It is not for nothing that specialty coffee has so much demand all over the world. Specialty coffee has many nuances and hence only experienced coffee drinkers will understand what gives a good taste and what yields a bad cup of joe in your universal cup holder.
To start with there are two types of specialty coffee beans you may want to know about. The first is the Arabica. These coffee beans are of high quality and are grown at an altitude of around 3,000 meters. The Arabica is the source of one of the finest blends of coffee in the world.
The importance of this variety can be judged from the fact that every step of coffee making with Arabica is extremely taken care of. Starting from growing the coffee beans, milling and roasting, a lot of care, focus, and concentration goes into getting the coffee out of this species, which is why it is one of the most sought after coffees in the world.
Another variety of coffee is the Robusta which is a cheaper variety of specialty coffee that gives lower quality beans and might even be sitting in the mug in your cup holder as you read this. On its own, this coffee tastes a bit like rubber and is generally used in creating cheaper blends with other coffees including a lower cost blend of Arabica. This coffee is not always grown at high altitudes.
Not just the coffee beans but the process too impacts the quality of coffee to a great extent. Roasting for example is a very important process and over-roasting can sometimes lead to bad tasting coffee being produced from high quality coffee beans.
This is why treatment of the coffee beans is always something that is best left to the experts as there is no fixed formula. The coffee processing including roasting varies from bean to bean and it requires skill to identify which coffee bean needs what extent of processing to produce the best coffee that it is capable of.
Coffee taste interestingly depends on lot of external factors. It varies from country to country and region to region. Surprisingly, it varies from one year to another as well, one more reason why only experts can produce the finest coffee in spite of the differences.
The quality of the coffee in a particular region depends on the area where coffee is being produced, the soil content of the area, and also the altitude of the place. The manner in which the coffee plants are grown also affects the final taste.