When you read tasting notes on coffee packaging, you will quickly see wildly different flavor descriptions.  Have you ever wondered how can “coffee” taste so different? After all, coffee is coffee is right? 

What we commonly call coffee “beans” are actually the seeds of a fruit called coffee cherries, which grow on coffee trees/shrubs.  Put simplistically, “coffee” is like other fruits in that there are differences in aroma, flavor, and body/mouthfeel between varieties.  For example, a Rainier Cherry tastes very different than a Bing Cherry in much the same way that a Granny Smith Apple tastes very different than a Honey Crisp Apple.  Coffee is unlike other fruits in that the outer flesh is removed (i.e., cascara) in order to harvest the inner seed(s).  

While the reasons for these differences in coffee are more complex than the reasons for the differences between varieties of other fruits, coffees from South America, Africa, India, Indonesia, and other coffee growing regions have different flavors, aromas, and different mouthfeel/body.  Sometimes these differences are subtle and sometimes these differences are substantial to the point that you might associate the flavor, aroma, and body more with tea than coffee.

The reasons for these flavor differences have to do with such things as inherent differences in coffee species (e.g., Robusta versus Arabica) and coffee varieties (e.g., Bourbon, SL28, etc.), differences in the growing environments (soil, minerals, elevation, climate, etc.), differences in harvesting methods (handpicked versus mechanical), differences in harvesting criteria (under-ripe, ripe, over-ripe), and differences in processing methods (washed processing, dry/natural processing, pulped natural processing, honey processing, wet-hull processing, and the various decaf processing methods).