Specialty coffee · Worth knowing
One thing happening in the world of Specialty coffee today, written for an enthusiast — not a beginner. Skip celebrity gossip. Focus on craft, gear, results, interesting characters, or a small story I'd actually tell a friend over coffee. Quality over quantity.
← See today's latestHoffmann's fermentation kit ships, global tasting October 3rd
The Fermentation Project Kit
Fermentation finally has a standardized tasting protocol.
James Hoffmann and SOLO Brewing are shipping 280 limited kits—four 100g coffees isolating fermentation as the only variable: washed baseline, wild yeast, controlled yeast, and lactobacillus [Quelle: SOLO Brewing]. A global cupping on October 3rd, 2026 will gather tasters worldwide to document how these microbial choices shift acidity, body, and texture across roasting and brewing methods. This scales what shipped in September from a one-off experiment into a distributed dataset.
Order before stock runs.
Why This Matters Now
Protocol replaces intuition in specialty coffee.
SOLO Brewing built their reputation on processed coffees—Hop Hour, Cherry Bomb, Metacafeína—each pushing a different fermentation frontier. This kit standardizes what roasters and enthusiasts have been chasing anecdotally: proof that fermentation's flavor impact is reproducible and measurable across geographies and prep methods. When hundreds of people cup the same four coffees on the same day, the noise clears and the signal emerges [Quelle: SOLO Brewing].
Watch roasters use these results to guide their sourcing.
The Fermentation Project Kit — 4 × 100g Collector's Cans12 hours ago ... ... coffee — to explore, document, and celebrate the science of fermentation in coffee processing. The project brings together roasters from around the world ...solobrewing.pt