If you're worrying at this point that you're going to have to grow a beard, get a full sleeve tattoo, and start wearing braces, fear not.
Dialling in doesn't have to mean full on coffee geekery, it just means paying attention to a few variables.
If you have an espresso machine with a portafilter, and you're using it with standard single wall baskets (and not with dual wall, pressurised baskets), you'll need to dial in to at least some degree.
OK, you may get lucky and find the beans you've bought just happen to work perfectly with the settings you were using for your last beans, but that's fairly unlikely.
Dialling in isn't all that difficult, there's just a few steps and it's quite common for people to miss one or more of these steps.
So in this post we're going through ten tips for dialling in. Starting with:
When I say "the right" coffee beans, the main point here is freshly roasted, and I'm not referring to how many days it has been since they were roasted, I'm talking about the presence of a roasted on date on the bag.
I'm not saying here that you have to use coffee a day or two from roasting, I'm referring to two different types of coffee.
Coffee that has been roasted fresh by a small batch roaster, which comes with a roasted on date, vs coffee roasted in much bigger batches that comes only with a best before date.
Beans that don't have a roasted on date, and only have a best before date, which is the case with most beans you'll pick up from the supermarket, are not beans that would usually lend themselves to being dialled in.
This is why some coffee machine manufacturers who supply both types of filter baskets (dual walled pressurised, and single walled traditional baskets) state that the single walled traditional espresso baskets are for dialling in with freshly roasted beans.
If you're changing the grind size, the ratio and various other variables, and nothing you can do is changing the way the coffee tastes, if your beans don't have a roasted on date, it's likely to be just the kind of beans you're using.
These kind of beans tend to taste how they taste, more or less. You may be able to make slight changes to the taste, but often you can't properly dial in with beans like this.
If you're using beans without a roasted on date, I'd recommend being a bit less demanding of yourself and your gear when it comes to trying to dial in, and allow for the fact that the taste of the espresso from beans like this can't quite be controlled in the same way as freshly roasted beans.
In addition to being freshly roasted, if you're wanting the ability to properly dial them in, the next thing about buying the right beans, is buying the right kind of beans for your setup, for your current level of home barista skill, and for your palate.
A lot of people I speak to who are having issues with their espresso, especially those who're complaining of continually sour tasting shots, turn out to be using medium roasts, which tend to take a bit more effort to dial in, especially with entry level setups.
When you're just getting started, especially if you have an entry level setup, you'll find espresso blends to be the most forgiving kinds of coffee beans.
I'm not saying they have to be super dark roast, in fact most of the espresso blends you get from small batch roasters that are labelled as "dark" or "medium/dark" will be quite a bit lighter than most bags of coffee beans on supermarket shelves labelled as medium roast.
When it comes to our coffee beans, I'd highly recommend starting out with our most forgiving blends, Chocolate Brownie Blend and/or Chocolate Fondant Blend.
Chocolate Brownie Blend
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Chocolate Fondant Blend
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
It also makes it easier if you have more of the same beans to work with. If you start out with a 200-250g bag of coffee beans when you're trying to get familiar with dialling in, you may well find out that you run out of beans before you've managed to get properly dialled in.
I'd recommend buying your beans by the kilo while you're dialling in, you'll usually save quite a bit of money this way too, vs buying by the 200, 227g or 250g bag.
You can't dial in pre-ground coffee for espresso, as the grind size for espresso is specific to every particular espresso machine.
We only offer pre-ground coffee for espresso, for dual walled pressurised baskets, simply because the one size fits all approach just doesn't work for standard baskets, if we do that, it'll over extract on some machines and under extract on others.
My advice for getting the best results with pre-ground coffee for espresso would be to use dual walled baskets, and try to balance the shot with ratio.
If the shot tastes under extracted, overly sour, tangy, unpleasantly acidic, just try pulling a bigger shot with the same dose, for example instead of a 1:2, 16g of coffee to 36g of espresso, try a 1:2.5 or 1:3, by stopping the shot at 40g or 48g for example, with a 16g dose.
If the shot tastes over extracted, bitter, dull - do the opposite, pull a slightly smaller shot with the same dose.
Ultimately though the only way to really get decent results with espresso is to grind your own coffee beans, using an espresso capable grinder.
Many people empty their bags of coffee straight into their hopper, where they'll remain until they get through them all. In my opinion this is a mistake.
Hoppers aren't designed for long term bean storage.
They're designed for commercial use, the concept was borrowed from grain milling, although on a much smaller scale of course.
When used on commercial coffee grinders it's a time saving tool to stop baristas having to constantly load the grinders, and the hoppers in busy cafes will need to be loaded several times per day.
When home users fill their hopper, it can often be sitting in there for around a week, and beans sitting in a hopper for a week will go stale faster than beans that have been kept in an air tight container away from air & light, and away from changes in humidity and temperature.
The main issue with storing beans in the hopper, though, is they offer no protection to the continuing change in room temperature and humidity.
Not only is this likely to have an impact on the speed of the staling process, but it'll also wreak havoc where dialling in is concerned.
Within just an hour or two, a kitchen can change quite a bit where temperature and humidity are concerned.
Many people will notice that they'll dial in their beans, and an hour or so later they're not dialled in at all, and the main reason for this is the change in room conditions as the day goes on.
Our beans come in bags with a re-seal strip with a one way valve, my recommendation is always to either keep your beans in the bag and just be sure it's properly sealed, and push the air and CO2 out of the bag via the valve, or keep them in an air tight container, preferably something like Airscape or Fellow Atmos, which allows you to push the air out.
Then just use the beans you think you're about to use, and be ready to top up if you run low while grinding.
How to store your coffee beans
One of the most common questions I'm asked is how to achieve specific shot time, often it's 25-30 seconds, sometimes 28-32 seconds, recently I've had quite a few emails from people who're thinking they need to achieve bang on 30 seconds.
The fact is, there's no specific golden rule about shot time. Yes, professional baristas are usually trained (on commercial setups, I might add) to aim for a specific shot time, and it's usually something like 28-32 seconds.
But even with Pro baristas this is only for guidance, and it always mean quite the same with home setups as it might do for high end commercial espresso machines.
I recommend starting out with a much more forgiving shot window, of around 20-35 seconds. Once you're inside this shot time window, try to focus mainly on taste.
Are you happy with the taste?
Yes - carry on, don't change anything, ignore the numbers.
No - OK, work towards dialling in, because it doesn't taste right, not because the numbers would appear to predict that it shouldn't taste right.
If your espresso makes you pull a face and shudder, due to the unpleasant acidity, almost like sucking on a sour sweet or chewing a lemon, this indicates under extraction.
This means you've only extracted the more sour compounds, so it's unbalanced towards sourness.
If it tastes overly bitter, like having a gob full of cocoa powder, and/or tastes dull, and dries out your tongue, this indicates over extraction, you've tipped over past the balanced point, into the bitter dullness of over extraction.
If it tastes balanced, that's a well extracted shot.
This is what were aiming for, a well balance shot, one that doesn't make you grimace or shudder.
It's worth pointing out that if you're not use to drinking neat espresso, you may be so unfamiliar with that level of intensity that even a "god shot" may make you shudder.
So if you're someone who mainly drinks cappuccino, latte, flat white etc., I'd recommend making your drink and then tasting it, and the same if you tend to mainly drink Americano / Long black, taste it how you drink it in order to be able to fully appreciate how good (or not) it tastes
I'd still recommend tasting every espresso you make, though (give it a stir first) prior to adding anything, to aid in developing your palate.
Many new home baristas are of the impression that dialling in simply means changing the grind size, and this is the main tool we use for dialling in, but it's not the only one.
We also have brew temperature and/or ratio at our disposal as tools for dialling in.
Make sure you only work on tweaking one variable at a time though, or things can get very confusing.
If your machine has adjustable brew temperature, it's worth experimenting with temperature as part of the dialling in process. For instance, if you've switched to a slightly lighter roasted bean, generally speaking a higher brew temperature will help with the extraction, so you might want to knock the brew temp up by one or two degrees.
Even if you don't have adjustable brew temperature, you always have ratio, and this is a very powerful and often underrated tool.
Ratio means the relationship between the amount of ground coffee and the amount of espresso, so 18g of ground coffee to 36g of espresso is a one to two, or sometimes described as a two to one ratio.
18g to 54g would be a one to three, and we'd refer to this as a Lungo, but this doesn't mean it's not an espresso, by the way.
Because of the adoption of the terms "Ristretto, Espresso & Lungo" by certain pod coffee machine manufacturers... many people actually think these are completely different drinks. They're actually just the different names for different espresso ratios.
Ristretto is usually about 1:1 - 1:1.5, a standard espresso is about 1:2 - 1:2.5, and a Lungo is about 1:3.
The way we can use ratio, is by increasing the ratio to increase the extraction, and decreasing the ratio to decrease it, however ratio can only be used up to a point, especially when it comes to upping the extraction, due to the sacrifice that has to be made to intensity and body.
You might taste the shot, and declare that it's under extracted at 1:2, so you leave the dose (the amount of ground coffee in the basket) as it is, and you increase the yield (the shot weight), aiming for a 1:3, so you end up with around 54g of espresso instead of 36.
Then you might taste the shot and decide that, actually it tastes really balanced now, but the intensity has really dropped as has the lovely thick body of the last shot, so now you might decide to drop it to 1:2.5 by pulling a 45ml shot, and see where you're at.
At this point if you're not quite dialled in you may then nudge the grind just slightly finer in order to gain the additional extraction required without sacrificing intensity and body, or if you have a machine with adjustable brew temp you may try a slightly hotter temperature.
Once you're familiar with ratio and how much it can impact the shot, you’ll understand why you shouldn’t just let your machine dictate the shot volume.
I'm not saying you need to pull shots manually all the time, just while you're dialling in. Once you're dialled in you can re-set the shot volume or time with the next shot.
This is something that will make a lot more difference with freshly roasted beans, than with "normal" beans with a sell by date but no roasted on date.
Most people who are used to drinking this kind of coffee, who haven't yet spoiled their taste buds with freshly roasted coffee, will often be relatively happy with it, and wouldn't be able to detect much difference between a 1:2 ratio shot and a 1:3 ratio shot, for example, using these beans.
When someone then makes the switch to freshly roasted beans though, they may be surprised by the difference that the shot variables make, including ratio, and this is one of the reasons that people often detect extraction issues when switching to freshly roasted coffee beans.
While it doesn't really matter all that much what you do with mainstream coffee beans, it matters more with freshly roasted beans, you'll find that the difference that just a 50g shot vs a 40g shot, for example, can make to the taste, can be quite dramatic.
Most people are purely thinking about dose weight when they think of dose, but there are two elements to dose, weight and volume.
The dose weight obviously means how much the coffee in the basket weighs, and it's important to know this so you know what yield you're aiming for in order to achieve your target shot ratio.
Dose volume refers to how much space in the basket the coffee takes up, and this will change with different coffees, and mainly with grind size, simply because if you grind finer you’ll get more in the basket as there's less space in between each particle.
The reason volume is important is because it changes the amount of headspace, the space between the puck of coffee and the shower screen.
If you close this gap too much with too big a dose volume (which is possible to do with the same weight of coffee but ground coarser) you can over dose, which means there's not enough headspace, and it causes issues with the way the water pressure builds up, and how the water flows through the puck of coffee.
If you end up with a bigger headspace (which, again, is possible to do with the same weight of coffee ground finer) you can under dose.
Under dosing doesn't necessarily cause problems with the shot, it mainly just leads to a soggy puck, but it can require a finer grind, and can mess up the shot slightly from that perspective.
So grinding finer with the same dose weight can actually lead to a smaller dose, which can lead to a finer grind being required.
If you think about that, it means that in intentionally changing one variable (grind size) can have a side effect on another variable (dose volume) which can in part override the intentional change, making you scratch your head and wonder why grinding finer didn't produce the intended result.
So just be aware that the dose volume will change as you're changing the grind size if you're sticking to the same dose weight.
If you have a Sage coffee machine, I'd always recommend using the the razor tool they come with, at least when getting started, because this keeps the shot volume the same every time, so it makes things more straight forward.
Just keep in mind, though, that when you're using the razor tool, you need to base your yield off the dose weight after trimming with the razor tool, not before.
If you grind 20g, but you have 18g after trimming, then a 1:2 would be 36g, not 40g.
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Many people underrate this step, especially with clever machines with super fast heat up times.
If you have a Sage Bambino or Bambino Plus, Barista Pro, Barista Touch or Barista Touch Impress, for example, the amazingly fast three second warm up time only refers to the very small and very efficient heater.
The rest of the machine is absolutely stone cold at this point, including the brew path (the pipes from the pump through to the group) the group, the portafilter and the cup.
So it's important that you run enough water through your machine to heat everything up.
A bonus tip for you, when it comes to all of the machines I've just mentioned, all the thermojet machines from Sage, there's a way to heat them up slightly hotter, which I refer to as doing a "turbo flush".
This works to a certain degree with all thermocoil or themoblock machines, but the more traditional bigger thermoblocks don't suffer quite from the same degree in this area, as they're bigger units that kick off more heat inside the machine.
Thermocoils work by pumping water through a heated block, and they're set up to work based on the speed that the water will be passing through the coil when there's pressure in the basket.
So when you flush water through the group without any pressure, the water has less contact time with the heater, so it comes out of the group cooler.
With the Bambino, Bambino Plus, Barista Pro and the other thermojet machines, if you do the heating flush with the standard basket in place, water will hit the cup at about 60C.
If you do it with a cleaning disk with a hole in the middle (if you have one of the machines that came with a hole only, don't do this if you have a proper cleaning disk without a hole), or with the dual walled basket (pressurised basket), the water will hit the cup at around 80c, as the water is having the expected contact time with the coil.
By the way, don't mistake the temperature hitting the cup with brew temperature. The brew temperature is the temp that the water is when it hits the coffee, the extracted espresso isn't going to be at this temperature.
It's important to warm up your cup too, you'll be surprised how good a heat sink a cold cup can be. Just try it, pull a shot into a cold cup, then a hot cup, and see if it makes a different to the shot temperature if you start drinking it straight away.
I know, this is sacrilege, and you may think that I'm biased here, and I'd want you to waste coffee so you need to order more sooner ;-).
Actually, not at all, I despise waste, especially when it comes to lovely high quality freshly roasted coffee beans, knowing just how much love and care has gone in all the way from seedling to bag.
But the fact is, with most coffee grinders, there's something called exchanged retention, and you need to get rid of this, in certain cases.
Exchanged retention is the amount of ground coffee that is retained each time you grind, which then ends up in your next basket of coffee the next time you grind.
In order to get rid of this, we do what's known as purging, which just means grinding a bit and knocking it in to the knock box.
If you're making a few back to back shots, at the same grind size with the same coffee beans, no wastage required. If you've changed the grind size, or if it's been a while since you last ground, if you don't purge, some of the coffee in your next basket will be stale, or at a different grind size.
If you don't want to waste coffee, its absolutely fine, you don't have to, but be aware that the first shot of the day or the first shot after changing the grind size, isn't going to be perfect.
]]>That's what we're going to explore with this post, and in reading it you're going to discover loads more about Arabica coffee and other types of coffee.
Arabica, or Coffea Arabica to give it it's full title, is a species of coffee tree, with various varietals (varieties, we just use the word varietals because it makes us sound clever), and it's one of the two main commercially used coffee species.
So Arabica coffee beans are the seeds of the fruit (cherries) that grow on the various varietals of the Arabica coffee tree. They're trees or shrubs, by the way, although they're often referred to as coffee plants.
Arabica coffee was discovered by a goat herder... wait, what? No it flipping wasn't! ;-). Well OK, I can't be 100% certain, but this is a tale which I don't believe has any truth to it.
If you do a bit of Googling it won't be long before you find the story about Kaldi the goatherd, and if you haven't, it goes something like this:
Kaldi was an Ethiopian goatherd, apparently he noticed his goats munching on some berries and then doing goat parkour and riding skateboards, kitesurfing, all sorts.
OK I may have made up some of that. Anyway, he apparently took these cherries to a local Catholic Monastery, because that makes sense.
The abbot of the Monastery lobbed them on the fire, and then noticed an amazing aroma, so he threw water on the fire, and then decided to taste the resulting sludge. OK, I'd probably do that, it sounds like fun.
He shared his discovery with the other monks, and there we have it, a story (first written by a Christian chap called Antoine Faustus Nairon) which appears to suggest that coffee is Christian discovery after all.
This legend is very similar to an earlier one about the discovery of coffee which involves a Sufi mystic called Ghothul Akbar Nooruddin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, or Sheikh al-Shadhili.
This story is also set in Ethiopia, but here we have energetic birds instead of hyperactive goats, which lead to our protagonist wanting some of what these birds had been on, trying some of these berries for himself, and noticing the same energy boost the birds had received.
At least we know that the character in this story is a real person, but this doesn't ring true to me either, because when have you ever noticed a bird not being energetic?
Have you ever seen a sparrow chilling out, a Robin having a rest, or a Resplendent quetzal (which is a real bird by the way although it does look made up) yawning while nonchalantly nibbling a fig?
So unless the birds in question were displaying some kind of super powers, I'm really not entirely sure how a bird could stand out for being energetic. So I'm not buying that one either.
There's another story about the origins of Arabica coffee that sounds more believable to me.
This story which comes from Arabic tradition, depicts a Civet initially being responsible for dispersing coffee beans into the Ethiopian highlands, where it was used & cultivated for quite some time by the Oromo people, before being eventually discovered by merchants who took it to Yemen.
There's historical evidence to support the fact that coffee was first imported to Yemen from Ethiopia by merchants, plus, the Oromo people native to the Oromia region of Ethiopia and parts of Kenya, have a very long documented history with coffee.
This history is thought to way pre-date coffee being brewed, this probably came much later, it's thought that it began with mixing whole coffee cherries with animal fat to make a snack that was carried in a dedicated leather pouch to keep them satiated and energised during long and tiring hunting & gathering expeditions.
So this seems like a much more sensible explanation of the true origins of coffee, although we'll never know for sure.
I do realise, by the way, that most of the people who share the goatherd story do so as a fun little anecdote, but there are some people who literally quote this as the true origins of coffee, which just gets my goat, and yes that pun was intended, sorry.
The other main species of coffee tree that we use the seeds from, is Robusta - Coffea Canephora.
Robusta is a far more robust species, hence the name. It's more hardy, easier to grow and cheaper to produce.
Robusta also has roughly double the caffeine content vs Arabica, and most Robusta coffee beans are fairly harsh and overpowering where taste is concerned, known for bitter astringency.
I say "most", because this is partly down to the way most Robusta is produced, and there is some really interesting high quality Robusta being produced, which I think is really quite an exciting developing area of coffee that we'll see a lot of movement in during the next few years.
Robusta is usually blended with Arabica, rather than being used on its own, and in small percentages, it can help to create amazing espresso blends.
As I've said, I think this will start changing in the future, I think there will be an increasing number of really interesting Robusta beans being produced that people will want to drink on their own and not as part of an Arabica Robusta blend.
Currently though, the vast majority of Robusta is used via blends.
Kind of, but it's not quite as simple as that. Although the best quality coffee beans that are currently used commercially, are Arabica, this doesn't mean that all Arabica beans are the best.
You'll sometimes see the cheapest, worst tasting (in my opinion, each to their own) jars of instant coffee proudly boasting to be "100% Arabica", and most of the beans sitting on supermarket shelves are also 100% Arabica, does this mean they're all the best quality Arabica?
The simple answer to the question "Is Arabica the best type of coffee" is: Not all Arabica is made equally.
Arabica CAN be the best quality coffee, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is.
If you're producing Arabica coffee to be sold on the commodities market, you have to produce it as cheaply as possible, as you have no control over the cost price.
If the current price per pound has dropped to one dollar forty five for example, as it did in 2022, or even down to below 90 cents per pound as it did in 2019, and you're a farmer with produce to sell, that's what you're getting for your coffee beans - regardless of how much it actually cost you to produce.
So when you're producing coffee, whether you're a small family owned coffee farm or a much bigger operation, you need to produce it as cheaply as you can, and the cheapest produced Arabica coffee isn't going to be the best quality.
To grow coffee as low cost as possible, you need to grow it at a relatively low altitude, as higher grown coffee is much more expensive to produce.
You'll probably need to use the sun grown method (in some cases turning huge expanses of tropical forest into what look like vineyards, just row after row of coffee trees), and a lot of the time this kind of coffee production requires the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
You'll need to choose the lowest cost process from start to finish, including harvesting and processing, and the result is that the lowest cost coffee to produce is very unlikely to be the best quality coffee beans, leading to the best tasting coffee.
That really depends, there's so much variety when it comes to Arabica coffee beans. It depends on the origin of the coffee, the varietals or mix of varietals, how it was roasted & how it was brewed.
If you're thinking that "coffee just tastes like coffee", this is a sentiment that comes from "normal" mainstream coffee, it's really not the case when it comes to speciality coffee.
This isn't coffee snobbery, by the way, it's fact.
