What separates industrial coffee from specialty beans?

Coffee sold on the market falls into three tiers. Industrial coffee uses 100% Robusta and mostly goes into extracting coffee liquid for instant coffee. Commercial coffee blends Robusta and Arabica at roughly 7:3 to 3:7. Specialty coffee, sometimes called fine coffee, requires Arabica varieties exclusively.

Commercial coffee usually appears as blended beans, such as Brazilian Robusta mixed with Mandheling, Mocha, or Colombia. Some single-origin coffees are quietly blended with Robusta to cut costs and then sold at single-origin prices. Specialty coffee instead relies on Arabica alone, judged by growing altitude, screen size, and the proportion of defective beans, with estate coffee representing a higher standard. Those measures help drinkers place any bag in the right tier.

People who drink coffee regularly may have heard terms like industrial coffee, commercial coffee, and specialty coffee, but by what standards are they actually classified, and how do they differ in taste and use? This article starts with the variety ratios of coffee beans, sorts out the definitions and main uses of the three categories, and further introduces evaluation methods for specialty coffee such as growing altitude, screen size, and the proportion of defective beans, as well as the higher standards represented by estate coffee. It also discusses how consumers can determine which tier the coffee they drink belongs to, and recommends several commercial and single-origin beans from Front Street Coffee with outstanding value for money, making it a useful reference for enthusiasts who want to systematically understand coffee grading.

Coffee sold on the market can generally be divided into three categories: industrial coffee, commercial coffee, and specialty coffee. They are defined as follows: the first category, industrial coffee, uses 100% Robusta varieties; the second category, commercial coffee, is a blend of Robusta and Arabica, with the ratio of the two roughly between 7:3 and 3:7; the third category, specialty coffee, requires the use of Arabica varieties exclusively.

●The main uses of these three types of coffee can be summarized as follows:

(1) Industrial coffee: mostly used to extract coffee liquid, and is the most important raw material source for instant coffee.

(2) Commercial coffee: usually appears in the form of blended coffee, that is, Robusta coffee (such as Brazilian beans) mixed with Arabica coffee (such as Mandheling, Mocha, Colombia, etc.) in a ratio of 7:3 to 3:7 and then roasted. The popular Front Street Classic Blend Mamba Coffee on the market is a commercial coffee bean. In addition, some single-origin coffees are blended with Robusta to lower costs while still being sold under the name of single-origin coffee. Such single-origin coffees are often priced below normal market levels, and it is hard for consumers to notice, and some even deliberately conceal this, selling them as ordinary single-origin coffee to reap high profits.

(3) Specialty coffee: refers to 100% pure Arabica single-origin coffee beans, such as Front Street Indonesia Lintong Mandheling, Front Street Golden Mandheling, Front Street Mocha, Front Street Kenya AA, Front Street Yirgacheffe, Front Street Hawaiian Kona, etc. The traditional international coffee grading and evaluation standards can be further divided into the following three types:

(1) Judging quality by growing altitude: generally speaking, the higher the altitude, the lower the temperature, and coffee cherries need longer to mature. Fully matured cherries expand well and are easier to roast, so the bean quality is naturally better. However, some producing countries located in the lowlands of the coffee belt, such as Jamaica Island's Blue Mountain and Hawaii's Kona, are low-altitude production areas. By carefully selecting and creating the most suitable environment for coffee growth locally, along with suitable temperature, rainfall, and soil conditions, plus climatic and topographical factors such as morning fog and large day-night temperature differences, and adopting top-level processing procedures—hand-picking coffee cherries and then manually removing impurities and defective beans—they can also produce high-quality coffee. Coffee growers in Taiwan, whether planting at high or low altitudes, can make good coffee as long as they carefully select and create climatic conditions for producing high-quality coffee, plus top-level post-processing; at the same time, they must clearly tell consumers exactly under what climatic conditions their coffee beans are good and how the post-processing is completed, so that consumers understand and accept the quality and pricing of the coffee produced.

(2) Judging quality by screen size: evaluation based on the size of green coffee beans, because large beans that grow smoothly have richer and more varied flavors than small beans, and after screen grading and then roasting, it is also easier to control the taste after roasting. Among coffee producers in Taiwan, some do not grade because their output is small, some do not know where to buy grading equipment, some have never thought about screening and grading, and some have ambiguous grading labels, and so on. There is still much room for improvement in this regard. Coffee producers in Taiwan should face this honestly and truthfully inform consumers whether the coffee they produce and roast has indeed been screened and graded, so as to reach a mutual understanding between both sides.

