Firstly if you judge your coffee by how strong it is, throw away that perception, and while you’re at it throw away any coffee beans that have an indication of strength on the packet. In simple terms, the strength indicator is a ‘how burnt and bitter’ indicator and speciality coffee should be neither!

Strength can be used in terms of coffee but as an indication of the proportion of extracted coffee to water, so any variety of coffee can be made strong: ie a high proportion of coffee to water.

From now on we will talk about our coffee in terms of flavour and taste characteristics.

Tasting can become very complex (it gives us a chance to be obsessive, boring and drink more coffee) but we will keep it simple here.

In broad terms coffee has a few main characteristics:

• body & mouth feel
• acidity
• sweetness
• flavour
• balance
• aftertaste (not always mentioned but we feel it is important)