Most of the coffee beans that most of us Brits have been consuming up until fairly recently, have been big brand or generic brand commodity coffee that is produced, traded, roasted and imported in huge volumes.
This kind of coffee ends being a much of a muchness when it comes to the taste in the cup, simply due to the nature of these kinds of coffee beans.
To explain this I'll tell you a little story, don't worry, this one doesn't involve goat herders ;-).
When jack came down the beanstalk, being chased by the giant (who's often portrayed as the bad guy, but when you think about it, he was a burglary victim, Jack was the perpetrator) in addition to the goose or the chicken or whatever it was, some kind of golden egg laying poultry, he also pilfered a few magical plants.
Jack came to realise that the seeds of the cherries of this magical plant, are packed full of magic.
He developed a little business for himself selling the freshly picked and carefully processed magical seeds, which gave the drinker all kinds of super powers, invisibility, flight, X-ray vision & so on.
Little did Jack know, however, that while he was drawing the attention of the angry giant, there was another tea leaf up there too, by the name of Joe, who nabbed as many of these magical plants as he could get his hands on.
Being more business minded than Jack, Joe developed a huge operation, processing and distributing these magical beans all over the magical fairy tale kingdom.
Joe's beans, however, were being produced on the kind of commercial scale that made it impossible to result in beans that retained the same kind of magic in them when they reached the customer, as with Jack's beans.
Joe's customers had mild magical abilities as a result of consuming the resulting magical brew, while Jacks customers could walk through walls, teleport, fly, and all manner of other impressive and convenient side effects of making their magical elixir from these magic packed beans.
When we're talking about coffee beans we're mainly talking about taste, although the magical powers analogy actually isn't all that far off when you consider the energy and mood enhancing quality of coffee!
Basically, coffee beans are treated very differently all the way from growing right through to being brewed, depending on what market they're headed for, and the kind of coffee most of us grew up with in the UK, tends to taste like "coffee".
This is why many people who've not yet tried speciality coffee, often don't get it, until you've experienced what this kind of coffee has to offer, it probably seems a bit weird.
This doesn't mean speciality Arabica coffee beans taste weird.
I had a comment on one of my Instagram videos not long ago, from someone who declared that speciality coffee tasted sour & strange.
When I asked for more info, it turned out that they had one experience with speciality coffee at a well known speciality coffee shop in London, and from this one experience, they'd determined that they this kind of coffee isn't for them.
What had clearly happened here is that the first coffee they'd tried was one that didn't agree with their taste buds, and given where this was, I'd imagine that this was quite an interesting coffee, possibly a light roast natural processed coffee.
I'd recommend if you're trying speciality coffee, start out with something similar to what you're used to, rather than jumping in at the deep end.
Heart & Graft (a very well known Manchester based roaster) have a great idea in this regard, that they were using at the Manchester Coffee Festival recently.
They had four urns of different coffee on a rotating wheel, starting out with a more "normal" tasting specialty coffee, which most people who were more used to drinking mainstream coffee would probably be a bit more familiar with. This was tasty, enjoyable, and easy drinking.
They then took the visitor on a journey, tasting slightly more interesting coffees until they got around to their "Crazyhorse", warning that anyone who started out with crazyhorse who isn't used to this kind of coffee, may have a bit of a shock.
This was a natural processed Honduran, and it didn't shock me as I've tasted some really wild speciality coffees, but I can definitely see how someone who things coffee just tastes like coffee, would get a shock when tasting coffee that doesn't actually taste much like coffee at all ;-).
This probably had more in common with mulled wine in terms of flavours, than a "normal" cup of coffee.
I really enjoy tasting weird and wonderful coffees like this, although I also love my espresso blends, and I definitely wouldn't use a bean like when making a flat white.
Some people do use fruity, funky naturals for milkies, and each to their own, but to me it often makes them taste like the milk is off. But as black coffee, I love this kind of Arabica.
But most speciality coffees don't taste this wild and funky.
If you want it you can certainly find it, our Cranberry and Pomegranate or Melon and Toffee Ethiopia for example, are different & interesting coffees for anyone who wants to try something a bit off the beaten path in terms of the coffees that are considered more "normal".
Cranberry and Pomegranate
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Melon and Toffee Ethiopia
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
However, if you're transitioning from having spent years drinking "coffee that just tastes like coffee", you'd be better off starting out with Arabica coffee beans along the lines of Millionaire's Shortbread Honduras, Choc and Nut Colombia ,Dark Chocolate Sumatra Mandheling, or Cherry and Caramel Brazil.
Millionaire's Shortbread
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Choc and Nut Colombia
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Dark Chocolate and Sumatra Mandheling
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Cherry and Caramel Brazil
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
The Fairtrade logo on a bag of Arabica coffee means that the producer is enrolled in the Fairtrade scheme.
It means the producer is guaranteed to receive a set price for their coffee beans, which is higher than the commodity price, and they also receive the Fairtrade premium.
This doesn't necessarily mean that Fairtrade coffee is better quality than Arabica coffee beans that don't carry the Fairtrade logo, and although the Fairtrade price producers receive for their beans is higher than the commodity price, generally speaking the price paid for speciality coffee beans is much higher.
Arabica and Robusta are the main coffee species that are currently used commercially, they're not the only coffee species, though - there are many.
Coffea Liberica is a coffee species that is seeing a resurgence. This species was particularly popular in the late 1800s, at a time that Arabica producers were really struggling with leaf rust.
It became apparent that it was a bit harder for big producers to work with, it has to be very carefully processed and roasted in order to taste good.
Back in the late 19th century thought most of the roasters were bigger operations, roasting beans in large volumes. These days there are large numbers of small batch roasters who have the roasting chops to be able to give these beans the care they require in order to end up tasting great.
There are lots of varietals and cultivars of varietals, and you've probably heard of some of these even if you weren't aware of what they are. Typica, Bourbon, Kona, Blue Mountain and Geisha are varietals you may have heard of.
There are also many cultivars of varietals (cultivated variants), hybrids and crosses, which are usually referred to also as varietals although technically speaking they're not.
For more info on all the different varietals, cultivars and so on, see: coffee plants of the world - SCA.
There really isn't a "best" where these are concerned, it's just personal preference. The great thing about speciality coffee is there's just so much choice, try lots of different coffees and you'll start to figure out in time what coffee beans you have a preference for.
The best quality Arabica coffee beans are those that have been produced literally from start to finish with quality in mind.
There's a huge difference between the speciality coffee market and the commodity coffee market. Speciality coffee is priced based on quality, the better the quality, the more the producer gets for it.
Coffee that is being produced for the speciality coffee market is cupped by SCA Q graders, it has to score over 80/100 to be classed as SCA approved speciality coffee, and generally speaking the price increases with each additional point.
So this isn't a case of coming up with a fancy brand name or high quality packaging, it's literally a case of doing everything possible to produce the best tasting coffee.
Not all coffee producers are fortunate enough to be able to even consider producing for the speciality market, I think it's important to make that clear.
The location of the farm is one of the keys to the potential cup quality, the specific conditions in that area including the soil condition, altitude & shade. The producer also needs to be able to afford the costs involved in being SCA graded, or to be part of a COOP that shares the costs with its members.
But those who are able to produce coffee beans that have the potential to become SCA scored 80 or above, have a lot of incentive to pull out all the stops and produce the best quality coffee beans they possibly can.
I'm not only talking about the fact that price is linked to quality score. I can imagine that there's a huge amount of pride and sense of accomplishment in being awarded a high quality score, after all time, effort and investment that will have gone into it.
OK so we've ascertained that not all Arabica coffee beans are the same, and that the best quality Arabica beans are those that have been produced with quality in mind, in that they've been produced for the the speciality coffee market, rather than being produced with the commodities market in mind.
But which are the best of the best Arabica coffee beans? In other words, which are the best speciality coffee beans?
The word "best" is hugely subjective, your best won't necessarily by my best, so a lot of it is just down to personal taste. Higher scoring coffees into the high 80s and beyond, have been awarded a higher score by the Q graders, this doesn't necessarily mean that you'll prefer a SCA 87 bean over an 82, or 83, for example.
This is really what it comes down to. While there's a big difference in quality from commodity Arabica to speciality Arabica coffee beans, a lot of the difference in taste from one speciality coffee to another comes down to personal preference.
I've tasted some very high scoring coffees that I think are very vibrant and full of flavour, but aren't necessarily my "cup of tea". If you're looking for a coffee that tastes like tropical fruits, for example, and you find a high scoring speciality Arabica that tastes just like tropical fruits, then you might declare that to be the best coffee you've ever tasted.
If, on the other hand you tend to prefer low acidity, sweeter coffees with chocolate and caramel notes, you might not find that this particular coffee bean is one of your favourites despite it being scored higher than some of your favourite beans.
]]>You decide to go back to the beans you were using previously, and you vow never to use those terrible tasting coffee beans again in your life!
This is a lot more common that you may think, and strangely, it's more common with high quality, freshly roasted coffee beans than it is with "normal" mainstream big brand or generic brand beans.
If this has ever happened to you, you may be surprised to hear that it's not the coffee beans!
This is most common when people have switched from their normal supermarket mainstream coffee beans, to buying freshly roasted beans, and in some cases it can happen with the first bag, while often it happens a few bags later.
So what's the crack here, if it's not the coffee beans, why does one bag of coffee suddenly taste terrible when you were happy with the espresso you were getting from the last bag of beans, or why when you switch from "normal" beans to freshly roasted, would you find that it doesn't taste as good?
The main cause is:
This is the most common with integrated grinder espresso machines, such as the Sage Barista Express and Barista Pro.
People switching from "normal" coffee machines, bean to cup machines, to integrated grinder traditional coffee machine often use them in what I call "set & forget" mode, where they might do a little bit of adjustment when making their first coffee, and then rarely or never change the settings after that.
It's important to understand if you do want to use your integrated grinder machine in this way, you can (and I'll explain how shortly) but you have to do a couple of very specific things, and most people miss these things, which is why they end up disappointed with the quality of the coffee they're making.
So what tends to happen is that the first couple of bags of freshly roasted coffee beans they get after switching, aren't too far off being within the realms of properly extracted with their set & forget settings, but then they get a bag of beans that is very under or over extracted (usually under) with their settings, and it tastes very wrong.
Best Bean to Cup coffee machine recommendations
Best Espresso Coffee Machine Recommendations
Traditional, portafilter espresso machines are capable of the best tasting espresso, but they need dialling in, with every different bag of coffee beans you use.
You can't just dial in once with the beans you start out with, and then leave the settings as they are. Well, you can, but only with "mainstream" commodity coffee beans, for reasons that I'll illustrate shortly.
Dialling in means to tweak the grind size and other parameters to improve the extraction.
Some people (quite a lot of people, it would appear) decide to switch to an integrated grinder espresso machine such as a Sage Barista Express or Barista Pro, expecting that they can use it exactly the same as they used their previous machine, and enjoy the better tasting coffee that these machines will apparently produce.
It's really no wonder that people make this misunderstanding giving that a lot of the big retailers actually sell machines like the Barista Express and other integrated grinder machines as bean to cup coffee machines, by the way, but they're really not.
Bean to cup machines are coffee machines that have technology to replace the barista, they offer vending machine type convenience, but use whole beans, so all the user has to do is put beans in the top and press a button.
There's a built in grinder, and a brewing unit, sometimes called the "infuser", and there's very little for the user to do other than keep the hopper and water tank full, and to keep the used coffee grounds bin and the drip tray emptied.
Bean to cup espresso is slightly different to traditional portafilter espresso, at least when we're talking about home machines, in that they tend to produce a less intense espresso. They're really geared up for long coffees, lungo & cafe crema.
If you were to drink espresso from a bean to cup machine, and espresso from a traditional portafilter espresso machine side by side, you'd probably find that the bean to cup version is less intense in both taste and mouthfeel.
Many people want coffee closer to the quality they'll get from their favourite coffee shop, and this is often the reason for going for something like the Barista Express, but the mistake is in thinking that using this machine is just like using their previous bean to cup machine.
As I mentioned earlier, it is possible to use espresso machines like this in set and forget mode, meaning you don't need to dial in each new bag of coffee, but there are a couple of specific requirements if you want to do this.
The main prerequisite for using your machine like this, is you'll need to stick to mainstream, commodity coffee beans, so this is fine if that was what you were planning to do anyway.
If you're using "normal" coffee beans and not higher quality freshly roasted beans, you can't really make these taste much different, no matter what you do with them.
What people tend to do, though, is to start off with the beans they would usually use, and they're generally happy with the taste.
But then they switch to freshly roasted beans, sometimes to find out what the fuss is all about, and often, the shot is severely under extracted, and it tastes really bad.
So my main advice to anyone who wants to use their machine like that, is to keep buying your favourite "normal" beans, and don't worry about freshly roasted beans, or speciality coffee beans.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love you to buy our coffee, and I think most people would find that a well extracted shot of any of our coffee beans will taste way better than any bag of supermarket coffee, but using freshly roasted beans does mean you can't really use your portafilter espresso machine as if it were a bean to cup machine.
This doesn't mean that you have to go full tilt towards home barista geek, though. If you're using forgiving beans (I'll explain), just a couple of very easy tweaks with each bag of beans should be all you need to do, and it'll become second nature once you're used to it.
I'll create a little fanciful story to better illustrate this.
After Jack's mum axed down the giant beanstalk, they lived happily ever after only for a while, ironic I know. But then the golden hen did a runner, so they needed to start looking at earning some money.
Jack had a keen interest in horticulture, and the initial fairy tale missed the part where he bought a few magic plants back down the beanstalk with him.
The beans from these plants had amazing magical properties, but Jack discovered that caution was advisable.
He learned that if you ground them with a mortar and pestle, (or is it pestle and mortar, I'm never sure) and brew them, if you get the brew right it'll give the drinker super-human strength and eternal youth.
He also learned, in a rather alarming manner, that if you get the brew wrong, instead of a magical elixir, you end up with a brew that will cause the drinker to swell up like a balloon & float off into the distance, like Harry Potter's Aunt Marge.
Little did Jack know that someone called Joe also had a similar encounter with some magic beans, but being very enterprising, Joe wasn't bothered about harps or hens.
He sneakily brought sacks full of these plants down the beanstalk with him while Jack had the attention of the giant, and he went about setting up a huge enterprise to produce & distribute these beans all over the magical kingdom of wherever the heck Jack & The Beanstalk is supposed to be set.
The beans that Joe was creating were produced in such a huge commercial scale, that these beans only had a bit of magic left in them by the time they reached the buyer, simply because producing beans that are full of magic and preserving that magic all the way through to the cup just isn't as commercially viable.
On the positive side, the person purchasing Joes beans wouldn't be able to do anything wrong with them that may lead to adverse reactions.
On the negative side, the little magic left in these beans would only provide a very small amount of positive impact on the drinker, maybe a slight glow to the skin & a minor reduction in flatulence, but no eternal youth or superhuman strength.
Here we have what I hope is a helpful analogy to describe the difference between freshly roasted, high quality coffee beans, and mainstream coffee beans.
How long do coffee beans last?
Prior to roasting, coffee beans are hard, greenish yellow uninviting little things that look a bit like peanuts, and wouldn't taste of much if you ground them and brewed them.
So much magic happens chemically when beans are roasted, but that magic can be lost in a couple of ways.
The main way it tends to be lost is by being roasted overly dark, thus getting rid of all the subtle nuances the bean had to offer.
The main reason commodity coffee is roasted in this way is because the batch consistency wouldn't be great otherwise, and big brands need batch consistency. The mix of beans is never exactly the same, if they didn't roast so dark, each batch would end up tasting quite a bit different.
The second most common way to lose this magic, is the staling process, caused mainly by oxidation.
With mainstream coffee, you have no clue when it was roasted as there's no roasted on date on the packaging. You also don't know how long the green (raw) beans were kept in storage after harvest before they were roasted, and with commodity coffee, this can be a few years or even more than a few years in some cases.
When you switch from "normal" coffee beans, to freshly roasted high quality coffee beans, you're basically switching from beans that don't have much magic left, to beans that are still jam packed full of it.
With coffee beans, thankfully this isn't going to lead to any kind of adverse reaction requiring a trip to the accidental magic reversal department. The only strong adverse reaction is likely to come from your taste buds.
Mainstream coffee beans don't have the same amount of "magic" remaining in them to allow the possibility for them to go very right or very wrong, and this means they're very easy to use, and generally speaking they lead to a "coffee like" taste, and in my opinion it's for this reason that people who've not yet experienced speciality coffee, tend to believe that "coffee just tastes like coffee".
If you're buying freshly roasted beans, they're still full of magic.
The positive side of this is that if brewed correctly, that can lead to amazing tasting coffee, possibly even coffee that tastes so good that it makes you question your beliefs entirely on what coffee is and how it can taste.
The negative side is that if brewed incorrectly, they can taste very bad, possibly making you question whether this speciality coffee thing is a complete fairy tale.
So, with this all said, what can you do in order to get better results with your magic, freshly roasted coffee beans?
How to store your coffee beans
Generally speaking, if you're switching from supermarket beans to freshly roasted beans, the problem you'll face is a very simple case of under extraction.
The main problem is usually that the grind size is too coarse. If you choke the machine (no espresso flowing) then it's the opposite problem, this means the grind is too fine. But if you're switching from supermarket beans, the problem will usually be too coarse a grind.
You can tell that this is the case when you find that the normal grind time is leading to your portafilter overflowing, and to lots of coffee being trimmed off when you use the razor tool, if you use it.
A good sign that the grind is too coarse, is too much coffee in the basket, a sign that the grind is too fine is your tamper dropping deeper into the basket.
So if all you do is to take your grind a few clicks finer, this will help, but another thing that makes a big difference is ratio.
If you keep the dose (the amount of coffee you grind into the basket) the same, but change the yield (the amount of espresso) you change the ratio, which is the relationship between the amount of ground coffee and the resulting amount of espresso.
A "normale" espresso is usually around 1:2, 18g of coffee to 36g (or so) of espresso. A lungo is around 1:3 - 1:4, and a ristretto is around 1:1 - 1:1.5.
Changing the ratio changes the extraction (how much of the compounds are extracted), and therefore the taste, but also the mouthfeel, and intensity.
A bigger ratio reduces the overall strength and the mouthfeel, but extracts more of the compounds.
So to a certain degree you can control the extraction just by pulling a smaller or bigger shot, if the espresso tastes on the sour side, pulling a bigger shot will extract more so it'll taste less sour.
The reason you wouldn't want to control the extraction purely with ratio, though, is that you sacrifice intensity and mouthfeel by going too far with the ratio. So you may increase the ratio in order to reduce unpleasant acidity, but you may lose texture and strength at the same time.
A great way to approach dialling in is to use a combination of grind size and ratio to balance the shot.
If a shot tastes tangy, overly acidic, but the flavour is intense (bad, but intense), a slight increase in ratio in combination with an adjustment a tad finer on the grind size, could be all you need to do, to produce an amazing tasting shot.
The biggest shock when people are using their machines in set and forget mode, is when they switch to a light or medium roast single origin coffee bean, and the reason for this is that these tend to require more skill from the user in extracting more of that magic we've been talking about.
Most people who're relatively new to speciality coffee, will probably find that they don't like the taste of a lot of the lighter roast beans as espresso, even if they do manage to dial them in well and extract a great shot.
A good way to figure out if this is the case or not, is to get yourself to one of the coffee festivals, Manchester Coffee Festival, London Coffee Festival or whatever coffee event is more local to you.
The photo above for example is one I took at the recent Manchester Coffee Festival, at the Sanremo stand. They were pulling really interesting shots using a light to medium roast single origin natural processed coffee bean, on the Sanremo You espresso machine.
If you go to these kinds of events you'll find loads of roasters, and you'll invariably find some who're using lighter roast beans for espresso, and you'll experience what these tend to taste like when properly extracted.
If you find that you love this kind of espresso, then great, but just keep in mind that you may have to upgrade your gear and your home barista skills to get decent results with lighter roasts.
If you prefer classic espresso profiles, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, caramel, nutty notes and so on, then you're in luck, because these kind of beans are more forgiving, as they're easier to extract. There's still a bit of skill required, but not as much as with getting great results with lighter roasts.
In terms of our coffee beans, the easiest, most forgiving beans to dial in for espresso, are the beans found in our Beginner Home Barista Collection.
Beginner Home Barista Collection
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order
Three of the four beans in this collection are medium dark roast espresso blends. If you're used to supermarket coffee beans, they'll look slightly lighter in colour to what you probably think of as dark roast.
This is something you'll get used to as you move from mainstream to speciality coffee, as what small batch roasters call "dark" or "medium" is very different to what big brands would call medium or dark roasts.
Fruit and Nut blend is a blend of two speciality coffee beans (Brazilian Mió lot 1930, SCA score of 84.5, and Costa Rican La Trinidad, SCA 85), it's just a tad lighter in roast level than the others, and this bean is just slightly more challenging than the other three.
