How do you shop for coffee? Do you think about the roast? Are you partial towards a certain region? Do you like coffees with nutty undertones and avoid citrusy ones? Or maybe you only buy dry-process Ethiopian coffees from the Guji Zone of the Oromia region at 1800m of elevation or higher roasted very light, so the origin comes out and bitterness of the coffee is in the backyard barely noticeable? And you thought the person in front of you at Starbucks had a complicated order.
There are a ton of factors that go into a coffee purchase decision. The section of our education articles titled Origin will help you maneuver this confusing aspect of coffee.
Most of the time when a coffee drinker finds a cup they love they want to keep coming back to that amazing cup of coffee. So they attribute one of the many factors that went into that particular bean to what they love and then buy based on that attribution. The million dollar question (or maybe less) is, "was that person correct in what they attributed to the flavor?" Maybe they thought they like Panama coffee, but in fact, it is the Bourbon varietal that can be found all over Latin America. Or perhaps they liked fruity coffees and had a dry process Ethiopian. So they attribute it to that country, but we have seen dry process Costa Rican coffees that were more fruity than any Ethiopian.
Origin influences coffee flavor more than any other part of the coffee process. This is why we take such pride in our sourcing of amazing coffees. I've said this before and will say it until I die...Sagebrush Coffee doesn't do anything special to the beans. The only thing we try to do is source the best coffees we can get our hands on and put the work the great folks at origin completed on full display with our roasts. Origin is what coffee is all about. However, the origin is much more than the region or country. It is influenced by the elevation, the cherry process, coffee tree varietal (Arabica vs Robusta is only the beginning of that discussion), and many other factors.
We have several articles that discuss the origin, but because of the importance of this aspect of coffee, we will spend a lot of time developing new articles. Keep coming back regularly to see what else we've written.
