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How to choose the best coffee beans?

A great cup of coffee starts with using the best beans. You may think that only professional baristas can make a really good brew with all their fancy equipment, but the essence of a great cup of coffee is found in the beans themselves – are they richly flavored, roasted for peak flavor, and freshly ground?

Best-coffee-beans

The fresher the grind, the more flavorful the cup of coffee. Some baristas use the rule of thumb that coffee should be used within 3 minutes of grinding to maximize taste and subtle flavors. So, if you can get your hands on a good coffee grinder (or your super automatic espresso machine has a a grinder built in), recreating your favorite coffee beverage without having to leave home is only a few grinds away. For the best-tasting drink, you should buy your beans whole and grind them yourself right before brewing.

Choosing the best coffee beans for you

Baristas and most espresso drinkers are familiar with the more common Arabica and Robusta coffee beans, but there are actually are four different types of coffee beans: Arabica, Robusta, Liberica, and Excelsa. The most popular and common coffee beans are Arabica and Robusta; you should try the other two if you find them. It is likely that you will encounter specialty beans by geographic region—such as Kona Coffee or grown organically or following free-trade guidelines. Learn about all these bean varieties and and tips to choose the best coffee beans in this article.

Arabica vs. Robusta coffee beans

Aribica-vs-Robusta

Most coffee drinkers prefer Arabica to Robusta. Although Arabica coffees can have a wide range of taste profiles depending on exactly how and where the beans were grown, Arabica coffees tend to be less bitter than Robusta coffees and to have subtler flavors with hints of fruit or chocolate.

That being said, the more bitter taste of Robusta beans often has a place when brewing espresso. Often a blend of Arabica and Robusta beans are used for the best flavor in espresso.

Because of its more subtle and nuanced flavor, most coffee drinkers prefer Arabica. So, Arabica is the most produced and exported coffee worldwide (estimated to be about 60% of coffee traded), but Robusta coffee trees are easier to grow and are less subject to disease for the grower. You will find both beans at your favorite roaster (or for roasting).

If you would like to try coffee made from pure Arabica beans, we would suggest Kauai Whole Bean Coffee, Koloa Estate Medium Roast (view on Amazon) – 100% Arabica Whole Bean Coffee as a wonderful starting point.

Does Robusta produce better Crema?

Many espresso drinkers prefer the smooth, creamy texture from their crema. Using at least some Robusta when making espresso makes it easier to achieve that smooth, creamy texture that many espresso drinkers desire.

Robusta tends to have more caffeine

In fact, it appears to be the higher caffeine that makes the Robusta plant more disease resistant.

If you would like to try the unadulterated flavor of Robusta coffee beans, we suggest that you purchase the following Robusta Whole Bean Coffee from Vietnam (view on Amazon).

Also, make sure you try Liberica and Excelsa Coffee Beans to broaden your coffee experience.

Liberica Coffee Beans

It would be difficult to guess now that more than 100 years ago, Liberica coffee used to be a very popular coffee bean. Now they are considered an unusual treat.

Liberica-coffee-beans

Liberica coffee grows on “trees” 20-30 feet tall and typically in jungle environment. The height of those trees and the typical jungle environment in which they grow make the harvest more difficult than other coffee varieties.

The climates in which they are grown are not conducive to very large-scale production. But at the height of Liberica’s popularity a plant disease called “coffee rust” had wiped out much of the Arabica coffee production worldwide.

The Philippines were first to really commercialize the growth of Liberica coffee, having a climate and geography well suited to the plant.

Liberica Coffee is known for its fruity, floral, and slightly wood flavor, and it was well received in the marketplace. Unfortunately (for the Liberica coffee market), the Philippines which, at that time, belonged to the United States, declared its independence.

In retaliation, the U.S. imposed trade sanctions on the Philippines which dealt a fatal blow to the new coffee industry and to the Liberica coffee bean industry. Now Liberica beans are grown in other, similar tropical locations such as Malaysia.

To try the pure flavor of coffee brewed from library Beans, you might try Aik Cheong Kopi-O Liberica Beans (view on Amazon).

Excelsa Coffee Beans

Excelsa coffee beans are typically from Vietnam where it is often used as a blending coffee that can add complexity to other coffees. Excelsa beans are typically processed using traditional methods including sun-drying.

Excelsa-coffee-beans

If you’d like to try the taste of pure Excelsa beans, we suggest ordering this Vietnamese Excelsa Whole Bean Coffee (view on Amazon)

Which Beans Are Best?

All of the coffee bean varieties are “best” for some specific purposes. Why don’t you try a virtual coffee tour and try all four major varieties of coffee beans so you can learn what each brings to the table.

Often coffee aficionados who prefer their coffee “straight up”, unadulterated with creamers, sweeteners, and other flavors, will prefer a light or medium roast Arabica coffee. Those who appreciate a good crema and more caffeine may well chose a hearty Robusta.

Make yourself more knowledgeable and appreciative of coffee varieties!