So with this collection you have the opportunity to "cut your teeth with the other more forgiving blends, before giving yourself just a little bit of a challenge in the form of the Fruit & Nut blend, which will generally involve a combination of grinding finer and increasing the ratio slightly, vs the other blends in the collection.
If you're not interested in developing your home barista skills, and you're just looking for as tasty espresso as possible with as little effort as possible, then my recommendations where our coffee is concerned, would be these two:
Chocolate Brownie Blend
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Chocolate Fondant Blend
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
These are both blends of the same beans, two Arabicas (Brazilian Santos & Ethiopian Mocha Djimmah) and Indian Cherry Robusta.
Chocolate brownie blend is a slightly smoother and more mellow blending of these beans, while Chocolate Fondant blend has more of the Ethiopian Mocha Djimmah at a slightly more developed roast, and as a result it has a slightly toasty note which for me just tastes like chocolate fondant, hence the name.
If you're not sure, have a look at our bundle deal that combines both of these coffees (our two most popular coffee beans), and save money at the same time :-).
Chocolate Brownie and Chocolate Fondant Bundle Deal
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
If you're moving from "normal" mainstream coffee beans to freshly roasted beans, and you just want a bean that will give you great espresso with as little hassle as possible, I'd recommend these two, depending on how intense you like your espresso.
So to conclude, if you're using an integrated grinder espresso machine including (but not limited to) the Sage Barista Express, and you find that some coffees taste awful, you now know the most probably cause, and what you can do about it.
]]>Either that or you were just bored, and fancied reading about kilo bags of coffee beans, in which case, whatever floats your boat ;-).
If you literally just wanted a 1Kg bag of coffee beans and you wanted a quick suggestion, then before I go on, these are our best sellers in terms of freshly roasted, 1Kg coffee beans:
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
I wonder if many people searching for best 1Kg coffee beans actually realise what a good question this really is?
If you were thinking it was a fairly mundane question with not much going for it, along the lines of which is the best rice, or which is the best white bread, then you may be surprised to find that there is way more difference between one 1 Kilo bag of coffee beans and another, than with other items on your shopping list.
So if you thought you were wasting your time, you're really not, you're investing your time very well on answering a very important question.
Before we get into detail about the best, the worst & the rest, let's first talk about why buying your beans by the Kilo is a good idea.
The most obvious reason to buy 1Kg bags of coffee vs smaller quantities, is price.
When you buy your coffee in 1Kg bags vs 200, 227 or 250g, what you need to keep in mind is that you're using a quarter of the packaging material (bags & labels) and a quarter of the labour, as it takes about the same time to pack up 250g of coffee than it takes to pack up 1Kg of coffee.
So as a result, it's cheaper to buy your coffee by the kilo.
When it comes to freshly roasted coffee beans though (and we'll talk about the differences between freshly roasted and "normal" mainstream coffee beans shortly) there's another reason that 1Kg coffee beans are cheaper, which is that most roasters also roast for wholesale customers.
If you're a roastery that is roasting for wholesale, when you move to also supplying retail customers, the main reason for charging more is the increased cost of sale of selling to retail.
A lot of people don't realise this, and instead just assume that companies like to rip off the individual, which isn't the case.
The cost of acquiring a customer, and then the average lifetime value of that customer, has to be taken into account when working out pricing.
The cost of acquiring new retail customers is about the same as acquiring a wholesale customer, and the average lifetime value of wholesale customers if much higher.
So with this, and the increased cost of selling coffee in smaller quantities, it's not hard to understand why retails customers end up having to pay more.
However, roasters tend to price their retail 1Kg coffee beans much closer to their wholesale pricing, vs the cost of the smaller bags.
So many roasters will see 1Kg coffee beans more as their wholesale volume, and 200/250g bags as retail, so if you buy by the kilo you generally end up paying closer to wholesale price.
Delivery cost also comes into play here, when it comes to buying by the kilo being cheaper, as many roasters and suppliers will give free delivery over a certain spend.
I'll let you into a little secret here, which really isn't a secret, and I'm sure you're aware, but the truth is, nothing is free! ;-).
When a roaster or coffee supplier states that they offer free delivery when you buy a kilo (or over a certain cost, which achieves the same aim) what they're really saying is that they've factored the cost of delivery into the price of a kilo of coffee.
It's usually not possible to factor all of the delivery price into a 200 or 250g bag, so they have to add a delivery charge to ensure they don't make a loss when selling coffee in smaller volumes.
The less obvious reason to buy 1Kg bags of coffee, is dialing in.
If you're using a brewing method that requires more dialing in, espresso of course, but also pourover and other brew methods albeit to maybe a slightly lesser degree, buying your beans by the 1Kg bag makes so much more sense than buying smaller bags.
Let's say you're using an espresso machine, and you're using standard, traditional espresso baskets so that you can dial in for as close to perfect extraction as possible.
If you've had some experience already of using traditional espresso machines, you'll be nodding your head in agreement (which may look strange to any onlooker) when I say that it's almost impossible to get decent results with your first shot.
In fact, if you're relatively new to dialing in, you'll probably be familiar with having worked your way all the way to the bottom of a 250g bag, and you're still not properly dialled in.
This isn't a rarity, this is actually hugely common, because espresso is a pain in the backside ;-), it's amazing when you get it right, but wow you have to work for it, especially when you're just getting started.
When you're going through the initial learning curve, at least, buying beans by the kilo makes a lot more sense.
I'd also recommend sticking to one bean initially, rather than continually trying lots of different coffee beans, just while you're initially honing your skills. Of course once you've started to get the hang of things you'll want to start trying different beans, and this is where your skills will really start to develop, as you rise to the challenge of dialing in different beans.
How long do coffee beans last?
When you do get to the point that you'd like to try dialling in various different beans, check this out, a 1Kg box (4 x 250g) of four relatively forgiving blends, to ease yourself into dialling in:
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Is buying 1Kg coffee beans better for the planet?
Another consideration when it comes to whether you should buy your coffee by the kilo or in smaller quantities, is sustainability.
Buying by the kilo means less bags, less degassing valves, less seal strips, so there's less carbon footprint involved with making the packaging for your coffee, and less waste.
It also means less carbon footprint where delivery is concerned, if we're comparing buying one or two 250g bags at a time vs buying 1Kg at a time.
If you're buying 4 x 250g bags per month vs one 1Kg bag, then of course there's no difference where delivery is concerned, but some people prefer to have a fortnightly or even a weekly delivery so they can always crack open a freshly roasted bag, so this means your coffee has a bigger carbon footprint due to delivery, which is something that many people are starting to thing about.
OK so we've explored the reasons to buy coffee by the Kilo, now let's get into what you're probably really hoping to discover, which is what 1Kg beans are the best.
The first thing to explain here is that there are essentially two main types of coffee, there is "mainstream" commodity coffee, and there's freshly roasted coffee.
Mainstream coffee, or commodity coffee, is coffee that is produced, traded and roasted in huge quantities. It's priced by the commodities market, so this kind of coffee is really just coffee, just as rice is just rice, oil is just oil, sugar is just sugar, and so on.
Where do coffee beans come from?
Up until the early to mid 1970's, this was the only type of coffee. There were small roasters in certain parts of the world who would trade door to door in some parts of the world, or via markets and so on, but it was all pretty much the same kind of coffee that was being roasted. So this kind of coffee was freshly roasted, but it was the same kind of green coffee (raw unroasted coffee beans) that were being used.
This is until an amazing young lady called Erna Knutsen came along, and changed everything!
Erna worked for a one of the big coffee traders in San Francisco, in the early 70s.
She was a secretary, so when she showed an interest in getting involved in coffee, she faced an uphill battle, to say the least, which started out with her having to do remote cuppings from her booth, waiting for one of the men to bring her a cup, as women weren't allowed in the cupping room.
She convinced her boss to give her a seat at the cupping table and to allow her to sell coffee, which lead to some of the male salesmen threatening to revolt (they sound fairly revolting anyway).
Erna found that there were a number of interesting producers in more remote origins, producing what were referred to as "broken lots", which she referred to as "gems".
The big traders weren't interesting in these, as they bought by the full shipping container, and these small lots didn't fill a container.
She knew a number of smaller roasters that the big traders also weren't interested in, she convinced these guys that this special coffee was worth the extra cost, it worked, and she created a booming trade, which she called "Specialty coffee".
She literally started the speciality coffee movement.
Oh, and she then bought the company, and she very kindly solved the problem of the blokes who didn't want to work with her, by handing them their P45s, hehe.
Since Erna Knutson coined the phrase "Specialty coffee" during an interview in 1974 with a trade journal, specialty or speciality coffee has been the phrase to describe the high quality, smaller lots of coffee that were being freshly roasted and sold in smaller volumes, often directly from roaster to customer.
By "high quality" we're talking about coffee beans that have been grown & processed in order to produce the best cup quality that this origin has to offer, and then also exported roasted and (hopefully) brewed all with the same aim of producing outstanding, characteristic flavours.
Brands can't just claim that their coffee is speciality, though. It has to have the seal of approval of the Speciality Coffee Association in the form of a cupping score of at least 80/100 to be officially termed "Speciality Coffee".
In 1982, the Specialty Coffee Association of America was formed, SCAA, and later in 1988 the SCAE, Speciality Coffee Association of Europe, and the two merged in 2017 to form what is now simply the Speciality Coffee Association, SCA.
While this may seem like red tape the uninitiated, it's a lot more than that, it protects speciality coffee from being used simply as a marketing term. If that were allowed to happen, speciality coffee would have been polluted to destruction by now, I would imagine.
Big brands do their best to borrow from the speciality industry, using terms that would lead many to believe they're buying speciality coffee, but the fact that supermarket shelves aren't full of bags of coffee with "Specialty" proudly stamped on them purely to increase perceived value, is a very positive thing for the industry!
So speciality coffee is high quality freshly roasted coffee, and the fact that it has a score of 80 or more from the SCA and is therefore officially specialty coffee, is proof that this is the case.
The efforts of Erna, and others involved in the development of speciality coffee, were focused on finding special coffee, and developing a situation where the coffee retained it's special character all the way from farm to cup.
Speciality coffee these days not only achieves that, but the industry rewards producers for higher scoring coffees, as this is how speciality coffee is priced.
So given that speciality coffee is special, characterful coffee, which is priced based on quality, the opposite of speciality coffee is commodity coffee. Commodity coffee is coffee beans that are traded as a commodity, in huge volumes, via the commodities market.
This kind of coffee is just "coffee" in the same way that salt is salt, oil is oil and so on, there's really nothing special about it, in fact it's usually roasted particularly dark in order to ensure batch consistency, so this kind of coffee tends to be fairly generic.
This is why people who haven't yet immersed themselves in speciality coffee are often sceptical about the notion that coffee could have peculiar flavour notes.
"Come on, you're telling me that COFFEE can taste like tropical fruits, fudge, milk chocolate, wine, or other weird and wonderful tastes that have nothing to do with coffee?" Yes, absolutely, if it's a very special bean that has been planted, grown, picked, processed, imported, roasted and brewed in a way that ensures that these characteristics are not lost at any stage.
Back when speciality coffee was just starting out, it was probably fair to say that if it wasn't speciality coffee, then it was commodity coffee, but now while there may be Speciality coffee and non Speciality coffee, this doesn't mean that all non-speciality coffee is the same as "normal" commodity coffee.
There are many smaller producers who can't afford the associated costs of SCA grading. Many small producers join coops which share the costs among many different producers, but small coffee farmers in areas where there isn't a local coop they can join, often don't have the funds to consider trying to gain SCA approval.
Also blends don't qualify as speciality coffee, only single origins.
Many small batch roasters source incredible quality beans from producers who can't officially sell their beans as SCA approved speciality coffee beans, and there are many great espresso blends that can't be officially termed speciality.
In my humble opinion, the best way to ensure that you're buying high quality coffee beans, is to buy freshly roasted coffee beans.
Small batch roasters are usually very passionate about what they do, they're not in it to turn a quick profit, they're in it for the love of it more than anything. So even if you're buying espresso blends, or single origins that haven't been graded, if you're buying beans that have been freshly roasted by a small batch roaster, it's unlikely to be "commodity" in the same sense as the mainstream coffee beans you'd pick up from a supermarket shelf.
Best is a very subjective thing, in reality, the best 1Kg coffee beans are whatever coffee beans you enjoy the most.
But having said that, there is a big price difference, and not only between commodity beans and speciality beans, either. So are these all the same beans just available at different prices, or is there a difference?
There really is a difference.
At the lower end of the price point there are generic brand coffee beans selling for as little as £6-£7 per Kilo when you buy 2 Kilos, and then there are well known brands including Illy, Lavazza, Segafredo & Pelican Rouge selling their beans for around £10-£12 per kilo.
To the average every day coffee drinker, it may seem that this is commodity vs speciality, and this isn't the case at all. Most of the big well known brands are actually trading in commodity coffee.
The main difference is that the bigger brands have spent a lot of time and money building their brands, and there's a value in a trusted brand. The big brands don't have to sell their beans at crazy low prices, and they couldn't anyway if they wanted to remain in business, due to the costs involved with building and maintaining bigger companies.
The other difference however can be age, in that the much cheaper coffee can be quite old.
I'm not referring to age from roast date, you never know this with commodity coffee anyway as it doesn't come with a roasted on date, and usually you're looking at months since it was roasted, when you crack it open.
To be fair, I don't actually think it really matters how freshly roasted that kind of coffee is, the nature of this coffee means that it doesn't really matter all that much how long ago it was roasted, and it doesn't really matter how good a job you do of the extraction, it's all going to taste very similar.
I'm not looking down my nose at commodity coffee by saying that, in fact I think this is one of the positive things about this kind of coffee, this and the fact that it's inexpensive, but when I refer to some of the much cheaper generic coffee beans potentially being older, I'm referring to how long ago it was harvested, and how many years it's been sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
Commodity coffee is discounted based on its age from harvesting, and there are occasionally opportunities to buy older coffee beans at a big discount, even sometimes almost free, so in some cases the very cheapest coffee on the market can be coffee that was getting on a bit before it was roasted.
There was a a bit of a fuss kicked up with this a few years ago when a WSJ article ran a story about coffee beans that had hit the market that were 9 years from harvest. Coffee at that age was reduced by $1.55 per pound, and in 2019 coffee was priced between $0.91 - $1.33 per pound, so you don't have to be particularly good at maths to work out that, this coffee would have been even better than free!
So if you're a fan of "normal" coffee beans, and you've not yet spoilt your taste buds like I have to the point that drinking that kind of coffee can often cause an involuntary backflip, I would say that the best 1Kg coffee beans would be the bigger, well known brands.
If you've left mainstream beans in your rear view mirror, and you're looking for the best freshly roasted beans by the Kilo, then you may expect me to say that you'll find the best freshly roasted coffee beans right here :-).
Yes, you'll find great quality freshly roasted beans by the Kg right here, but actually, you'll find mega quality freshly roasted beans by the 1Kg bag from loads of sources these days, including the hundreds of small batch roasters we now have in the UK.
I can't say that ours are the "best", because again best is a very subjective, but I'd say since your here anyway, why not try some of our freshly roasted beans and see what you think?
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I do realise that you're probably talking about shelf life, but there's a few answers to this, depending on what you mean exactly with this question.
The first thing to ascertain if you’re asking the question “how long do coffee beans last” is exactly what you mean by that.
Do you mean how long can you safely use coffee beans without them being potentially dangerous to your health, or do you mean how long will they taste great for?
If you’re talking about commodity coffee (big brand & supermarket own brand coffee) then you’re probably referring to shelf life rather than taste life.
If you’re referring to high quality freshly roasted coffee (the only kind of coffee beans you’ll find around here) then you’re probably referring to how long they’ll taste great for.
Coffee beans are a cooked food product, they’re the roasted seeds of coffee trees, so it would make sense that they’d have a shelf life.
I mean, surely you can’t open a bag of coffee beans two years after it was sealed, make coffee with it & drink it, without becoming violently ill?
Actually, so long as coffee beans haven’t been exposed to moisture and air, leading them to develop mould, theoretically it’s safe to drink coffee beans that have been kept sealed, pretty much indefinitely.
They might not taste all that exciting, but how long they’ve been sitting in the bag, as long as it was sealed, won’t actually impact on the safety of consuming them, in theory at least.
The huge numbers of compounds that coffee contains, will wither away over time, so I wouldn’t expect to get much at all from a 5 year old bag of coffee, but as long as they look fine and haven’t become furry or become infested with some form of life, it’s doubtful that they’re going to pose any kind of a threat just due to their age.
It would make sense to think there would be a law to state how long a shelf life (sell by date or best before date) should be on coffee beans, given that they are after all, a cooked foodstuff, but there isn’t actually a law (not in the UK at least, and at the time of writing) to say how long this should be, just that a date has to be stated.
So if this is all you wanted to know, literally how long can coffee beans be consumed for as long as the bag has been sealed, then the answer is forever, theoretically.
If you have a 100 year old bag of coffee beans, send them to me, that would make for a great YouTube video :-).
Is this why your coffee tastes bad?
It’s common for coffee beans in supermarket beans to have a 12 months best before date, but some brands assume a longer shelf life, it’s not uncommon for beans to have a 2 year long best before date, for example.
When it comes to speciality coffee, it’s the roasted on date that you’d usually be focusing on, rather than the best before date.
Our coffee is roasted daily, so the roasted on date is usually the day of dispatch, sometimes the day before, but rarely earlier than that.
We put a roasted on date on our bags of coffee, along with the best before date, and the best before date is 6 months from the roasted on date, but we believe they're at their best from 1-4 weeks from the roast date.
Now this is a slightly different question, and again it depends which kind of coffee beans you’re referring to.
If we’re talking about high quality, freshly roasted coffee beans, then we believe they’re best enjoyed from around 1 - 4 weeks from roast date.
It’s usually best to let the coffee rest for around a week from roasting, and from then, our coffee is at it’s most vibrant for around 2-3 weeks.
As long as the coffee beans are unsealed, or kept in airtight storage out of heat and light, it’s fine to use freshly roasted coffee beans beyond this, it’s literally just that they’ll taste less vibrant as time goes on.
How to store your coffee beans correctly
We don’t tend to have problems with customers drinking our coffee when it’s too old, it’s actually the other way around ;-).
As we roast daily, when Royal Mail do their job well you might get it when it's only a day or two from roasting, and while it’s OK to use at this point, it’s still in the most volatile stage of the degassing process, so it’s more difficult to extract well and consistently.
If we’re talking about commodity coffee beans, where coffee beans are traded as a commodity and roasted and packaged on a huge scale, I'd say that the taste doesn’t really change much as time goes on, in my experience.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on your perspective. Actually, if you enjoy the taste of this kind of coffee, as many people do, then I’d say it’s a good thing, as it means you don’t really have to worry about how old the coffee is that you’re grabbing.
If all supermarkets sold purely freshly roasted speciality coffee, it would be a similar situation to fresh bread on supermarket aisles, where you have to get in there at a certain time in order to not just be left with the older stuff a day from the best before date.
What is the importance of fresh coffee beans?
Speciality coffee is produced and roasted all with the intention of presenting that coffee at its very best in the cup.
So it’s at its most vibrant & potent after about a week of roasting when it’s gone through degassing, and usually it’s still great within about four weeks, but after that it would usually start to taste less exciting as time goes on.
Commodity coffee is an asset that is valued based on supply and demand. It’s usually purchased and roasted in big volumes.
It’s unlikely to taste hugely differently if you pick up a bag that is 3 months from roast date, or a bag that’s 12 months from roast date.
If it did, this wouldn’t be a good thing for the brand, as consistency is hugely important if you’re trying to build or maintain a brand name.
Commodity coffee was the only kind of coffee that existed, commercially, until an amazing woman called called Erna Knutson, pioneered speciality coffee in the 70s.
She noticed that there were “broken lots” the harvests from certain producers that didn’t fill a container, which were ignored by other traders.
She started cupping these coffees and realised that some of it was really special, she also had a relationship with lots of small roasters that the big traders weren’t interested in dealing with.
She put the two together, and speciality coffee was born.
I’ve just created a fairly dull nutshell version of an amazing story that really deserves to be turned into a movie, such an inspiring story!
Anyway, the point is, these are two completely different types of coffee, and with speciality coffee, you’ll find the coffee is at it’s most enjoyable within about 1-4 weeks from roasting.
With commodity coffee, you can pick up a bag of coffee without having to worry how fresh it is, one bag from the other (talking about the same beans) should taste almost identical.
The biggest impact on freshness, is oxygen. So if you can keep your coffee beans in air tight storage, that’s a good start.
When you seal a container, you’re trapping in oxygen that will continue to cause oxidation in a sealed container, so if you can push as much of the air out as possible, this is even better.
Our bags contain a re-seal strip and a degassing valve, so if you ensure the strip is properly sealed, you can push the air out of the bag, and the bag itself works as air tight storage.
The only issue with bags is they’re not infallible. Occasionally the valves malfunction and become 2 way (uncommon but it can happen), and it’s very easy to think you’ve properly sealed the re-seal strip but it’s not quite sealed.
Put down your scissors, don't cut our bags!
