Goofy Stance Bean Notes

There's an old legend about coffee. Long ago, an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi noticed that his goats ate the red fruit of a certain tree and then jumped around all night, unable to sleep. Kaldi brought the fruit to a nearby monastery, where the monks made a drink from it and found they could stay awake through their long night prayers.

No one knows if it really happened. The story wasn't even written down until the late 1600s. But it is true that coffee began in the forests of Ethiopia, where wild coffee trees still grow on their own today.

A coffee bean is the seed inside the fruit of the coffee tree (the coffee cherry). That's why so many coffees smell and taste fruity, like apricot, berries or plum. Acidity isn't a sign of something gone bad. It's the tang of ripe fruit.

Coffee starts with a seed. Seeds are sprouted in a nursery and grown for about 6 months to a year, then planted out in the field.

It usually takes 3–4 years for a transplanted tree to flower and bear fruit for the first time. The first crop is small, though, and a farmer needs to wait 5–7 years after planting for a steady harvest. After that, the tree keeps bearing fruit for about 20–30 years.

From flower to ripe red cherry takes another 6–9 months for Arabica, and even longer in the shade. In the end, one tree gives less than 1 kg of green coffee a year. That's how much time goes into a single cup.

The cup in front of you has come a very long way.

1. Harvest — Cherries are picked when they turn red. Even on one tree, cherries ripen at different speeds, so good farms pick by hand, going over the trees several times and taking only the ripe ones.

2. Processing — The cherries are processed right away. Using methods like washed or natural, the seeds are taken out of the fruit and fermented.

3. Drying — The seeds are dried slowly down to about 10–12% moisture. Drying too fast, or not enough, spoils the flavor.

4. Hulling and sorting — The dry outer skin (parchment) is removed, revealing the green coffee. It's sorted by size and weight, damaged or insect-bitten beans are picked out, and the coffee is graded.

5. Export and import — Green coffee is packed in sacks and crosses the ocean by ship, which can take weeks or months. Along the way it's cupped several times to check quality, then passes through an importer to reach the roaster.

6. Roasting — The roaster finds the tastiest point for each coffee. Freshly roasted beans then rest for a few days to let the gas inside escape.

7. Brewing — Finally, the barista grinds the beans and brews them as filter coffee or espresso. The same beans taste different depending on grind, water temperature and time, so we taste and adjust every day.

Years from seed to first fruit, then months from harvest to cup. A cup of coffee is made by the hands of many people along the way.

Why do coffees taste so different? The flavor of green coffee comes down to three main things.

· Variety — What kind of coffee tree it is. Just as different apple varieties taste different, coffee varieties like Gesha, 74110 and Castillo each have their own natural aromas and flavors.

· Processing — How the seed was taken out of the fruit and dried. Washed, natural, anaerobic fermentation: a different process turns the same green coffee into a different cup.

· Terroir — Everything about the place where the coffee grew: soil, altitude, temperature, rain and sun, wind, and even the way the farmer tends the land. The word comes from wine.

That's why our bean notes list origin, altitude, variety and process. You can read about each one in more detail below.

One step above variety is the species. People drink three main species of coffee.

· Arabica — About 55–60% of the world's coffee. It was born in southwestern Ethiopia, near the border with South Sudan, as a natural cross between Robusta and another wild species (Coffea eugenioides). It grows best in cool highlands and has rich aromas with delicate acidity and sweetness. But it's vulnerable to disease and heat, so it's hard to grow. Most specialty coffee is Arabica, and all of our beans at Goofy Stance are Arabica. Varieties like Typica, Bourbon and Gesha below are all branches within Arabica.

· Robusta — About 40–45% of the world's coffee. As the name suggests, it's a "robust" tree that grows well in low, hot places and resists disease. It has about twice the caffeine of Arabica, with strong bitterness and a heavy body. It's widely used in instant coffee and espresso blends, and Vietnam produces the most.

· Liberica — A species from West Africa with very large trees and large beans. Very little is produced, mostly in places like the Philippines and Malaysia. Because it handles heat and disease well, it's getting new attention as an option in a changing climate.

Everything from here on is a variety within Arabica. Arabica began in Ethiopia, and some of it spread around the world by way of Yemen, giving rise to many varieties.

