag would be kind of the same. And is that better than if the beans are all different sizes mixed together to create a more representative batch from that harvest?
Jared: So the issue that comes up when you mix all of the different sizes is related to the various densities that are mixed together. Peaberries could be more dense because of the way [they are] shaped.
When you put all these seeds that have a different density into a coffee roaster, they're going to roast at different rates, and you're going to get really inconsistent results when you roast it.
So, it is generally better to have a tighter range when you're roasting. It's really, it's really about roasting and that process.
For example, if I were a roaster, I would prefer to have the A beans all separated and then buy the peaberry beans separated from the A and roast both of them separately rather than having one batch of A and peaberry blended together.
Not because the two coffees [are bad, but because they don't roast well together].
R!WC: I really appreciate all this knowledge you're bringing me, but I also have a complaint, which is every time we talk, I end up with more questions than I've just had answered. So, I'm looking forward to you coming back.
I know we're probably going to talk about this grading and ranking green coffee thing in the future because that seems really interesting to me.
And now I know that when I see peaberries at $30 for a 12-ounce bag, I should at least think about it.
Jared: Yeah, taste it. Try to taste it first.
*This transcription has been edited for length and clarity. We use an automated audio transcriber. Then go through each line to make sure it makes sense and stays true to the voice of the speaker. It is a real pain in the behind.
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