So if you can get a container such as Fellow Atmos or AirScape (there are various other options) that allow you to force the air out, these are a great idea for keeping your beans protected from oxygen.
The other important elements to keep your beans away from are moisture, heat & light.
An airtight container will keep moisture out, and some of them will keep the light out too (not the clear ones of course, which should be stored in a dark cupboard) but generally speaking I’d recommend keeping your beans in a relatively cool place, out of direct light (natural or artificial).
Don’t keep beans in the fridge, fridge temperature wouldn’t help with preventing staling anyway, and they’re one of the worst places to keep coffee benas.
You can freeze your coffee beans, as long as they’re sealed when they’re put in the freezer, and as long as you allow them to thaw before opening the bag - and providing that you don’t re-freeze once you’ve taken them out of the freezer and opened them.
]]>Decaf coffee doesn’t have to taste like dirt, even though it was recently ground (the old ones are the best, wait, no they're really not!), and it may surprise you to know that the poor-tasting decaf coffee we’ve all experienced in the past, probably has relatively little to do with the reduction in caffeine!
Before we talk specifically about the best decaf coffee beans though, let’s explore why decaf coffee has developed such a bad reputation over the years.
The main reason most of the decaf we’ve consumed in the past hasn’t been the best, is that they’re not the best coffee beans to start with, it’s that simple.
It’s not mainly about the decaffeination process, although that can play a part and we’ll go into more detail on that shortly, it’s mainly that when you start out poor quality coffee beans, then decaffeinate them, its just never going to taste good regardless of the decaffeination process.
I think non-alcoholic wine is a good analogy to use here.
If you’re partial to a fairly decent bottle of red, as I am, you’re not going to pick up just any bottle of red off the shelf, if you’re drinking it for the taste and not just to get hammered.
I do like white wine too by the way, but only for helping to clean red wine off the carpet ;-).
It would probably be obvious to most people that the most important consideration when it comes to how the wine is going to taste, is the grapes used, and the skill of the winemaker.
You’d expect great wine to be made using great grapes and a winemaker with great skills, wouldn’t you?
If you had to cut down on your alcohol intake, and you were looking for an alcohol free wine, the taste is going to be just as important, arguably more important as all you’re going to get from the wine is the taste.
The old “it’ll taste fine by the time I get to the last glass” doesn’t quite work with alcohol free ;-). So you wouldn’t just waltz up the wine aisle, pick up any bottle labelled zero booze and lob it in your basket.
It’s exactly the same with decaf coffee. While a great wine stems from great grapes and a great winemaker, great coffee stems from great coffee beans and a great roaster, whether it’s decaf or not.
As was the case with vegetarian and vegan food until fairly recently, decaf coffee has been largely an afterthought up until quite recently.
Not just by brands, coffee roasters and retailers, I actually think that generally speaking decaf coffee has been an afterthought among most coffee drinkers too.
Many people have told me that their idea of keeping decaf in, is to have an old bag of pre-ground decaf festering at the back of the cupboard somewhere to unleash on unsuspecting family or friends.
Even people who mainly drink decaf I think have been overly tolerant to poor quality decaf, for example purely drinking instant coffee because they’ve made the decision that since they “only drink decaf” it doesn't make sense to invest in a grinder or an espresso machine.
Best espresso machine recommendations.
Best Coffee Grinder Recommendations.
This reminds me of my experience as a TV extra, I did it for a few years before I was involved full time in the coffee industry, and the vegetarian options were often a mere afterthought back then. I usually took my own food just in case there wasn’t a vegetarian option at all!
One day in the middle of a field somewhere around Manchester, after a long morning of pretending to be a bouncer at a festival organized by the Maguire family (series 11 episode 7 if you're interested), I got to the food truck to find that the vegetarian option was half rice, half chips ;-).
I don’t mean these were the side options, I mean that was it, a plate containing rice and chips! Needless to say lunch wasn’t the highlight of that day. I did have some great experiences as an extra though, one of which was chatting with David Bradley, Filch in Harry Potter, Walder Frey in Game of Thrones, really nice guy too!
I digress, but the point is as with vegan and vegetarian food, decaf is no longer being treated purely as an afterthought, it’s been given the attention it deserves especially within the speciality coffee industry.
So if you want to drink decaf, either purely to replace caffeinated coffee, or occasionally so you can reduce your caffeine intake or so you can drink coffee later in the day, you don’t have to resort to drinking coffee that doesn’t taste good.
I think this is a good place within this post to just make sure we’re all clear on what decaf coffee is, by taking a step back and ascertaining exactly what coffee is.
What we know as a cup of coffee is a beverage made by extracting the soluble compounds from the roasted seeds of the coffee tree. You knew that, of course.
What we call coffee beans (they’re not actually beans but again you probably know that, they resemble beans which is why they were labelled “coffee beans” and that name stuck) are amazing little parcels packed full of natural elements, just one of which is caffeine.
What you might now have known is just how low the % of caffeine is, by weight, in coffee beans compared to things like proteins, tannins and oils. Caffeine tends to be the most noted natural ingredient of coffee, which is natural given that is is a drug after all, but it's worth pointing out that there are masses of other elements in coffee beans aside from caffeine.
We’re talking about around a thousand different chemical compounds, and that’s probably a figure you’ve heard repeated many times in the past if you’ve been into speciality coffee for a while, but what may surprise you is that when it comes to taste specifically, there are 300 different natural chemicals in green, unroasted beans and 850 in roasted coffee that contribute to taste.
Don’t take my word for that, by the way ;-), all of these elements are listed by Ivon Flament in his book “Coffee Flavor Chemistry” which you can buy from Amazon if you have a spare few hundred quid!
So coffee is a hugely complex beverage full of all kinds of naturally occurring compounds, and this is the case for both caffeinated coffee and for decaf coffee.
The only difference is that decaf coffee has had much (not all) of the caffeine removed.
So if you’re wondering if decaffeination leads to a lesser tasting coffee, the answer is that it can do depending on the decaffeination process, but it doesn’t have to.
As we’ve ascertained, the main reason decaf would taste like muck would be if poor tasting coffee was decaffeinated, so if we’ve selected high quality coffee for decaffeination it’s important that these beans are decaffeinated in a way which only removes the caffeine, and has as little impact as possible on the myriad of substances responsible for many of the flavour notes it has to offer.
It isn’t the reduction of caffeine that can leave decaf coffee not tasting the best. If they were great quality coffee beans to start with, it’s probably that the few hundred other taste related compounds in green coffee beans have been reduced by harsher decaffeination processes.
Actually there’s at least some evidence pointing to a reduction in caffeine actually allowing coffee to taste better, or at least less bitter and more sweet, if that’s what you class as “better” as taste is very subjective.
A Cornell University Study, found that subjects noted a reduction in sweetness and an increase in bitterness in food & drinks containing caffeine. This is probably why some of the best decaf coffee tends to be high in sweetness, and relatively low in bitterness.
So if we could reduce the caffeine while leaving all of the other naturally occurring chemical compounds in tact, then we stand a chance of enjoying that coffee at its very best in terms of taste, regardless of the great reduction in caffeine.
We can do that, and we do that by using less harsh decaffeination processes, which leads us nicely to:
There are four methods of decaffeination, direct solvent processing, indirect solvent processing, water processing and Carbon Dioxide Processing.
Direct solvent processing is where the beans are steamed to open the pores, and they’re then soaked in a chemical solvent, which is then removed along with the caffeine.
This was the first method of decaffeination, and it began with harsh chemicals including benzene which have since been banned in food use as it came to light that they’re carcinogenic.
These days direct solvent decaffeination usually involves ethyl acetate or methylene chloride.
This is the one decaffeination process in particular that is likely to be responsible for stripping away other elements that we don’t want to be reduced, leading to a reduction in flavour including some of the more subtle flavour notes that the beans would have had to offer before direct solvent decaffeination.
Thankfully when it comes to speciality coffee at least, you’re unlikely to find many decaf coffees these days that are decaffeinated using the direct solvent process.
Indirect solvent processing uses similar chemicals, but it’s done in two stages.
In the first stage the green (unroasted) coffee beans are soaked in hot water for a number of hours, to create a “charged water”, water which has taken in chemical compounds from the coffee, including but not limited to caffeine.
This charged water is moved into a separate tank with the solvent, it bonds with the caffeine and is then removed, thus removing the caffeine from the charged water but leaving the other compounds in tact.
This charged water is then reintroduced to the beans, so that any of the good stuff that was removed can be soaked back into the beans.
The Carbon Dioxide decaffeination method is a relatively new process, which is quite expensive at the time or writing so it’s more commonly used for large volumes of commodity coffee.
The coffee beans are soaked in water and then transferred to what’s referred to as the extraction vessel, in which liquid CO2 is introduced under high pressure (just under 70 bars, 1000 PSI).
The caffeinated CO2 is moved into another chamber, the pressure is released, and then the caffeine is removed with charcoal filters so that it can be sold.
The water decaffeination process, sometimes called “mountain water processing” or Swiss Water Decaffeination (if it has been done by the Swiss Water company), is a non-chemical process first developed in the thirties in Switzerland.
This is a process in which a charged water is created, similar to with the indirect solvent process, this charged water is used to remove the caffeine, the matching molecules (including the 300 aforementioned compounds relating to flavour) in the beans stay where they are, and it’s only the caffeine that is removed.
When it comes to speciality coffee, the most common decaf coffee beans are decaffeinated using the water process or the indirect solvent (commonly methylene chloride, or the “MC method”, often also referred to as the sugar cane method as sugar cane is often fermented to make the methylene chloride).
When it comes to these decaffeination processes, I think the beans themselves and the roasting, has a much bigger impact on flavour than the decaffeination process used.
When it comes to our coffee beans, we currently have two decafs, both using high quality speciality coffee beans which are decaffeinated using two processes.
Milk Chocolate and Caramel Decaf Peru
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This is lovely single origin organic & fairtrade decaf with an SCA score of 83, so this is a good example of the quality of the beans being of paramount importance.
As you’ll see from the reviews - non of which were written by me, I hasten to add! ;-) - this is a stunning tasting coffee, that happens to be decaffeinated.
Would the same beans taste different if they weren’t decaffeinated, I’d say yes, all decaf processes are going to impact on the flavour in the cup, but the important thing is that these beans taste amazing, and as far as my tastebuds go these are the best decaf coffee beans we offer, in fact they’re the best decaf coffee beans I’ve ever tasted.
Milk Chocolate and Coconut Decaf Brazil
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Another cracking single origin decaf, this one is a Brazilian (Bourbon & Catuai) which is decaffeinated using the indirect solvent method using Methylene chloride.
I really enjoy this decaf, I think it has very interesting sweet coconut and chocolate notes, and it is one of the better decafs I’ve tasted, but I won’t lie, my all time favourite decaf is the Milk Chocolate & Caramel Peru.
Yeah, although “decaffeinated” would appear to suggest that it’s caffeine free coffee, it isn’t, it has the caffeine greatly reduced, but some remains.
How much caffeine is left in the coffee beans depends on the bean and on the specific decaffeination process, but in the UK to be classed as Decaf, coffee cannot contain more than 0.1% caffeine by weight.
Although the apparent health benefits or dangers of coffee appear to differ quite a lot depending on who you ask, it appears that the majority of the dangers associated with coffee are related to caffeine.
I say “it appears so” because actually I don’t think coffee has been researched nearly enough as of yet to make any definitive conclusions.
When it comes to the aforementioned 1000 bioactive substances found in coffee, only around 30 of them have actually been rigorously investigated, and there’s no scientific consensus as of yet about the health effects of any single compound, as far as I can tell, let alone all of them combined.
However there are numerous potential health benefits being reported by various research, including drinking coffee being beneficial in terms of reducing the risk of various health conditions.
The studies that have been done specifically on decaf appear to suggest that the majority of these health benefits are due to the various other chemical components in coffee including antioxidants and anti-inflammatories, rather than being directly linked purely to caffeine.
Here are are some of the studies I’m referring to:
Effects of Caffeinated and Decaffeinated Coffee Consumption on Metabolic Syndrome Parameters.
Drinking coffee could lead to a longer life, whether it’s decaffeinated or caffeinated.
Coffee Drinking and Mortality in Ten European Countries – the EPIC Study.
Well, that sounds way better than "conclusion" anyway ;-), but to conclude, while you may expect me to say that our decaf coffee is the best decaf coffee - and as I've said, my absolute favourite decaf is our Chocolate and Caramel Peru, it's a stonking coffee that happens to be a decaf, in all honesty there are tonnes of great decafs out there that you may find to be the best decaf coffee beans for you.
In order to find the best decaf coffee beans for your taste buds, what I'd recommend is shift your attention away from the most obvious choices.
If you're someone who would usually buy the cheapest big name brands while doing your supermarket shopping, I'd encourage you to try high quality coffee beans, whether you're buying caffeinated coffee beans, or decaf.
When you buy tins or bags of commodity decaf from the most well known brands, you're buying a very specific type of coffee, and it's a very different market to speciality coffee.
Arabica coffee beans are they the best type of coffee?.
As you'll probably know, coffee is traded as a commodity, just like sugar, oil or rice, this is what is referred to as commodity coffee
It's traded and shipped by the container load, and regardless of the brand name on the product this kind of coffee is all remarkably unremarkable.
That's not to say it's no good, but to say that, generally speaking, it's a much of a muchness, and when it comes to decaf coffee, you'll probably find that you can work your way through all of the biggest known brands, and still not taste any decaf coffees that really make you smile.
Once you try speciality coffee, however, two things will happen, firstly you'll be completely spoiled for "mainstream" coffee, and secondly you'll come to know a whole new world of different flavours to be experienced from coffee, including decaf!
It's true to say that at present most speciality coffee suppliers and small batch roasters only tend to have one or two decaf options, and I think this is a reflection of the popularity of decaf, however this is changing!
As people cotton onto the fact that decent quality coffee can taste amazing when decaffeinated, more & more people are looking for decaf, so it's rare now to find a roaster that doesn't offer at least one or two great decafs.
We currently offer two decafs, and as a matter of fact our single origin Peruvian decaf is usually our second best seller, second only to the hugely popular chocolate brownie blend, and we do plan on introducing more decafs to the range in the near future.
We have a fantastic bundle deal so you can have the best of both worlds, Chocolate Brownie Blend which if fully loaded with caffeine and the Milk Chocolate and Caramel Decaf for when the need to be caffeine free takes your fancy ;-)
Chocolate Brownie Blend and Milk Chocolate and Caramel Decaf Bundle
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Yup, decaf coffee does contain caffeine, although the amount is of course dramatically reduced, in the UK to be labelled as decaf coffee beans they have to contain no more than 1% caffeine by weight.
Decaf coffee is made by staring out with normal full-caffeine green unroasted coffee beans, and then using one of the various decaffeination processes to remove the caffeine.
When it comes to speciality coffee, coffee beans are usually decaffeinated using the water process (Swiss water if it’s specifically done by the Swiss water company in Canada), or the indirect solvent method, commonly the E.A method also know as the sugar cane method, as sugar cane is often used to make the ethyl acetate.
It depends what you mean by different, if you were to get hold of the exact same coffee beans and try them full caffeine and decaf, then yes you’d probably notice a difference in taste, regardless of the process used.
If you mean should a bag of decaf coffee beans taste different from a bag of caffeinated beans, again, yes, but that’s to be expected, any two different beans will taste different, not just decaf vs full caffeine.
Well, it can do, but it’s not necessarily down to decaffeination. The reason we’ve all tasted bad decaf over the years is that brands, particularly mainstream brands, have chosen to use poor quality coffee beans for decaf.
If you’re buying high quality speciality coffee beans, they shouldn’t taste bad, whether they’re decaf or not.
Best is a very subjective word, as we all have different tastes, but generally speaking the best quality decaf is going to be decaf that is made using the best quality coffee beans, so if you’re buying your decaf from a small batch specialty coffee roaster or specialist supplier, you’re more likely to find the best decaf coffee for your taste buds, vs buying mainstream decaf from the supermarket.
Yes, Starbucks decaf coffee is made using the Swiss Water Process, which removes almost all of the caffeine from the coffee beans.
Yeah! In fact I’d go so far as to say that ALL high quality speciality decaf should taste “good”, although good is a bit of a vague term when were discussing something as subjective as taste.
Remember, it’s the quality of the coffee beans before they’re decaffeinated which really determines whether the coffee will taste good in the cup or not.
What is commonly referred to as "Swiss water decaffeination" can only be officially labelled as Swiss Water on coffee that was decaffeinated by the Swiss water decaf company, who at the time of writing does all of their decaffeination in Canada.
There are decaffeination plans, however, in Mexico and Colombia, which use a water decaffeination process using mineral water from the mountains of the are, hence the "mountain water" reference.
But don't worry, I'm going to answer this question from all positive perspectives, so whatever the reason behind your question, you'll get the answer you were looking for, and more :-).
I'll answer a slightly different but very closely related question first, as I think this info is interesting to most coffee lovers (who weren't already aware), and it helps as a foundation on which to answer the main "where do coffee beans come from" question.
Meet the seed of the coffee tree, which we commonly refer to as "coffee beans". These are fresh coffee seeds ready for germinating, so this is what they look like before any kind of processing (other than being removed from the cherry) prior to roasting.
There is actually no such thing as a coffee "bean", it's a misnomer, a mistake made hundreds of years ago in identifying the seeds of the coffee cherry as "beans" because they resembled the seeds of the legume family of plants, which are called beans.
If coffee trees were part of the bean family, then yes they'd be coffee beans, but they're not, so what we've been referring to as coffee beans for hundreds of years (well, not you and I specifically as I'm sure neither of us are quite that old, but people in general) are coffee seeds.
We've been referring to them as coffee beans for so long, though, this phrases is embedded in our language, so referring to them as coffee seeds would seem very weird.
So, coffee beans are the seeds of the coffee tree. They are found inside the cherries of coffee trees.
There isn't just one type of coffee tree, by the way. Just like their are Braeburn apples, Gala apples and so on, there are various different varieties of coffee tree.
I'm not referring to Arabica and Robusta, by the way. These are different species of coffee tree, and they're not the only coffee tree species, but they're the two main commercially viable species for coffee bean (seed...) production.
What I'm referring to are the many different varieties of Arabica coffee tree, which we tend to refer to as "varietals", because it makes us sound clever :-), so when you see varietals listed as "Typica", "Bourbon" and so on, this tells you what specific coffee tree the beans came from.
Arabica beans are they the best type of coffee?
So coffee cherries are the fruit of coffee trees, and I'm calling them "trees" by the way, because that's what they are, so if you were wondering why some people call them coffee plants, it would appear that’s another coffee misnomer.
I’ve called them coffee plants in the past, and I’ve heard them being referred to interchangeably as plants or trees, or sometimes shrubs, but according to Dr. Aaron Davis from Kew Gardens, they’re trees, as reported in this sprudge article.
OK so this is one of the possible angles that this question may be asked from, meaning that when you ask where coffee beans come from, you mean where do the originate from.
If this is what you’re looking for, then it’s widely agreed (by boffins & stuff) that the birthplace of coffee is the forests of what is now known as Ethiopia. This area has the longest known history with coffee as a drink, and an even longer history with coffee as s food.
Tribespeople of this area used to mix coffee cherries with animal fat to make small caffeinated balls of sustainance, which they wore in animal skin pouches to keep them energised on long hunting/gathering trips.
If you’re now expecting me to tell a tale of a goatherd called Kaldi or Khaldi in the 9th century whose goats nibbled some cherries & started doing backflips, leading to this chap taking these interesting tree fruits to a monk, who threw them on a fire, then poured water on the fire, and drank the result, then no, just no.
Don’t get me wrong, I know this is just a legend, but it’s quoted so often (sometimes as if it’s factual) that I find it slightly irritating.
If this really did happen, then this goatherd was very late in making his “discovery”, given that the people of that region (his ancestors, if he was supposedly from that area) had been consuming coffee cherries for a looooong time by that point.
It’s hard to know for sure, but I suspect, from what I’ve read, that the Oromo people were probably already “cooking” (what became roasting) and “crushing” (what became grinding) coffee beans by that time to make their portable energy mix, they may have even got to the brewing stage of the evolution of coffee by then.
Anyway, to answer the “where do coffee beans come from” question from the perspective of the origins of coffee, it would appear to be Ethiopia.
Another potential perspective for the “Where coffee beans come from” question is regarding where coffee beans come from now, i.e. where in the world is coffee currently being produced.
The answer to this is that coffee grows in what’s referred to as the “Coffee Belt” which is an area spanning the globe, running horizontally across the equator between the Tropics of Cancer & Capricorn.
If you wanted specific countries, the top ten coffee producing countries in terms of volume are as follows:
It’s worth pointing out that this changes if you were to filter it to species, i.e Robusta or Arabica.
For the full list see list of coffee production by country, Wikepedia.
Another angle that this question could be asked from, would be based on where you should buy your coffee beans, and this is a very simple question, you should by them from us! :-).