· Typica — One of the oldest cultivated varieties. Coffee that traveled from Yemen to India was taken by the Dutch to Java in Indonesia, then spread through European botanical gardens to Latin America. Tall trees with small harvests.

· Bourbon — Coffee from Yemen taken by the French to Bourbon Island (now Réunion), where it settled. Together with Typica, it's one of the two roots of Latin American coffee. There are Red and Yellow Bourbons, named for the cherry color. (The similarly named "Pink Bourbon" turned out, through genetic testing, to be closer to Ethiopian landraces than to Bourbon.)

· Mocha — Originally the name of a port in Yemen. Coffee was once shipped to the world through this port, so Yemeni and Ethiopian coffees were called "Mocha." There's also a separate "Mocha" variety with small, round beans. (The chocolate drink "café mocha" takes its name from this.)

· Gesha — A variety from the Gesha forest in Ethiopia. Famous for long beans and floral aromas, it's the most expensive variety traded today.

· Pacamara — Created in 1958 by El Salvador's coffee research institute by crossing "Pacas" (a short variety that came from Bourbon) and "Maragogipe" (a very large-bean variety that came from Typica). The two names combined make Pacamara. The beans are very large.

· Castillo — Developed by Colombia's coffee research center to resist leaf rust. By crossing disease-resistant trees with good-tasting ones, it lets farmers grow coffee more reliably.

· Ethiopian landraces (74110 and others) — Trees from Ethiopian forests that a research institute selected and numbered. They're called by numbers instead of names.

Even the same variety tastes different depending on where and by whom it was grown (terroir) and how it was processed.

Gesha's home is the Gesha forest in southwestern Ethiopia. Coffee seeds collected there in the 1930s passed through a research station in Tanzania and were stored in 1953 at a research center in Costa Rica (CATIE) under the number "T2722." In the 1960s, a Panamanian government official brought the seeds to the Boquete region and planted them.

At first the trees were planted for their resistance to leaf rust. Then in 2004, Hacienda La Esmeralda picked their cherries separately and entered them in a competition, and the floral aroma stunned the world. The original name is "Gesha," after the forest, but it became better known by the similar-sounding "Geisha."

So not every Gesha is the same Gesha. Panamanian Gesha spread from a single line, T2722, so it's genetically uniform. But Ethiopia has countless native coffee trees growing near that same forest, so some coffees sold as "Gesha" from Ethiopia are genetically different from Panamanian Gesha. This happens because variety names often come from the name of a region or forest.

Ethiopia has thousands of nameless native coffee trees growing in its forests. A research institute picked out good ones and gave them numbers, and those numbers became the variety names. In 74110 or 74112, the "74" means the tree was collected in 1974, and the rest is the institute's number.

Each coffee cherry holds two seeds, and those seeds are green coffee. Processing methods differ in how, and in what order, the skin, the fruit flesh and the sticky layer around the seed (mucilage) are removed, and how the seeds are dried.

· Washed — The skin and flesh are removed by machine → the mucilage stuck to the seed is fermented off in a tank (usually half a day to two days, depending on temperature) → the seeds are rinsed in clean water → after drying on raised beds, the thin husk around the seed (parchment) is removed.

· Natural — Whole cherries are spread on drying beds → turned often so they dry evenly, for 2–4 weeks in the sun → the dried skin and flesh are removed all at once.

· Honey — Only the skin and flesh are removed, and the seeds are dried with the mucilage still on. Depending on how much mucilage is left and how fast it dries, the color changes, so it's called yellow, red or black honey.

· Anaerobic — Whole cherries, or seeds with the flesh removed, are sealed in a tank and fermented without oxygen for a set time, then dried.

· Carbonic maceration — Whole cherries go into a sealed tank filled with carbon dioxide → with the oxygen pushed out, fermentation goes very slowly and in a controlled way → they're left for a few days so the aromas made inside the skin soak into the seeds, then taken out and dried. The method comes from winemaking.

A process doesn't guarantee a flavor. Even with the same process, the result changes with the coffee, the farm, the weather and the fermentation time.

