Natty
A few months ago, I wrote some text about natural processed coffee. In short, coffee is a tropical fruit. You’re drinking some ground-up, roasted seeds that were each at one point surrounded by a cherry. Most of the coffee you drink involves the cherry husk being washed away from the bean, which results in the final form being more nutty, roasty, chocolatey. There are other ways to remove the cherry, including sun-drying and agitating (which is called a natural process); and using honey to remove the cherries, which is especially common in regions of the world that lack a reliable clean water supply.
There are many non-washed processes, but given the nascent state of things they are pretty much all lumped under the term natural coffee, even though that term has a specific meaning to coffee nerds. And speaking of nerds, they are wildly polarized on natural coffee. James Hoffmann did a tasting with 10,000 people, and the one very clear takeaway was that a bunch of them absolutely hate the hell out of natural coffee.
I love this, because it doesn’t track at all with my relationship to natural coffee over the past year. I have a few stories that I’d like to stitch together here, all of which have to do with other people.