Fruity coffee?? Yes, it’s real and you should try it!
The Adventure Roast coffee we make at Prairie School Coffee almost always features some sort of sweet fruit notes. This is my absolute favorite type of coffee to drink and, frankly, fruit-forward coffee is one of the reasons why I got in to coffee roasting in the first place. I loved it and wanted to be able to produce it myself. But up until 5-10 years ago, most people hadn’t ever heard of, much less tasted, naturally sweet, fruit-like coffee. Yes, there were blueberry / strawberry frappe-whatchyacall-its from big chain coffee shops, but those were essentially flavored milkshakes with a splash of coffee.
A well-developed, naturally-occurring, fruit-noted coffee is a thing of beauty. In this post, I’ll dive into how these coffees came to be. If you like facts more than narratives (no judgement!) you can skip to the end where I give you my cheat sheet on what factors influence fruit notes in coffee.
A Brief History of (my) Coffee Drinking
The coffee I first drank, and subsequently got used to drinking, tasted like… coffee. A little burnt, bitter and tasting like something I’d either just need to choke down or - more commonly - dilute with cream and sugar. For me, these were the bad old days of Folgers, Maxwell House and whatever coffee it was they served at Denny’s & Baker’s Square. Through the tail end of high school and all through college, coffee did its job but wasn’t something I delighted in drinking. This coffee, often freeze dried and devoid of much flavor, was part of the “first wave” of coffee. Widely available, mass-produced, and relatively inexpensive, first wave coffee was rough around the edges but effective as a stimulant.
I liked coffee for the social aspect, the little jolts of electricity it gave me, and I liked it above all because drinking something warm is pleasant. But I can’t say that I enjoyed the black coffee of those days. It tasted bad going down and it left a worse aftertaste. The aroma of the coffee always got my hopes up, but the taste was always lacking.
Soon, though, like almost everyone, my coffee experience was revolutionized thanks to the “second wave” coffee companies like Peet’s, Starbucks, and Caribou Coffee. Coffee from these coffee shops actually tasted good. I found myself hanging out, drinking coffee and enjoying the coffee without sugar and maybe just a bit of cream. Lattes, cappuccinos and other espresso drinks became morning mainstays. All that dark espresso got me through the early years of parenthood & powered me through my chaotic work days. Dark, bold, and so thick it bordered on bitter - this coffee became my daily fuel. I still found myself splashing cream into these dark and roasty brews at Starbucks and the like, but this coffee was on a different planet from what I swilled years before.
And then… And then it all changed for me. On a particularly hectic day at the office, I went for a stroll to clear my head. I stumbled on a little coffee shop underneath the El tracks downtown Chicago and decided to grab a cup. It looked quaint, cramped, barebones and a little shopworn - just my style. Truth be told, I don’t remember which coffee shop it was or what I ordered other than “black coffee”. I took my paper cup, paid, and continued my walk, coffee in hand. I took one sip.
That first sip was my first taste of genuinely “good” coffee. A little hint of blueberry wafted up. This still tasted like coffee, but the unmistakable notes of dark fruit really jumped out. Incredibly, there was no bitter afterbite. No charred “jet fuel” burn going down. It seems silly to describe it like this, but I remember it tasting smooth and rounded. I couldn’t believe this was actually coffee!
It turns out, with that special, magical cup, I’d happened upon a “third wave” coffee shop - those coffee roasters and houses that are dedicated to bringing out the full flavor and glory of coffee, just as nature intended.
Fruity Origins
How could coffee taste so good? How could it have mellow fruitiness when, after all, coffee was just a burnt bean, ground and soaked in water? This wasn’t some sticky blueberry syrup dumped in, nor fake laboratory-made additive to the beans. This was coffee - but in a totally different league. I went on a wild research spree to find out what the story was.
