Understanding the Quality of Coffee Beans; Arabica & Single Origin Coffee

You may discover an array of coffee beans that are marketed as great quality beans while you walk into any supermarket. If you look for high-quality coffee beans online, you shall find plenty of marketing ads designed to convince you. But are they the real quality coffee? How can you identify it?

We are pretty sure, this blog can provide you with the best answers to these coffee concerns.

100% Arabica

You are very familiar with this “100% Arabica” tag as most of the coffee brands boast about in many jars of instant coffee. But do you think 100% Arabica is truly a sign of great quality coffee?

Robusta (Coffea canephora) and Arabica (Coffea arabica) are the two chief commercially grown coffee plant species. There are plenty of subspecies that are usually called varietals when it comes to Arabica coffee beans.

As its name suggests, Robusta is generally a very hardy plant and can be grown, picked, and processed at cheaper rates with ease. It produces a bit of an acquired taste; very bold and harsh flavors. This is why Robusta gets usually blended with Arabica. Moreover, Robusta comprises up to twofold the caffeine content and is more acidic than Arabica.

Certainly, so many brands of low-cost coffee have a habit to make a blend of Robusta for the price and Arabica for the taste. There are lots of poor-quality Arabicas out there. Just because it utters 100% Arabica on the container, doesn’t refer to the quality of coffee beans.

Single Origin

Single origin is another term you might see many times with coffee that sounds like denoting quality.

Single origin simply means that the entire beans in the bag have come from a sole origin or the same region. For instance, a single origin Ethiopian coffee contains coffee beans brought all the way from Ethiopia.

The term single origin is generally used to define single estate or single farm coffee in the speciality coffee industry, but at the same time in the commodity coffee world, it is also used to describe the coffee delivered from that specific region.

Buy Coffee Beans from the Specialists

When you purchase coffee beans directly from speciality coffee suppliers or order from their websites- for instance from Kerchanshe Trading PLC in Ethiopia, you are buying coffee beans from coffee specialists, who are truly meticulous and passionate about the quality of the coffee they supply.

Shopping coffee beans straight from a roaster or a specialist supplier is totally different from purchasing from a supermarket. Turnover and profits are the sole concerns of the supermarket chains.

But in the case of a specialist, you are buying from an individual or a small cluster of folks who are dedicated to coffee. That simply means they do this business for passion, not for profit, especially Kerchanshe- the largest producer and exporter of the purest coffee beans from its homeland, Ethiopia.

The Speciality Coffee Association

One of the best means to identify high-quality coffee beans is the score given to the coffee by the Speciality Coffee Association (SCA).

SCA is an organization of coffee connoisseurs, who taste and grade coffee beans. The SCA ranks coffee on a scale of 1 to 100 across 10 groups: aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, body, uniformity, balance, cleanliness of cup, sweetness, and then a total score.

The coffee must score a minimum of 80 points to get categorized under speciality coffee. Hence speciality coffees aren’t just coffee beans that trade well or price more, they are coffees that have met a minimum border for quality, in the assessment by experts.

Being committed to supplying the pure quality speciality coffee beans, Kerchanshe Trading PLC has crossed a decent score, passing each valuation done by SCA with flying colors!

Now you know how to check the quality of coffee beans. So don’t fall for the marketing deceits when you buy coffee beans the next time. Make a habit of purchasing speciality coffee beans from an ardent seller of high-quality coffee beans.