What is Specialty Coffee? Must Premium Coffee Be Brewed with Specialty Coffee Beans?

When we talk about "specialty coffee," people tend to define it solely as "specialty coffee beans," believing that specialty coffee is simply coffee extracted from these beans. In reality, the "specialty" aspect primarily depends on the roaster's deep understanding of the coffee beans and the brewer's comprehensive knowledge of how these roasted beans manifest their characteristics! It's not about roasting beans just for the sake of roasting, or brewing coffee just for the sake of brewing.

Roasting coffee beans until they're cooked is easy, but roasting green coffee beans to make them delicious is incredibly difficult. It's like having a premium Chinese cabbage in your hands—some people might think: "It's just cabbage, boiling it in hot water will suffice." Others, however, will observe the cabbage's variety, freshness, and fiber texture, recognize its superior quality, and then thoughtfully craft it into the renowned banquet dish "Boiled Cabbage."

The same applies to green coffee beans. If a roaster doesn't examine the freshness of the beans or thoroughly understand the variety, processing method, moisture content, growing altitude, and regional flavor characteristics before casually applying their "signature" roasting approach—or worse, deliberately trying to be different by roasting excessively light to showcase more flavor layers—have they considered the feelings of the coffee beans? These beans have grown painstakingly to achieve the desired quality, only to be casually cooked like this?

Each coffee bean requires a suitable roasting method, not simply being tossed into a roaster and cooked until done. The bean variety determines the bean shape/size, which affects the roaster's rotation speed; the variety also determines the basic flavor direction of the coffee. The moisture content determines the length of the dehydration period during roasting—insufficient dehydration can lead to underdeveloped beans with astringent flavors. The growing altitude affects the bean's density—higher altitude means higher density, making it easier to have uneven heating resulting in underdevelopment.

The coffee's origin and processing method impart distinctive flavors to the beans. Don't assume that lighter roasting automatically means more distinct flavor layers—that's not true! Sweetness, acidity, and bitterness all require specific temperatures to manifest properly; they won't appear just because you want them to. Furthermore, if you don't understand how factors like temperature return point, yellowing point, first crack time, and post-first crack development time affect flavor expression—if you don't even study and research the most fundamental roasting knowledge—how can you talk about specialty coffee beans? How can you talk about specialty coffee?

There's a saying that circulated online: "High-end ingredients often only require the simplest cooking methods," and the same applies to brewing coffee. The more elaborate the technique, the better the coffee won't necessarily be—nor is it effective to think, "I saw competition brewers do it this way, so I'll do it this way too." All brewing rules are inseparable from basic extraction principles and a deep understanding of the properly roasted coffee beans in your hands. You can't brew delicious coffee simply by copying techniques.

To take an extreme example, even if competition brewers use the exact same coffee bean variety they competed with, using their competition techniques and parameters won't necessarily produce delicious coffee. Moreover, competition brewers often想办法 to highlight certain flavors in their coffee to immediately impress judges—they're facing professional evaluators.

In daily life, however, baristas serve ordinary consumers who need a cup of coffee with balanced flavors that won't cause unpleasant experiences, rather than a cup designed to showcase certain flavors where the coffee tastes flavorful at first but then becomes tasteless, or where the initial flavors are abundant but develop unclean textures as it cools slightly.

The True Meaning of Specialty Coffee

Regardless of the coffee bean variety, if the extracted flavors can achieve balance without being jarring, that constitutes a cup of specialty coffee. Every coffee bean has both strengths and weaknesses—if you amplify the weaknesses while trying to showcase the strengths, that won't be specialty coffee. Even if the coffee bean itself has subpar quality or flavor, it still possesses its own merits. Even Robusta coffee beans can be specialty coffee—it just depends on whether people can showcase their advantages.

The roaster's responsibility is to research suitable roasting parameters for each specific coffee bean, rather than immediately blaming the bean quality when the roast doesn't taste good. Nothing succeeds on the first try; continuous trial and error is necessary. Even if you succeed once, it doesn't guarantee success every time—after all, different bean states require different roasting approaches, which requires observation and adjustment with each roast.

Those who knowingly release problematic roasted beans for production or sale—please don't label them as "specialty coffee."

The same applies to baristas—before having sufficient understanding of basic extraction principles, don't blindly follow trends in brewing techniques. If you don't understand the coffee beans in your hands, how can you find the appropriate water temperature, grind size, water-to-coffee ratio, and pouring method? Different filter cups have different extraction principles, and without understanding these fundamentals, how can we discuss brewing techniques? Without a suitable extraction method tailored to the coffee beans themselves, how can we have specialty coffee?

The Philosophy Behind Specialty Coffee

"Specialty coffee requires people to cater to the coffee beans, not the other way around."

When a rough diamond is placed before people, some may not recognize it, but when a polished diamond is presented, everyone recognizes its value. The difference between being overlooked and universally pursued lies in the craftsman's understanding and shaping of the diamond. By polishing and shaping the diamond to reveal its purest essence in its sparkling form, there will be those who appreciate it—and coffee beans are no different.

Whether something is "specialty" depends on interpreting its inherent advantages from a professional perspective. Coffee is coffee—whether it's specialty depends on whether the interpreter can professionally and balancedly showcase the pure essence of the coffee.

Image source: Internet

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