Check out our suggested choices for coffee beans.

Which coffee beans should I buy?

The best coffee is a very personal decision. Do you value crema? Do you want a mild coffee with floral bouquet? Do you want enough caffeine to knock your socks off?

We’ve tried a wide variety of beans, and we find that many combinations of bean types and roasts are “just right” for particular situations. We suggest that you sample a variety of coffees made the ways you prefer (espresso, pour-over, etc.) and form your own opinion through that experience.

FAQ’s

What are the best beans for espresso brewing?

As always, the ultimate judge of which are the best beans for brewing espresso is you. You should always prefer to use the freshest beans you can find. Especially check out the roast date. Many people find a blend of Arabica beans beans for smooth taste and subtle flavors and Robusta beans to add bold flavor and excellent Crema. You might find it beneficial to start with beings from a big roaster (like Peet’s), and then you can try other beans and have a baseline for comparison.

What are the best coffee beans to use in a French Press?

A French press can be used to brew great coffee from almost any good beans. With a French press you can brew great coffee from dark roasts, blends, or single origin, either caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. So pick your preferred coffee style, put it in your French press, and go for it!

What are the best coffee beans cold brew coffee?

Cold brewing tends to bring out the subtle flavors in coffee beans. You should start your search with beans that emphasize these subtle flavors. For example, you might start with Stonestreet cold brew coffee (view on Amazon) which is both smooth (low acid) and strong. It’s a Colombian single origin Arabica coffee. Use that coffee as your baseline, and feel free to explore from there.

How does Starbucks make cold brew coffee?

Don’t confuse cold brew coffee with iced coffee. Iced coffee is conventional hot coffee poured over ice, whereas cold brew coffee is ground coffee added to cold filtered water and allowed to steep for about 20 hours. If you want to make it easy on yourself, you can buy pouches at Starbucks of cold brew coffee concentrate that you can mix up at home. Otherwise, take your favorite coffee beans, grind them, put them in a picture of cold water and let steep for 20 hours…

Is there such a thing as GOOD decaffeinated coffee?

While the very terms good and decaffeinated coffee seem to be an oxymoron and sacrilegious to some of us, decaffeinated coffees have made huge improvements over earlier chemical tasting decaffeinated coffee. You might start by trying Decaf Dark Roast by Black Ink Coffee (view on Amazon) which is a medium roast decaffeinated by the Swiss water process.

What are the best coffee beans in the world?

Some might argue (especially based on price) that kopi luwak, made from coffee beans plucked from the feces of civets, are the best to beans in the world.

kopi-luwak-coffee-cherries-and-a-civet

Assuming we don’t have any civets handy, many would suggest that Hawaiian coffee from Kona or Kauai beans are among the best in the world.

What is the best whole bean coffee?

While you should always start with whole bean coffee, there is no single best whole bean coffee. The answer, of course, is it depends on your personal tastes and mood. A good start would be to ask your local roaster to give you a quick tour of the coffees they have available–then you can branch out from there.

Is it cheaper to buy green coffee beans?

While it is cheaper to buy green coffee beans, the cost difference is a lot less than you might expect. Green coffee beans contain excess water and oil which is partially lost during the roasting process. Thus, by weight, you will end up with a smaller amount (by weight) of beans than you started with. Additionally, the roasting process itself is energy intensive and certainly will cost you something. The final risk to consider is that you need to buy significant quantities of green beans to save much money, and you may not want to do that because of the beans aging out before you use them. However, there would be a real benefit to buying green beans and roasting them yourself if you have some secret roasting process that produces just the taste you want.

Filed Under: Coffee beans

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Enjoy Flavored Coffee Beans

We must admit that the aroma of a fresh brewed coffee from flavored coffee beans can start a cascade in our senses that can only be satisfied by a flavored coffee drink. How does that flavor become infused in the coffee beans? What should you know to enjoy these flavored coffees?

flavored-coffee

First, flavored coffee beans are becoming more and more popular. Where we once had to go to a specialty coffee shop to get our fix of flavored coffees, we now can ubiquitously find flavored beans at almost any grocery store. Where there used to ben only 2 or 3 flavor choices, we now can find dozens of flavors as whole beans, ground coffee, K-cups, and more.

SF Bay Coffee Hazelnut Crème Whole Bean

SF-Bay-Coffee-Hazelnut-Creme-Whole-Bean

View Product on Amazon.com

How do the beans get flavored?

Generally, while the beans are being roasted, flavored oils are added to coat and infuse the beans. If you examine the beans closely, you will see that they are typically shiny because of that coating. While that shows you where the flavor comes from, there is a danger that the oily beans will clog up that great grinder you have in your super automatic espresso machine. Additionally, a true espresso grind is too fine for flavored beans, often resulting in a sticky paste unless you always set your grinder to a very coarse grind.

Grinding Flavored Beans

So how do we get a good grind for flavored beans and not gum up the works?

