Why Bad Coffee Hurts Your Stomach | TORC Specialty Coffee

Why Bad Coffee Hurts Your Stomach. We’ve all been there.

You drink a cup of coffee, and instead of feeling awake and focused, you feel that sharp acidity in your chest or that uncomfortable twist in your stomach.

Here’s the truth: coffee itself isn’t the problem.

Bad coffee is.

And the difference has everything to do with how it’s grown, processed, and roasted.

1. Over-Roasted Coffee: A Chemical Burn

When coffee is roasted too dark, most of its natural sweetness and gentle acids are destroyed.

At that stage, the bean develops compounds like phenols and quinic acid, the same ones responsible for that burnt taste and the feeling of acidity or reflux.

These compounds don’t just affect flavour. They irritate the stomach lining, triggering discomfort and inflammation.

At TORC, we roast each coffee just enough to highlight what’s beautiful in it, never to burn or mask anything. The result? Balance, sweetness, and complexity of flavours, cup after cup.

2. Defective or Old Beans: hidden fermentation 

Low-quality coffees often use defective beans… Unripe, over-fermented, or poorly stored.

Those defects can produce unwanted acids, mold, and toxins that disrupt digestion and gut balance.

Specialty coffee starts differently.

Our producers pick only ripe cherries, process them cleanly, and dry them slowly under controlled conditions. The goal is purity: a clean, stable cup that feels as good as it tastes.

3. Industrial Roasting: speed > quality

In mass production, beans are roasted fast and hot to cut costs.

This can leave behind acrylamide and other chemical residues that stress your digestive and nervous systems.

Careful roasting, like what we do at TORC, allows all chemical reactions to complete naturally, reducing those residues and keeping the coffee’s chemistry balanced.

4. Unbalanced blends: too much caffeine, too little sweetness 

Most commercial coffees mix different grades of beans, often including Robusta, which usually has nearly double the caffeine and far fewer natural sugars than Arabica.

That extra caffeine can overstimulate your digestive system and make your stomach produce more acid.

In contrast, high-quality Arabica beans (like the coffees we roast at TORC) are naturally sweeter, gentler, and easier on the body. Again, the same way this is not about coffee, this is not about robustas. We have several high quality specialty robustas being grown all over the world and they can be as amazing as arábicas! The problem is bad robusta being mixed to bad arabica! Think of alcohol. If you drink a good wine, it will probably not going to hurt you like a bad plastic bottle one!

5. The solution: respect coffees nature!

Coffee is naturally complex: it contains hundreds of aromatic compounds that interact with your senses and your body.

When it’s roasted correctly, these compounds stay balanced: the sweet ones soften the acids, and the natural oils coat your palate.

That’s why a good cup of coffee feels smooth, never aggressive.

It wakes you up, but kindly.

To make your life better…

If coffee upsets your stomach, don’t blame the drink itself, blame the shortcuts.

Over-roasted, low-quality coffee is chemically unstable. It’s full of residues and imbalances that your body reacts to.

Good coffee, on the other hand, is the result of care: from the farmer who picks it at peak ripeness to the roaster who brings it to life with precision.

It’s clean, balanced, and full of life.

That’s the kind of coffee we believe in at TORC: coffee that energises your mind, respects your body, and turns your morning into a ritual you actually look forward to.