Pu’er Coffee

 Most of my long posts in February were dedicated to café hopping in Australia. During the month I spent there, I once again found myself marveling at the incredible richness—and rarity—of the green coffee resources available in Australia. If you are a coffee enthusiast who truly values the terroir and regional character of coffee, I strongly recommend putting Australia on your travel list. Among the many cafés I visited, Veneziano Coffee left a particularly deep impression on me. They are the kind of roaster that seems to “hunt” for beans from highly specific micro-regions. In their shop, you’ll find several house espresso blends as well as multiple SOEs permanently on the menu, and each one has its own distinctive flavor profile and memorable character. It’s no surprise that they’ve been listed among the World’s Top 100 Coffee Shops . At the time, I bought a bag of beans that could be used both for pour-over and as an SOE. The beans come from the ARGCAFEE cooperative in Cauca,...

 Every time I go to a coffee expo, it feels like I need to come away with something for it to feel worthwhile. For me, the biggest value of these events is that they offer a concentrated window into brands and products that are new, distinctive, and sometimes even pleasantly surprising. What I’m sharing this time is another discovery from late November last year at the Shanghai Coffee Expo—a startup roastery from Shanghai called Stellaria . I noticed their booth the moment I walked by. The packaging was fresh and clean, and you could sense the emotional value the brand wanted to convey through subtle design details. They have a rather romantic and idealistic interpretation of their brand story: “Named after ‘celestial radiance,’ and paired with the simple ‘-ia’ suffix to enhance memorability, Stellaria captures the essence of youth and cutting-edge technological design. In Chinese, it evokes the poetic image of stars drifting quietly across the night sky, symbolizing the rich a...