3 December 2007 by Shifrah Combiths
Peaberry Coffee: A Cup Above
Imagine that you’ve savored many, many kinds of coffee. You’ve traversed the spectrum of roasts from the lightest, brightest grain-tasting ones through the blackest French roasts, bittersweet and oozing with oil. You’ve straddled continents, enjoying beans harvested on Jamaican mountaintops or from beneath banana trees in Colombia. You’ve been brewing it your favorite way – in a coffee press, letting the hot water swirl with the grounds, picking up flavor and natural oils that seep through the mesh of the plunger and into your awaiting mug.
You’ve alighted on a variety of coffee that fills you with delicious anticipation as you wait to drink it, one that delights you with its intricate flavor at every sip. Now, what if someone told you that you could obtain an even more concentrated and intense version of your favorite? Coffee aficionados the world over believe that peaberry coffee is exactly that.
Spawning the name of many specialty coffee shops, the word might be familiar. Peaberry coffee is made from a particular type of coffee bean. It has nothing to do with the coffee’s country of origin or roasting method. A peaberry coffee bean gets its unique identity from the moment of its birth.
Peaberries occur when a coffee plant’s cherry, or drupe (any fruit that has soft flesh enclosing a hard seed or stone), produces only one coffee bean. Typically, each cherry contains two beans. When only one of the two ovaries in a coffee flower is pollinated, a peaberry bean is born. This happens anywhere from two to 10 percent of the time in Arabica crops. The occurrence is usually greater when Arabica is crossbred with robusta beans. In fact, too high an incidence of peaberries could signal infertility in the self-pollinating Arabica plants.
Termed caracol or caracolillo, “little snail” in Spanish, peaberries are smaller than their doubled counterparts, and are more egg-shaped. In the past, these coffee bean runts were considered inferior and were sorted out from amongst the other beans and discarded. Sometimes, they were just left in with the other beans. But it was since discovered that these little guys have more to offer than meets the eye.
Peaberry coffee beans produce coffee that’s twice as robust as coffee brewed with normal, twin beans. Peaberry coffees are said to be generally higher in acidity, a term used to describe dryness like that of wine. Basically, peaberries are believed to produce a coffee that’s better version than that brewed from the more common twins.
It’s a tantalizing possibility. Perhaps the only way to test the hype is to conduct a little coffee tasting session of your own. Find some peaberry coffee, and compare it to its regular counterpart. Maybe you’ll encounter an even better version of the best.