Friedhats - Ngunguini - (Kenya, Washed, SL-28, SL-34, Ruiru 11)

Peaberries. Look at these greedy little freaks. They’re like your spoiled friend growing up who never had to share a room with a sibling- spatially entitled, autonomous, well developed, and flourishing for it. I resent them a bit. Oof, let's get back on track. 

There are a lot of misconceptions about peaberries, so let's take a second to simplify the topic. Typical coffee cherries grow two seeds inside. Something like 5% of the time they only grow one, like humans having twins but the opposite. Easy? Easy. When this happens, they have all this extra space for activities that would usually be taken up by their counterpart, so they relish in the opportunity to live without a roommate and grow to occupy all the space on their own, taking on a different shape and density. This difference in density will cause them to take heat during roasting differently from the other normal coffee it grew up with, so peaberries get separated out and lumped together by the producer to best address that.

There doesn't seem to be much science at the moment supporting the idea that there is anything uniquely special about the development of peaberries resulting in a better cup of coffee. It's more likely that the additional layer of quality control in screening out peaberries from the rest of the crop simply helps maintain a level of standards that was already producing great coffee at that farm or mill.