I was re-reading Hoffman's coffee atlas the other day and wound up thinking about the potential causes of herbaceous character in coffee.

The obvious first region that springs to mind is Southeast Asia. Obviously, Giling Basah / wet hulling is common there, and you have uneven drying and coffees that taste herbaceous. But you also have clean washed coffees that have some herbaceous / pyrazine / green bell pepper elements.

If we look to Africa, one of the biggest differences between Kenyan and Rwandan coffees tends to be processing quality. In Rwanda, processing tends to be a bit less attentive to evenness of drying, and I tend to get more rustic and herbaceous qualities. (Though Kenya's famous for tomato-stew type flavors.) I was reading about the Semeon Abbay, and apparently that was intentionally unevenly dried... and it's herbaceous.

I'm curious if any of you have found any correlation between coffee processing and herbaceous character. Here's your opportunity for some pocket science.

I've tasted Laotian and Thai coffees for planter's projects. This involved different Arabica and Robusta cultivars, different sort levels, and different preps. The herbaceous taste was in all of them; it's terroir, not prep or varietal, the most indisputable instance of it I've ever seen.

The best ones are very sweet and have hints of snow peas and basil; the worst are cabbage. I think people might grow to appreciate the taste in the good ones as a regional marker; but for now even the well prepped coffees are used mostly in dark roasts where the flavor disappears.

Obviously, this has no bearing on herbaceous tastes in other regions, which may have other causes.

So that's what I'm curious about. I've also experienced herbaceous qualities in Indonesian coffees that I know were prepped in exceptionally clean manners. So it's not just a processing effect.

But the taste crops up in other regions too, often in instances where parchment drying was uneven, untraditional, or fast. But I want to see if other people with more experience with green coffee processing have found that to be the case. It could just be inherent in the coffee and brought out by the processing or purely coincidental.

I wouldn't describe Semeon Abay as strongly herbaceous. It wouldn't even land in the top list of descriptors for me. I know one of their packages had "sweet basil" on it, but as crazy exotic and complex as that particular coffee is, it could be applied because there literally are flavors and aromas in it that defy description. Someones "sweet basil" might be another's "bubblegum". But the south east Asia/Indonesia and green bell pepper association certainly seems to bear true in many cases in my opinion.

TomC wrote:But the south east Asia/Indonesia and green bell pepper association certainly seems to bear true...

+1. Even I can pick up that one. And I've experienced it in washed coffees.

Certain cultivars (Pacamara for example) tend towards vegetal.
But probably the most common cause of vegetal notes is misroast.

malachi wrote:Certain cultivars (Pacamara for example) tend towards vegetal.

Interesting, thanks.

malachi wrote: But probably the most common cause of vegetal notes is misroast.

How so? Certainly, roast cannot impart vegetal flavors. Perhaps a roast can fail to develop vegetal character into something else. A roaster can choose not to cover vegetal character with other flavors, but that is the roaster's choice. (I'm going to ignore underdevelopment as imparting vegetal-savory-peanut-grass character since that's not the point of this thread.)

Anyone tried Taiwanese mountain grown coffee's?

I did.... in a cafe at Jiufen mountains

NoStream wrote:(I'm going to ignore underdevelopment as imparting vegetal-savory-peanut-grass character since that's not the point of this thread.)

It would seem to me that the most common cause of herbaceous qualities in coffees would at least be of interest given the topic of the thread.
But if we're excluding under-development roast defect, then no... roast defect isn't any where near as significant as cultivar.

I didn't mean for that to come across as harsh. I was curious what people thought caused herbaceous qualities apart from underdevelopment, which is a seemingly more obvious cause. And I think underdevelopment comes across in a very particular way that is hard to describe but pretty obvious once you've experienced it, or experienced it many times while trying to dial in light roasts as in my case

It seems that the main explanation endorsed here is variety, and that's a good one.