All terms
Everything in the Decaf glossary lives under one of nine categories, and the grouping answers a practical question: what were you doing when you went looking for this word? Brewing methods covers the techniques themselves — pour over, French press, AeroPress, moka pot, cold brew, gongfu — and the variables each one puts in your hands. Coffee beans deals with species, varieties, processing and roast. Grinding is about burrs, particle size and the words used to describe them. Espresso covers the pressure end, including the shot names and the numbers behind them.
Milk drinks holds the vocabulary of what gets poured in — flat white, cappuccino, cortado — and the texturing terms behind them. Tea types covers the leaves themselves: green, oolong, black, white, pu-erh, and the named styles within each. Tea brewing is the tea-side counterpart to brewing methods, where temperature, time and vessel matter far more than pressure. Tasting gathers the words for what you smell and taste, including the ones that get misused. Equipment is the hardware: grinders, scales, kettles, filters and the parts named inside them.
Categories are a sorting convenience, not a fence. A word like "extraction" turns up under both espresso and tasting, and several terms are defined once with links across to every group they touch. If you are not sure where a word lives, the A–Z list and the search box ignore categories entirely.
brewing-methodsBrewing Methods
The techniques and the vocabulary that comes with them: pour over, French press, AeroPress, moka pot, siphon, cold brew, and the tea-side gongfu method. Most of the words here describe what the water is doing — immersion or percolation, a bloom, agitation, a staged pour — or the variables you control while it happens. Read this category first if you are new to any of it; nearly every other group assumes you already know what these methods do.
coffee-beansCoffee Beans
Species, varieties, processing and roast — the words printed on a bag, and the ones roasters use among themselves. Arabica and robusta, heirloom varieties such as Bourbon and Geisha, washed, natural, honey and anaerobic processing, and the grade and roast labels applied after picking. Entries here explain what a term does tell you about a coffee, and what it quietly does not.
grindingGrinding
Burrs, particle size, and the language for describing them. Flat and conical burrs, blade grinders, grind settings, fines and boulders, static, retention, and the calibration ritual of finding a grinder's zero point. Entries here lean practical, because grinding is where a small change in vocabulary maps onto a large change in the cup: "medium" means something different on a filter grinder and on an espresso one.
espressoEspresso
Pressure, puck, and the numbers behind the shot. Ristretto, lungo, doppio and the rest of the shot vocabulary; pre-infusion, tamping, distribution, channeling; brew ratio, yield, brew temperature and the nine-bar convention everyone cites. The hardware words live here too — portafilter, basket, group head, solenoid — because they come up the moment you try to describe what your machine is actually doing.
milk-drinksMilk Drinks
What goes into the cup with the coffee: flat white, cappuccino, latte, cortado, macchiato, mocha, and the ratios that separate one from another. The technique side sits here as well — steaming, stretching, microfoam, latte art, and how plant milks behave differently under a steam wand. Several entries spend their time on definitions cafés disagree about, because the boundaries between these drinks genuinely move from country to country.
tea-typesTea Types
The leaves themselves, sorted by how much they are allowed to change before they are dried. Green, white, yellow, oolong, black and pu-erh sit on a spectrum of oxidation and processing rather than in separate botanical families — all of them come from the same plant. Entries cover withering, fixing, oxidation and roasting, plus named styles such as matcha, hojicha, lapsang souchong, and the blends sold under house names.
tea-brewingTea Brewing
How tea is brewed, and why the method changes the leaf far more than it changes coffee. Gongfu, western and grandpa-style brewing, rinsing, steep time, water temperature, leaf-to-water ratio and resteeping — the handful of variables that decide whether a tea tastes bright, bitter or flat. Vessel vocabulary belongs here too: gaiwan, teapot, fairness pitcher, and the small cups a gongfu session is built around.
tastingTasting
The words for what you smell and taste, and the protocol for comparing one cup against another. Acidity, body, mouthfeel, sweetness, bitterness, astringency, aroma, finish and balance describe sensation rather than ingredients. Alongside them sits a whole cupping vocabulary: the standardised tasting format the trade uses to buy and grade coffee, and the sensory language built on top of that protocol.
equipmentEquipment
The hardware, and the parts of it that have names of their own. Grinders, brewers, kettles, scales, filters, presses, espresso machines, and the tools around them — tampers, distribution tools, baskets, cleaning tablets. The measurement side is here too: refractometers, TDS meters, water hardness and the recipes for adjusting it, since water is the one piece of equipment most brewers ignore for years.