Peaberry Coffee: Worth the Extra Cost?

You may have seen peaberry coffee advertised online or on a bag of beans at your local coffeeshop. You may have also seen that they are usually more expensive – sometimes quite a bit more.  Two questions may come to mind:

1.     What are peaberry coffee beans? 

2.     Are they worth the extra expense?

Let’s tackle that first question. The term peaberry refers to the bean’s shape and size. If you examine a typical coffee bean, you’ll see that it is flat on one side. Peaberries are not, they are round and slightly smaller than the typical flat-sided beans. This is due to an anomaly that occurs in the fruit’s development (coffee beans are the seeds of plant that produces what is called coffee cherries with an edible but slimy fruit under a tough and slightly bitter skin).  Usually, coffee beans form as dicots (two seeds in each fruit); however, in about 5-10% of time a single bean, a peaberry, is produced (called a monocotyledon).  Peaberries can occur in both Coffee arabica and Coffee canephora (also called Coffee robusta) varieties of coffee.  From a coffee production yield standpoint, the occurrence of peaberries is not a good thing. Unless, you can charge more for these beans to make up for the decreased yield – they have to be sorted out, which could justify the higher price if they taste better.

The second question is tougher to answer.  There appears to be no clear-cut answer on whether peaberry beans taste better than regular beans.  Some have suggested they roast more evenly due to their shape.  I contacted the owner my favorite local coffee shop (he is a 4th generation coffee roaster) and asked him whether they roast any differently, his response was that wasn’t their experience because when beans of any type are roasted, they are agitated by the machine so much they’re in constant motion.  Most research seems to point to the health of the plant and proper production techniques as more important to overall flavor than whether the beans are a peaberry or not. This point was also brought up repeatedly in my conversation with my local coffee shop. Interestingly, some researchers have suggested that peaberry beans produce an aphrodisiac effect – at least in male mice (Wahono 2016 at https://repository.unej.ac.id/handle/123456789/75023 ).  I will let you decide whether that is an added benefit or not as well as if this is ethical research. 

Since peaberry are more expensive and if you decide that they are worth a try, it is best to get whole bean peaberries and grind them yourself (you should do this with all your coffee beans).   This way you can visually check the beans to insure that they are indeed authentic peaberries.  If you’re a chemist and have the knowledge to do a UV-visible Spectroscopy analysis of the ground beans, you can confirm your ground beans are really Peaberries – guessing most of us don’t have one of these laying around the kitchen (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10942912.2017.1296861 ). 

It is hard to say whether peaberries are just part of a coffee fad, marketing hype, or really contribute to a better tasting coffee.  Fads in food are nothing new and certainly coffee has had many.  The worst coffee fad must be an originally Indonesian “production” process called kopi luwak whereby coffee cherries are fed to civets (a nocturnal cat-like creature) and the indigestible coffee beans are excreted in their feces.  Workers then pick through the feces to recover the beans.  The process has turned very industrialized with serious animal cruelty concerns (to read more about this go to this critique: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2013/sep/13/civet-coffee-cut-the-crap )

 Hopefully, the last bit of information didn’t ruin your appetite for the following recipe. 

Iced Kaffe with Almond Milk and Simple Syrup

This is a wonderfully rich, vegan iced coffee latte that is simple to make a home using the cold brew method of making coffee.

Ingredients

½ cup coarsely ground coffee beans

~14 oz cold water 

Almond Milk

Simple Syrup

Equipment

16oz Mason Jar; preferably the regular mouth jar (but wide jar will work too)

Fine sieve and/or cheesecloth 

Directions

1.     Place the roughly ground coffee beans into a mason jar (or similar such jar with a tight fitting lid)

2.     Fill the mason jar with cold water to nearly full (you want to leave a little room at the top of the jar).

3.     Secure lid fairly tightly and give it a shake or two to combine.

4.     Place in refrigerator for a minimum of 12 hours, preferably 24 hours.  Give it another couple of shakes throughout its stay in the fridge but try not to shake it the last 4 hours

5.     When ready to consume, gently strain the brew through the sieve and/or cheesecloth into a tall glass (e.g., 14oz Tom Collins glass) that is 1/3 full of ice so that the brew and ice occupy about 2/3 or slightly more of the glass.

6.     Add simple syrup to taste (typically a tablespoon will do) and top with almond milk give it a stir and enjoy (see our recipe section for the syrup and milk recipes)

Save the beans as you can get one more extraction out of them but it will be slightly weaker