A Beginner's Guide to Buying Better Coffee Beans

I'm Rosie Garrett and you're listening to the Wire Cutter Show. There, it's Rosie. In our last episode, Christine and I talked with wire cutter editorial director Marguerite Preston about the gear you need to upgrade your coffee setup at home. We covered grinders, different brewing methods, and other techniques to develop the flavor you want in your morning brew. So go check that out if you haven't heard it.

There was one important element of a great cup of coffee we didn't have time to talk about, and that's the coffee beans themselves. Every cup of coffee starts off as a ripe coffee cherry, the fruit of the coffee plant. The seeds of that plant get harvested, dried, roasted, and packaged up as coffee beans.

Every step of the coffee production process is an opportunity to change the way a cup eventually will taste, from the type of coffee plant you grow to the temperature at which you roast the beans. To be honest, I find that a bit overwhelming. I've been a wannabe coffee snob for years and I still struggle at the grocery store or at my local coffee shop.

deciphering the words on the back of a bag of beans. How do I experiment with new brands or new coffee roasters and still have confidence that I'm actually gonna like the taste? So to understand that, I'm going through Coffee 101 with some Yah. Sum is co-founder of Coffee Project New York, which began as a coffee shop in New York's East Village, and it has since expanded into roasting, wholesale, retail, education.

Some also happens to be a certified Q grater, which I've just learned is essentially the equivalent of a smalier in wine. So after the break, some's gonna tell me about how to buy coffee beans that will end up in a cup of coffee I love. Or Big Yacht, the Lexus, bragging about money. Those are just props. That's not the engine. That's not the emotion that my music is running on.

That is, of course, Jay-Z. I'm John Caramonica, one of the critics behind the New York Times' 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters project. We interviewed some of the songwriters on our Including Taylor Swift, who hasn't sat for a video like this in a long time. topic. Yeah, criticism has been a huge fuel for me, like a creative writing prompt or something.

These are not ordinary conversations. These creative superstars are sharing parts of their process in ways that you rarely have access to. On top of the mad task of picking only 30 people, we also went out and got some music world heavyweights to weigh in. Watch all the video interviews for free and check out the entire 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters Project at nytimes.com. slash thirty greatest or in the app. And let us know if you agree with our pitch.

We're back with Some Guy, coffee expert and co-founder of Coffee Project New York. Some, welcome to the Wire Cutter Show. So happy to have you. Thanks for having. Thank you for being here. Um, my first question is how, why, when did you fall in love with coffee? I'm from Malaysia, born and raised. And coffee culture there it's a big thing. Like we would go hang out.

drink coffee at any time of the day, seven AM to like two A.M. in the morning, because it's just like a medium for us to get together and talk about things. My love for actual like the specialty coffee side of things. didn't really happen until I moved to New York City. I wanted to actually build the space like what I have back home in Malaysia for people to come in and gather, drinking whatever that they want. However, I realized that as soon as I start the business

Me diving deeper and deeper into coffee as a beverage. Yeah. And now it become coffee as the fruit. And then the whole coffee culture is the people, the producer and all these people that we're bringing together changed a lot for me from the beginning itself where it is just the barrage as a medium of connection.

Okay, so you obviously have a very, very deep knowledge of coffee. We're gonna ask you to dial it way, way, way back, like you're talking to curious novices. So how do you choose beans you know you'll like when you get home? So I think the first thing is maybe look at the bag of coffee and see some of this flavor calls that is listed on the back. I prefer to go with the flavor first or the profile first because then it opens up your mind about trying different coffees from different origin.

I wanna talk a little bit about these tasting notes and some of the words that you see on on a bag of coffee. If you see chocolatey as a as an example, what does that mean? A lot of times it's an impression. The back of coffee tells you what is the first thing that you might be tasting. Coffee itself is a fruit. So the innate

flavor call that you get from it, it's gonna be either fruity or something herbaceous or floral. Okay. Or a combination of both. But when you see a bag of coffee that you have notes like chocolate. Hazelnuts, brown sugar. These are all the chemical reaction that's happening when we put the seed into a roaster and start roasting them. So it's the sugar in the city itself browning to a certain reaction, it reminds you of how it tastes like chocolate, hazelnut, or um brown sugar.

I've seen cherry, I've seen apple, I've seen so many different things and I've always wondered what that means. So that manifests when the beans are being roasted. Correct. So um technically speaking, like whenever the coffee is getting roasted. chemical reaction happen and the heat changed some component in the beans itself to a compound that you might also find in let's say strawberry. So

When we both eat a strawberry together, we know it tastes like strawberry. Right. But I don't know how your strawberry tastes and you will not know how my strawberry tastes. But we both know that we're tasting strawberry because we have experience having them. With the roasting side of things is if this coffee has impression of strawberry, highly likely there is a compound in the beverage itself that reminds you of the strawberry that you had.

in the attic compound when you're eating a strawberry. So So this is all incredibly subjective because notes of strawberry to me in a bag of coffee are is very likely gonna be different or different on my palate than it will be on yours, whatever that strawberry. Correct. So uh whenever I am teaching a class or I'm like getting a note uh on the back of coffee, a lot of times we try to stay calibrated.

We will know, like if let's say this spec of coffee tastes like strawberry, then my strawberry and your strawberry will somewhat be the same because we have experience with what we call the coffee lexicon or the flavor wheel where we do a bunch of palette calibration together. Can you explain this process? I've I've heard of it, I've read a little bit about it but I'm I would love for you to kind of paint a picture of what that looks like, the calibration process.

