Nine criteria for distinguishing "good coffee" from "bad coffee"

Clancy Rose, the second place winner of the "Roaster's Choice Award" of the 2015 American Coffee Championship, teaches you how to distinguish the quality of coffee from 9 aspects: in addition to the differences in the coffee beans themselves, the coffee's growing environment and climate, aroma, drying process, storage time, etc. all affect the quality of coffee.

Microclimate of coffee bean growing area

Coffee comes in many shapes and sizes, and while most are the same, specific varieties are best grown for different local microclimates. The best farmers adapt to local conditions.

Picking time

At the end of the harvest season, coffee beans are picked before they are fully ripe in preparation for the next season. Most of these coffee beans are classified as bad varieties called "subgrade" because they are not ideal.

Do you want to highlight desirable features or hide imperfections during baking?

Don’t say that any roaster, or even just any person, can produce a dry, grey, dull coffee. This is a way to cover up flaws, and producing more complex fruity or caramel flavors requires high-quality coffee beans and attention to detail.

The degree of care in drying

Once the beans are picked, there are a few different ways to dry out the moisture in the beans, the simplest being to leave them outside in the sun for a few weeks, or using an expensive dryer. High-quality beans are tested to make sure they don’t get moldy, while lower-quality beans are left unattended in the sun because the labor costs are too high.

Is coffee cooled with water?

In large coffee roasters, too many beans are roasted at once, so it is impossible to use air to cool the beans, and water mist needs to be sprayed quickly inside. Although there is no clear data, many roasters believe that: although the water evaporates quickly, if the water contacts the coffee beans, it will reduce the overall quality.

The amount of coffee purchased by the roaster

At the farm level, quality and quantity are directly related. There is simply not enough high-quality coffee in the world to meet the needs of large roasters. Small companies can buy 5-10 bags, and other high-quality coffees for limited or small-scale operations, but these quantities are not even close to the amount of a batch of orders from large roasters. Once a roaster reaches a certain scale, their ability to provide high-quality coffee is greatly reduced.

Storage time

If the coffee beans used by the coffee shop come from a good local roaster, they are within a week, which ensures freshness. Different from the coffee beans from big brands but of low quality.

Quality or quantity?

In the quest for scale, many manufacturers end up sacrificing quality for quantity. When roasting 2 million pounds of coffee beans a week, there’s no time to pay attention to details.

Analysis of coffee aroma

The aroma is what makes coffee special, and while professional roasters often think it’s silly to write taste notes, if a company uses blanket terms like “smooth” or “blod,” it shows they’re not paying attention to the more subtle characteristics.

The pictures and text are re-arranged by the micro-body community

(This article comes from Thrillist)

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