Basically, you may find that an expensive blade grinder works best with flavored beans. The other choice is to grind unflavored beans and then add the flavoring after brewing is complete. While we don’t recommend blade grinders for fine espresso, they work remarkably well to grind flavored beans without clogging.

Hamilton Beach Fresh Grind Electric Coffee Grinder

Hamilton-Beach-Electric-Coffee-Grinder

View Product on Amazon.com

What would a Barista do?

If you watch a barista make a flavored coffee drink, you will notice that they first grind unflavored coffee and then add flavored syrup at the end of the process so as to not clog the grinder. That way you get a better result and don’t create a problem at clean-up time.

We suggest you start with a great medium roast bean, grind that bean without flavoring, brew your drink, and then add flavoring in the form of syrups widely available.

Torani Variety Pack

Torani-Variety-Pack

View Product on Amazon.com

Related article:
  • Visiting a Coffee Cooperative: how do those beans get to my espresso machine?

Filed Under: Coffee beans

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Visiting a Coffee Cooperative: how do those beans get to my espresso machine?

We recently had the opportunity to travel with our extended family on a trip from Los Angeles to Miami in which we traversed the Panama Canal. Being coffee fanatics, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to visit a number of Central American coffee plantations and cooperatives.

Coffee Bush to Coffee in Your Cup

Producing that great shot of espresso in your cup is a long and labor-intensive process that is also becoming increasingly sophisticated in making sure the coffee tastes just right. One of the more impressive tours we went on was of a coffee cooperative in Costa Rica.

Coffee Cooperative

Growing coffee is most economically done at a large scale. This initially led to very large corporations dominating because they could afford the very large plantations necessary to grow the coffee and also the large expenditures on processing and marketing. More interesting to us is the growth of coffee cooperatives. Coffee cooperatives are formed by often large groups of small growers banding together to gain the economies of scale of the large corporations. However, they still maintain critical unique aspects of the individual small growers.

For example, the cooperative that we visited in Costa Rica provided both shared land where individual growers could have their plot on a much larger property and also shared processing equipment and labor where small growers could gain the economies of scale of large growers but still be processing their own unique coffee product (perhaps even grown on the grower’s small plot of land).

These cooperatives operate not only for the growing and processing of the coffee but also to provide financing and marketing resources for the growers. Interestingly, it’s not just the small growers that participate, we also noticed that massive coffee retailers use the co-ops to experiment with new products and new growing methods.

Coffee Growing

Growing coffee starts and ends with the coffee bean. Coffee beans are initially planted in small, cup size containers where they germinate and produce the first sprout of a coffee bush.

coffee-beans

Growing coffee requires a temperate, almost equatorial climate with lots of sun (although the coffee bushes or trees themselves are typically grown under a taller canopy of trees that provide some shade). Along with a reasonable amount of rain, coffee bushes seem to grow best in rich, volcanic soils.

After planting, the coffee plants grow rapidly to a size ready for transplantation.

coffee-beans

Typically it takes a coffee bush 3 to 5 years to begin producing fruit. It may then stay in its productive phase for 25 or more years. The fruit forms as reddish “cherries” on the plant-each of which has two coffee beans inside.

coffee-beans

coffee-beans

When the cherries are harvested, they are transported to a sorting and separating machine. The cherries then start a long and mechanical process that sorts them by size and density and begins the long process of stripping away the portions that we don’t want in our coffee. Initially the cherries are dumped in a large vat of water and sorted by density-those that float in those that don’t float! Incidentally, this coffee cooperative has virtually no waste. The layers of the coffee cherries that are stripped away are turned into compost (on the Coop’s property) and used to enrich the soil for the coffee bushes.

coffee-beans

Moving through several very specialized machines the outer layers of the cherry are progressively removed to get down to the beans. During this whole process, the beans are kept separated by grower, type, quality, etc.

The beans are initially dried by being spread out in a large concrete courtyard (sometimes enhanced by drying machines). They then get more intensely dried in rotating ovens (although not roasted yet) and are moved on to individual storage rooms by grower.

coffee-beans

coffee-beans

Typically the beans rest for a period of weeks to a few months in the storage rooms and then they are processed and bagged for shipment. At this point in time, a vast majority of the beans have not yet been roasted. The coffee beans will be roasted when they arrive at their destination.

coffee-beans

Some beans are roasted as requested in this facility using large hoppers and roasting ovens and coffee roasters.

coffee-beans

Finally, the beans are ready to be ground and used. Here we see one of the several large coffee grinders used at the Cooperative. However, the beans are rarely ground at the Coffee Coop, as most of their customers prefer to roast and grind their coffee beans locally. But a few beans are ground at the Coop for local or smaller customers.

coffee-beans

We hope this quick trip through world of growing and processing coffee has been as interesting for you as it is for us. We’ve only brushed the surface in this article. If you have a chance to visit a Coffee Cooperative, we strong suggest you do so. Besides, they will have you sample some wonderful coffee at the end of the tour!

Filed Under: Coffee beans Tagged With: Growing coffee

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