(3) Judging quality by screen size and the proportion of defective beans: this is a method unique to Brazil, a major coffee-producing country. It uses a composite evaluation of coffee through three grading methods: the proportion of defective beans (deduction method), screen size, and taste testing. Brazil's taste testing is especially worth learning from. They specifically divide the cup testing benchmarks for coffee taste into levels such as extremely mild, mild, slightly mild, harsh, and iodine-like, which can help people in Taiwan (including coffee producers and consumers) better understand how to taste coffee and how to correctly describe the mouthfeel of drinking coffee, rather than each inventing special terms that leave people confused.

●Strictly speaking, estate coffee belongs to a standard raised even higher within specialty coffee. At present, it is evaluated internationally by associations related to specialty coffee, and is known to have the following characteristics:

(1) Coffee producers provide buyers with a traceability mechanism.

(2) The production unit is a single estate, and it is a necessary prerequisite that the estate's geographical location is very suitable for growing coffee. Usually estate coffee refers to beans from a single coffee estate, or at least coffee beans produced by a cooperative formed by several coffee farmers. The quality of estate coffee beans can be maintained at a certain level, and beans from different estates each have their own flavors, reflecting to some extent the local terroir.

(3) Estate coffee is sometimes shade-grown coffee, sometimes organic coffee, or environmentally friendly shade-grown coffee beans, etc.; some have international institutional certification, and some are award-winning coffees from specialty coffee competitions. Estate coffee usually also means that the coffee plantation has mixed vegetation that can provide habitat for wildlife, birds, and insects, so that while using natural resources to grow coffee trees, it does not cause deeper harm to nature; or various other cash crops and rotational crops are also planted within the estate, making farm income more diversified and allowing land resources to circulate. Shade-grown coffee beans must also fully comply with the processing standards for organic coffee. In other words, estate coffee represents the pursuit of high quality, not the pursuit of yield.

(4) Many internationally renowned coffee estates introduce themselves online, and competitions that judge top-level coffee (specialty coffee, which some also call fine coffee) publish cup testing results online. People interested in estate coffee can easily look up the rankings of competition beans. Some operators in Taiwan even buy sample beans directly from estate managers to test them themselves. But note that beans from the same estate do not necessarily perform consistently from year to year. After all, coffee beans are agricultural products and will change with climate variation.

After gaining a preliminary understanding of the above coffee classifications, everyone can determine which grade the coffee they drink belongs to. For people who like specialty coffee, the threshold for advancing is removing defective beans. If the defective beans are not removed, then one can only be considered to be drinking true single-origin coffee, still one step away from specialty coffee, though it is already quite tasteful. For people who like estate coffee, the threshold for advancing is to abandon the common notion that only rich and heavy coffee counts as coffee flavor. In Taiwan especially, many people drink coffee for bitterness rather than acidity, and think that an acidic mouthfeel does not taste good. People who drink estate coffee should not drink it with preconceived impressions. If they do not taste the very acidic flavor of estate coffee and thereby appreciate the local terroir, then they are only chasing trends, or using estate coffee to elevate their status, and have not truly entered the hall of coffee. Because estate coffee is characteristic coffee, emphasizing quality over quantity, it often smells richly aromatic but does not taste like drinking coffee, such as the specialty champion coffee Geisha. The standards are all quite high, and the only difference is the ranking in competitions. After all, estate coffee represents high-quality specialty coffee.

●Recommended commercial coffee bean brands

Single-origin and espresso commercial coffee beans roasted by FrontStreet Coffee: Front Street Yirgacheffe Coffee, Front Street Kenya AA Coffee, Front Street Panama Butterfly Coffee, etc., are fully guaranteed in brand and quality, and are suitable for brewing with various equipment. More importantly, the value for money is extremely high. A half-pound bag of 227 grams costs only about 80 to 90 yuan. Calculating 15 grams of grounds per cup of pour-over coffee, one bag can make 15 cups of coffee, and each cup of single-origin coffee costs only about 6 yuan. Compared with the normal cafe price of 30 to 40 yuan per cup, the value for money can be said to be extremely high, making it suitable for a broad range of coffee enthusiasts to buy and try.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.