Selecting Your Beans Part 2 – Better Know a Bean

So assuming you’re ready to make the upgrade to only buying fresh roasted whole bean coffee, how do you make heads or tails of various origins, roasts, labels, and blends? What criteria should you use in selecting coffee and where do you begin to explore this new landscape? You’ll get different answers asking different coffee nerds, but here is my long winded take, after the jump.

Freshness
Backtracking a bit, it bears repeating that freshness is key to great coffee. Look to buy only beans that reveal their roast date and aren’t going stale in open containers. Coffee’s full flavor goes into quick decline after the first week out of the roaster so try to buy coffee in smaller amounts at least every other week.

Great coffee begins with quality green coffee
Growing coffee is hard. Cultivating trees at high altitude, often in remote areas with limited infrastructure, tending to the land, knowing the precise moment to begin the harvest – knowledge, patience, and hard work are all prerequisites. The very best coffees come from dedication to sustainable practices and hands on plant husbandry that cannot be matched by industrial agricultural techniques. The use of lower yielding heirloom varietal coffees, smaller scale processing, or unique microclimates can contribute to a coffee being great and distinctive.

Ethical coffee and quality coffee go hand in hand
Farmers and cooperatives that get a fair price for their coffee can produce better coffee. When coffee is regarded as a fungible, homogenous, interchangeable commodity, irrespective of quality, the farmer loses – and we lose as great coffees disappear into a sea of mediocre beans. Programs like Fair Trade, third-party certifications, and quality-based auctions have helped some growers get better prices and market access. A small handful of roasters have also begun buying direct, paying more for quality coffee and giving growers the opportunity to share in the rewards and invest in their communities. This is a very complicated topic – no doubt you’ll be hearing more from me on this before the week is out.

What is a single origin coffee?
Single origin is usually taken to mean that the coffee is all originating from a single country, region, cooperative or farm. The origin can be very generic identifying only, for instance, “Colombia” or “Kenya” or generic to a region like “Ehthiopia Yirgacheffe” or “Mexico Chiapas”. Coffee labeled with the name of a specific mill, estate, program, or cooperative is more likely to have unique characteristics and singular quality than coffee which is labeled more generically. Coffee that is traceable to the trees it was picked from, the land it was grown on, and the people who grew, harvested, and processed it is almost always going to be more remarkable in the cup.

What is a blend?
Different roasters have different ideas about blends. For some, blends are for the customer who is turned off or intimidated by the exotic sounding names of origin coffees and wants simply to buy coffee. For some a blend is a way to formulate a general flavor profile that can be maintained year round in spite of the seasonality of coffee or changes in particular crops. Some blends serve to create balance or harmony in multiple coffees, becoming more than the sum of their parts (like a well crafted espresso blend). Other blends are dumping grounds for coffees lacking the quality to stand on their own. Many blends are just exercises in the modern American folk art of “branding” and have more to do with clever names and packaging than the beans they represent.

A few words on roast degrees
A well executed roast of a coffee will highlight the intrinsic qualities of the bean, preserve the coffee’s natural and delicate sweetness, and present an overall balanced cup. At most of the geeked-out artisan roasters, the degree of roast is uniquely tailored to each individual coffee and no longer adheres to the old familiar categories.

Why do so many coffee nerds turn up their nose at darker roasts? Dark roasting can cover up a lot of coffee crimes, from a lack of roast profiling to inferior green beans. Very dark roasts replace “tasting the steak” with “tasting the grill”, obliterating much of what coffee has to offer. One of the reasons dark roasts are so popular, beyond their ability to mask flaws in lower quality beans, is that they are much more forgiving of the low or erratic brew temperatures of most home coffee machines. A dark roast will remain relatively neutral at brew temps that would make optimally roasted coffee taste unpalatably sour or bitter. Another drawback is darker roasts tend to go south more quickly as much of the coffee’s oils are brought to the surface where they can quickly become rancid. There are roasters out there who do dazzling things on the darker side but they are by and large the exception to the rule.

preferences and prejudices
When I begin brainwashing a new victim introducing a person to better coffee, one of my first commands pieces of advice is to set aside any of the preferences and prejudices they may have picked up about certain coffee origins or roasting styles. One disappointing experience with Colombian coffee should not blind you from tasting some of the nut-rippingly amazing coffees coming from the Colombian regions of Huila or Cauca in the last year. The more you explore the more you’ll find exceptions to and variations on the expected cup profile from different countries. Truly great coffee is great coffee no matter where it was grown.

Okay, okay… just give me a good cup of coffee
In part 3 I’ll talk about how to find and get your mitts on coffees worth coveting.