If you've not ordered from us before, you don't know what you're missing, just click on the link below :
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Why should you buy from us? Mainly because our coffee tastes amazing, it's super freshly roasted (usually only a day or two from dispatch, sometimes even on the day of dispatch), and we offer a great service too.
But we are going to say that, aren't we? So let us put our money where our mouths are, and use the 25% discount code to find out.
We also believe that our website is much easier to order coffee beans from, when it come to finding the perfect coffee beans for you, because of the way our product filtering works.
On the left hand side of the website, you'll see filter boxes that you can tick, for example let's say you just want to narrow it down to the coffees that work well with any Sage espresso machine, no worries, just tick that box.
Maybe you brew manually? Just tick the relevant box depending on your favourite manual brew method, and the coffee will be sorted to show you just the coffee we think works best for your chosen brew method.
Maybe you only want organic coffee beans? Again, just tick that box, and the same is true if you only want to see Fair Trade coffee beans, blends, single origins, and specific origins.
So hopefully you'll agree that we've made it as easy as possible for you to find the best coffee beans for you, and if we haven't, just click on the chat icon at the bottom of the page, have a chat with us & let us know.
I'm not really that bothered about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, but here are a few of my favourite beans:
Chocolate Brownie Blend
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
This has been my favourite for flat whites since I first tasted it, a stunning blend, which works brilliantly for espresso, creates rich chocolatey flat whites, cappuccino, cortado, latte etc., and it's a really forgiving bean to work with, so not tricky at all to dial in.
Want something that reminds you of an old school pudding favourite, have a look at the Bakewell Tart Peru
Bakewell Tart Peru
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
If you're looking for a lovely easy drinker for pourover, this is a great choice, there's a subtle hint of Frangipane, but it's not overpowering.
As espresso, Americano, long black or as an intense milky (flat white, cortado), for me it tastes as close as you could get to the taste of a Bakewell tart without actually adding a Bakewell tart to your cup, which I may just have to do at some point...
Taste is a subjective thing of course, and when we're talking about flavour notes in coffee they're usually very subtle, but for me as espresso, there's no mistaking the main flavour notes of this one.
This is a medium/dark roast, so quite a forgiving one when it comes to your setup and barista skills.
Milk Chocolate and Caramel Decaf Peru
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
If you think decaf tastes like dishwater, try this, you'll change your mind! We nearly called it "I can't believe it's not caffeinated" but didn't fancy being sued by Unilever ;-).
Honestly, this is a lovely coffee, which happens to be decaf. I would drink this for the taste, because it's that enjoyable, which isn't something I ever thought I'd find myself saying about a decaf.
Usually I'd think of decaf as a last resort that I'd drink because I want a coffee but it's a bit later in the day and I don't want a sleepless night, but that's not the case with this, this is a very enjoyable coffee, which happens to be decaffeinated.
Obviously we're not the only source of great quality coffee beans, we're incredibly lucky in the UK these days that there are literally hundreds of small batch roasters these days, producing mega quality coffee beans.
Most of us even have at least one roaster within our home town, and going into a roastery, especially one that has a cafe attached or locally, is a great way to source your coffee beans, as you can usually get friendly advice while you're at it.
So if you don't want to buy your coffee beans from us, that's fine, don't get me wrong, we'd love your custom, but if you decide we're not for you, just look around and you're bound to find that you have a relatively local roaster, and of course there are a huge number of roasters and specialist suppliers with websites that you can order from.
What is the importance of fresh coffee beans?
My main advice when it comes to where you get your coffee beans from, is to expect a roasted on date.
If you pick your coffee beans up from a supermarket, or from a more general website, and the bag comes with a use by date but no roasted on date, then you have no idea how old the beans are by the time you get them.
Also if you're buying from a roaster or specialist supplier who're passionate about coffee, you're likely to get much better quality beans, than the more "run of the mill" commodity coffee that you'll get from the more mainstream sources.
So, hopefully this answers your "where do coffee beans come from" questions regardless of the perspective you were asking the question from.
But in case it didn't, here are some frequently asked questions.
Coffee trees grow coffee cherries, and the seeds of the coffee cherries are what we know as coffee beans.
You'll often hear the word "coffee plant" being used, and you'll sometimes hear that coffee grows on "shrubs", but actually coffee grows on trees. Many of them are quite small trees, which I think is why they're often called plants or shrubs, but technically speaking they're trees. So, money might not grow on trees, but coffee does :-).
Hmm, is this a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” type question? ;-). If so, I’m not the person to answer to that, I’m not clever enough to answer such a philosophical question, which I can prove by the fact that I couldn’t find what I’d done with the cheese the other day, and then discovered that I’d put it in the cutlery drawer, instead of putting the knife back in there. Genius I am…
What?? This is actually a predicted search on Google, which is very odd. Coffee beans do not come from an animal, they are the seeds of coffee trees. It may be that people are thinking about Kopi Luwak, or "Cat Poo Coffee", which doesn't actually come from a cat ;-).
These are beans which are processed (meaning the way the seeds are separated from the cherry flesh) by going through the digestive system of the Asian palm civet.
It's an interesting (meaning weird) concept, but I've never tried it, and never will, because I don't like the idea of any fellow being that we share this planet with, being imprisoned and force-fed one particular food just so very privileged humans who can afford to pay the price, can try it.
I know that some brands say they're free range and that there's no animal cruelty involved, but PETA don't seem to be convinced about that: Civets Suffering for Cruel Coffee.
See the last question. Basically, no of course not, coffee is the seed of the coffee cherry, which grows on coffee trees.
The seeds need processing, which means to be removed from the fruit. This is usually done in processing plants where it's washed processed (which is what it sounds like) or natural processed which includes the cherries being left in the sun for a while, depending on the specific process being used.
This changes the flavour profile, washed processed coffees and naturals, produce different flavour notes.
In the wild, the Asian Palm Civet will sometimes eat coffee cherries, and since they come out at the other end without the cherry flesh, someone saw the digestion of this cute looking animal as a processing method.
It's not a particularly commercial viable processing method, it's expensive, which is why the beans are so expensive, and most importantly, it's cruel. Many poor wild Civets have been abducted and forced to live in a tiny cage and do nothing but eat one particular food (which in the wild would probably just be an occasional snack).
So don't worry, there's no way you're going to accidentally buy coffee that does come from animal droppings, you'd know about it because you'd be paying a ridiculous price for it!
In terms of the origins of coffee, Arabica is thought to originate in what is now known as Ethiopia.
When it comes to production countries, the top 10 production countries for Arabica by volume as reported by Index Mundi, are:
Brazil
Colombia
Ethiopia
Honduras
Peru
Guatemala
Mexico
Nicaragua
China
Costa Rica
I can answer this with one word: Freshness.
If you weren't bothered about freshness, you wouldn't be here as a customer or potential customer of a supplier of freshly roasted high quality coffee beans.
It's really easy to walk into any supermarket just about anywhere, and pick up whatever bag of coffee beans looks the most appealing, or has the lowest price tag, or to just click on a bag of coffee beans while doing your online shop.
I'd imagine the reason you're here, on a website where you can buy stunning freshly roasted coffee beans that are roasted usually on the day of dispatch or sometimes a day or two earlier, is that you're no longer interested in drinking stale coffee.
You've been there, you've done that, and you've worn the T-shirt that is now coffee-stained from spitting out what tasted like last week's bath water.
But now you've tasted the difference, you know what fresh tastes like and you can't go back to drinking dull-tasting old coffee that was roasted and packaged who knows where or when.
So what a travesty it would be, to buy fresh, vibrant, tasty coffee beans and then store them in a way that means they start to go stale.
But you're not going to do that, you're here reading a post on the best way to store coffee beans, so all is well :-).
It's true to say that whole beans stay fresher for longer than ground coffee beans, because when you grind a coffee bean, so much more of its surface area becomes exposed.
Having said that, even whole coffee beans will go stale when they're exposed to the air, so if you're going to buy fresh coffee beans, it really does make sense to store them as well as you possibly can.
The main culprit where this is concerned, is Oxygen. Obviously we can't be too negative about Oxygen, we'd be stuffed without it ;-), but when it comes to coffee beans, oxidation is the main cause of coffee going stale, which is the process of the evaporation of the solubles.
These solubles are the plethora of compounds that we want to dissolve with water when we brew it, so if we get to it and much of it has already dissolved thanks to oxidation, this is a bit like trying to re-use a tea bag ;-).
In other words, coffee goes stale because the dissolved solubles that we call a cup of coffee, have already been dissolved in the air when we come to dissolve them in water.
Oxidation isn't the only cause, moisture changes, high temperatures and direct sunlight can also damage our precious coffee tree seeds (OK, coffee beans has a much better ring to it so let's go with that, despite it being technically incorrect).
So roasted coffee beans goes stale due to oxidation, moisture, direct sunlight and heat.
In a nutshell, the best way to store coffee beans is in a moisture free, air tight container kept in a relatively cool place out of direct sunlight. But there is a bit more to it than this.
In order to properly explain the "how to store coffee beans" question, we first need to ascertain whether you're talking about long term storage, or short term storage.
We'll get long term storage out of the way first, since I think this is the least common reason anyone would be searching for information on how to store coffee beans.
If you're looking to store coffee beans for several weeks, or even months, the best way to store coffee beans, is to freeze them.
There's a catch to chilling your beans though, freezing coffee beans only works if you do it properly, which means following some very important rules:
Don't break the seal
You need to ensure that your coffee beans are properly sealed before freezing. If you don't do that, your coffee beans will get knackered, basically. Moisture will creep in and bugger up your beans, so only freeze properly sealed bags of coffee beans.
Don't put them back, Jack
Once you take your beans out of the freezer, don't put them back, or they'll become damaged by moisture changes.
Thaw before you pour
When you remove your bag of sealed beans from the freezer, don't open them yet, leave them to thaw for at least a few hours (I'd recommend leaving them to thaw overnight) before opening them.
Just to contradict myself... there are some experts who swear by grinding frozen coffee beans, some believe them to actually grind more uniformly when they're ground frozen.
To do this though, really you'd need to freeze individual doses, and you'd need to have a relatively high end grinder with a powerful enough motor, as grinding frozen beans may cause grinder stalls (and damage) to more entry level grinders.
Theoretically there's no upper limit to this, as long as your beans are properly sealed. I've heard of people freezing beans for a year or even longer and claiming to have noticed very little deterioration in taste.
When I say "theoretically", this is because this would rely on the bag being properly sealed, and there being no mishaps over this time such as power cuts or someone being a bit heavy handed when launching the Iceland delivery into the freezer ;-).
This is what most people probably came here for, as most people just buy enough coffee for the next couple of weeks or for the next month, and yes, buying in bulk and then separating to freeze in smaller bags is one way to save money, but a much more popular way to save money is to simply order by subscription.
What most of our customers do is to order various bags of coffee over a period of time in order to figure out which are their favourites, and then add these to a fortnightly or monthly subscription, which means a saving of 15%, plus free delivery (if you're spending over a tenner).
How do I start a subscription?
Let's start out with the most commonly used coffee bean storage methods that are definitely not the best way to store coffee beans:
1: Storing coffee beans in the hopper
Many people still store their coffee beans in their hopper, and this is one of the worst places you can possibly store coffee beans, in my humble opinion.
Remember that the enemies of coffee bean freshness are oxygen, direct sunlight and heat, and you'll realize there's at least one major problem with this coffee bean storage solution.
This problem is oxygen, because hoppers aren't air tight.
I've seen this misunderstanding in coffee machine and coffee grinder reviews in the past, where customers are complaining that with some grinders there is no rubber gasket on the lid to keep the air out.
What people tend to forget, is that even if you do have a rubber seal on the lid, you have a gaping hole called a grinds chute, leading to another gaping hole (well, it is a gaping hole where oxygen is concerned) in between the burrs, so you're always going go have air flowing into a hopper.
If you're single dosing, then this won't be an issue, but otherwise I'd recommend just loading up your hopper with the beans you're likely to use that morning, and leave the rest in your airtight storage container.
Bean to Cup Coffee Machine recommendations
2: Leaving your coffee beans in the reseal bag
This is a better solution than leaving coffee beans in the hopper, because your reseal bag will have a degassing valve, so if it's properly sealed, air will only go one way.
The issue with reseal bags is that the seals aren't perfect, and it's very easy to think you've sealed it and you haven't.
3: Storing your coffee beans in the fridge
Keeping coffee beans in the fridge is a big no-no. There are few reasons for this, firstly most people are thinking more short term when they're thinking about storing coffee beans in the fridge, so they're not usually talking about storing only fully sealed bags in the fridge.
Instead most people would consider the fridge to be a good place to keep your coffee fresh as you do with other stuff, milk, butter, tins of baked beans if your name is Joey Essex ;-), but it's really not.
The main reason for this is that coffee beans will condensate if they're regularly in and out of the fridge, meaning that condensation will form on the beans, which is moisture of course, and they'll actually end up going stale faster than if you left them in the kitchen.
Another reason the fridge isn't a good coffee bean storage solution is that coffee beans will suck up other aromas, and you don't want your coffee tasting of onions, garlic, cheese and tomatoes... Well, maybe you do, each to their own ;-).
Yes, by the way, the same is true of storing coffee beans in the freezer, but that's the reason for the rules including the fact that they must be fully sealed, air-tight, before freezing.
Is this why your coffee tastes bad?
As we've ascertained, the enemies to coffee bean freshness are oxygen, heat, light and moisture, so the best place to store coffee beans is in an airtight storage container kept in a relatively cool place.
If you have a solid material container which keeps light out, you can simply keep it out on the work surface near your coffee machine, but if you're using a clear container such as a glass jar, you'll want to keep it stored in a cupboard away from constant light (natural or artificial).
My preferred coffee storage solution is to have an airtight container with a one way valve (so it lets air out but not back in) with a mechanism to push out air when putting the lid on.
There are a number of solutions along these lines, the most popular being Airscape and Coffeevac.
In case I've not answered any of your questions, here's a list of frequently asked questions, some of which may be somewhat repetitious if you've read the entire post ;-), but not everyone does, so this is mainly for the people who skipped straight to the FAQ.
Should I store coffee beans in the fridge?
No, no and thrice no. The fridge is one of the worst possibly places to store your coffee beans, they'll actually go stale faster in the fridge than if you just leave your bag of coffee on the kitchen worktop.
Should I store coffee beans in the freezer?
You can do, for longer term storage, but it's very important that if you do this you follow the rules that I mentioned earlier, namely that the beans are properly air tight sealed, that they remain this way until being removed from the freezer, and once taken out of the freezer they're left in the sealed bag until thawed, and not put back in the freezer.
How long do coffee beans stay fresh?
The staling of coffee beans once roasted, as with any "cooked" product, will happen naturally as time goes by. Keeping your beans stored in airtight storage and away from moisture and light will help to slow down this natural process.
But still, freshly roasted coffee beans are at their most vibrant up to a couple of weeks from roast date, and after this they're still fine to consume for months, but they'll simply gradually start to taste less impressive.
So I'd personally say try to use your coffee beans within 2 weeks of roast date to enjoy them at their best, but you'll still have enjoyable coffee up until about 4 weeks.
How long do coffee beans last?
Can I store coffee beans in the hopper?
Many people do, but it's really one of the worst storage solutions for coffee beans. Even if your hopper lid has a seal, there's no seal at the other end, oxygen is free to enter the hopper via the grinds chute and through the gap between the burrs.
Can you store coffee beans in the bag they came in?
Again, many people do, and in theory as most bags have a lining and a one way valve, it's OK to store coffee beans in the bag they came in if it has a reseal strip, the problem is that these reseal strips aren't very good, they commonly only close partially, or you think you've sealed them and the pesky things unseal themselves as you walk away.
If you're already a customer of The Coffeeworks, and you already make espresso at home but you're just looking for some help to make espresso making more simple, then you can ignore the next couple of paragraphs, this first part of the article is for people who've landed here who are looking for more basic advice on how to make espresso.
So if you're wondering how to make an espresso at home, and you don't currently have an espresso machine, then the easiest way to make espresso (and the only way to make "true" espresso) is with an espresso machine.
If you have visions of installing a huge, expensive espresso machine in your kitchen and having to do a degree just to learn how to use the flipping thing, then fear not ;-). Home espresso making doesn't have to be that way.
It can be if you like, and some people do go to these lengths, but the vast majority of people who make espresso at home, do it with much smaller, much lower cost equipment, which is usually relatively simple to use.
The easiest way to to make espresso at home is with a bean to cup coffee machine. These are espresso machines, but the espresso making part comprises of a built in grinder and a brewing unit, and all you have to do is click a button. See my post at coffee blog:
Best bean to cup machines Recommendations.
If you want a more traditional home espresso making experience, not just to press a button, then you'll want a manual espresso machine. Popular home espresso machines these days at the more beginner side of things include the Sage Bambino, Sage Bambino Plus, Gaggia Classic Pro, and the Sage integrated grinder espresso machines including the Sage Barista Express, Barista Pro, and the Barista Express Impress.
If you're quite new to home espresso, and you want to use a more traditional machine and you want espresso as close as possible to that which a pro barista would produce, then I'd look atone of the latest machine from Sage, the Barista Express Impress. I think a fairly large percentage of people who want the best of both espresso quality and convenience, would find this machine is perfect for them. The Sage Oracle or Oracle Touch achieves the same goal, but the Express Impress is much more affordable.
For more on espresso machines see below:
Best Home Espresso Machines Review
OK so if you have a traditional espresso machine, and you're finding it all a bit mind-boggling, or if you're about to buy an espresso machine and you're concerned that it seems really complex, the following should help.
In a nutshell, home espresso making (using a traditional espresso machine) involves grinding coffee into the filter basket, tamping the ground coffee with the tamper, and then pressing the shot button to "pull" the shot of espresso. We call it "pulling" the shot, not "pushing" because the first espresso machines involved a lever that the barista would pull.
But it's not quite as simple as it might sound, simply because there are so many variables, but I'll hopefully make this much more simple, shortly.
First, let me just introduce all of the terminologies you'll hear for espresso making:
Ratio
Brew ratio or just "ratio" is the output ratio of espresso vs the amount of ground coffee you've started out with. So if you end up with the same weight of espresso as ground coffee, that's a 1:1 ratio.
A "normale" or standard espresso shot would usually be about a 1:2 ratio, so if your starting dose is 18g, you'd be looking to pull a shot of approx 36g or ml (grams to ml is about the same for espresso).
A lungo is a longer extraction and a fairly standard ratio for lungo is about 1:3, while the 1:1 ratio I mentioned earlier would usually be regarded as a "ristretto".
So now you know that when you hear terms like "normale, lungo, ristretto", these are simply terms for espresso ratio, meaning how intense you make the shot.
Portafilter
This is the filter holder, sometimes referred to as filter handle, and it's the part that holds the filter, so the filter clips inside the portafilter (filter holder).
Filter basket
This is the basket that you dose with ground coffee, which clips into the portafilter to be then locked into the group of your espresso machine.
Group
This is the part of your espresso machine that the portafilter locks into, usually referred to as group or grouphead.
Headspace
The gap between the top of the coffee and the shower screen above, important for building up pressure in the basket.
Shower screen
This is the round piece of thin metal screwed into the group, where the water comes from.
Dose weight
This refers to how much coffee in weight (usually grams, in the UK) that is dosed into the basket.
Dose volume
This refers to the amount of space in the basket taken up by the coffee, and really what this means is the height of the coffee in the basket and how much space there is above it.
Standard basket
This is the normal filter basket, also known as single-walled, it is basically a piece of mesh made into a basket shape, so it has holes that go all the way through.
Pressurized basket
These are also known as "dual-walled" baskets, they look like standard baskets from the inside, but if you look at the bottom, you'll usually see just one hole. If you have one of these, just keep in mind that these aren't intended to dial in with, in the traditional sense. You have very little control over the shot with these kinds of baskets, but in their defense they do make things a lot more simple, while also reducing the potential shot quality.
Single baskets
Most espresso machines will come with single and double-shot baskets, and single shot baskets are made for single shots, of course. It's worth noting that using single baskets is usually trickier than using double baskets, so you'd be well advised to start out with double baskets, and try using single baskets once you're more familiar with the process if you want single shots.
Double baskets
The baskets the majority of people tend to use, intended for double shots. Typically while a single shot is made for a guide dose weight of around 7-9g, a double basket is usually made for a dose weight of approx 14-19g.
Tamper
The tool used to tamp the coffee, usually a flat metal head with a wooden or sometimes plastic handle. Some of the cheaper home espresso machines come with a scoop with a flat part intended to double as a tamper, if you have one of these I'd advise seeking a proper tamper compatible with the size of your portafilter, as these scoop tampers are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.
Brew pressure
The standard brew pressure used for espresso is 9 bars. If you're getting into really sophisticated pulls mainly aimed at lighter roasted beans for espresso, then you may want even lower pressure, or you may have a machine capable of varying the pressure, but most espresso machines have a fixed pressure, aimed at producing 9 bars in the basket. If you have heard that 15 or even 19 bars is better, you've probably read the marketing blurb of an entry-level home espresso machine and forgotten to take that with a rather large pinch of salt ;-).
