What exactly is speciality coffee?

Imagine if the coffee you start each new day with had to travel a really long way before it ended up in your favourite cup.

At first, the coffee trees slowly, slowly ripened and grew to produce a harvest of...two exceptional coffee beans. To give you a better idea, we'll add that up to 100 kg of coffee beans need to be harvested to produce around 15 kg of coffee beans. After appropriate processing, the beans go out into the world, undergo complex examinations and a special roasting process - this is the point at which they come under Robert's care. And all of this is done so that, at the very end, they get into the hands of the people who will brew them - that is, yours, or Wojtek's if you're sipping coffee at Story Coffe. And that, in a nutshell, is the description of speciality coffee.

And now from the beginning...

The term speciality coffee was coined in 1974 by Erna Knutsen. Erna Knutsen coined the term in 1974. She used it to describe the coffee beans with the richest, unique and best flavour, which are produced in a special microclimate.
Simply put, speciality coffee is coffee where quality counts. Throughout the entire process of its creation, at all stages, care is taken not to have as much coffee as possible, but to make it the BEST. So that its flavour and aroma are rich and full-bodied.

From plantation to cup

What route does a coffee have to take to become known as speciality? As we mentioned at the beginning - it's not the shortest route, and it has a few obligatory stops along the way. Namely:

- plantation

- quality control

- roasting

- brewing.

Well, now, one step at a time. First, the owner of the plantation plants the trees for many, many years, meticulously looks after the coffee plants and harvests the crop at harvest time. Then the beans go through a thorough, often manual selection, and the entire coffee-making process is meticulously verified according to rules and standards set by the Specialty Coffee Association.

Next we have the assessment of coffee quality. Here it is not at all simpler. This stage too is carried out according to a demanding, precisely defined scale. Experienced tasters, referred to as Q-Arabica graders by the Coffee Quality Institute, check the key factors for speciality coffees, including consistency, acidity, purity of flavour or the taste notes perceptible in the brew. Only those coffees that score a min. Only those coffees that score a minimum of 80 out of 100 points after this stringent assessment by a demanding jury are recognised as belonging to the speciality segment.

Roasting is also quite a challenge! It is done in strictly defined water and temperature and a sample of coffee roasted at the right time and to a certain degree of roasting measured in Agtrons. This ensures that the highest quality flavour is extracted from every single bean.
The roasted beans end up in your hands and the hands of the baristas. This is where the last but not least important step comes in - brewing. To bring out the full potential of speciality coffees, they need to be brewed properly.

In summary - it is quality and uniqueness that distinguish speciality coffees.

In mass plantations, the greatest concern is for low production costs and product quantity. Have you ever come across a situation where there is a shortage of produce on a shop shelf? Exactly! Such coffee is always available because it is made from blends of different types of coffee. This results in combinations that often do not match in terms of taste....

Speciality coffees, which can already be found at similar prices to supermarket coffees, definitely stand out with their incredible richness of flavour and aroma. Depending on the region and weather conditions, the altitude of the crop or the processing method, we can experience notes of caramel, nuts, tropical fruit, chocolate and flowers in its bouquet. This is a coffee that you will brew in many alternative ways. We guarantee that once you try it once... you will want more and more!