Quality by Design

Great coffee is not the result of chance. This sentence, printed on the back of every bag of Intelligentsia coffee, speaks to the incredible effort behind each one sold. It speaks to the deliberate nature of our work, and the skills required to create coffees with exceptional quality. In this section, we pull back the curtain, demonstrate the meaning of quality, and describe how we work with our partners to get there.

Quality by Design is our way of walking through the choreography necessary to make a truly gorgeous and unforgettable coffee. Read more about this in How Extraordinary Coffee Is Made.

Roasting coffee is a profoundly transformative act that radically alters a coffee’s profile. The art of blending coffees is a culinary alchemy not unlike the work of chefs. The choices made when brewing determine which flavors rise to the surface and which remain understated. Even the choice of cup has a part to play in the holistic sensory experience of an extraordinary coffee. And throughout the process, coffee is evaluated over and over in a QC (quality control) environment in Chicago.

We are deliberate about every step of a coffee’s production, often starting before the seed even goes into the ground—leaving nothing to chance in the effort to produce coffees that jump out of the cup. This is what we mean when we say “Quality by Design.”

Over decades of deconstructing, studying, and immersing ourselves in coffee, we’ve deepened our understanding of coffee’s range of sensory attributes, and we’ve sharpened our definitions of quality. As part of our ongoing quest to deliver the most enjoyable coffees possible, we are open-minded about coffee’s potential to surprise us with exciting and unexpected flavors, but we’re also uncompromising in our scrutiny. What this means in practice is that we use key indicators, including sweetness, acidity, and clarity, to judge a coffee’s level of quality and potential for the customer. If those aspects aren’t balanced, it’s game over.

When we evaluate coffee using these key indicators, we account for both the presence of desirable flavors and the absence of unpleasant elements that distort taste and diminish the pleasure you can get from the coffee. When searching for desirable flavors, we make a clear effort not to impose our personal biases on the coffee, staying receptive to the wide range of fascinating flavors coffee is capable of expressing.

One of the most important sources of coffee’s flavor is its abundance of organic acids. Citric, malic, and tartaric acid are some of the most well known, given that they are also responsible for the refreshing juiciness of our favorite fruits, like oranges, peaches, and berries. They give coffee its character and dynamic range. Without them, coffee would taste flat, dull, and lifeless. Coffee contains dozens of different organic acids, and the unique combination of these define a coffee’s taste. Some are very agreeable, like malic acid. Others are downright awful in a cup of coffee, like butyric acid, which is mostly associated with stinky cheese, or acetic acid, which gives vinegar its distinct sourness.

Many acids play a complementary role—chlorogenic acids, for instance, in the right proportion, give coffee just a hint of bitterness that, like an ever-so-gently-hopped beer, adds complexity and balances sweetness. But if there is too much chlorogenic acid present, it smothers the more delicate traits of the coffee and delivers an aggressive bite. To add injury to insult, chlorogenic acid breaks down at room temperature into quinic acid—the acid best known for the tartness it brings to tonic water—and can quickly turn a coffee even more sour. Some more uncommon acids give particular coffees their signature taste.

Coffee is a composition of flavors that interact. In the best cases, they amplify one another. In the worst, they clash and compete. Sweetness is the balance, and the mouthwatering organic fruit acids present in coffee can be a source of great pleasure, but only when that balance is struck. Think about a glass of lemonade: when there is only lemon juice added to water, the taste is electric but overly aggressive, sour, and difficult to enjoy. Add a little honey or cane sugar, and it changes everything—the drink transforms into something impossible to resist. But go too far with the sugar, and the aftertaste becomes cloying, making it tough to swallow.

Those same interactions happen in coffee, which is why we always evaluate coffee quality holistically, paying attention to its sweetness—the relationship between the sugars, acids, flavors, and the ways they modify one another.

Coffee’s fundamental taste appeal comes from its balance and structure, along with the presence of attractive flavors and the absence of bothersome ones. Yet what separates the truly extraordinary coffees from the merely great ones often comes down to clarity. How clearly do the flavors express themselves? And how easy is it to appreciate not only the dominant individual flavors, but the delicate and nuanced ones as well?

Consider the difference between reading through a pair of glasses that hasn’t been cleaned in weeks, and the pristine pair you just picked up at the optometrist’s office. The difference is extraordinary. One is muddy and muted and hard to see through, and the other is crystal clear. The highest-quality coffees have similarly impeccable resolution. They are loaded with delicious flavors that are also razor sharp, on full display with minimal interference.

The principal job is to structure taste that is desirable by maximizing the sweetness of fruit acids, but also retaining the sense of place that is present in all coffee. That is really fundamental to the job. As the Director of Coffee, I am approving samples, and we are working to maximize the fruit acids and the sweetness. I am also there to make sure we don’t run out of coffee.