Preinfusion
This is a feature of espresso machines that introduce water to the ground coffee under lower pressure prior to the pressure being ramped up to full brew pressure. True preinfusion is done at line pressure, meaning that a commercial espresso machine which is plumbed in, would be set to introduce the water to the puck of coffee in the basket at the plumbed in water pressure, for the set preinfusion time before the pump applies the pressure. Some machines have a clever feature (Sage machines for example) which mimic true line pressure preinfusion by the machine being able to control the pump pressure, and dropping the pressure way down for the preinfusion time before ramping it up to full pressure.
Distribution
This is the process of evenly distributing the ground coffee in the basket, and there are multiple ways to do it, the most popular approach and probably the most effective, is WDT, or Weiss Distribution Technique, which is often referred to as the "WDT method", which would mean the Weiss distribution technique method which always makes me giggle (small things amuse small minds). This involves using a thin pointy object such as a needle (or a tool with multiple needle-shaped impliments) which are put into the coffee in the basket and moved around in concentric circles to evenly distribute the ground coffee.
Over extraction
If the shot runs particularly slowly and tastes overly bitter, this is usually what we refer to as over-extraction, and we deal with this mainly by grinding more coarse, but brew temperature can also help here, dropping the brew temperature slightly if you have a machine with controllable brew temperature, can fix over extraction.
Under extraction
If the shot runs too quickly and tastes sour, this is what we refer to as under-extracted, and the most obvious solution is to grind finer, but as above, we can also make the brew temp hotter (if your machine has adjustable temp) in order to increase the extraction.
Shot time or Shot window
This refers to the time taken to pull the shot. The most universal shot time is 25-30 seconds, or sometimes 28-32 seconds.
OK so this is most of common the espresso-making jargon explained, so now let's jump into the main causes of confusion with espresso-making, so we can try to simplify them and make home espresso much more simple.
As I explain in the above video, the issue with the usual 4 or 5 second shot window, is it's soooooo tiny. It's like playing darts for the first time, and trying to hit the bullseye, while of course if you're just learning to play darts, your first focus would be on simply trying to hit the board.
It's not as if it's worth the effort, either, because most of us when we're just starting out are at a point that our palate isn't all that well developed. This isn't always the case, but I know from speaking to many people (and I was the same) that most people when they start making espresso at home, don't have really developed palates where espresso is concerned.
There are people who're throwing shots of espresso away that would taste absolutely fine to them, simply because the shot didn't pull within this shot window.
When I first started making espresso at home I started out with a used Gaggia Classic (I paid £100 for it, which seems like a bargain now as their value has risen so much since then) and I paired it with a manual Hario Skerton grinder which I used with a cordless drill to speed it up.
I didn't really know what I was doing, and the espresso I was making back then, made me very happy. These days, I think if I made the same shots I was making back then, I'd be disappointed with it, because my palate for espresso has been developing over a period of several years, but the fact is, I was happy with it then.
It's also important to understand that using home espresso machines often isn't the same as using commercial espresso machines, and a lot of things in espresso including this shot window actually comes from professional barista training. Depending on your espresso machine, your grinder, and the coffee you're using, you might actually experience the worst results by managing land your shot within this particular small shot time window, not the best.
So my main tip to anyone who is new to home espresso, and especially if you're starting out with a relatively entry level setup is to forget the usual very small 4 or 5 second shot window of a total shot time of 25-30 seconds or 28-32 seconds, and instead to be mainly guided by taste.
Shot time is fine as a very rough guide, but I'd recommend a much bigger window of around 15 seconds, aiming for a shot at somewhere between 20 - 35 seconds.
If you're using a traditional espresso machine with standard baskets (not dual walled, pressurised baskets, if you're using these then shot time has no meaning) then I think 20-35 seconds is a much more helpful guide shot time. As long as you're not massively under or over this rough shot time window, most people will find that they're producing relatively good results within this window, and from here you can simply tweak things by taste.
When it comes to the taste of espresso, the two key things we're looking out to which point to something being wrong with extraction is sourness or bitterness.
If you imagine sourness on one side and bitterness on the other side, then speaking very generally, we'd expect a good extraction to result in a taste that doesn't deliver any harsh sourness or bitterness.
If you're picking out strong sourness, along the lines of lemons or grapefruit, just check the taste descriptors for the coffee you're using and check these flavour notes aren't supposed to be there. If they're not, then it's probably under extraction that you're tasting.
If you're tasting obvious bitterness in the shot, then if this is down to extraction, it will be over-extraction you're tasting. I say if it's down to extraction, because it may just be down to the beans you're using, and more on that shortly.
The main ways to deal with under or over-extraction, are to change the grind size, the ratio, (if you're able to) the brew temperature, and to change the coffee beans.
So if you're tasting sourness in the shot, and you suspect under extraction is going on, then the two most obvious things to tweak would be the grind size and the ratio.
Grind size is the obvious change to make, but I'd also encourage upping the ratio, but just change one thing at a time, I wouldn't recommend changing the grind size and the ratio at the same time.
If you're aiming for a 1:2 (for example 36ml of espresso from 18g of ground coffee) just try upping the yield to 45ml (1:2.5) or around 54ml (1:3) and see if the shot is more balanced.
In some cases, the bean you're using may just be particularly nonporous and trying to up the extraction with grind alone may be a struggle.
If you've ever tasted a salami shot (this doesn't involve sausages, it's just splitting a shot into several cups and tasting them at each point) then you'll know what I mean when I say that the first part of a shot usually contains the sourness, and the bitterness is usually towards the end of a shot.
If your shots are unbalanced on the sour side then upping the extraction for example from 1:2 to 1:2.5 or 1:3 is a relatively simple fix.
Tweaking the brew temperature is also a route to go down, but this will depend on your espresso machine and whether it has adjustable brew temperature.
What many people don't pay enough attention to when they're trying to figure out why their coffee tastes the way it does, is the beans they're using. If you don't like the taste of your coffee, the most simple fix is to use different coffee.
This isn't necessarily because the coffee beans you're using taste bad, it may just because they're not particularly compatible with your setup.
If you're plagued by overly bitter and burnt-tasting shots, then this could be that you're using supermarket bought coffee, AKA commodity coffee. This is the mainstream of coffee, it's bought roasted and sold in massive volumes, it comes with only a best before date, no roasted on date, and this kind of coffee is often described as tasting bitter.
So if you're struggling with bitterness and you're not using freshly roasted coffee beans, then just be aware that your choice of beans is usually going to be the reason for the bitterness you're experiencing.
If on the other hand, you're finding that you're plagued by sour-tasting shots (and this is very common with people who're getting into speciality coffee, buying from small batch roasters) again this could be to do with the coffee you're using.
Generally speaking, single origins are less forgiving to work with than blends.
It isn't that single origin coffee is sour, it's simply that blends - especially blends that have been specifically created for espresso, are more forgiving on barista skills and equipment.
So someone who is relatively new to espresso and/or someone with a relatively entry level home barista setup will find it easier to get good results with espresso blends, usually, than single origins.
If you wonder why some people spend thousands of pounds on seemingly ridiculously priced espresso setups, quite often this is because the setups in question make it easier to get better results with single origins, and with lighter roasts.
I say "and" with lighter roasts, because it's often the roast level alone that is cited when talking about beans which can be trickier to work with, but I think that's just part of it, it's also down to the bean itself, the altitude, the varietal, the processing method and also the roast level.
If you want to start out with more forgiving blends that will be more likely to give you great results without lots of frustration, I'd highly recommend these blends:
Chocolate Brownie Blend
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Fruit and Nut Blend
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Fruit Cake Blend
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
One final thing to mention when talking about simplifying making espresso at home, is dose.
The dose refers to how much ground coffee is put into the basket, in the portafilter, but it's quite a bit more complex than it sounds.
Usually, you'll be instructed to dose a particular weight of coffee into the basket, for example 18 grams, but what many people don't give credit for is how much a difference the beans and the grind can have on the weight.
The dose in weight is only really important in and of itself to the ratio, meaning that you need to know the dose in grams so that you can achieve the target yield, but the weight of the dose doesn't actually directly impact on extraction, it's only the weight in volume that does.
The headspace (the space between the top of the puck of coffee in the basket, and the shower screen above) is important, because if you overdose the basket resulting on too small a headspace, this can cause problems with the shot.
If the headspace is too small, it doesn't cause problems as such, other than causing a soggy puck which isn't as satisfying to knock out of the portafilter.
When you're adjusting the grind size, and you're focusing purely on dose weight, the volume in the basket will change, so this means that if you're only keeping an eye on the dose weight and not the dose volume (the height of the puck in the basket) then you're changing two variables at the same time, which can make things very confusing.
If you have one of the Sage espresso machines which comes with the razor tool, this is the main job that this clever little tool does. It ensures that the puck height is the same each time, so headspace is one variable that isn't constantly changing.
Espresso Machine recommendations
If you don't have a Sage machine, you can keep an eye on the dose by how far out of the basket the tamper is stands.
I'd usually expect it to look something like this:
So that none (or very little) of the flat part of the tamper is standing proud from the rim. This may differ depending on the tamper you're using though.
To conclude, espresso making is a complex thing. We're novices (myself included in comparison to professional baristas) trying to develop skills with a small amount of practice each day that pro baristas spend a heck of a lot of time developing.
So while you certainly can work on developing your knowledge and skills, and I do very much hope that this post helps in that regard, we do all need to be realistic, I think, and just go easy on ourselves when it comes to our level of expectation when we're just getting started, especially if we're starting out with a very modest budget.
So just keep in mind that taste is all that really matters, and your palate will develop along with your skill, so I'd recommend not paying too much attention to the numbers (especially shot time), and remember that the coffee beans themselves are the biggest contributing factor to the way your espresso tastes.
]]>
But you're here, on a website that sells freshly roasted coffee beans, reading a post about the importance of fresh coffee beans, so like me you're probably someone who screams and runs when they see a jar of instant, and has a similar albeit slightly less dramatic reaction when accidentally walking past the bags of stale coffee beans on supermarket shelves...
OK, I'm exaggerating ever so slightly ;-). I think instant coffee is (only just) better than no coffee, and commodity coffee beans are better than instant, but I'm passionate about the fact that fresh is best, and you probably are too, again, you're here aren't you? ;-).
But in case you're not quite sure why "fresh" is important when it comes to coffee beans, or if you prefer fresh but you're not quite sure why - then this post is for you.
I'm starting out here with a reason for the importance of freshness which may not be the most obvious, but I actually think is the most important reason.
When you buy freshly roasted coffee beans, they're usually higher quality coffee beans. I'm not just talking about the result of aging, I'm talking about the quality of the green beans when they were roasted.
More often than not, when you pick up a bag of coffee beans from a shelf in a supermarket, or add it to your virtual basket when doing your online shop, the green unroasted beans were not high quality coffee beans.
So regardless of the impact of having sat in the bag for who knows how long by the time you end up with them, usually these kind of coffee beans aren't the best quality coffee beans to begin with, because they're usually commodity coffee beans, and commodity coffee beans by their very definition, aren't the highest quality coffee beans.
When you buy freshly roasted coffee beans, from a specialist supplier or directly from a UK small batch coffee roaster, you're usually buying higher quality coffee beans.
Commodity coffee beans are coffee beans that are traded as a commodity, priced by the NY stock exchange.
These coffee beans, are just coffee beans - just as sugar is just sugar, salt is just salt. There's no quality grading, a coffee bean is simply a coffee bean.
The vast majority of coffee sold all over the world, whether it's beans, pre-ground or instant, is this type of coffee bean - and this includes some of the biggest brand names in coffee, by the way.
Speciality coffee beans Vs Commodity coffee beans
Simply put, the highest quality green unroasted coffee beans aren't traded on the commodities market, because the producers of this kind of coffee can get a more stable and often higher price for their beans than this market would provide.
The commodity price for coffee beans can be volatile, it's very difficult to run a business when you have little idea from one month to the next how much your produce is going to be worth.
Instead, the higher quality coffee beans usually make their way to small batch roasters, and into the hands of coffee lovers either directly from the roaster or via speciality coffee suppliers who work with small batch roasters.
So if you're buying freshly roasted beans from a specialist supplier or direct from the roaster, you're usually buying higher quality coffee beans.
Moving on from commodity beans vs higher quality coffee beans and the fact that you're much more likely to end up with higher quality beans when buying freshly roasted coffee beans, the most obvious benefit of fresher coffee beans is that the quality of the coffee beans have been impaired less by ageing.
Coffee beans are their highest in quality soon after roasting. Depending on the bean, there may be an initial day or two of degassing to be done, allowing the beans to go through the initial more dramatic release of CO2, and after this, they're ready to enjoy at their best.
As with any fresh produce, it gradually moves beyond its best as time goes on. So the fresher the better.
How long your coffee beans deteriorate will depend on where it's stored. One of the worst places you can possibly store your coffee beans, is in the hopper of your grinder, which just happens to be where most people tend to store their coffee beans!
Coffee shops tend to empty Kilo bags of beans (or bigger volumes) into their hoppers, but they also go through them much quicker than home baristas. If you're going to be using the full bag of beans that day, then sure, slap them all in your hopper, but if a bag of coffee is more likely to last you several days or longer, you'd be better off re-thinking what you do with your coffee beans.
The best place to store coffee beans for quick access, is in airtight storage containers, such as coffee vac & airscape. Coffee stored in this way will still deteriorate, but it'll do so quite a bit slower than if you keep coffee beans in your hopper.
If you want to store coffee beans and keep them fresher for longer periods of time, the freezer isn't a bad idea, as long as you allow the beans to thaw before breaking the seal, and as long as you don't put them back in the freezer.
You will hear people saying that freezing coffee beans isn't a good idea, but the only reason it wouldn't be a good idea would be if you were freezing a bag and removing it from the freezer to take some beans out and then putting the rest of the bag back in the freezer.
This wouldn't work, the regular changes in humidity and temperature would be likely to cause issues with the beans. But as long as you follow the advice above, freezing coffee beans isn't a bad way to store them.
How to store coffee beans correctly
One of the most common causes of many espresso extraction issues, is down to how fresh the coffee beans are.
This is why you'll find that Sage Appliances, for example, have started stating that the dual walled, pressurized baskets that they supply with their espresso machines are not just for pre-ground, but are also for use with older coffee beans.
If you want great quality espresso, near-perfect extraction and rich crema, you need to be using freshly roasted beans.
Don't be fooled by fancy sounding names on bags of coffee that give you the impression that regardless of the fact that the coffee beans were roasted at an unknown time in the past and have a long sell by date, that the space-age packaging process will lock in the flavours and aroma.
In my humble opinion, and from experience, packaging does little to slow down the deterioration in coffee quality.
Our packaging contains a one way valve to keep the beans fresh, one thing though is don't cut the bags! there is a strip on the back if the bag, pull the tab to open the packet, there is a plastic strip that you press to reseal the bag..simple ;-)
So far I've mainly covered the the importance of buying freshly roasted coffee beans and then being careful where storage is concerned so you can keep them as fresh as possible for as long as possible, but another very important consideration here is whole beans vs pre-ground.
As I've mentioned, you do have a bit of grace where coffee beans are concerned in terms of how long you can enjoy them at their best or close enough to being at their best, with pre-ground coffee beans though, you really have little or no grace.
This is because most of the surface area of the bean is kept safely away from the air until you grind it, but once you grind the coffee bean much, much more of it is exposed to the air.
So buying your beans whole and grinding them yourself as you're about to brew, is by far the best way to enjoy your coffee at it's best, because it goes beyond its best so much quicker once it's ground.
Initially I actually refused to sell pre-ground coffee via The Coffeeworks, simply because I want my customers to be able to enjoy the coffee they buy when it's at it's very best, and there's nothing I can do about the deterioration of pre-ground coffee during delivery.
But it became apparent that many people who wanted to try my coffee, weren't doing because they didn't have a grinder, so I thought it would make sense to supply these people with pre-ground and then do my best - with content like this - to convince customers that they would be so much better off buying a grinder and freshly grinding their own freshly roasted coffee beans, to enjoy their coffee at its very best.
Coffee grinder recommendations
So what we do now is we grind the coffee beans for our customers, for their selected brew method, but we do this literally as we're bagging it up, so that as long as Royal Mail don't let us down, it's only being resting in the bag for a day or two after grinding before it's with our customer.
This isn't ideal, you would be way, way better off buying wholebean and grinding yourself, but I think this is the next best thing.
Hopefully this has answered most of the questions you may have about coffee beans and freshness, but just in case, here's an FAQ for you:
Very simple, freshly roasted coffee beans will have a "roasted on" date on them, telling you when your beans were roasted. If it doesn't, and instead purely has a sell by date or use by date, then these are probably not freshly roasted.
By the way, if you've bought coffee from The Coffeeworks and you don't think it has a roasted on date, check the base of the bag :-).
Daft question, here of course! ;-). If you're a new customer by the way, use the this code:
Use code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order.
Other places to buy freshly roasted coffee, well the most obvious source would be direct from your local small batch coffee roaster.
Many of us are very lucky these days that we have either a small batch roaster or a coffee shop which is run by a roastery where you can pick up bags of lovely freshly roasted coffee from.
Certain supermarkets sometimes stock some freshly roasted beans, which is why I use the words "mainly" and/or "usually" when I'm referring to supermarkets selling coffee beans that are traded as a commodity. Again, you'll know whether the beans you're looking at in a supermarket are freshly roasted or not because if they are, they'll have a "roasted on" date.
Don't pour the entire bag of coffee beans into the hopper of your grinder, instead just pour the beans you're about to use (roughly) into the hopper, and leave the rest in the reseal bag, or better still transfer the beans into an airtight storage container such as Coffeevac or Airscape.
If you want to freeze your coffee beans, that's OK as long as you freeze them sealed, and let them completely thaw before you open the seal, and then don't put them back in the freezer once you've opened them.
This really depends how you store them, but personally I think as long as you're sensible with the storage once you've opened the bag, between two to four weeks is a good rule of thumb.
Dry coffee beans that haven't come into contact with moisture, don't go bad as such, in terms of going off, they simply go beyond their best, beyond their most vibrant, and get duller over time.
Coffee beans degas after roasting, and they continue to do so, but the most volatile stage in terms of the biggest changes occurring to the coffee bean due to the degassing (CO2 release) happens within the first 24 hours or so, for most coffee beans.
This is why you'll rarely be sold a bag of coffee beans for consumption on the day that it was roasted. It's fine to use coffee beans that have just been roasted, but they're at their most stable after this initial degassing phase, and dialling them in can be a bit tricky if you're trying to dial in a bean for espresso, when it's still in the initial degassing stage.
]]>I do have to remind myself occasionally that not everyone is geeky about coffee ;-). Most of the coffee knowledge I now take for granted would have been a surprise to me maybe 10 years ago, when I was yet to catch the "home barista bug".
Anyway, if you're wondering how to go grind coffee beans for the best results, or maybe you're wondering how to grind coffee beans for a specific brew process, fear not, as you'll know this and more, by the time you've finished reading this article :-).
So let's deal with the main question first, literally how do we grind coffee beans?
With a coffee grinder ;-). OK, you knew that much, you weren't about to try to use a boulder were you?
Well, actually this is how coffee was ground in some countries for centuries, this and some form of mortar and pestle was traditionally used to grind coffee beans until the invention of the coffee grinder, relatively recently.
It was in Turkey at some time in the 1400s as far as I can tell, when some form of manual grinder was first used to grind coffee beans, and a couple of hundred years later various grinder designs were invented in Europe, these were all quite a bit different in design from modern burr grinders though.
It was actually a bloke called Thomas Bruff, who just so happens to have been Thomas Jefferson’s dentist, who submitted the first U.S patent for a coffee grinder. Thomas, or "Bruffy" as I'm sure his mates called him, had the idea for burrs with different sized teeth in order to basically chew coffee beans.
From what I've been able to figure out, it was this teeth related design which we have to thank for the modern coffee burr design, which basically work like teeth to chew up the coffee beans into as uniform pieces as possible.
Anyway, thankfully these days you don't have to use a boulder, or a mortar and pestle, you simply need a coffee grinder - but not all grinders are built equally, as I'll explain shortly.
You can choose to grind your coffee with either an electric coffee grinder, or with a hand powered manual coffee grinder. Both are just as capable, so which you'd want to go for is completely up to you.
Keep in mind that how fine or how coarse you need to grind your coffee will determine how long the grinding will take.
For this reason it's more common that people would use manual grinders for brew methods like filter coffee and cafetiere which require a more coarse grind, and it's more common for people to use electric coffee grinders for espresso, for instance, which requires a more fine grind which would take more time and effort with a manual grinder.
The best coffee grinders, in my humble opinion, are those that have "proper burrs" which chew up the coffee beans into uniform pieces.
Blade coffee grinders are very cheap, in some cases they can be cheaper even than manual grinders, and to be fair they do the job, but they don't do it very well - simply because they don't create uniform particles.
With fast spinning blades, coffee beans are hacked and smashed into bits instead of being ground into uniform pieces, the way that they would be with burrs which are properly designed to chew the beans into similar sized chunks.
