Boot Coffee · A side-by-side cupping
How much can fermentation change one coffee?
Four treatments of the same Guatemalan lot. We’ll roast them, cup them blind, and find out what we can actually taste.
We’re cupping coffees from the 2026 Fermentation Project, created with James Hoffmann and fermentation specialist Lucía Solís. Sweet Maria’s released a limited set of all four green coffees, and we got one.
Each version comes from the same lot at Finca San Miguel Urias in Antigua, Guatemala. That gives us a rare way to compare the treatments without changing the farm, harvest, or coffee.
Same farm. Same harvest. Same coffee.
Four fermentation paths.
The four cups
We’ll roast each treatment at Boot Coffee and taste them together before revealing which is which.
- 01Mechanically demucilagedThe control, with essentially no fermentation
- 02Wild fermentationNaturally occurring microorganisms
- 03Lactobacillus fermentationInoculated with lactic acid bacteria
- 04Saccharomyces fermentationInoculated with yeast
First, we taste. Then we compare notes and talk through what happened in each treatment. Finally, we reveal the cups.
What will you notice?
- Can you pick out the control?
- What changed in the yeast-inoculated coffee?
- How does wild fermentation compare?
One coffee, four versions, tasted side by side. If you roast, cup, work with processing, or simply want to understand why coffees taste the way they do, come taste this set with us.