I learned that coffee could taste fruity because coffee “beans” are really just the seeds inside the cherries of a coffee plant. Until I began my research, I had no idea where coffee really came from and it surprised me to no end when I discovered the fruity origins of coffee beans. This helped explain why that fabulous cup of coffee really did have naturally-occurring blueberry notes.
But if all coffee comes from the cherry fruits of a coffee plant, why doesn’t most coffee taste fruity? Shouldn’t all coffee beans have a hint of the cherry fruit that bore them?
Third-wave coffee roasters are the group that began paying attention to coffee as a crop. Things like country/region of origin, altitude, coffee cherry / bean processing methods, and roasting techniques all became important factors in developing third-wave coffee flavors. I discovered that a combination of these factors can lead to extraordinary tasting brews. Over-roast your beans by just a little bit and you’ll evaporate the blueberry notes. Over-roast your beans by a LOT & you, too, could start a Seattle-based global chain selling coffee and milkshakes! (gentle teasing, of course). A few thousand feet of elevation can mean the difference between “earthy” and “fruity”. A few miles east or west in a region can make coffee “floral” or
Truly delicious coffee was a delicate blend of art and science. This was the magic!
Factors in Fruitiness
Here’s the cheat sheet; what I’ve learned about bringing out the fruit
Coffee Processing Method - Coffee seeds (beans) need to be extracted from the coffee cherry, or “processed”. There are two main ways to do this: washed process and natural process.
.The most common way to separate beans from the cherries is to blast the cherries with a high volume of water, in essence, power washing the seeds out of the cherry. This is called “washed process”. While highly effective & efficient, this also strips out any fruit flavor from the cherry, leaving the bean squeaky clean. All the flavor of washed process coffee comes from the nutrients and elements developed in the bean itself.
Conversely, “natural process”, sometimes called “dry process”, coffee is a method that allows the coffee cherries to sit out and dry in the sun with the coffee seeds inside. Once the cherries dry out, the cherry fruit is manually stripped away, and the seeds plucked out to dry even more. Because the seeds sit inside the cherries during the drying process, they absorb some of the fruit flavors of the cherry. The natural processed coffees are subject to more variation (and potentially defects) compared to washed coffee. But the fruit flavors they yield can be incredible. Ethiopian coffees are the most common “natural processed” coffee, but other regions have begun using this method, too.
Roasting Method - bringing the best out of the bean depends on how the beans are roated.
Light roasts bring out the flavor of the coffee bean and, somewhat obviously, it follows that the darker you roast the less you taste the bean. This is why most “serious” coffee shops and roasters will only serve light to medium-light coffee. Anything darker and you can no longer taste the native flavors of the coffee - you’re just tasting roast (or more often, char) levels. Cheap coffee roasted dark tastes exactly like expensive, specialty coffee roasted dark. Some roasters use this to their advantage: if you roast dark enough, the coffee bean quality doesn’t matter!
But there’s more to it than roasting light. Through experimentation, I’ve found that roasting with high heat to start but shorter roasting time overall is key to bringing out the fruit. This method tends to accentuate the acidity in beans, and acidity is needed to carry the fruit flavors. If you have a nice, even, steady, light roast, you will produce delicious and smooth coffee. But you’ll also likely roast the fruit and acidity right out of the bean.
Elevation
I’m not an expert when it comes to elevation & coffee, but I learned a lot from various sources during my early coffee research. In all the places I looked, I kept seeing a variation on the “elevation pyramid” - an infographic showing the various coffee flavors associated with different elevation levels. I’m going to link to one of the best articles on the subject, written a few years ago by “"Land of A Thousand Hills” on medium.com. Give it a read - it’s great! In the article, they make use of the image below:
Exciting Conclusion
We’ve come a long way from the days of mixing freeze dried coffee with tepid well-water as a way to get our kicks. Although I still do enjoy a cup of International Delight for old time’s sake, I’ve found that once I experienced the sweet, fruit-noted splendor of a natural processed, high-elevation, light roasted coffee - well, it’s just never been the same!