(Footnote 1) Specialty coffee is here defined as un-mixed coffee bought in small quantities of a few hundred up to a few thousand pounds at a time, and marketed for particular regional or roasting characteristics. This is in contrast to conventional or supermarket coffee, which is dominated by a few large corporations that buy massive quantities from large producers or pooled from many smaller growers. These larger coffee roasters depend on a chain of coffee brokers, whereas the specialty coffee roaster often buys direct from selected farms. A more narrow, quality-based definition of specialty coffee is �high-quality coffee having high acidity, good body, and fine aroma. these characteristics come from producing Arabica varieties at higher elevations, wet processing the cherries and then sizing the dried beans to 16/64 � sieve (Maxey 96)
