What Does "Anaerobic Process" Actually Mean?
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The word on the bag
Anaerobic
What does that really mean?
A small word on a coffee bag. A bigger story about flavor, care, and the people behind your cup.
Artwork: Feel The Fire by Boise artist Joelle Ater, created for Solar Flare.
There are a lot of words printed on a bag of specialty coffee.
Origin, variety, elevation, washed, natural, honey, and increasingly, anaerobic.
Some of them make sense right away. Others can make picking out a bag of coffee feel like you should probably know more than you do.
The good news is, you don’t need to understand the science behind coffee processing to enjoy a really good cup. But learning what happens before that coffee reaches you can make drinking it a whole lot more interesting.
So, let’s talk about anaerobic coffee.
Anaerobic simply means “without oxygen.” In coffee processing, the term describes fermentation in an environment where oxygen is limited or removed.
Depending on the producer’s approach, whole coffee cherries or depulped coffee can be placed inside a sealed tank or another container that limits oxygen. During fermentation, microorganisms break down sugars in and around the coffee.
The producer can make decisions about things like time, temperature, and the conditions surrounding that fermentation. And those decisions matter. Even small changes during processing can have a noticeable impact on what we eventually experience in the cup.
That’s part of why anaerobically processed coffees can be so expressive. They can bring out bright fruit, florals, sweetness, and sometimes flavors you might not expect to find in coffee at all.
From the process to your cup
A Case-Study: Solar Flare.
Our summer release, Solar Flare, is a pretty great example. It’s a Pink Bourbon micro-lot cultivated by Claudia Samboni at Finca Las Nubes in Huila, Colombia.
200
hours of fermentation
Anaerobic washed process
Two-hundred hours. Two fermentation stages.
Ally Coffee’s lot profile describes 100 hours with the cherries in sealed tanks, followed by another 100 hours after depulping. The coffee is then washed and dried.
What we taste
- Watermelon
- Grapefruit juice
- Orange zest
- Rosewater
In the cup, we find vibrant notes of watermelon, grapefruit juice, orange zest, and rosewater.
Explore the process in Ally Coffee’s green coffee profile.
None of those flavors were added. They’re naturally experienced in the coffee and are influenced by its variety, where and how it was grown, the processing decisions Claudia made, and eventually the way we roast it here at Epiphany.
That last part is something we think is worth talking about.
When we describe a coffee, it’s easy to focus on the fun details: the tasting notes, the variety, the fermentation time, or a processing method like anaerobic. But there is a person behind all of those details.
The person behind the coffee
For Solar Flare,
that person is Claudia.
Processing isn’t something that simply happens after harvest. Producers make intentional choices throughout it, and those choices can completely change the way a coffee expresses itself.
Claudia’s work at Finca Las Nubes is part of what makes Solar Flare the bright, fruit-forward coffee we get to roast and share with you.
By the time a coffee arrives at Epiphany, an incredible amount of care has already gone into it.
Our part is to honor that work and roast it in a way that allows the coffee to speak for itself.
And maybe that’s the best part about learning what words like anaerobic mean.
A bag of coffee can sit on your kitchen counter for a couple of weeks, but its story stretches across months, countries, and an incredible number of hands before it ever gets there.
You absolutely don’t need to know all of this to enjoy your morning coffee. But knowing a little more about where it came from and who helped create it can make that cup feel a little more special.
So the next time you see anaerobic printed on a coffee bag, you’ll know there’s a much bigger story hiding behind that one little word.
And if that bag happens to be Solar Flare, now you know a little bit about Claudia, too.