Coffee Glossary · Quality
Quakers
Unripe beans that sneak through sorting and refuse to roast properly — staying pale tan while their batch-mates brown, because they lack the sugars that drive roast development. In the cup they taste of paper, cereal, and peanut shells; a single quaker can flatten a brewed cup's sweetness. They evade green grading (unroasted, they look nearly normal) and are counted after sample roasting instead. Prevention is upstream: ripe-only picking and flotation, the steps quality premiums exist to reward.
Related terms
Defects (Green Coffee)
Physical faults in green coffee counted under grading systems like the SCA's: category 1 (primary) defects —…
Coffee Cherry
The fruit of the coffee tree — a small drupe that ripens from green through yellow to deep red (or…
Hand Sorting
The final human quality gate: workers — overwhelmingly women, at origin after origin — picking defective…
Bean Density
How much mass a coffee bean packs per volume — measured in g/L or judged by feel and appearance (tight,…
Cupping
Coffee's standardized tasting protocol: coarse-ground samples steeped in bowls under strict ratios and…
Grading (Green Coffee)
The classification of green coffee into commercial tiers by measurable criteria — screen size, defect count,…
Reading up before buying? Volcana Coffee exports SGS-inspected specialty Arabica and Fine Robusta from the Bolaven Plateau, Laos — and we're happy to walk new importers through every term on a real offer sheet.
Talk to Our Export Team