Processing is what happens between picking the cherry and shipping the green coffee. It is also, more than variety and arguably more than terroir, the thing most responsible for what you taste.

In a washed process the fruit is stripped off within hours and the seed is fermented in water to remove the remaining mucilage. What you are left with is the coffee itself — clean, articulated, acidity forward. Washed coffees are the ones that taste like a specific place.

In a natural process the cherry is dried whole. The seed sits inside its own fermenting fruit for weeks, and it takes on that fruit. This is where the blueberry and the strawberry and the fermented, almost winey character comes from.

Neither is a shortcut. A badly managed natural tastes like compost. A badly managed washed tastes like nothing at all. We buy both, and we roast them differently — naturals slightly gentler, washed lots slightly longer in development.