What really matters to coffee isn't height itself, but how cool it is. The higher you go, the cooler it gets, so the cherries ripen slowly, and the slower they ripen, the more densely sweetness and acidity build up. That's why high-grown coffees often taste clear and complex.

But two coffees at 2,000 m can taste very different. The altitude number is only a hint about coolness, and real conditions differ by region.

· Distance from the equator — The farther from the equator, the cooler it is even at low altitude. Hawaii's Kona grows great coffee at a few hundred meters, while Kenya, Colombia and Ethiopia, close to the equator, have to go much higher to get the same coolness.

· Wind and fog — In Boquete, Panama, cold winds and fog coming over the Barú volcano keep things very cool even at 1,500–1,800 m. That's why delicate coffees like Gesha grow so well there.

· Sun and rain — The Ethiopian highlands have strong sun and big swings between day and night temperatures. With clear rainy and dry seasons, the cherries ripen on a different rhythm.

· Soil — Soil with volcanic ash (Panama, Guatemala, parts of Colombia) is rich in nutrients and gives the flavor another kind of character.

So when you look at a coffee, check the country and region along with the altitude. It'll help you guess the flavor.

Coffee used to be called by country, like "Colombian coffee" or "Brazilian coffee." In specialty coffee today, what matters more is that flavor changes a lot within the same country, depending on the region, the farm, and who grew it and how.

Why does each farm taste different? Even neighboring farms have different small environments (microclimates): which way the slope faces, shade, wind. And depending on what variety the farmer plants, whether they pick only ripe cherries, how many hours they ferment and how carefully they dry, the same region can produce completely different coffees. Much of a coffee's flavor is decided by the farm and the farmer's choices.

Even within a farm, each lot is different. A lot is a unit for managing a section of the farm, or a batch of harvest, separately. On the same farm, cherries taste different depending on which slope, what altitude and when they were picked, so the best farms keep lots apart, processing and selling each one separately.

A famous example is Hacienda La Esmeralda in Boquete, Panama, the farm that introduced Gesha to the world. It names each section, like Jaramillo, Cañas Verdes and El Velo, and releases them separately. Every year it auctions only its top-rated lots under the name "Esmeralda Special," and these days lots from new sections above 2,000 m, like "Nido," sell for the highest prices. Nido is the name of a lot, not a farm. In 2025, a Nido Gesha set a world record at auction at about $30,000 per kilogram. Same farm, same variety, and the higher, better lot sells for far more.

That's why coffee names list country → region → farm (or producer). For example, "Colombia El Paraiso" is the El Paraiso farm in Colombia, and "Ethiopia Guji Sakiso" is Sakiso in the Guji region of Ethiopia.

In countries like Ethiopia with many smallholders, coffee is often named after a "washing station," where many farmers bring their cherries to be processed together, or after the area instead of a farm.

Being able to trace where and by whom a coffee was grown is called "traceability," and it's an important way to choose good coffee.

Grades sort green coffee by bean size and by how few defects (insect-damaged or broken beans) it has. Each country has its own system. Ethiopia grades by number of defects, with G1 (Grade 1) the highest. Kenya uses bean size, like AA, and Guatemala uses growing altitude, like SHB.

Green coffee is green and smells grassy. Only when heat turns it brown does it start to taste like coffee.

The lighter the roast, the more the bean's own flavor comes through. The character of where it grew, what variety it is and how it was processed shows clearly.

The darker the roast, the more you taste the bittersweet, nutty flavors that come from roasting itself, and the differences between beans fade and become simpler.

That doesn't mean lighter is always better. If it's underroasted, the inside isn't fully developed, leaving grassy, sharp sour or astringent flavors. Roast too far, and the bean's character is hidden behind burnt flavors.

Every coffee has its own sweet spot, and finding that timing is the roaster's job. The sweet spot can even change depending on whether the coffee will be brewed as espresso or as filter coffee.

Single origin coffee uses beans from one place only, like one country, one region or one farm. It's a great way to taste that coffee's character just as it is. Our Guji Sakiso is a single origin.

A blend mixes different coffees in set proportions. It's a bit like combining ingredients in cooking to create one flavor.

Why blend?

· Balance — One coffee might have great acidity but lack sweetness or body. Mixing coffees with different strengths fills in the gaps and balances the flavor in one cup.