Our job is to articulate a sense of place. Something that I really enjoy about Direct Trade is that it allows our roasters to receive the same coffee that was growing on a particular hillside in Guatemala, each and every year. We can taste last year versus this year, and it allows us to make stronger decisions. Going from green to roasted is relying on historical information.

When the coffee shows up at our warehouse, we run trials on those coffees and rely on those old profiles, but it eventually means asking, what do we get out of the drying phase, how do we achieve a peak rate of rise, where do we want to hit first crack, and how much development do we want on this? The desire of the roaster is to maximize all the things we find positive, and minimize all the things we find negative, during the trial phase.

To completely distill the science of coffee roasting, beans absorb heat, and when they can’t absorb any more, they release energy in the form of the first crack.This is exactly what happens when popcorn pops. That said, there are differing ways of understanding this point in the roast. Our beans “go audible” somewhere between seven and eleven minutes in, depending on what we desire with the final result. When a single-origin roast is completed, they are often in the midst of first crack when they are removed from the roaster. We are doing this intentionally, as we are not pushing development to carbonization.

The golden rule for me is to know exactly where you are at all times. If I am one minute and thirty seconds into the roast, I should be able to tell you where I will be at minute three, minute six, minute twelve. And if the plan deviates in any way, I should be able to react.

Yes, art and commerce should align in a very cohesive manner. We want to sell great coffee that our customers enjoy, and adding a layer to that, we want to present coffees that are progressive. That makes a statement on our menu. This can mean variety, processing, milling, roasting, extraction, or tasting notes. Any and all of these align and balance themselves between these three characteristics at Intelligentsia.

Every coffee is a roll of the dice, and by that I mean that when we receive the coffee, we taste it at least fifteen times during the arrival grading process before the roasters have touched it—and sometimes during the trial roast, it’s exactly where it should be, and sometimes it isn’t. For single origins, the question is: Is it meeting expectations? For the blends, the question is: Is it meeting solubility levels to make it work with the preexisting roast profile?

The goal of arrival evaluations is to confirm the coffee is going to perform at the tier it was purchased at, and we do this by evaluating random samples through each lot we present to our customers. Depending on the size of the lot, and how the coffee is broken down, our quality control department will take a specified number of samples from these coffee bags immediately upon arrival. This can be as few as two samples and as many as twenty. We receive lots as small as 44 pounds and as big as 42,000 pounds, so the variance in the sample size is determined on the grade and the size of the lot.

The samples we pull are around 300 grams each, and they allow us to see snapshots of the unroasted coffees’ composition, uniformity, and cleanliness. Once we can see the coffee meets our unroasted specifications, we then sample roast and confirm through cup quality that this coffee will perform like the initial sample we received from our producers during their harvest. From here, the coffee will be passed to our roasting department to determine roast approach, and to conduct trial roasts before the coffee goes live.

When we think of coffee in grades, the idea of coffee being a fruit really comes back into focus. As a general rule, we look for sweetness and balanced fruit notes in our highest-tiered coffees. The more fruit we have, the higher that coffee grade is.

When we find a coffee that has uniform ripeness and clean processing, this will present itself to us in the form of high inherent sweetness and more expressive fruit notes. Based on the levels of sweetness and fruit notes, we can assign a specific score to the coffees we present, much like wine, and we can determine which grade we should place them in.

It comes down to coffee being a fruit, and it has a number of carbohydrates that are converted into sugars and caramelized in the roasting process. If the picking is ripe and even, the coffee will have a more unified structure in the roast profile, which will allow you (the roaster) to be a bit more aggressive about how you express that coffee.

Cupping is a process to grade coffee that is a standard in the industry, because you can do it anywhere. All it requires is a cup and a spoon (and the coffee), with gravity as your filtration system. Every cup of coffee goes through some sort of extraction. Machine brewers have paper filters, and espresso machines have portafilters, and for cupping, the filter we use is gravity. This method is easy and adaptable, so long as you have a cup, a spoon, hot water, and ground coffee.

How it works: pour water on the coffee, wait four minutes, and give the coffee three firm stirs with your spoon. Following this, skim the residue off the top and wait for the beverage to cool. After about ten to fifteen minutes of cooling, the coffee is ready for evaluation. The simplicity in this approach is extremely adaptable, and it also minimizes brew variables that can potentially distract an evaluator from determining a coffee’s true quality.

It comes down to repetition and having a good mentor. I was lucky enough to work with Geoff Watts when I was twenty-four, so having somebody guide you toward refinement is essential. What is sweetness, what is age?

I cupped more than 4,000 samples last year. I use that as a goal, because I know that master sommeliers taste that many wines in a year.

The data lives in Cropster, a software we’ve been using since 2012, so we have a lot of historical data in there. We are on roast 170,000. I remember when we roasted roast one. It was a different time. The hard part is taking the time to understand the data. We will go through lots in a week.

