Arabica Done Right
The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® is proud to offer you a range of Specialty grade coffees we proclaim to be simply the Best.
As one of the most popular beverages on the planet, you could say coffee has become something of an obsession with human beings. Today, the world knows two kinds of coffee: Arabica and Robusta, the former being our Specialty. Our roasting technique lets you experience the full range of sweet, distinctive flavors and aromas that it has to offer. To source the world's greatest coffee, our Green Coffee Buyer, Jay Isais, travels from one end of the tropic to the other to seek out hand-selected coffees directly from the best estates and small farms, ensuring the quality of our product.
ORIGINS
Costa Rica
The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® is proud to offer you a range of Specialty grade coffees we proclaim to be simply the Best. As one of the most popular beverages on the planet, you could say coffee has become something of an obsession with human beings. Today, the world knows two kinds of coffee: Arabica and Robusta, the former being our Specialty. Our roasting technique lets you experience the full range of sweet, distinctive flavors and aromas that it has to offer. To source the world's greatest coffee, our Green Coffee Buyer, Jay Isais, travels from one end of the tropic to the other to seek out hand-selected coffees directly from the best estates and small farms, ensuring the quality of our product.
Colombia
Here, along the slopes of the 13,500-foot Galeras volcano, are some of the world's highest and most prized coffee-growing regions.With the help of families and neighbors, farmers pick, pulp, separate, ferment, wash, and dry their harvest on their own before delivering their parchments to local coffee mills for final drying, sorting, and grading. The most renowned of these mills - not just in Narino, but in all of Colombia - is the TrilladoraNarino Mill, run by the legendary Jose Enrique Vasquez.
Costa Rica
For the Best in Arabica, let's return to where it all began!
The birthplace of coffee is also the original home of Arabica, the more complex and nuanced of the two known coffee beans (the other being Robusta). This East African country is where coffee thrives; if you travel around Ethiopia, you might find Arabica trees growing in the wild under natural shade.
The regions of Yirgacheffe and Sidamo are our Ethiopian coffee connection. Yirgachaffe is a tiny growing region. In fact, it's a part of the much larger Sidamo region, but its coffees is especially prized in the world market. At The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf®, we buy exclusively Yirgacheffe - with its floral, almost perfume-like aroma, a delicate "lemony" snap, and clean, creamy finish, the seductive, invigorating Ethiopian Yirgacheffe has converted many a coffee skeptic into a devout believer
Papua New Guinea
A Habitat for Both Excellent Coffees and Thriving Natural Life
Under the professional guidance of Hugh Laird, who holds an eminent place in the island's coffee lore, the Sigri Estate has developed coffees of world-class richness and complexity. Laird's passion and mastery for coffee guarantees that his selections for The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® live up to the reputation we have set. On terraces as high as 4,500 feet, above the breathtaking Wahgi Valley, the coffee here is shade grown under Casuarina and Albizzia trees.
By funding a small school for the workers' children on the estate's grounds, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® is proud to have played a role in positively adding to the lives of the workers at Sigri, where great coffee goes hand in hand with conservation, sustainable agriculture, and healthy communities.
QUALITY
Bringing Out the Best in Every Brew
Coffee, as they say, cannot be improved upon. It can only be ruined. So, while the conditions in which it's cultivated are excellent, we make sure that our fresh green coffee beans are roasted to perfection and perused for fragrance, aroma, flavour, acidity, body and finish designed to bring out each bean's inherent potential.Our Master Roaster uses state of the art techniques and expert instincts to preserve the unique richness of coffee drinking. Once the fruits are ripe, they are sorted out by hand before they undergo a thorough screening process that isolates the best of the bunch for final sorting and export.
GROWING COFFEE
Dedication to Quality Unites Our Whole World!
Travel to the lush, remote lands where our varieties of coffee are grown, and you'll notice stunning differences in culture, customs, language, and ethnicity. But our select coffee regions share many things in common. One of them is altitude. All our coffee is grown between 4,000 and 6,000 feet - the ideal range for growing coffee as the altitude facilitates slow ripening and the characteristics of the coffee fruit become much more concentrated which sharpens the aromas and flavors.The slopes of the terraces protect the trees from mountain winds, and a steady diet of nitrogen keeps the seedlings growing healthily.
HARVESTING COFFEE
The Mastery of (Selective) Action
The harvesting process begins the moment the coffee cherries are plucked from the trees. There are two methods of removing these cherries. The first is Strip Picking, where the cherries of all stages of ripening are indiscriminately removed and taken for processing to accumulate them in bulk for mass production.
The second method - the one that The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® uses exclusively is Selective Picking. This process requires finesse and expertise as the picker evaluates and selects only those cherries ready for processing. The Selective Picking requires someone keenly familiar with the coffee harvest that a mere glance and touch can glean quality in the fruit. It's Coffee Mastery in action.
PROCESSING COFFEE
In the coffee trade, we speak of a Dry Process and a Washed Process in referring to how the quality of the fruit is judged and the shipments of beans readied for export. We at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® have always been partial to the Washed Process as it tends to have brighter flavors and a cleaner finish.
Our Coffee Truly Comes From the Top of the Heap
Our coffees go through a rigorous screening process, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® selects from the top 1% of the world's best coffees. Our blends are hand-selected, renowned for their consistency of quality, and hail from the world's elite coffee growing regions.
CUPPING
On the Delicious Art of Coffee Cupping
Before one of our delicious blends finds its way to your cup, it's first got to pass the test in one of ours.
Cupping is the industry method of tasting a sample of coffee, scrutinizing it for the coffee's acidity, aroma, body, and flavor. The cupping process starts with adding boiling water to freshly ground coffee and letting it steep for 2-3 minutes. After clearing the floating coffee grounds, the next step is to taste coffee by taking a spoonful and slurping it rapidly, so that it fills all parts of the tongue.
The official green coffee buyer of The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® is Jay Isais, a coffee expert who cups all kinds of coffee that we purchase to ensure that they meet the flavor profile and standards that we expect from our products. for 100% quality.
ROASTING
And Roasting Completes the Magic
Coffee lovers are familiar with the light to the dark spectrum of shades that coffees come in. Those gradations in shade are the result of the coffee's roasting process. Your favorite, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf® 's offerings may, therefore, range in color. Roasting emulsifies and caramelizes the sugars inside the coffee beans, drawing the sugars out as coffee oils onto the surface of the beans. The oils are what give coffee beans their shine; the longer the roast, the darker and shinier the coffee. A lightly roasted coffee will retain its original green color and will boast a bright, crisp, and complex palate of flavors. And a darker roast would bear the intensity and aroma, which we associate with fuller bodied coffees.
BLENDING & FLAVORING
Another Dimension in Coffee Enjoyment
Blending enables us to match coffees of complementary tastes to create new, unexpected harmonies. Additionally, blending a different variety of roasts together can reveal invigorating new avenues of taste. For example, a coffee blend that consists of a light roast and a medium to dark roast captures a broader spectrum of flavor. In addition to blending, flavoring can be a delightful way to add your connection to your favorite beverage.Flavored coffee does not contain additional calories or sugars and is considered a guiltless treat!