· The same taste, every day — Coffee is a crop, so its flavor changes from year to year and harvest to harvest, and some coffees run out quickly. By swapping components little by little and adjusting the ratio, a blend keeps a similar taste all year round, so regulars always get "the one they love."

· Built for the menu — Espresso is brewed strong in a short time and is often mixed with milk. So blends are often designed specifically to taste good in both americanos and lattes.

· Creating new flavors — Blending can create flavors that no single coffee could on its own.

Blends can be mixed as green coffee and roasted together, or each coffee can be roasted to suit it and then mixed. Our Caramelo blend mixes three Ethiopian coffees for espresso, and we use it so it tastes great in both americanos and lattes.

Cupping is the way coffee is evaluated when green coffee is bought and sold, or when roasts are checked. The method is fixed so everyone tastes under the same conditions anywhere, which means any difference in flavor comes only from the coffee.

· A set amount of coffee is ground coarsely into a cup, and first you smell the dry grounds.

· Hot water is poured in, and after about 4 minutes a crust of grounds forms on top. You break it with a spoon and smell the aroma that rises.

· After skimming off the floating grounds, you take a spoonful and slurp it hard. That spreads the coffee all over your mouth and pushes the aroma up to the back of your nose, so you can taste it fully.

· You taste it many times, from hot to cool, scoring aroma, acidity, sweetness, body, aftertaste and balance one by one.

For a long time, coffee that scored 80 or more out of 100 under the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) standard was called "specialty coffee," and the industry still commonly uses that benchmark. But in 2021 the SCA redefined specialty as "a coffee or coffee experience recognized for its distinctive attributes, and because of these attributes, has significant extra value," and since 2024 it has used a new evaluation (CVA) that records the intensity of flavors and how good they are separately, instead of one single score. People who specialize in this evaluation are called "Q Graders."

Tasting notes like apricot, honey or chocolate aren't added flavors. Coffee contains hundreds of aroma compounds, and some of them are the same compounds found in fruit, flowers or nuts. That's why coffee reminds you of familiar foods.

Much of what we call "taste" is actually smell. The tongue only picks up sweet, sour, bitter, salty and savory. Things like apricot or black tea come from aromas that rise from the back of your throat to your nose as you drink. That's why coffee tastes much flatter if you pinch your nose.

Tasting notes are what roasters and cuppers write down when a cupping reminds them of familiar foods. There's even a shared map of flavor words, the "Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel," so everyone can use the same language.

Still, tasting notes are hints, not answers. Everyone has eaten different foods and has different memories, so one person might taste apricot in a coffee where another tastes peach. Flavors change with temperature too, so try sipping slowly while it's hot and as it cools, and find your own flavors.

Green coffee contains quite a bit of sugar, but most of it breaks down during roasting. So very little sugar actually ends up in your cup.

Coffee still tastes sweet thanks to aroma. Roasting creates compounds that smell "sweet," like caramel or cotton candy, and our brain reads those aromas as sweetness. That's why sweetness fades too if you pinch your nose while drinking.

So notes like brown sugar or honey don't mean sugar was added. They mean the coffee has those sweet aromas.

These three are often mixed up.

· Sour — A tangy brightness at the sides of your tongue that makes your mouth water. People who don't expect acidity in coffee sometimes call this "bitter."

· Bitter — A bittersweet taste that lingers at the back of the tongue. In the right amount, like dark chocolate, it's part of the flavor.

· Astringent — Less a taste than a feeling: your tongue goes dry and tight, like biting into an unripe persimmon. A 2025 study found that astringency in coffee comes not from tannins but from some of the brown compounds formed during roasting. You'll notice it most in over-extracted coffee.

Next time a coffee tastes "bitter," try to tell whether it's really bitter, sour or astringent. It makes finding coffee you like much easier.

Specialty coffee scores highly in cupping and is valued more for its own special flavor and story. Getting there takes a huge amount of work.

· Hand-picking — To pick only ripe cherries, workers go over the same tree several times by hand. That takes far more time and people than stripping a whole branch at once by machine.

· Keeping lots separate — Lots are processed, dried and stored separately instead of mixed. Quantities get smaller and management gets more complicated.

