How to choose great coffee!!!
A quick guide to choosing great coffee for home.
Believe it or not, there are a few simple rules for finding great coffee at home.
I will start with the price. If you think it’s too cheap then it’s not good coffee. I still find it hard to believe that you can buy roast and ground coffee for less than £2 in certain places. I won’t get into it here as I am not really sure how this is possible. One for a later post, maybe.
Is it fresh? this would be high on my agenda when looking for great coffee. This comes with a little more complexity than you would think. The coffee world loves the use of the word fresh, and you will see it everywhere if you look. Freshly brewed, freshly roasted, freshly ground. Unfortunately, most places are telling the truth, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the coffee is fresh. Raw green coffee has a shelf life and can stay pretty tasty for around a year if it is stored correctly.
Part of my QC assessment at the Roastery is looking for the signs of age in coffee. Old coffee starts to smell and taste very woody, it reminds me of pencil shavings. Most of the coffee I buy doesn’t hang around for more than a year but you will be hard pushed to find a harvest date on a retail bag of coffee. there are however a few things that will indicate freshness. My advice would be to look at the use-by date first. Most credible roasters will give you a 3-month shelf life and a roast date will help a little, most roasters who are selling fresh coffee will want you to know when it was roasted so you can get the optimum flavour out. I would personally consume it within a month.
Buy from a trusted source. This might seem obvious but if you are looking for great coffee then your local roastery is probably the best place to start. Ask a shedload of questions, and don’t be afraid to ask, even if you think it is silly, passionate people love talking about their product, it is also a good indicator that they are selling quality.
Figure out what you like. This is the fun part. I would say try as much coffee as you can. Coffee is very subjective and what works for you won’t necessarily work for everyone. My general rule, if you are starting out, is to go for Central or South American coffee. Ask for a traditional flavour profile and expand from there. Brazil or El Salvador will be a good shout.
Coffee is a fruit. Remember this one and you won’t be surprised by the sweetness and acidity a good cup offers. Fruity notes in a coffee are a good thing. The majority of the caramel and dark chocolate flavour notes will come from the roasting process, it is the balance of sweetness and acidity that indicates the quality of the coffee. This tends to be amplified as the coffee cools and is a good sign of quality.
Brew it well. Use filtered water, find a recipe that works for you, and stick with it. Coffee has a tonne of variables so being consistent will yield good results. Start with something simple like the Cafetiere - making sure to weigh everything out. Learn what works for you and once you find your desired strength of brew you can tweak from there. Invest in a set of digital scales and start with the recipe of 60g of coffee to 1000g of water. Adjust the amount of coffee up or down depending on your strength preference.
The last thing I would recommend and the thing I would invest in above everything else is a grinder. Buying your coffee as whole-bean and grinding fresh is the single most significant thing you can do to improve the quality of your end cup. Even a basic hand grinder will give you significantly better results than buying pre-ground coffee.
I hope this helps and if you have questions I will try my best to answer them.
Burts