I recently read James Hoffman’s fantastic book The World Atlas of Coffee and followed the also fantastic new Terroir course at the Barista Hustle web site. All of this reading motivated me to think a bit more about coffee varietals when I’m enjoying a cup of coffee. Previously, I had noticed some obvious taste differences between varietals, like the fact that typical Kenyans such as the SL28 varietal tend to have a nice taste of blackberries (or tomato when the roast is underdeveloped) but I did not think about it much further.

His book also made me realize that I couldn’t find much information about the typical taste profiles of different coffee varietals or processing methods, other than anecdotic facts and tasting notes of individual roast batches. Clearly, there is a ton of subjective tasting notes available out there, and I thought if we could only collate a big pile…