· Small harvests — Coffee from high mountains, demanding varieties and careful processing is produced in small amounts to begin with.

· A fair price for farmers — The price of commodity coffee rises and falls with the global market, and sometimes it sells for less than it cost the farmer to grow. Specialty coffee is bought at a price that matches its quality, through direct trade with farms or at auction. That way farmers can keep growing good coffee the next year.

So the price of specialty coffee isn't just about flavor. It also reflects the time and care of the people who grew and selected it.

Both are ways of extracting coffee from ground beans, but water moves through the coffee differently.

· Espresso — Finely ground coffee is packed firmly, and a machine pushes hot water through it at high pressure, making a short, strong shot in 25–30 seconds. The brown foam on top is the "crema." It's strong and heavy, so adding water makes an americano and adding milk makes a latte.

· Filter coffee (hand drip) — Slightly coarser coffee goes into a paper filter, and water is poured slowly so it drips through by gravity. It takes about 2–4 minutes. The paper filter catches the coffee oils, so the taste is clean and it's great for tasting a coffee's delicate aromas.

That's why the same beans taste different as espresso and as filter coffee. At Goofy Stance, we use single origins roasted here in the shop for filter coffee, and the Caramelo blend for espresso drinks.

Crema, the brown foam on top of espresso, forms when carbon dioxide created inside the beans during roasting is pushed out under high pressure.

So crema shows how fresh the coffee is and how dark it was roasted. Freshly roasted and darker-roasted beans make thicker crema, while lighter roasts or older beans make thinner crema.

Thick crema doesn't always mean better flavor. Lighter roasts like our Caramelo can taste great even with relatively thin crema.

In a cup of filter coffee, only about 1–2% is coffee. Everything else is water. So the water you use changes the flavor a lot.

Minerals dissolved in water, like calcium and magnesium, help draw out coffee's flavor compounds. On the other hand, too many minerals, or too much of the components that neutralize acid, make coffee taste dull and flat. It's one reason the same beans taste a little different from café to café.

· Espresso vs filter — Espresso is strong, so it seems like it would have more caffeine, but the serving is small. Per cup, a filter coffee usually has more caffeine.

· Do darker roasts have more caffeine? — No. Roast level makes little difference to caffeine. A more bitter taste doesn't mean more caffeine.

· By species — Robusta has about twice as much caffeine as Arabica. All of our beans at Goofy Stance are Arabica.

· Decaf — Most of the caffeine is removed, but a tiny amount remains. In Korea, coffee could be labeled "decaf" if 90% or more of the caffeine was removed, and from 2028 the beans must contain 0.1% caffeine or less.

Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety recommends that adults keep caffeine to 400 mg or less per day.

Arabica is a fussy tree that only thrives in cool highlands. That makes it one of the first crops affected as the planet warms.

· Less land to grow it — Research suggests that by around 2050, about half of the land that's good for Arabica today may no longer be suitable. The altitude needed to grow coffee is expected to rise by more than 300 m on average. Farmers move higher up, but mountains have tops.

· Cherries ripen unevenly — In heat, cherries ripen too fast and develop less flavor, and when rains become irregular, the rhythm of flowering and fruiting is thrown off.

· Diseases and pests move uphill — Leaf rust and insects that bore into cherries are spreading to high places they never used to reach.

· Wild coffee is disappearing — About 60% of the world's wild coffee species are threatened with extinction from climate change, deforestation and disease. That includes wild Arabica in Ethiopia's forests. Wild coffee matters even more because it's a "gene library" for breeding new varieties that can handle disease and heat.

· New varieties — Researchers around the world are working on varieties that resist heat and disease and still taste good.

· Forgotten species — A 2021 study found that "Stenophylla," a wild coffee from West Africa, grows where average temperatures are more than 6°C higher than Arabica's, yet tastes similar to Arabica. Liberica, introduced above, is getting new attention for the same reason.

· Growing in the shade — Growing coffee under the shade of tall trees keeps the soil and plants cooler and protects the forest. It's how Ethiopian forest coffee has always grown.

· Helping farmers keep going — Trade that pays a fair price for good coffee gives farmers room to prepare for climate change.

For the cup you drink today to carry on into the future, we need to think about the land where coffee grows and the people who look after it.