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Pour-over coffee. The term itself sounds pretty self-explanatory.

But there’s a whole wealth of information you need to be armed with to truly appreciate the process and prepare your coffee the right way.

For a long time in coffee history, pour-over coffee reigned due to its several benefits (which we cover later in the blog) and also the context in which the method was discovered.

Even today, a lot of coffee shops will serve you pour-over coffee as it produces fresher coffee than machine-brewed one.

We see these words on coffee bags and read about them in articles, but what are the coffee varieties and their effect on your cup?

We don't generally enter a café and ask for a Bourbon varietal latte in the way we would order a glass of wine in a bar. However, the coffee industry inherits terminology from the wine industry. In wine circles, everybody knows the difference between a Shiraz and a Sav Blanc. Whereas, in the coffee world, varieties are much less understood.

There's also a common misuse of the terms so firstly, let's set things straight.

Monsooned coffee had an accidental beginning. 

In the time of the British Raj, ships transporting coffee by sea from India to Europe would find vast changes in the characteristics of their packed coffees, due to moisture in the air within the wooden cargo hold.

Over a 4-6 month period of exposure to this humidity, raw coffee beans would lose their green colour and turn a pale, straw yellow. 

With this, the taste would also change, the beans attaining a distinct flavour profile with a practically neutral pH balance (making it one of the lowest acidic coffees in the World). The resultant cup would be a heavy-bodied brew that Europeans began to favour.