Selecting Your Beans Part 1 – the Truth on the Coffee Aisle

A great cup of coffee begins with great coffee beans. The long aisle in the grocery store and the seeming plethora of options can be daunting but knowing a few brutal truths about coffee will help you see the landscape as it really is.

There are a few things the giant coffee companies don’t want you to know (for instance, what real coffee tastes like). The biggest dirty secret is that roasted coffee has a pretty short shelf life. The fullness of coffee’s vast flavor potential peaks in the first week out of the roaster and rapidly plummets in a way that no fancy packaging will adequately mitigate. The coffee in open bins or bulk bins fares even worse with the exposure to oxygen wiping out much nuance that might have once have made it into your cup.

Freshness is perhaps the most important factor in getting a good brew. If it does not have a roast date it almost certainly was dead on arrival before it hit the shelf.

The majority of familiar coffee brands you’ll encounter in the grocery store are owned by the “Big Four” – Kraft, Nestle, Sara Lee, and Proctor & Gamble. Collectively they account for around 40% of global coffee sales. Their products contain cheap robusta coffee and low grade commodity arabica and at best are a caffeine delivery system slightly less painful than snorting crushed up Vivarin.

Once you become accustomed to fresh coffee its hard to ever go back. Ideally you would buy beans directly from an artisan coffee roaster who provides fresh roasted coffee, roast dated in airtight bags. Ideally you would grind them at home as needed and not in the dirty bulk grinders found at the supermarket. Ideally you would buy coffee at least every week or at worst every other week. Its good to think of buying coffee beans in the same way as you’d think of buying fresh bread and less like you’d regard other packaged goods.

In part 2 I’ll give you advice on choosing your beans and in part 3 I’ll clue you in on some of the better places to get them.