Fridays: Big Beans

Big Ones, Small Ones, Some as Big as your Head!


I bet you have that song stuck in your head now.

Obviously, all coffee plants are not the same. The only mass-produced plant that is genetically identical is actually bananas.

Coffee beans vary in a lot of ways, some relating to flavor, but a lot just relating to appearance. Let's take a look at some of the common varietals (different breeds, basically) of Coffea Arabica, the standard bean for all gourmet coffees.

Regular ol' Arabica

This is the standard varietal of Arabica. Beans such as Blue Mountain, Bourbon, or Typica all look like this. Pour Jons has beans that look like this, but we have 4 different varieties of bean based on the region they are from.

Elephant Beans

Known as "Maragogype", these are just big. These beans are known for their smooth flavor, but the trees they grow on produce a small annual yield, so they are more expensive.

Peaberries

It's hard to tell the difference between these and typica beans, but these beans are known as Peaberries. Most coffee cherries have 2 coffee beans in them, but peaberries occur when only one bean grows in the cherry. They look lumpy and stunted, and usually possess spicy and complex flavors. Our Ethiopian and Tanzanian beans are occasionally peaberries.




This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are 20 or 30 major varieties of one plant, Coffea Arabica, in addition to another 5 or 10 varieties of a plant that we haven't talked about, Coffea Canephora. If you want to be blown away by the vast amount of ways to grow coffee, just look at the Wikipedia article.

This weekend at Pour Jons, buy a house Americano and get a free refill of a different bean. Try something new!

~P.J.