What is Bali Peaberry Coffee? Why is Bali Peaberry Coffee So Expensive?

Bali Peaberry Coffee

Bali peaberry is a variant of the coffee bean, referring to what is known as peaberry or caracoli.

Formation

The exact cause of peaberry formation has not been scientifically confirmed, but coffee beans growing at the ends of the coffee tree's branches are more likely to show the phenomenon.

Classification

Coffee beans are the fruit of the coffee tree. Normally a single fruit, or coffee cherry, contains two beans, known as Type I. Because of the factors above, however, some fruit develops only a single bean when mature. This oval-shaped single bean is called peaberry, or Type II. Type I is sometimes informally called the "female bean" in Chinese, but the two are really just differences in how the bean grows, not a difference in gender, and the Chinese terminology can be misleading.

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Peaberry appears across several varieties on the market:

A notable example is Kona, an Arabica variety grown in Hawaii, where about 5% of Kona beans are peaberry.

Bali Golden Coffee has about 5% peaberry beans.

Tanzania Peaberry contains about 5%-10% peaberry beans, and they are particularly small.

Generally, peaberry accounts for about 5%-10% of the single fruits on a coffee tree.

Flavor and Price

Some drinkers believe peaberry carries a more intense aroma. Combined with its relatively scarce production, peaberry is sometimes sold at inflated prices.

In reality, different varieties with peaberry characteristics taste different, and the factors that create peaberry may also be influenced by human intervention.

In all coffee grading, the number of times a batch is manually hand-sorted is the primary factor behind price differences. Peaberry requires each bean to be picked over by hand. During that selection, any possibility of broken, poorly developed, or otherwise defective beans being mixed in is removed. During roasting, the risk of lower quality from defective beans is minimized. This is the main reason small-scale peaberry production and large-scale unsorted production cannot be compared on equal footing. Round peaberry beans also heat more evenly during roasting than regular mixed beans of varying sizes, which eliminates the burnt taste that can hurt quality when broken beans overheat.

Bali coffee trees grow mainly in the high mountains of north-central Bali at altitudes of 1000-2000 meters.

Because the region's cool, foggy climate is perfect for coffee, Bali's "Golden Coffee" was born.

For anyone not deeply versed in coffee, it can come as a surprise that coffee is described as having male and female beans. The "male" beans are relatively complete and larger, while the "female" beans are the half-beans most people see, more slender and elongated.

Because peaberry beans are rarer, their prices differ as well.

Bali's "Golden Coffee" is a fine-ground coffee with a flavor that is neither sour nor astringent, rather sweet and bitter, leaving an endless aftertaste.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Peaberry is really a story about grading and sorting: a single round bean that results from how the cherry grows, and that earns its price largely through the handwork of picking it out. The same principle, careful selection and consistent quality, runs through FrontStreet Coffee's Arabica lineup.

The natural Sidamo Huakui comes from an heirloom Ethiopian variety, grown from a mix of trees that plants beans of varying sizes, and its classic natural process delivers creamy strawberry, mango, jackfruit, citrus, and blueberry, the ripe tropical-fruit character typical of a Sidamo natural; it was also a first-place bean at that year's TOH competition. The washed counterpart is the Yirgacheffe Gedebeb, which at the top Ethiopian G1 grade goes through selection, pulping, fermentation, washing, and drying to give white florals, citrus, orange, and green tea. Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1 comes from the Typica variety, one of Arabica's representative types: balanced, gentle, and smooth, with a full, pure aroma, and a balance that few other regions can match. Panama Red Label Geisha, from the famous Esmeralda estate in Boquete, brings elegant florals, citrus, peach, and layered fruit over a creamy body with an oolong tea finish. Brazil Queen Estate is one of the first discovered Yellow Bourbon lots, with cream, peanut, toasted bread, and sugarcane aromas, and Colombia Sidra brings florals, tropical fruit, grape, dried fruit, and passion fruit with a juice-like body after a medium-light roast.

Being Arabica, these coffees share the variety's clean, layered character, and each is built for a different method. A pour-over suits the delicate, floral lots, while the rounder, sweeter beans also shine in a moka pot or as an espresso, so the same shelf can cover a range of brewing.