Coffee drinkers - spill the beans!

[Mr. Cleetus]

^^. I think the most important thing is go with a local roaster where you are guaranteed to be getting freshly roasted beans (most, at least here, have a FTO blend). The bean origin, profile & blend is a pretty personal thing and I imagine you will get the best advice from the roaster itself. Sounds like fun.

[Herbsman]

So true. You see beans on a supermarket shelf, with an expiry date of 18 months in the future and you think 'hang on a minute....'

[Herbsman]

Obviously your grinder is really important too. It is generally regarded as the most important piece of coffee making equipment. Its ability to grind coffee into uniformly-sized particles is paramount to the flavour. Everything else is "an accessory to the grinder".

Briefly, and as far as I understand, the reason is because lower quality grinders smash the coffee into pieces of various sizes. You end up with 'bricks and dust'. This affects the flavour because smaller particles will be over-extracted, causing bitterness, and larger particles don't get as much flavour extracted from them. It also affects the smoothness of the flow of water through the coffee. Lots of odd sized particles won't sit on top of eachother tightly, instead there will be a load of gaps. Instead of going through at a regular rate, the water will spurt and dribble through gaps, not properly extracting flavour from the grounds.

I think ceramic, conical burr grinders are thought to be the best. Grinder will obviously allowyou to adjust the particle size of the coffee grounds, which affects the rate at which the water in the machine passes through them and how much flavour/bitterness is extracted from them.

Also, it's important that the machine allows manual control of water temperature and pressure (the pressure will also determine the amount of time that the water is in contact with the grounds), as both of these variables have a huge effect on the coffee's flavour.

[xrodolfox]

Fox, I just read this: http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/Shopping ... asted.aspx
If I we were in the UK, you can bet that'd be the coffee we bought.

[Clem Snide]

Hey HF, if you are over in Liverpool at any point a new indie coffee shop has opened, named Bold Street Coffee. Real nice place, the owners are friends of mine with all kinds of info about quality ethical coffee on a budget. (Not veggies sadly).

Worth popping in and chatting to them if you're in the area, they are very keen to forge relationships with other independent places.

[Hiking Fox]

^^. I think the most important thing is go with a local roaster where you are guaranteed to be getting freshly roasted beans

I live in a 99% white, old-fashioned little town in the hills. The majority of people here think that good coffee means Nescafe gold blend. I really, really doubt there is local coffee grinder, though you never know...

[Mr. Cleetus]

ahh true, but by local, I was really just thinking a roaster located somewhere on your little island where you can get the beans quickly (day or two or whatever) after roasting, instead of some weeks/months later.

[Hiking Fox]

Hey HF, if you are over in Liverpool at any point a new indie coffee shop has opened, named Bold Street Coffee. Real nice place, the owners are friends of mine with all kinds of info about quality ethical coffee on a budget. (Not veggies sadly).

Worth popping in and chatting to them if you're in the area, they are very keen to forge relationships with other independent places.

Thanks, I'll do that next time I visit my parents.

Rodolfo, the coffee you mention is the one I have at home for visitors. They like it.

Cleetus, ok I'll bear that in mind.

[garrettedge]

Be wary, not all Fair Trade instantly means fantastic. There's a coffee shop near me that has such quality coffee that the farmers growing it refuse to let it be Fair Trade so they don't take a bit of the profits. It doesn't mean that the coffee is immoral, it just means that the farmer gets way more than Fair Trade and they don't want to give a share of that.