What does honey processed mean?

#8 · Brewed on December 13, 2024 · By Aravind Balla ·
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Hello coffee lover. How has this week been? Vikra and I are traveling this week, but don’t worry, we have an Aeropress with us.


Understanding "process" label on coffee bags

I still remember looking at the coffee bags in my initial days of brewing coffee at home and wondering what "honey processed" label on it mean. I thought the beans were marinated in honey. If not anything, I expected the cup to have notes of honey.

Soon, I realized that's not the case. I learnt a thing about how coffee is processed. And its quite interesting.

Coffee processing and its affect on the taste

Coffee begins as a cherry-like fruit. Processing is simply how we get from that fresh fruit to the green beans (which then are roasted to become brown). They eventually become your morning brew. Think of it like how wine-making transforms grapes into complex wines.

This is how the cross section of the coffee fruit. This will be a good reference when we talk about the different processing methods, especially the mucilage.

Natural

This is most obvious and basic way where the whole coffee fruit is dried. Mucilage and the pulp dry with the seed and latch on to it. This will develop complex flavours and make them sweeter. When these beans with lot of content on them are roasted, they go through a nice maillard reaction, which is a common process in cooking, that results in unique flavours.

Washed

As you might have guess now, the bean is washed before drying here in washed processing. However, they pick nicely ripe coffee fruits to maintain the sweetness. These are put in de-pulper machines which leave the beans mucilage and remove up to the pulp layer. Then it is water washed to remove everything else until the seed.

This is generally quicker than the other methods but a lot of natural resources like water are wasted in this method.

These coffees are generally light bodied, and have more brightness.

Honey

Coming to my earlier disappointment, there is no honey involved.

Honey processed coffee is a method that involves a combination of both the natural and washed methods. You can think of it as the best of both the worlds.

They remove the pulp but not the mucilage from the coffee fruit. That mucilage is the honey!

The flavours that these cups give are unique. Cleaner bodies than naturals and more syrupy sweetness than the washed.

Not just these three but these are the major ones. There also a fermentation step that people do which is a topic in itself.

Which one do you think you like?

Despite knowing all the theory and forming a bias into which one you will like, its complete experience in itself tasting them and figuring out which one you like.

I recommend you parallelly try them out and see.

You can go to cafe and see if they have beans with different processes and order two cups.

Or, there are a few roaster that let you order a sample pack of three different smaller coffee beans. You can choose different processings there and try at home.

You can google and find that there more than these options.


Whats brewing this week

A lot actually.


That’s all I have. Have a caffeinated weekend.

See you.

Keep on brewing!