“A Journey through coffee part 3” What’s in my cup, Mr Bean?
- Jayne Oliphant-Thompson
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
What’s in my cup, Mr Bean?
As part of my barista classes at the vineyard, one question that always arises is which coffee is the best to buy. Whether it's beans or instant, which coffee will give me a lovely cup, and where can I get it? There are several things that need to be considered.
Arabica vs Robusta
The many types of coffee plants come under two main umbrella headings, Arabica and Robusta. There are hundreds of varieties of each type, just like roses or apples. Robusta is generally grown with profit in mind. This plant grows readily at any altitude in most conditions that the coffee-growing countries can provide. It will grow easily at sea level on flat ground making it easy to harvest with machines. This makes it cheaper and machines harvest everything whether it beripe or not, so the quality is generally lower. Also, the caffeine content is higher. The coffee plant produces caffeine as the bitter taste makes it unpalatable to insects and repels them. At sea level, there are more insects so the plant produces more caffeine.
Arabica, however, is grown with quality, flavour and sustainability in mind. Arabica best grows at altitude which means steep slopes, making it impossible to use machinery. It’s picked by hand, harvesting only the best ripest fruit. Also at altitude, all of those sweet, acidic, complex compounds that make up amazing-tasting coffee that develop under the heat of the daylight sun are locked in during the cold nights that come with 2000 metres above sea level (masl). These are the reasons that arabica tastes so much better.
When buying coffee look out for those packets that have arabica written on it. If it doesn’t tell you which type, it’s going to be robusta. Good coffee will also tell you the altitude at which it was grown.
Freshness:
After roasting coffee beans the volatile compounds that give you flavour and aroma start to escape. Most of these will have broken down after a couple of months so 4-5 month old beans will have lost most of their flavour and aroma. The only thing that will give you an idea of freshness is roast date so any bag without this date could be very, very stale. Any good independent coffee shop or speciality coffee bought online will have a roast date clearly labelled. I talk about speciality coffee a lot. This is coffee that has been scored by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) for flavour, provenance, ethics and sustainability. When searching for coffee online use the search term “speciality coffee” and you’llbe buying quality, ethical sustainably grown beans.
We have some great speciality coffee suppliers locally. Exe Coffee Roasters, Crankhouse, Exploding Bakery, 18g Coffee, and Common Beaver are just a few of the cafes in Exeter that will sell you a very fresh, very good quality bag of beans. They’ll all grind it for you on the spot too if you haven’t got a grinder.
Of course, you can also come to the vineyard and buy a lovely tin of our own speciality coffee sourced from Clan Roastery just outside Bude.
After grinding beans, these volatile compounds I spoke about will escape within 48hrs so all pre-ground coffee will be stale.
Sourcing coffee from supermarkets means that you’ll be drinking stale undated coffee or even staler pre-ground coffee. The thing is a lot of people have only ever drunk stale coffee and so have got used to it as they’ve never tasted fresh coffee. My suggestion is that as with any food, fresh is best so buy locally with a roast date or even better get a grinder. (A £50 hand grinder will do the job and give you exercise)
Instant Coffee:
Like any other coffee, you can get good and bad quality instant coffee. First, it’s best to look at how instant coffee is made.
It tends to start with robusta coffee because it’s cheap. It’s then roasted for a long time at high temperatures to get someflavour as the inherent flavours from the cheaper bean are lacking. This roasted coffee is ground coarsely and brewed at high temperatures to extract as much flavour as possible from the coffee so that some of it is left at the end. The brewed coffee is then frozen to -50C in order to get granules, these granules are then heated in a vacuum (called sublimation) to remove moisture.
When brewing coffee well, we only tend to extract about 20% of the compounds from the ground coffee into the liquid.This is usually the tastiest, smoothest, sweetest part of the coffee. Extracting at higher levels (with instant, about 60%) means that the unwanted bitter compounds are also extracted, making for a bitter brew. This bitterness will mask any of the good flavours that have survived the process. The processes above also tend to remove colour so often additives like colouring are added to give the coffee the expected brown colour. Sweeteners are also often used to mask this bitterness.
You can get better instant coffee if that’s your thing. Look out for Arabica on the jar and terms like speciality. These coffees will only extract 20% of the tastiest elements of coffee leaving the bitterness behind. They’ll also use good beans roasted less so the quality isn’t masked. Littles Coffee based in Cullompton are a good example.
Of course, if you’re happy with your daily brew that’s fine but if you fancy trying to see if you can improve it by spending a bit more time and slightly more money sourcing it, then I hope this helps.
If this is all interesting to you and you want to learn more about coffee and get hands-on with learning how to make delicious cups consistently then join me on my Barista Course:
