Hot Take: Variety > Origin
Here’s a secret: where coffee is grown matters much, much, much less than its variety. When you say you “love coffee from Colombia,” you probably mean you love Caturra or Castillo or one of the several other varieties that happen to be commonly grown there. Were we to hand you a Gesha grown in Colombia, you’d have no idea where it came from, because you’re tasting “Gesha,” not “Colombia.”
We like this analogy: A Granny Smith doesn’t taste like a Honeycrisp doesn’t taste like a Golden Delicious. Growing all three side-by-side in Chile won’t make them taste the same. But a Honeycrisp from Chile and a Honeycrisp from Washington State? Same apple, same taste, same crunch. Coffee works the same way.
“But what about terroir?”
Welllll… terroir is mostly BS. Variety does 60% of the work. Processing does 30%. Terroir? Maybe 10%, and I’m being generous. The “terroir” idea is romantic and it helps tell a lovely story, but it’s giving credit to geography for work that genetics and processing methods are actually doing.
What actually determines what you taste: Variety (plant genetics), Processing (washed vs natural vs experimental), Terroir (soil, climate), and Roast (we can ruin it all or let it shine).
The actual humans growing the coffee and the decisions they make are the most important part of this entire exercise, and they are hugely important in how the final product lands in the customer's cup.
I mostly pushing back here on the idea that assigning a “country name” to a coffee may not tell us as much as people think it might. For this conversation, I presume a similarly high level of care among specialty growers for the sake of the argument. Certainly there are many farmers and producers creating agricultural magic every day, and I am at their service. So…variety and processing often explain more of what shows up in the cup than origin shorthand does…all things being equal.
Provenance matters, people matter most, and growing practices matter a lot. My point is that “this tastes like it's from Colombia” is often a much fuzzier claim than coffee language makes it sound.
Bottom line: Have a chat with your favorite roaster and talk about what you like and let’s see what we can discover together. It’s a big world out there, and coffee production, processing, roasting and brewing are always changing and evolving. Cheers!
