Styles Of Coffee Bean

I know basically nothing about coffee and when I go to a coffee shop, most times I have no idea what I’m ordering. So I’m going to change that.

So, in these next three episodes, I’m breaking down, outlining the three most important aspects of making a perfect cup of coffee; the bean, the roast and the brew. We’ll start with the bean. For help, I turned to Minneapolis-based coffee importer,

Café Imports, for some information on the differences between different types of coffee beans and to learn what kinds I might prefer best. That’s a lot of coffee.

First, I met with Noah. So, here at our warehouse in Minneapolis, we have roughly four million pounds of coffee at any given time. We source coffee from about 26 different countries. After roasting, it’s about 90 million cups of brewed coffee. Wow! That will last a while.

Pretty extensive. So, why does coffee generally need to be grown in the mountains? So it gets very cold at night at high elevation and what happens at night is that the coffee cherry actually enters a state of stasis and then when the sun comes back out, then suddenly it releases all these nutrients and starts to grow and it’s that cycle of stasis to extreme growth that really helps the bean to be a more flavorful, more vibrant cup. All of the coffee that we have here is Arabica.

Coffee Bean Importer

In the global production, there are about 22 billion pounds of coffee that are sold, a high percentage of that is Robusta, which is a lower grown, lower quality variety. So, Robusta is probably what most people are familiar with. Y

ou know, the old cans of coffee that they would see in their parents’ house. So, it’s a pretty big taste difference those two species then? One is very leathery, flat, cardboardy (if that’s a word) and these typically are more interesting or can be at least.

Next, I checked out the tasting room with Dan to try out a sample of different beans in a process called cupping. Cupping is the way that we evaluate coffee here in the coffee industry. What you’re looking for are the inherent qualities in the coffee bean, you’re looking for: acidity, flavor, sweetness, body and just your overall appreciation of the coffee.

We’ve got Mexican coffee here, we’ve got a Kenyan coffee, Colombian coffee, Brazilian coffee and a Costa Rican coffee. So, not only do we have coffees from different origins, but we have coffees that are processed in different ways. Let’s go ahead and evaluate the dry fragrance of each coffee. Go ahead and grab a cup and you can tap the grinds a little bit, give it a little smell.

Do you smell anything in there? Smells like coffee. Like coffee? Good. So, to me, this coffee smells a little nutty, a little chocolaty and there’s probably a little bit of caramel in there and I’d say that’s pretty typical for a Mexican coffee. Maybe I smell that. So, let’s go to the next one; this is Kenya. Hopefully, this one is a little bit more of a stand out to you. Good. Actually doesn’t smell a lot much like coffee.

A lot of people say that about Kenyan coffee. So, some of the common notes that people will use are tomato or bright red berries, pretty accurate for this coffee. And this is the last one we’ve got, this is a Costa Rican. It’s a naturally processed coffee. What that means is that they pick the cherry off of the tree and they put it on a drying bed and it dries like that. Oh, yeah. Definitely fruity. There’s no coffee.

So now we’ll move on to pouring the water into the cups to brew the coffee. That will take about 45 minutes. We’ll let it stiff and then what we’ll do is break the crust with spoons, we’ll evaluate the aroma that comes up once you break that crust and you will push through to break the crust and you’ll do it three times.

I’m going to rinse this spoon off and we’ll go to the next cup. For a lot of people, this is the most intense aromatic experience that they have with coffee. Breaking that crust can really release a lot of oils and a lot of active components in the coffee that contains a lot of the things that make it taste really good. You know, put them together like this in the back of the cup and then just pull them together like that and scoop that stuff up.

Okay. That’s the stuff that we don’t want. The most important part of cupping, which is what we call evaluating coffee, is aspirating the coffee so that it covers all of the taste buds on your tongue. And this is like in wine tasting when you see people slurping wine, it’s exactly what they’re doing; they’re trying to spray the coffee liqueur all over their tongue and then you spit it out.

Oh. You can swallow it if you want but you’ll get super caffeinated. I drink it. It’s cool. What are the kind of notes that you’re tasting in this Kenyan coffee that we’re cupping? It seems not super bitter, but it’s a little bit sweeter. Let’s move on to the Colombian. All right. That tastes a little bitterer.

Okay. Less acidic I think. How does it feel in your mouth? Does it feel creamy or really light or? It feels fairly light, maybe not… I think the Kenyan is a little bit lighter maybe. Yeah, I would agree. So, I would say it’s a pretty classic Colombian profile; it’s got dark chocolate, a little bit of medium acidity, not a super-heavy body, probably medium; it’s a nice sweet balanced coffee.

Let’s move on to Brazil. Yeah, chocolate flavor. I smelled it, it’s definitely still there. I’m getting some nuttiness, which is pretty common for Brazil. Let’s go to Costa Rica. Yeah, it’s definitely very fruity. Yeah. It’s cool. It’s different. Yeah, very different. I don’t know if that’s like what I’d want for a cup of coffee in the morning or not.

That’s a really good point. I think a lot of people find natural coffees to be intense and sort of hard to handle. They don’t want to drink a lot of it. Alright. Now onto Mexico. It seems pretty good. Just kind of… everyone’s kind of extreme flavors but this one kind of seems like a balance, just kind of a good normal coffee. Yeah.

I really like this coffee, it’s got a milk chocolate flavor to me as opposed to the Colombian, which have more of a dark chocolate. It’s got some medium acidity, it’s very balanced, it’s creamy, I would say.

This might be what I would want in the morning for a normal cup of coffee. The other ones have a nice interesting flare to them but I like this one best.

Well, you know, since you like the Mexican coffee so much, it might be really cool to go to Mexico and visit some producers there. You could probably set you up with some nice coffee. Sounds great.

Thanks to Café Imports, I now have an idea of what vast differences different beans can offer to the taste of coffee and an idea of what type of bean I prefer best and where I might want to head when I make my coffee entirely from scratch. Up next, I’ll tackle the next important aspect of making the perfect cup of coffee; the roast. If you haven’t yet, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss these or any of our other videos. Thanks for watching.