Also, as you can move burrs further away or closer to each other, you're able to control the grind size this way. With blade grinders the only way to control grind size is by grinding for less for a more coarse grind, or grinding for longer for a finer "grind".
Personally I'd say using a blade grinder is better than buying pre-ground coffee, as I rate freshness as even more important than particle uniformity, but if you do have a blade grinder I'd recommend upgrading to a burr grinder at some point if you can, for a more uniform grind and more control over the grind size.
Coffee grinder recommendations.
The cheapest electric "burr grinders" (Krupps expert, Delonghi KG79, Melitta Molino) don't have traditional burrs, instead they have flat, blunt "grinding wheels" which work more like rolling boulders over beans.
While these kind of grinders are probably a step up from blade grinders because at least you can move the burrs in order to adjust grind size, the particle uniformity is similarly all over the place as with blade grinders, because the beans are crushed rather than being "chewed" with the teeth of the burrs.
If you can, I'd recommend avoiding the blade grinders and these blunt grinding wheel grinders, and go for one with proper burrs - you can actually get proper burr grinders for a very similar price.
See my best coffee grinders post for a much more detailed explanation and lots of reviews.
If you're using manual brewing methods, such as Aeropress, cafetiere or filter, most people will find that they don't need to spend much money at all, whether you decide to go for a manual grinder or an electric grinder.
I'd say £30-£50 for a manual grinder, or £80-£120 if you want a really good manual grinder, and from about £50 and upwards for electric burr grinders.
As long as it has proper burrs, as discussed, I think that were manual brewing methods are concerned, most people probably won't experience much of an upgrade in cup quality from spending a lot more money.
I say "most people" - because the vast majority of people are what I'd refer to as "normal" coffee drinkers.
If you love coffee, but you don't currently treat it as a hobby, you simply enjoy the drink - it's likely that your palate won't be developed to the point that you would benefit much where cup quality is concerned, by spending several hundred pounds on a coffee grinder for manual brewing methods.
If you regularly enjoy cupping sessions, if you've been drinking speciality coffee for years and you have well-developed coffee palate, then it's likely that your palate will be sensitive enough to mean that investing more money in your grinder will lead to better tasting coffee.
If not, then there are still benefits to be had from spending more money on a coffee grinder, including durability, reliability, speed and ease of use, but until and unless your palate is sensitive enough, it's relatively unlikely that you'll be able to notice much improvement in the cup.
So all I would say is if you're buying a manual grinder, keep in mind that the smaller the burrs, the more time and effort it's going to require to grind. So something like the 1Zpresso JX with 48mm burrs is going to take less grinding time than something like the Hario Skerton or Porlex Mini and many other hand grinders that have around 38mm burrs or smaller.
Also, for manual grinders check the maximum grinding amount as some of the smaller ones have a max of 20-25g.
If you're grinding coffee for use with a traditional espresso machine, then the kind of grinder you'll need will depend on the type of espresso machine.
If it's a bean to cup espresso machine, you obviously wont need a grinder, as your machine will have a built in coffee grinder.
If it's one of the cheaper domestic espresso machines such as Swan Retro, Cookworks, Delonghi Dedica, Gran Gaggia, Gaggia Viva, Smeg ECf01(which I know isn't exactly cheap, but it's the same kind of basket) then what these machines have in common is that they have pressurized baskets, or pressurized portafilters.
What this means is that with this kind of espresso machine, you don't need to grind your coffee beans anywhere near as fine as you would have to with traditional baskets.
Higher end espresso machines that I'd usually refer to as being entry level home barista espresso machines such as the Gaggia Classic Pro and most of the Sage espresso machines, come with both standard baskets and pressurized baskets so the user can decide how to use their machine.
If you're using a machine like this, with a pressurized basket or pressurized portafilter, you don't need an espresso capable grinder, and most proper burr grinders starting from about £50 will do the job, as with manual brewing methods.
Espresso Machine recommendations
If, however, you're using a Gaggia Classic Pro or a Sage espresso machine, or any other traditional espresso machine with traditional non-pressured baskets, then you'll need an espresso capable grinder.
There are a couple of exceptions (Sage dose control pro, Iberital MC2, Lelit Fred) but usually espresso capable grinders start at around £200 at the very entry level, and ideally you should allocate a budget of two to three hundred pounds or even more for your coffee grinder.
For traditional barista espresso, the grinder is key, and I believe you should focus the majority of your budget on the grinder.
The difference your espresso machine choice will make to cup quality within a range of a few hundred pounds difference, for example, is probably going to be very small. The difference a few hundred quid spent on a grinder, however, can make a huge difference.
How to make espresso more simple.
Despite what you're likely to read online about very specific grind sizes for different brewing methods, it's actually very difficult to describe different coffee grind sizes, and it's also very difficult to suggest a grind size even for very specific brew methods.
The reason it's hard to describe is that there are no real descriptors that are precise enough.
For instance you'll find descriptions relating to the size of particles of sand, table salt, sugar and so on - but unless you go and get some sand, table salt or sugar and actually compare, do you really know the exact particle size of a grain of table salt or builder's sand?
But just a slight change in visible particle size can actually be a really big difference, so using vague descriptions like this I just don't think is helpful.
Also, it depends on how you're using your brewer, as different methods require a different grind size even with the same brewer.
You can use cafetieres the traditional way with a more coarse grind, or you can use them in a more modern way with a much finer grind and a longer brew time.
You can use an Aeropress in various ways, with various different grind size depending on the method you're using, and with filter coffee often a different grind size is required depending on the size of the brew you're doing.
So what I'd say is start off with this guide and adjust until you're happy with the taste of your coffee:
Imagine focusing in a camera, if you go too far one way you'll go out of focus, if you go too far the other way you'll go out of focus, if you get it in the sweet spot in the middle, you'll be in perfect focus.
I think this is a good way to learn to dial in the grind with any brew method, by imagining lemon juice sourness at one side and very dark chocolate or cocoa bitterness at the other side.
You're aiming right for the sweet spot in the middle, so your coffee doesn't make your eyes water through to sourness, or make you wince due to bitterness, and instead is as in the middle as possible.
So just start off with a grind using the rough guide below, and adjust accordingly.
If you're happy with the taste of the coffee, don't do anything.
If you don't like the way it tastes, try to understand why. Is it because it tastes sour, like lemon juice - or is because of bitterness, like shoving a spoonful of cocoa powder in your gob?
If it's sourness, this is a sign of under extraction, so you need to try to extract more from the bean.
This can be achieved by grinding finer, and/or by increasing the brew temperature, and/or with a longer brew time (for immersion brew methods such as cafetiere and Aeropress).
If it's bitterness, this is a sign of over extraction, so you need to try to extract less from the bean, which can be achieved by adjusting the grind coarser, and/or decreasing the brew temp, and/or reducing the brew time for immersion brew methods.
With that in mind, here's what I'd recommend as a starting point for your grind size.
Cafetiere: Start towards the more coarse setting on your grinder.
Large batch filter: Same as above.
Small batch filter: Start towards the middle of your grinder's range.
Aeropress: Start towards the lower end of your grinder's range if it's a cheaper grinder with a relatively small range. If it's a more premium grinder with a bigger range, start just below the middle or at the Aeropress range if it has one.
Stove top: As above
Espresso for pressurized baskets: As above
Espresso for standard baskets: Using an espresso capable grinder, you'll be able to use flow rate to determine whether you're dialled in. For example aim for your desired ratio (for example 1:2, 18g of ground coffee to 36g of espresso) in a brew time of 28-32 seconds, and if the shot time is under 28 seconds grind finer, if it's over 32 seconds grind coarser.
Just be aware that it can take a long time to get the extraction right with any brewing process, so it makes sense to stick with the same coffee bean for a while, at least until you think you're tasting the best possible results from that coffee bean.
Many people swap from one bag of beans to the next continually, right from the start of their exploration into freshly brewing freshly roasted coffee, and this can make the learning process much longer.
If you try everything with a coffee bean and you just don't like it, it may just be because that coffee bean isn't for you. With high quality freshly roasted coffee beans there should be a lot more flavour than in commodity coffee - which is the kind of coffee most of us are more used to.
With commodity coffee each different coffee is often just a slightly different grade of bitterness, it all tends to be roasted dark to hide taste defects and staleness, so this is why many people think "coffee just tastes like coffee".
That's actually not true at all, but when all the coffee you're consuming has been roasted particularly dark, and has been roasted who knows when, and has been sitting in a bag for possibly months by the time you get it, then yes all of that kind of coffee is going to be relatively indistinct by the time you brew it.
When you're using freshly roasted high quality coffee beans however, you may get a bit of a shock when you detect flavours you're not used to detecting in coffee.
You might even get some coffees that you really, really dislike because they don't taste like you think coffee should taste like, and that's because there are some coffees that are acidic and juicy, for example, which you might not have experienced before - and there are some coffees which have what you may find as peculiar taste notes including things like leather and even tobacco.
But if you stick with a bean for a while to give you the best chance of dialing in with your chosen brew method to the point that you're getting the best results possible with that bean, and then work your way through different beans, you'll end up discovering some amazing coffee beans which take your enjoyment of freshly brewed coffee to a whole new level!
Enjoy :-).
]]>Pondering the question how to choose high quality coffee beans, shows that you understand that one of the keys to better cup quality, is better quality coffee beans, and while this may seem obvious, it doesn't always appear to be.
I know from exchanges with customers and readers, that many people don't consider the quality of the coffee beans as the most important factor in increasing their cup quality.
I've heard from people who have gone through a number of different brewing methods and have invested lots of money but still just can't get a cup of coffee they're completely happy with, and when I've asked them what coffee they're using, they've told me they've been using the same coffee from the start, and they've changed just about everything but the coffee beans.
Anyway, clearly this isn't you, you're reading this post about choosing high quality coffee beans, so you're on the right track :-).
This isn't to say, of course, that gear isn't important - or, maybe more specifically, using the right gear for the right beans, but more on that a bit later on in this article.
When we say good quality coffee beans, what we really mean is coffee beans that we're going to get a great cup of coffee from. Well, I hope that's what most of us are looking for, if not then it seems a bit of a pointless quest.
If someone told you that there was a certain coffee bean which was factually the very best quality coffee bean on the planet, but it happened to taste like vomit, would you buy it?
I don't think you would, so I do think most people will agree that what they mean by quality coffee beans, is coffee beans that will result in amazing tasting coffee.
So now that we've established what the goal actually is here, to find coffee beans that will give us a cup of coffee that we find really enjoyable, let's have a look at the various elements that we need to consider if we're to succeed in this noble quest:
Our palate
The first thing to keep in mind is that we're all individuals, and none of us have exactly the same palate. I love green olives, I don't mind black olives, I love dark chocolate, I love red wine, I don't like white wine, I love marzipan, I love Marmite.
I'll bet that even with this small list of likes and dislikes, you differ on some of them?
That's simply because we all have different palates, and our palates don't remain the same all our lives, either, they change as we go along, I remember as a kid I couldn't stand olives or dark chocolate.
So the first thing we need to understand is that we have a specific palate, so there will be some coffees we like more than others, and this isn't necessarily going to be same as me, or someone else reading this article, so just because one person thinks a particular coffee bean is fantastic, doesn't mean you will.
The great news is there is such a huge variety of flavour profiles to be enjoyed from various different coffee beans, thanks to the different coffee varietals, different origins, different processing methods, different roast profiles and different blends, you'll be able to keep trying different coffee beans and slowly building an idea of what you like and what you don't like, and over time you'll start to see a pattern emerging which you can use to seek out other coffee beans that you like.
For example you may find that you like low acidity coffees, or that you generally prefer washed process coffees to natural processed, or vice versa, and you might find that there's something about coffee beans from a particular origin that you particularly enjoy.
This does take time, but it doesn't exactly take effort ;-), you'll just have to drink lots and lots of coffee, what a hardship ;-).
Our gear
Another thing to keep in mind, is that different coffee beans react differently depending on how they're brewed.
I'm not talking about coffee beans being specific for a particular brew method, what I'm talking about is coffee beans being compatible with the specific equipment being used, and this is mainly when it comes to the more entry level espresso machines.
When it comes to espresso, darker roasts profiles have been traditionally used, and blends have been very popular, including blends of Arabica and Robusta.
As the third wave of coffee has progressed, more and more people have started working with lighter roasted coffee beans, and many roasters these days do what's known as "omni roasting" meaning that they don't categorize roast profile to a particular brew method.
This is fine, but when people who're new to home espresso come along, it's very common for them to end up using lighter roasted beans for espresso, without fully understanding that what they're actually trying to do (get good extraction with a lighter roasted coffee bean) is really quite a tall order.
This can lead to frustration, with coffee lovers blaming their skills, the beans or their equipment for the fact that all they can get from the coffee they're working with is poor tasting (often sour tasting) espresso, when all that's actually happening is that they're using a bean too light for their equipment to handle.
If you're using an integrated grinder machine such as one of the Sage Barista range, or something like the DeLonghi La Specialista, or Breville Barista Max - or an entry level espresso machine and grinder set up, and especially if you're using a bean to cup coffee machine, then keep in mind that if you try to use anything lighter than what I'd refer to as medium dark, you're likely to struggle to fully extract it, and as a result you'll probably experience poor quality shots.
This doesn't mean the coffee beans themselves aren't good quality, it just means they're not compatible with your setup.
It takes fine, precise grinding to properly extract a lighter roast, and it tends to take a higher brew temperature, too. Bean to cup coffee machines don't usually have the grinding precision or the control over brew temperature that you'd need to get decent results, neither do integrated grinder espresso machines and many more entry level setups.
Bean to cup Coffee machine recommendations
Espresso Machine recommendations
Manual coffee maker recommendations
So just keep in mind that especially where espresso is concerned, the lighter roasted you go, the harder it's going to be and the higher level a setup is likely to be required to get good results.
Similar is true of other brew methods, for example if you're brewing with a V60, you may find it more challenging to your abilities and to your grinder (depending on what grinder you have, how well it performs in terms of particle uniformity and how small the adjustments are) the lighter roasted you go.
OK so with these elements dealt with, remembering that the goal is a great tasting cup of coffee, how do we choose high quality coffee beans?
What many people don't realize is that there are essentially two types of coffee, there's commodity coffee which is grown and traded as a commodity just like wheat, salt or sugar, and then there's high quality coffee.
If you enjoy the taste of this kind of coffee, it's cheap and it's accessible so why not?
You probably don't enjoy that kind of coffee, though, or you wouldn't be here reading an article on how to choose high quality coffee beans, in fact you're probably here specifically because you've realized that you don't enjoy that kind of coffee and you've realized that you do actually have a choice, you don't have to drink that kind of coffee.
Coffee traded as a commodity is a different business than high quality coffee beans. High quality coffee beans change hands via a more old fashioned relationship based business, the pricing is based on quality, the price of the coffee is usually quite a bit higher, and prices tend to be a lot more stable.
You may wonder, then, why all coffee farmers don't focus on high quality coffee beans, and this is simply because growing high quality coffee beans is quite a challenge.
It requires the right kind of land in the right area at the right altitude, so it's a bit of a post code lottery in that respect. The land the producer has to work with in most cases is all that they have, and they don't have the opportunity to simply up sticks and go buy land where they can grow a higher quality coffee bean.
It also requires investment, so even if you have a coffee farm in the right area to produce high quality coffee beans, many farmers just won't have the money to invest in doing this, there's quite a lot to it.
1: Buy from coffee specialists
The main route to ensure you're buying high quality coffee beans is to buy your coffee from specialists, rather than buying from big business.
If you buy your coffee from a supermarket, don't get me wrong there are some high quality roasters these days working within the FCMG industry, but more often than not the coffee you'll pick up with your weekly shop will be just "coffee", in the same way that your sugar will just be sugar and your rice will just be rice - it's a commodity.
When you buy from specialists, like here at The Coffeeworks for example, or from any of the hundreds of other high quality coffee roasters and websites, you're buying your coffee beans from people who're genuinely interested and usually passionate, about coffee.
The good news here is that there are so many specialist coffee suppliers now, you're spoilt for choice! I say "specialist" by the way as I'm referring to people who specifically work with coffee beans, I'm not referring to buying coffee which is officially sold as "Speciality" coffee beans, as I'll discuss that shortly.
2: Look for a "roasted on" date
A good way to tell if you're buying high quality coffee beans or not, is the presence or lack of a "roasted on" label.
When you buy coffee from a super market, it'll usually come with a best before date which can be a loooong time in the future, and it doesn't really matter, how quickly you drink that kind of coffee in relation to when it was roasted isn't really going to make much of a difference.
When you're buying high quality coffee beans, though, you're buying coffee which has been treated very differently from start to finish (from sapling to roasting) and the whole point of investing more money on coffee beans that have been dealt with in this way, is that they give you a much more enjoyable cup quality, that's the goal.
So you wouldn't want to buy a bag of amazing quality coffee beans that has been sitting in the bag for months and has gone stale to the point that that lovely flavour the beans have to offer has flattened right off, and all you can taste is a general "coffee" taste - if you were going to do that you might as well have bought "normal" coffee beans while picking up spuds, cat meat, pasta & kitchen roll.
I do actually think that some people take the roasted on date too seriously, in terms of how quickly the beans are likely to deteriorate. There are some who believe that high quality coffee beans should never be sold more than 2 weeks after roast date, for example.
While I see a roasted on date as a sign of quality, and the lack of as a similar sign - personally I think that as long as they're well stored, most great quality coffee beans will taste great for a few weeks after roast date, and I wouldn't personally turn my nose up at a bag of coffee that was roasted five or six weeks ago.
Most of the coffee we sell here at The Coffeeworks is dispatched on the day of of roasting, or occasionally the day before.
3: Look for info
When you pick up a bag of coffee beans from a supermarket, you'll often find the packaging to be quite scarce when it comes to information, like:
Varietal
This tells you what specific Arabica varietal is used for the coffee in question. It's normal to get this info when buying quality coffee beans.
Altitude
This relates to the metres above sea level that the coffee was grown. Generally speaking, higher grown coffee is associated with a higher quality coffee, because the conditions tend to be more suited for growing better quality coffees at higher altitudes.
Producer
Sometimes this will be the name of the farm, and will often include the name of the farmer(s), while in some cases its the name of the coop.
Processing method
This refers to the way the coffee beans (seeds) are separated from the flesh of the coffee cherry, and this can make quite a difference to the taste.
Region / sub region
When you're buying high quality coffee beans you'll usually find info on the packaging relating to the specific sub region the coffee is grown, rather than just the country of origin.
The reason you don't tend to find this kind of info on coffee that is traded as a commodity, is that most/all of this info is simply not known, and may change from one batch to the next.
What is the importance of fresh coffee beans?
4: Look for an SCA score
For coffee to be sold certified as "speciality coffee" by the SCA (Speciality Coffee Association) an SCA Q grader has to have scored it at least 80/100.
Generally speaking, the higher it scores, the more it costs, so a coffee scoring 84 or 85 will usually cost you slightly more than one scoring 80, or 81.
I do think it's worth noting however that while all SCA certified coffee is high quality, that doesn't mean that all high quality coffee is SCA certified.
In other words, all coffee that scores 80 or higher is going to be high quality coffee, but there's a lot of high quality coffee beans that are simply aren't scored, so the lack of an SCA score doesn't necessarily mean it's poor quality.
The producer has to pay for the costs of grading, and many producers just can't afford it.
Let's say there are two producers in the same region, farming next to each other, and one has the resources to be able to pay for their coffee to be graded by the speciality coffee association, and the other doesn't.
The one who can afford to go through this process may end up with a high scoring coffee bean which they can officially trade as "speciality coffee" and which may lead to them being paid quite a bit more for their beans than their neighbour who may be producing just as good coffee beans, but just doesn't have the funds to pay for the grading.
This is where coops come in, as coops work by a number of producers working together to share such costs, but again it can be a post code lottery in terms of having your land to farm in an area where there's a coop you can join.
There are many coffee farmers who're producing very high quality coffee beans in a region where they don't have a coop available to join in order to combine the grading costs, who simply just can't afford to have their coffee graded, and there are many roasters and agents who have relationships with farmers like this who know from their own cupping, just how high quality their coffee is, and who choose to buy the coffee on this basis, regardless of the fact that there's no SCA score with this particular coffee.
So I'm not saying that the lack of an SCA score is the sign of a poor quality coffee bean, but certainly the presence of one does indicate that you're buying a high quality coffee.
Many people use the word speciality coffee to describe high quality coffee beans, however technically speaking to be "Speciality" coffee, it needs to be graded by the SCA (speciality coffee association), and to score at least 80/100.
SCA graders have amazing palates, and it's not that they're looking for a specific taste, a lot of it is concerning the lack of taste defects. Graders are first and foremost looking for taste defects, if there are none then it's likely to make the 80+ required, and to score higher than this it needs to impress the grader where things like sweetness, acidity, mouthfeel and balance are concerned.
