Why We Sell Only Arabica (And What Robusta Actually Tastes Like)

Every coffee we sell is Arabica. That is not a marketing line and it is not a preference we picked out of a catalog. It is the species, and there are only two commercially important ones in the world of coffee, and the other one is not in our bags.

Here is what that actually means for the coffee you brew, and what the other species tastes like when you meet it.

There are two species, and one of them does most of the talking

Almost every coffee label, menu, and bag in the world is Arabica, or Coffea arabica. It is around 60% of global coffee production. The other 40% is Robusta, or Coffea canephora, and it is the species that made instant coffee possible, that put crema on a hundred thousand espresso menus, and that keeps a lot of cheap cups affordable.

They are not subtle variants of the same plant. They are separate species, and they behave differently in ways you can taste on the first sip.

Arabica is the delicate one. It needs altitude — usually somewhere between 900 and 2,200 meters — and a climate that is not trying to kill it. It is sweet, aromatic, and full of the acids that make a cup taste like a specific place rather than a general idea of coffee. It is also fragile. It gets disease. It gets frost damage. It costs more per kilo to grow well, which is a large part of why it costs more per bag.

Robusta is the survivor. It grows from sea level up to around 800 meters, takes heat and humidity and bugs, and produces a lot more coffee per plant. That resilience is why it exists at this scale. What you get in the cup is more caffeine, more bitterness, more body, and a lot more of what people describe as rubber or dirt or hay.

What robusta actually tastes like

If you have never had robusta on purpose, you have probably had it. It shows up in lower-cost instant coffee, in the base of a lot of mass-market Italian espresso blends, and in the cheapest supermarket bags on the shelf.

The flavor is the giveaway: earthy, woody, a little rubbery, and noticeably more bitter than you are used to. There is a genetic reason for it. Arabica and Robusta contain different levels of chlorogenic acids, and when those acids break down during roasting they produce compounds with a distinctly bitter, sometimes rubber-note edge.

Caffeine is the other difference. Arabica usually lands somewhere between 1.0% and 1.5% caffeine by weight. Robusta lands higher, usually between 1.6% and 2.7%. That is roughly double the caffeine per gram, which is the whole reason some of the biggest coffee-drinking countries on earth grow robusta instead of arabica: it is more caffeine per kilo of land.

Crema is the third difference. The oils that rise to the top of an espresso shot are more stable and more abundant in robusta, and they carry color compounds that make the crema darker and more orange. This is the point of robusta in a classic Italian blend — body, crema, and a shot that holds up in a milk drink. You do not need it for flavor. You need it for texture and cost.

So why do we not use it

Three reasons, in order of how much they matter.

The flavor is not what we are trying to sell. We roast for sweetness and clarity. Robusta would put a wood-and-bitter floor under every bag we make, and a medium roast would turn that floor into a smoke-and-ash note. We taste every batch we roast twice before it ships, and a robusta floor would not survive that.

It would be cheaper, and that is exactly the problem. A roaster who blends robusta can sell the same bag for less. We could shave the cost of every bag in the catalog and nobody would notice on the shelf. But the customer would notice in the cup, six months later, and they would not know why.

We would have to change what we say on the label. "Single origin" is a specific claim about where a coffee came from, and it is the claim our whole catalog is built on. We wrote about how that works in what single origin actually means. Blending in robusta to hold a price would not break that claim, but it would make the coffee in the bag a different thing than the coffee the bag is describing. We do not want to be the roaster you have to decode.

There is a fourth reason, and it is the honest one: we are not equipped to source robusta well. Specialty arabica is what we know how to buy, cup, roast, and brew. Robusta is a different supply chain with different quality markers. Doing it badly would show up in the cup.

What arabica still cannot tell you

Saying "arabica" is a floor, not a ceiling. It tells you the species and rules out the coffee you would rather not be drinking. It does not tell you where the coffee grew, how it was processed, or what variety it is.

Our bags do a little better than that. The Colombia is from smallholder farms around Medellín in Antioquia, with dried orange, berry, and chocolate in the cup. The Costa Rica is from micro farms in Alajuela, and it tastes like sweet apple, raisin, and honey. The Nicaragua is from Molino Norte in Matagalpa, cocoa, floral, and citrus. We told that story in more detail in the taste of Nicaraguan coffee.

We can be specific about regions because the region is on the label and it is the level of detail we can stand behind for every bag we roast. We are deliberately vague past that point. We do not print a farm name or a cooperative name on a bag we cannot verify, because a name on a label is a promise. There is more on that in what we look for when we buy green coffee.

What the difference is worth to you

If you are drinking coffee every day and have never once had a robusta on purpose, you do not need to go looking for one. But knowing what it is changes how you read a shelf.

When a bag is priced well below the rest and says nothing about origin or process, species is one of the first things to check. When a blend lists a country and is cheap, it may still be good — a blend of arabicas is a completely different animal from a blend with robusta in it. And when you taste a coffee that is harsh and bitter and tastes faintly of rubber, that is a robusta note, and it is not your palate being wrong.

For what a bag from us costs: a 12 oz bag of our Colombia is $24.99, and it is roasted to order on Wednesday and shipped on Thursday.

Try one thing this week

Make the same drink twice from the same bag, and change only the temperature. Brew one cup at 200°F and one at 212°F, side by side, and taste them both while they are still warm.

That is the whole reason we do it this way. One variable, two cups, and you can feel the difference in your mouth instead of reading about it. We wrote about why heat changes the cup in why hotter water does not make better coffee.

P.S. If you want to know what a coffee tastes like before you commit to a bag, the Nicaragua post above is the one we would read first. And if you are curious about how a coffee gets chosen at all, how a new coffee earns a spot in the lineup is the honest version of that process.

Sip slow.

— Seraphina