Tanzania Peaberry Coffee: What a Peaberry Is, and Our Stone Street Grind and Brew

What a peaberry is, why so much Tanzanian coffee is sold as peaberry, and how Stone Street's Tanzanian Peaberry tasted in our 2019 grind-and-brew video, with the bag as it's sold today.

By Jay Arr Updated

This article accompanies our video from January 2020.

Tanzanian coffee in American shops is often sold as “peaberry”, and Stone Street’s Tanzanian Peaberry is one of the easier bags to find. This page explains what the word means and what it doesn’t promise, sums up Tanzania as an origin, and keeps our 2019 tasting of the Stone Street bag, with what the roaster sells under that name today.

Our 2019 grind and brew

We picked up a bag from Stone Street to grind and brew it fresh. The video, from November 2019, has no narration: the beans go through our Breville Smart Grinder Pro and are brewed as a pour-over through a Coffee Gator dripper, a stainless-steel mesh cone, into a glass carafe.

Our verdict, as the video’s description gives it:

Those are one tasting of one bag in 2019, not a promise for the bag you buy now. The filter matters too. Hoffmann writes that metal filters remove only the larger pieces of ground coffee, leaving some silty sediment and the coffee’s oils, which add body, while paper filters strain out the suspended material and oils and give the cleanest cup. The same beans through paper may taste cleaner and lighter than they did in our video.

Stone Street’s Tanzanian Peaberry today

Stone Street is a roaster in Brooklyn, New York. Its product page, checked October 18, 2026, still sells the coffee as “Tanzanian Peaberry”:

The page gives no harvest date, variety or altitude, so the bag tells you the country and the farm partner but not much else. Ask for the roast date, or look for it on the bag, before you judge how fresh it is.

We looked for the exact product on Amazon, signed out: the search for “Stone Street Coffee Tanzania Peaberry” returned other roasters’ Tanzanian peaberries and no Stone Street bag in its top results, so the link here goes to Stone Street’s own page.

What a peaberry is

Most coffee cherries hold two seeds, which grow face to face and flatten where they press together. Occasionally only one seed develops. With nothing pressing on it, it grows rounder, and that’s a peaberry. Hoffmann writes in The World Atlas of Coffee that peaberries make up around 5 percent of the crop; Café Imports says somewhere between 5 and 12 percent of any yield can be expected to form them, with some varieties and origins seeing more. Peaberries are usually sieved out and sold as their own grade, PB, which Tanzania lists between B and C in its size grades.

What a peaberry does in the cup is less settled:

So “peaberry” on a bag tells you how the beans were sorted. It doesn’t by itself tell you the coffee will taste better.

Why so much Tanzanian coffee is peaberry

Café Imports, which says it has leaned heavily on Tanzania’s peaberry market, explains it this way: most of the coffee Tanzania exports is bought by Japanese roasters, who prize uniform bean size and see peaberries as an undesirable defect. So the peaberries often go unsold to Japan, and they’re the majority of what’s left for Western buyers. In much of the Western world, it writes, Tanzanian coffee is known mainly through those separated peaberry lots.

Tanzania as a coffee origin

Tanzania grows both arabica and robusta. USDA’s July 2026 figures put the 2026/27 crop at 1.6 million 60 kg bags, 850,000 of them arabica and 750,000 robusta. That’s under 1 percent of USDA’s world total of 189.7 million bags, and 14th on its table (both calculated). Hoffmann adds that around 90 percent of Tanzania’s coffee comes from about 450,000 smallholder farmers, and the rest from larger estates; the better coffees he had tasted in recent years came from the estates.

Robusta grows mostly in the northwest, near Lake Victoria. Hoffmann’s arabica regions, with his altitudes and harvest months:

RegionAltitudeHarvest
Kilimanjaro1,050–2,500 m (3,500–8,100 ft)July–December
Arusha (Mount Meru)1,100–1,800 m (3,600–5,900 ft)July–December
Tarime1,500–1,800 m (4,900–5,900 ft)July–December
Kigoma1,100–1,700 m (3,600–5,600 ft)July–December
Mbeya1,200–2,000 m (3,900–6,600 ft)June–October
Ruvuma1,200–1,800 m (3,900–5,900 ft)June–October

He lists Kent, Bourbon and Typica in most regions, with Bourbon derivatives such as N5 and N39 in Ruvuma. Kilimanjaro is the oldest arabica area, he writes, with better infrastructure than the others but many very old trees with comparatively low yields.

As for taste, Hoffmann describes Tanzanian coffees as complex, with bright and lively acidity and often berry and fruity flavors: “juicy, interesting and delicious.” Café Imports, buying for the same qualities, writes of the complex acidity and juicy texture the best of them can have. These are what a Tanzanian coffee can taste like; the farm, process and roast decide the bag in front of you.

The tool’s calendar and varieties come from importers, so they differ a little from Hoffmann’s: it draws the northern harvest ending in November where he says December, and the southern one starting in May where he says June, and it lists Arusha and Blue Mountain among the varieties. Our coffee harvest calendar gives Hoffmann’s months for Tanzania alongside the January to April arrivals Café Imports lists, which is when fresh Tanzanian lots are most likely to reach roasters.

For neighboring origins with a similar bright, berry-toned reputation, see our Kenyan coffee guide and our Rwandan coffee guide.

Brewing a Tanzanian peaberry

Brew it as you would any medium roast. For a pour-over like ours, the Brew Guide’s V60 recipe is a good start: for a 12 oz (355 ml) mug it weighs out the coffee and water at 1:16, with the kettle at 201°F (94°C) for a medium roast. If the cup tastes sour, grind a step finer; if it’s bitter or drying, a step coarser. The recipe is for a paper filter, so with a metal cone like ours, expect a heavier cup and a little more sediment.

Our V60 guide covers the technique step by step.

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