By the way, it's this lack of taste defects that allows a coffee to be roasted to a roast profile which brings out the very best from that particular bean. Coffee with taste defects can be roasted dark to mask them, and this is why you'll notice that the majority of jars of instant coffee are dark roasted.
Where do coffee beans come from?
Arabica coffee is actually a species of coffee plant, of which there are many different varieties, usually referred to as "varietals".
There are a number of other species of Coffee, but the only other one which is really used commercially is Robusta. There are high quality Robusta coffees, but generally speaking Robusta is very bold in flavour.
A lot of Robusta coffee beans can taste particularly astringent, and it's used more often than not, by being blended with Arabica to give the coffee a kick & to improve the crema (as Robusta often provides a thick crema).
Nearly all of the coffee on the market, including instant, will either be Arabica, or mainly Arabica and with some Robusta blended with it.
Arabica beans - are they they the best type of coffee?
You're not necessarily going to like all high quality coffee beans, you may find for example that some are too acidic, too fruity, too dark, too light, and as discussed earlier, we all have different palates so I might love one that you can't stand.
But the main thing about higher quality coffee that differentiates it from the coffee that most people are used to drinking, is that it can be roasted to a profile which brings the best out of it.
The same isn't generally true of coffee traded as a commodity, as it's common for taste defects to be present that only roasting particularly dark can hide.
What this means is that when it comes to high quality coffee beans, there's a real variety in flavours. Not only this but because of all of the info you'll usually get about the coffee, you'll usually know what it is about this coffee that is giving it the specific taste you particularly enjoy.
]]>I know from my own experience, as someone who only really got into speciality coffee six or seven years ago, that it can actually be quite a shock when you discover the difference between these two types of coffee, as they really are different worlds.
Quick introduction, I'm Kev Lewis, founder of coffeeblog.co.uk and The Coffeeworks, and you can also find me on YouTube as Coffee Kev.
I started drinking coffee as a kid, my earliest memory of it being taking flasks of coffee with me on fishing trips, as I was into coarse fishing as a kid.
I wasn't very good at it, I very rarely caught anything ;-), but there's just something so magical about sitting next to a body of water for hours on end, and I'm assuming that I created some kind of neural pathway between that feeling of tranquillity, and coffee, which stayed with me ever since.
It wasn't until my late 30s that I got into speciality coffee, though which happened when I was given a cafetiere as birthday gift. To cut a long story short, I ended up trying different coffees, and fell down this rabbit hole known as speciality coffee.
I didn't fully understand, until that point, that speciality coffee was really anything different, I certainly didn't expect it to taste differently or for there to be tonnes more variety within this kind of coffee.
So if you're in a similar mindset to the way I was back then, and you don't fully understand what speciality coffee actually means, then don't worry as I'm about to share what I've discovered about this very different world of coffee.
Coffee Beans Where do they come from?
The coffee that the majority of the population will be familiar with, is commodity coffee. Commodity coffee is a HUGE business, and this kind of coffee is traded on the "C Market" (Central Market) as a commodity.
In the same way that sugar is just sugar, wheat is just wheat, and gold is just gold, coffee is just coffee, when it's traded on the C market.
There is no classification for different levels of quality or anything of that nature, the commodity price is simply whatever it is at the time, thanks to whatever deals have been done up to that point.
What the producer gets for their coffee beans within this market has absolutely no bearing on what it cost them to produce that harvest, the market dictates the price. Sometimes they may make a profit, sometimes they won't - and even when there's a profit to be made, it's usually slim.
Most of the coffee you'll be familiar with, whether it's coffee you buy as pre-ground coffee beans, instant coffee, even whole beans, if you're buying from the supermarket you're probably buying commodity coffee.
If you have the belief that "coffee just tastes like coffee", then this belief probably comes from drinking commodity coffee. This kind of coffee all tends to taste very similar.
The reason for this is simply that the cup quality of this kind of coffee varies a lot, but is generally fairly poor in terms of the high instances of various taste defects, and as a result it's usually roasted dark in order to hide these defects.
Roasting dark is also a way to ensure batch consistency from one bag of pre-ground coffee or one jar of instant coffee to another.
Could this coffee be produced to a higher standard so it doesn't have to be roasted as dark to hide the taste defects? Well, in theory yes - but in reality no, because this would cost more, and how can producers put more money into producing coffee when the price is fixed based on the market and has no relationship with quality?
The other reason that this isn't really feasible is that although certain things could be changed to improve quality, such as manual picking instead of mechanical for example, the most important factor is where the coffee is grown, and the majority of coffee producers just don't have the ability to simply move to a different location.
There's another market for coffee beans, the speciality coffee market.
This market is the polar opposite of commodity coffee. While cup quality doesn't have any impact on the price of commodity coffee, cup quality is how speciality coffee is graded and priced.
This kind of coffee is very different because it's not treated simply as a commodity. The people involved in this market, everyone from the coffee farmer all the way through to the roaster, and ultimately the speciality coffee drinker, treat coffee in a different way in order to ensure the very best cup quality.
I mention the consumer, the speciality coffee drinker, because generally speaking, people who drink this kind of coffee put a lot more effort into to brewing coffee in order to do this coffee justice when brewing, than the average coffee drinker who might just chuck some pre-ground coffee into a cafetiere, or spoon in some instant and pour hot water on top of it.
Another way to put this, is that everyone involved in speciality coffee, from the farmer to the consumer, cares about cup quality.
Organic Coffee Beans what are they and why are they good?
The Speciality Coffee Association is the body responsible for grading speciality coffee. Coffee is tasted and graded by SCA approved "Q graders", and to be "officially" classed as (SCA certified) Speciality Coffee, it has to be scored 80/100 or higher.
The speciality coffee association not only works to ensure high quality, but they're also concerned with ethics, sustainability, human rights and the environment, so there is more to buying SCA scored speciality coffees than purely taste.
For those who are fortunate enough to be able to produce coffee at the kind of quality that is required for speciality coffee, then yes, because your coffee beans will usually end up being valued at a higher price than the C market.
Not only this, but the speciality coffee market focuses a lot more on relationship, which means that the buyer (which in some cases is the roaster) and the producer have a direct relationship, and good old fair business practices are often followed, meaning that a producer of speciality coffee beans usually has a more sustainable business and dependable income.
The simple fact is, though, it's only a small, fortunate percentage of coffee growers that have this opportunity.
It's a bit of a post code lottery when it comes to whether or not the location of the land the producer has at their disposal is feasible for the high quality standards that this market demands. There are other factors in addition to location, as growing and producing speciality grade coffee is something that requires a lot of specialized knowledge, skill, experience and a fair amount of investment.
How do I choose high quality beans?
Speciality coffee is coffee which is treated with the required care, from start to finish, to result in a very specific tasting coffee, specific to that particular varietal or mix of varietals, the particular origin, processing method and roast profile.
Because this kind of coffee can be roasted to the profile which brings out the very best flavour the coffee has to offer (as determined by the roaster) and there's no need to roast it darker than is ideal simply to burn away taste defects, it allows for a great deal of variety.
I should say at this point, having just mentioned the roaster, that the role of the coffee roaster is incredibly important, and is one of things that makes speciality coffee what it is.
Most speciality coffee beans are roasted by small batch coffee roasters. These people have the same goal as the coffee producer, which is to produce the very best cup quality that the coffee beans they're roasting have to offer.
So every important step, including growing, picking, processing, importing and roasting, is done with a great deal of care, by specialists all who have the same goal of ensuring the very best cup quality from every bag of coffee beans.
As I've said, what this leads to is very specific tasting coffee depending on all of the things that impact on the taste. So it's not only about cup quality, it's also about variety.
I've been drinking speciality coffee for a good few years now, and as well as drinking my own coffee beans of course, I buy coffee beans from various different sources, in fact I have five or six different coffee subscriptions at the time of writing, and I buy coffee from various other roasters, and still I regularly experience coffees that surprise me when it comes to taste.
]]>If you have any entry to mid level espresso machine including (but not limited to) the Sage Bambino & Bambino plus, or any other sub £1,000 espresso machine, then reading this article may save you some frustration.
I know, I know ;-), to many people "sub £1000" doesn't sound like it belongs in the same sentence as "entry level", but the reality is that espresso machine setups really are quite expensive.
You can easily spend two to three thousand pounds on your setup, or even much more than this if you like. You don't have to, of course, but just keep in mind that when you're spending anything under around £1500 on your setup (including grinder) you're going to have to accept some compromises.
One of the compromises of going for a more entry level setup, is that you often don't have the control over brew temperature, and other fine tuning abilities that are required (along with fairly advanced barista skills) to enable great results with lighter roasted coffee beans.
If you'd have bought an espresso machine some time ago, before the third wave of coffee really started booming, you would probably have ended up with espresso roast coffees, that is, coffee beans that have been roasted to some level of espresso roast.
These days, however, if you're buying high quality, freshly roasted coffee beans - thanks to the growth of speciality coffee over the past few years, there's a good chance that you'll end up with a lighter roast, and while it is possible to use lighter roasted beans for espresso, it can be a real challenge.
Lighter roasted coffee beans challenge both the home barista, and the setup, as it's typically much harder to get good results with lighter roasted coffee beans.
Traditional espresso roasts are roasted darker, which makes them easier to extract, usually requiring less in terms of both fineness and precision when it comes to the grind, and requiring less in terms of brew temperature in order to fully extract.
This isn't to say that you can't use lighter roasted coffee beans with an entry to mid level setup, it just means that it's probably going to be more of a challenge than darker roasts are, both to the equipment and to your skills.
One issue you may face when using coffee beans that have been roasted to a lighter roast profile than the more traditional espresso roast, is grinding stalls.
This will depend on your grinder, in terms of what actually happens, but the issue is usually either that the grinder has a failsafe to prevent damage, and that failsafe kicks in when you're trying to grind a lighter roasted bean to fine enough for espresso with standard baskets - or, the grinder doesn't have a failsafe, and the gears are stripped as a result, or other damage is encountered.
Darker roasts are more brittle, lighter roasts are harder, and while the majority of coffee grinders will cope with grinding coffee more coarsely for espresso with pressurized baskets, or for Aeropress or cafetiere etc., more torque is required from the motor when it comes to grinding lighter roasted beans finer for espresso with traditional baskets.
The typical symptom of this issue when it happens with Sage grinders including the Sage Smart Grinder Pro & dose control pro, or Sage espresso machines with integrated grinders, is a clicking sound combined with a cease in grinding.
Thankfully, for owners of Sage machines, this isn't usually the sign of a broken grinder, it's the failsafe kicking in. Sage grinders feature a clutch as a failsafe, similar to the clutch used in cordless drills.
Best Coffee Grinder Recommendations
You'll be familiar with using a cordless drill on the screw setting, and that clicking sound which indicates that you need to twist the grip to a higher torque level to allow more power to be put into the process?
This is known as a slipper clutch, and in the case of drills it prevents you from causing damage both to yourself and to whatever you're screwing into by having it set to deliver too much torque.
Sage use this same feature in their grinders to prevent damage being done to the motor. It's worth keeping in mind, however, that the clutch kicking in can also be the sign of another issue, such as a worn impeller (which is mainly an issue on older models as they improved their impellers a few years back), or a damaged top burr or misaligned burrs.
It can also be caused due to adjusting the grind finer when the grinder is not running. While it's OK to adjust a grinder to make it more coarse when it's not running, you should only adjust a grinder to make the grind finer, either while it's grinding, or when it is completely free of grinds - and since it's very difficult to know whether the burrs are completely free of grinds, the best bet is to always adjust finer only when grinding.
If you adjust the grind finer when the grinder isn't running, you can end up, in theory at least, with bits of coffee grounds stuck in between the burrs when adjusting, and you can put the burrs out of alignment. If you suspect this may be the case, the trick is simply to unplug the grinder, remove the top bur and then put it back in place.
In theory you shouldn't actually be able to misalign the majority of burrs, but it's not a bad practice to check that this isn't what has happened if you do encounter such an issue.
If you encounter this problem frequently even when using espresso roast coffee beans, it's worth inspecting the burrs for damage. I have heard of this issue being caused by a damaged top burr.
Most of the time however, with Sage grinders, it is simply that when you're trying to grind the beans you're using fine enough to use with your espresso machine, using standard baskets, the amount of torque required is causing this failsafe to kick in.
When people email me about this, my advice is to check to make sure there's not some issue going on as I've just mentioned, and then once these have been ruled out, to just aim for a darker roast.
If you want to use the rest of your bag of coffee, I'd recommend either using it with a brew method that works with a more coarse grind (as you'll usually find there's no problem grinding the same coffee more coarse) or if your machine came with pressurized baskets as well as standard baskets, just switch to the pressurized baskets to allow you to finish the bag, as you can use much more coarsely ground coffee with pressurized baskets.
Not ideal, I know, but better than having to waste a bag of high quality, freshly roasted coffee beans.
If you're feeling annoyed by the Sage grinder for doing this, just keep in mind that this may have prevented your grinder from damage. Gear stripping, and other damage is quite common in coffee grinders that don't have such fail safes in place.
As I've said, the main advice here is if you're using an entry level grinder or integrated grinder coffee machine, you may need to set your sights on slightly darker roasted beans.
Aside from grinding issues, the other main symptom of trying to work with a coffee bean which is too lightly roasted for your setup, is sour tasting shots of espresso.
This can also present itself as bitterness, but this is usually just the sour-bitter confusion which is quite a common phenomenon especially among people who're just getting into speciality coffee, whereby people use the term "bitter" when it's actually sourness they're detecting.
If you're tasting a sourness, think lemons/limes or vinegar - this can be a sign of under extraction, and it's quite common to experience this with lighter roasted coffees mainly due to not being able to get the brew temperature hot enough.
If what you're tasting is actually bitterness, think cocoa or very dark chocolate, this is the symptom of an opposite problem, over extraction, so it's important to properly diagnose the issue you're having.
A great way to train your taste buds to help you to differentiate between under and over extracted, is to pull Salami shots. Not to be confused with espresso mixed with sausage, which would be vile I'd assume - Salami shots are where you get three (or however many you want but I think 3 makes the most sense) shot cups ready, and you separate each part of the shot into a separate cup or glass.
So for a three-part Salami shot, you'd pull the first 10 seconds of the shot into one cup or glass, then side in the second cup for the second 10 seconds, and finally slide in the third one for the final 10 seconds, and then taste them all.
What you'd expect to taste is sourness in the first cup, more sweetness in the middle cup, and bitterness in the last cup - and then if you launch them all into the same cup and swirl or stir, you should then find a much more balanced shot.
Once you've done this, you should find it easier going forward to detect whether a shot is under extracted or over extracted.
I do often hear from people with the Sage Bambino Plus, for example, complaining of sour tasting shots, and while it's also possible to under extract with darker roasted beans, I can usually tell when it's an issue with roast profile when people tell me that the shot doesn't seem to be under extracted but it tastes like it is.
Why does my coffee taste bad?.
When people tell me that they're getting the expected flow time, and they've tried everything when it comes to things like working on dosing, puck prep and so on, but all they get is sour shots, this would prompt me to reply asking what the roast profile is, and I'd expect to hear that they're not using an espresso roast.
My personal recommendation for coffee beans with any espresso machine which doesn't have an adjustable brew temperature and which is known to be operating at the slightly cooler side of things, is to stick to medium dark to dark roasted coffee beans.
If you're going by colour, I'd describe this as from dark brown and matt (medium/dark) to darker brown and shiny (dark).
If you're using beans that are roasted lighter than this, you can do your best to get the brew temp up by heating everything up as much as possible before pulling the shot, and by taking the grind finer if you can, and/or experimenting with the dose. Ultimately, though, the easiest thing to do is to stick to slightly darker roasted beans.
The coffees I'd recommend from The Coffeeworks for use with the Sage Bambino and Sage Bambino Plus, are:
cworks coffee suitable for use with Sage Machines.
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A scientific study from the University of British Columbia concluded that basically "it depends".
The benefit to the consumer vs the non-organic option depends on the country of origin, and when it comes to things like sustainability and impact on the environment, this is often a really complex situation, given the fact that there are pros and cons to organic farming vs. non-organic.
For example, the lack of chemicals in organic farming has to be a positive for the planet, right? Yes, but with some kinds of farming, a lot more land is required for organic farming vs non-organic, and given that land being converted into agricultural land is one of the leading causes of climate change and habitat loss, it's more complex than it may seem.
When it comes to coffee production, however, generally speaking, there are more pros than cons for organic coffee farming, for the consumer. The main reason for this is that as you'll know, coffee only grows in a specific strip across the globe known as the coffee belt, and, unfortunately, a lot of the coffee-producing regions are in developing countries.
Where do coffee beans come from?
While more developed countries tend to have stricter rules and regulations when it comes to the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, which can reduce the difference between the conventionally farmed produce and the certified organic produce coming from that same country, the use of chemicals in farming has often been used uncontrollably in some developing countries, meaning that there can sometimes be a big difference between conventional and organic coffee farming.
This is why coffee farms wishing to become certified as organic have to go through what's known as "conversion" a lengthy process intended to undo the negative impact of years of conventional farming with the use of pesticides, fungicides & chemical fertilizers.
In some coffee origins, the unrestrained use of chemicals in conventional coffee farming has made it a highly unsustainable process, and while pesticides probably don't cause much of an issue for consumers, they're a very real risk for farmworkers at origin, as this SCA article explains.
We sell organic coffee beans, so you may expect me to jump on my soapbox and start exclaiming that of course coffee beans that have been grown organically are better for your health, but it's really not that simple, and it does depend on what you mean.
How do I choose high quality coffee?
As the article I've just linked to, from the SCA explains, it's unlikely that there is any chemical residue left on coffee beans once the bean is removed from the fruit and dried, and even if there were, the chances of them still lingering after being roasted, are very slim.
Many people prefer organic produce because they don't like the idea of consuming chemical fertilizer, pesticides & fungicides - and of course, that's very unlikely to happen with coffee beans.
But, how does the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and so on, impact the quality of the compounds the coffee beans deliver into our cup?
Most people wouldn't consider coffee beans as having any nutritional benefit, but I think these people are forgetting what a coffee bean is. A coffee bean (isn't a bean but it looks like one) is the seed of the coffee plant, which we consume, ingesting a myriad of organic compounds.
We extract these compounds when we grind and brew our coffee, and we're talking about over a thousand natural chemical compounds, of which caffeine is only one, so coffee isn't just a drink that contains caffeine and tastes like "coffee".
Why do you think coffee does what it does to humans, do you think it's purely caffeine? If so, have you ever consumed caffeine via other forms, including tablet forms or energy drinks - and do you find you get the exact same experience from consuming caffeine in that way?
The Best Decaf Coffee Beans Review.
We clearly don't know enough about the plethora of compounds that the humble coffee bean delivers, and I'm certainly no scientist, but I know from my own experience that the effect of coffee in my system is unlike that of any other caffeinated beverage or substance.
So if, like me, you believe there is more to coffee than just caffeine - do you think that the seed of a coffee plant grown more naturally, in a more nurturing environment, is going to deliver the exact same quality compounds as the seeds of coffee plants grown in an environment where the natural goodness has been completely depleted through the use of chemicals over a prolonged period?
You can show me whatever scientific study you like, I'll still believe that mother nature is the best at knowing how stuff is supposed to grow and that the closer to nature we can get when it comes to producing the stuff we consume, the better. I do realise that even the best organic coffee farm is never going to recreate a 100% natural environment, as monocropping in and of itself isn't natural, but still, the closer we can get to nature, the better - as far as I'm concerned.
No, actually. Organic certification is costly, producers have to pay all of the inspection costs and that includes all expenses of the auditors who travel to the farm to carry out the certification, so it's something that most independent small scale coffee farmers just can't afford, without being part of a coop so the costs can be shared.
But there are many small coffee farmers who are organic producers simply because for them organic production is more accessible, this is generally known as passive organic farming (as they're not certified as organic) and a fairly high percentage of Ethiopian smallholders farm in this way, you just wouldn't know it because their coffee can't be sold as organic as it hasn't been certified as such.
Speciality coffee beans vs Commodity coffee beans.
This is a good question, and it doesn't necessarily mean exactly what you might think it means. There are articles about this that state very simply that organic coffee is coffee that is grown organically, but actually, that's not quite right if we're talking about coffee that has been certified as organic.
As I've just mentioned, there is coffee that is grown organically and can't be sold as organic, so while organic coffee has to be grown organically, there's more to it than that.
Coffee beans that are sold as organic, have to be certified as such and to be organically certified means that the farm has to go through a "conversion" process, which takes at least three years, in which no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers can be used. In addition to this, an approved plan to organically manage the land has to be put in place and adhered to in order to retain the certification.
So certified organic coffee is coffee that is grown on a farm that has undergone the necessary initial steps in order to achieve certification, and that continues to fulfil all of the ongoing requirements, not limited to purely the lack of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
It's a complex subject, but in my humble opinion the more naturally anything we consume is grown, the better - and I believe that coffee farms which have gone through the conversion process so their produce can be organically certified, are better for the people who work on the farm, better for the local environment, better for the planet and better for all of us as a result.
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