Once in a while we gather some of our team members and we buy a bunch of spices. and we eat it together and try to pinpoint the product that we're eating from ground level. So I'll take a lime and this as an example. So when I have a lime, I cut it open and I start eating it. Instead of just saying like it's sour, we're diving into the five basic things.

sweet, sour, bitter, umami, and salty. When we do an exercise like that together, we write down from aroma, fragrance, which is we start from smelling them. And I remember doing this exercise and realize for the very first time, lime on its own is not just sharp, bright and acidic, it's actually salty. And then we would tone down our levels to match each other. And at the same time would explain why I would taste this this way.

So this is how we stay calibrated in the professional setting. However, how do we stay calibrated with people who enjoy our coffee that is not in coffee? And that's when you see bags of coffee that says that it tastes like Jolly Wrench. Taste like uh cotton candy. So these are terms that it's a little bit more common that people can actually figure it out and also think about it.

And it's also more fun and personally I think it's less scary. So if I get a bag of coffee that tastes like fruity pebbles, I'll know for sure that oh it's a mixed bag of fruit. taste like a red sangria, then I know it's gonna be a little bit boozy and also like a lot of like red grapes. compared to like if you want to go straight into like this coffee tastes like orange, strawberry and kiwi. I think after brewing it, sipping it and looking at the label helped you understand the flavor.

When I'm buying coffee, should I be buying whole bean or ground? I think holding is always the go to. Because once you ground the coffee, you're exposing the coffee areas a lot more. So chances of it degassing, getting still is a lot quicker, even though you seal them.

But that's a very practical reason of why you do not want to ground your coffee ahead of time. It's because you don't know how you want to brew it. So if let's say you are you have a bag of coffee and you pre-ground or you bought it pre-ground, they're s only gonna be good for like filter. You won't be able to make any adjustment or like cater it to a different brew style.

Another term I've been curious about, roast date. What does that mean relative to my buying and then making and drinking a cup of coffee? So when we talk about roast date, is uh technically when is the beans getting roasted and finished and packaged. That date tells you the freshness.

when you have a bag of coffee that is super fresh, let's say it's roasted yesterday, and you brew it right away, it's not always the going to be the best results because there's still a lot of things going on with the coffee after we finish roasting. So what we like is to have a rest period. And that's one of the reasons why we want to pay attention to the roast date. The sooner you brew your coffee after the roast date, it's actually harder for you to extract the cough.

So it will not taste as good as if the coffee has been sitting in the bag for five days or more. The flavors won't be as deep. Yes, um not only that you might get a lot of like smokiness, gassiness. or what we call like grassiness, um, right after roast. And sometimes when we cup coffee together, a very common flavor call that we will be getting if the coffee is way too fresh is roasted beef. Oof. Yes, um, so as soon as it rests and open up, you'll get a lot more benefit from the beverages.

So in terms of shorthand, how long generally are you gonna wanna wait?

Ideally seven days. Rule of thumb is if you have a lighter rose, chances of it resting longer is gonna be better. Can you briefly explain the differences between light, medium, and dark roast? Light, medium, and dark rose is uh when we see the color of the beans itself, very, very subjective because somebody's dark rose can be somebody's medium rose.

However, uh what I like to see when someone is talking about light, medium, and dark roses, it is almost always reflected in the way that the bag of coffee has the calls. So like roast coffee, you will always see a lot of Herbaceous, floral and fruit notes in the back. OK medium roast of coffee you will see a little bit more often

the fruit, but at the same time you get some sort of brown sugar like uh vanilla or like cooked berries. Like think about pineapple or peach that you throw it on top of a grill kind. So that will be your medium roast. And if it's a dark rose, look up for notes like caramel, dark chocolate, roasted hazelnut, almonds. These are all signs that can tell you a little bit more on that.

As long as you're not tasting burnt or extreme bitterness from the dark rose itself, it will be great as a milk beverage or maybe that is the cup of coffee that you need to wake you up in the morning. What are some of the ways you can determine the taste of coffee beans based on where they're from? Mm, this is exactly where very fascinating for me. I love how coffee tastes in different region. So coffee from the Asian region a lot of times is going to be lower acidity because of the elevation.

And then coffee from the Americas. It's gonna be a little bit more mild and acidity and more spice through it, notes of apple and things like that. and then coffee from the African region will be brighter, fruity, and more floral. So these are all the classic But there's a lot of things changing right now and people are getting more and more creative with fermentation technique and it throws me off all the time. So I have a cup of coffee just maybe two to three weeks ago.

It is actually a cup of coffee from Indonesia. When I had it, it tastes like almost at high elevation Colombia because of the anaerobic natural process that I'm putting onto it. So while we all have something to ground us to the taste, now things are getting more and more complex.

Okay, so let's say I buy my coffee beans at the grocery store. I'm in the aisle, there are so many different options. What is your general guidance when you're looking up and down and trying to reach for a bag of whole bean coffee, what do I look for? When you're buying coffee in a grocery store, I think the first thing is uh pick the coffee that you like, how it tastes.

the brew method it's roasted for and then after that you can look into regions that might excite you. You wanna see something that is very common or not common if it's a blend or it's a single origin. And finally probably it's the roasting. You don't wanna have something that has to be sitting on a shelf for like six months or something like that. And also you want it y it needs to have a roast. Yes, I think highly likely you will see a real state on each and every bag of coffee.

So thank you so much for joining us. This was amazingly helpful. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you, Rosie. That's it on Coffee Beans. We'll link to the Coffee Project New York website in our show notes.