Every cupping and roast has been logged in Cropster, and we make a serious effort to tie our cupping data to every layer of the coffee production supply chain: the roast, the country, the farm, and, if possible, the specific area of a farm. We also take note of a coffee’s composition throughout the tenure of the production lot. By composition, I mean varietal, screen size variation, density, and moisture levels.

We understand that an approach for Honduran coffee will not necessarily work an Ethiopian microlot, but by continually trying to understand a coffee’s cup performance in relation to the roast, the harvest, and the environmental factors, we can say that some solutions help us and the producer make better decisions.

Our goal is to not change blends that often, and ideally, year over year, they will be similar. I see it as kind of a tugboat—something that is slowly pulling us in a single direction. Black Cat has changed really slowly over the years, but if we had the ability to give you Black Cat from six years ago, you wouldn’t believe me. I say that because our producers and direct trade partners are continually improving their understanding of what great farm management, harvesting, and processing look like. As a result, we have tinkered with coffees in the roasting process over the course of their lifespan, in an attempt to maximize sweetness and fruit acids. Through these micro-adjustments to the same coffee, year after year, we have been able to improve a coffee’s performance.

Consistency starts at the approval process. Ensuring our components are clean, meet the profile we are looking for, and match our goals for each aspect of the blend helps us in ensuring Black Cat has focus and consistency. Also, we taste Black Cat, or the individual components of the deconstructed blend, multiple times a week between our QC, retail, and roasting departments. We understand that our flagship espresso needs to remain consistent, so tastings of this coffee in these departments are a priority.

Our goal with seasonal blends is to present the fruit notes we crave at that particular time of year. For comparison’s sake, in the summer, we tend to present lighter, fresh summer fruits, and in the winter, we tone down the fruit acids and present something a bit more warming or sweetness-driven. This vision for seasonality allows us to expand our menu in a dynamic way while also presenting a blend our customers crave at that particular moment.

The roaster’s job is to take the green coffee and apply energy (heat) to create chemical reactions and change the coffee to create as many desirable compounds as possible—and as few undesirable compounds as possible. What follows is brewing, and the barista’s job is to identify that exact moment of extraction that results in a brew with the most desirable compounds, and an amount of undesirable compounds that does not notably detract.

Most of the desirable compounds of coffee are trapped in the bean itself, which leads to the grind. Within the coffee bean is an intricate network of woven fibers, not unlike a beehive with an internal honeycomb structure. Coffee’s cellular structure is more amorphous than regular hexagons. It actually forms and even fractures much like porous lava rock. The walls that surround these cells are composed of many interwoven fibers. The soluble part of the coffee is on the face of these walls, and also within the walls, between the fibers. We use water to wash the soluble coffee off the face of the walls, and also to extract it from between the fibers that make up the walls. The walls are only made accessible to us by first grinding the coffee.

The rule of thumb is that the smaller the coffee grind, the more compounds are available for extraction, and the more easily we can extract from the coffee. With this, the more difficult the extraction can be to control. The trick is to grind the beans fine enough to make enough soluble compounds available to the water for the duration of the extraction—but not so fine that the resulting brew has a net negative outcome due to an increased presence of undesirable compounds.

As with grinding, water is an equally important part of the brewing process. The specialty coffee industry learned a lot about water for coffee over the 2010s, and there are several important pieces of information that help us design water for coffee in our Coffeebars.

Water can be quite tricky to manage, because nature is always seeking balance, and water just wants to have minerals and resist manipulation. Generally, in our Coffeebars, we bring in water from the city and send it through a carbon filter. After filtration, the water hits a “Y” junction. One side of the “Y” goes through a reverse osmosis treatment. Then it goes back and joins the other side of the “Y” at a mix valve that allows us to control the ratio at which these two waters are blended—and hit the general hardness we are targeting. Specialty water for specialty coffee is one of the most exciting things being developed in our industry. New ideas and equipment are coming forward every year, and we’re constantly getting closer to understanding and being able to work with the ideal kind of water for our coffees in all of our locations where coffee brewing happens.

The first and most obvious reason that the ratio matters is that it has a direct impact on the strength of the resulting brew. If a brew is made with a little coffee and a lot of water, the brew might be relatively weak. If a brew is made with a little coffee and also a little water, like an espresso, then the brew might be pretty strong. Another way to look at it: If you are making a pour over, and you have the optimal grind size and energy in place, but the dose of coffee is too low, you might extract just enough of the coffee for great flavors perceived in the brew, but they might be at such a low concentration that the brew is deemed weak.

Time is a variable we are constantly learning more about. In general, we often feel like we need more time to dissolve desirable flavors, but that is mostly backed by anecdotal evidence. There is increasing evidence that a lot can be accomplished in a short amount of time, as long as the coffee is ground fine enough and there is enough energy in the coffee being brewed.

See our brewing guides for more information about how to brew at home with the Chemex, French Press, Aeropress, and other popular brewing devices.