14 Essential Coffee Terms Every Coffee Lover Must Know! What Do These Coffee Industry Acronyms Mean? What Does "Body" Mean?

Introduction to Coffee Terminology

Like any industry, the coffee world runs on professional jargon. These terms help insiders communicate quickly, but they can feel like a wall to newcomers: without knowing what they mean, it is hard to follow the conversation - and even harder to feel part of the community. So today, FrontStreet Coffee is sharing another round of essential terminology, hoping to help you step into the coffee world and talk shop without obstacles!

Small, Medium, and Large Bean Varieties

You will often hear coffee described as "small bean," "medium bean," or "large bean." These are shorthand for the three commercially important coffee species: Arabica, Robusta, and Liberica. The nicknames simply arose from describing each species by the look of its plants and fruit - a convenient way of keeping the conversation short.

Peaberry/PB

A peaberry is a special kind of bean. Normally a coffee cherry holds two beans, each with a flat side where they press against each other. But when a cherry is short on nutrients early in its development, it may produce only a single bean. With no twin pressing against it, the lone bean grows into a full, rounded ellipse. Thanks to its distinctive look, peaberries are sorted out and sold at a premium over regular-sized beans. PB is simply the English abbreviation for Peaberry.

Grade Classifications: G1/G2/AA/AB

These four labels appear frequently on coffee bags. As FrontStreet Coffee explained in detail recently, they are all grade classifications: G1 and G2 are grades based on defect counts, while AA and AB are grades based on bean size.

Hard Bean vs Soft Bean

This pair comes up constantly whenever coffee lovers discuss grinding or roasting, and it refers to bean density. Hard beans are denser, which makes them harder to grind and roast; soft beans are less dense and correspondingly easier to work with. Density also correlates with quality, because what makes a bean dense is its content of soluble solids - the more substance a bean carries, the harder it is.

Blend/Blended Coffee

Customers often ask FrontStreet Coffee about these two terms, but both simply mean "blended coffee" - different regions just use different wording for the same concept. A blend combines two or more coffees to create a bean with better value or stability, or to push the flavor further than any single component could. In short, the goal of blending is a 1+1>2 effect. (The word covers both the blended beans themselves and any coffee brewed from them.)

Single Origin/SOE

The opposite of a blend is single origin - coffee from one origin and one batch. Single origin beans are usually brewed as pour-over, but they can also be pulled as espresso. When they are, that espresso earns a new name: SOE, short for Single Origin Espresso. One caution: never say "SOE espresso" or "espresso SOE" - the E already stands for espresso.

Shot/Double Shot

In coffee, a "shot" is the unit for espresso. One shot equals one serving of espresso; ask the barista for a double shot and you will get two servings in your cup.

Crema

Crema is the Spanish word for "cream." In coffee, it refers to the golden foam that floats on top of an espresso - named, obviously, for its resemblance to cream. Calling it "oil" invites confusion with the cooking oils we use every day, when in fact this golden layer is just a mass of tiny bubbles filled with carbon dioxide.

Light, Medium, and Dark Roast Coffee

These three everyday terms describe different roast levels. How dark a coffee roasts depends mainly on how long it spends developing in the roaster and how much heat is applied. The labels describe not only the roast level itself, but also the flavor character typical of coffee at each of those three levels.

Brewing Ratio

Unless stated otherwise, "brewing ratio" means the coffee-to-water ratio: the weight of grounds relative to the hot water used for brewing. There is another common measure, the coffee-to-liquid ratio, which compares the grounds to the finished coffee liquid you extract.

Ristretto/Lungo

Ristretto and lungo (literally "short" and "long" extraction) describe how much liquid you pull from an espresso. A regular espresso yields roughly twice the grounds' weight in liquid. Pull far less than that and you have a ristretto; pull far more and you have a lungo.

Combo

Combo means combination. In coffee, it refers to serving several different drinks made from one single bean - a lineup of different coffees drawn from the same origin, hence the name.

Body

"This coffee has good body!" - a sentence you have probably heard many times. Body means mouthfeel, so the sentence is simply praising how the coffee feels in the mouth. Good body shows up as thick, rich, smooth, and full; poor body presents as thin, rough, or watery.

By Pass

By pass means to bypass. In coffee, it refers to bypass water - a somewhat unconventional way of adjusting a cup. The idea is that this water never touches the grounds and does no extracting at all; it is added straight into the finished coffee. Think of it as dilution, used mainly to tune concentration.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Theory is best paired with tasting. Since almost everything on today's specialty shelf is Arabica, here are three FrontStreet favorites worth trying:

• FrontStreet Huakui Coffee - a natural-process Sidamo bean from Ethiopia's most common local landrace, with uneven bean sizes from mixed trees and a delicate floral top note over prominent fruit. Expect creamy strawberry, mango, jackfruit, citrus, and blueberry - the ripe tropical-fruit character unique to Sidamo naturals, and the lush berry fragrance that won that year's TOH green-bean competition.
• FrontStreet Yirgacheffe Guodingding Cooperative Coffee - if Huakui is Ethiopia's natural-process calling card, Guodingding is its washed one. Top-grade G1 from a village cooperative in Yirgacheffe, classically washed, with elegant white florals, citrus, orange, and a green-tea finish.
• FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 Coffee - a true Typica, descended from trees carried from Martinique to Jamaica's Blue Mountains in the 1720s. Two centuries of adaptation gave it better disease resistance than typical Typica, and a balance that, in our cuppings, no other region has matched: mild, gentle, and softly sweet.