About Beans
To make a good cup of coffee you need good beans.
It starts with the bean – which comes from a fruit and is actually a seed, but everyone calls it a bean and so does the crew at Lou’s.
If you have bad beans, no matter how well they’ve been roasted or how great your brew gear is and how awesome your technique; the outcome will always be the same, at best, a well-prepared cup of shitty coffee. At Lou’s we don't do bad! We only select and roast the highest grades of coffee bean available.
At Lou’s, we find good beans so that you can have good coffee. What are good beans and where do they come from? If you’ve made it here, then you’re probably familiar with the term “specialty coffee”. Specialty coffee, a term coined in 1974 by coffee guru Erna Knutsen, describes beans of the best flavor produced in micro-climates. Specialty coffee beans are the highest grade of bean available, and these days the description generally encompasses the entire supply chain. Lou’s origine unique coffees display core supply chain details right on the label and in the product descriptions.
Where are specialty coffee beans found? In general, from all around the world. A more nuanced answer is that coffee is grown around the world but only in the sub-tropical regions bounded to north by the Tropic of Cancer and to the south by the Tropic of Capricorn, this region is sometimes referred to as the Bean Belt. There are more than 50 countries - from Angola to Zambia - that produce coffee. At Lou’s we’re more often than not partial to beans from Africa, South and Central America. However, we do occasionally source excellent beans from the Asian countries in the bean belt too.
There are over 100 identified species of coffee plant on the planet but 2 main species that make up the majority of crops planted and harvested commercially in any given year – Coffea Arabica and Coffea Robusta (also known as Coffea Canephora). Arabica accounts for about 60% of annual harvest with Robusta making up the other 40%. Indeed, there are other plants harvested for their beans but, to date these are in such low volumes as to be statistically insignificant. That’s not to say we won’t try them out. After all at Lou’s, as with people, all beans are welcome….until they’re not.