Which Coffee Bean Brand is the Best? What Are the Best-Tasting Specialty Coffee Bean Brands in China?

What Brand of Coffee Beans Should You Choose?

First of all, whether specialty coffee beans taste good is subjective—everyone's palate is different.

Secondly, choosing a coffee bean brand requires learning from the ground up; no single article can settle it. Making casual rankings would be neither objective nor fair to the people working in specialty coffee—because brand itself is not the standard for judging specialty coffee quality.

The specialty coffee market is more competitive than ever, and its potential is attracting serious capital. China has become a major battleground of the world coffee market.

Setting green bean quality aside, there are many well-known domestic brands—Fisher, Mingqian, Uncle Bean, and many more. Good brands like Seesaw, Fisher, M2M, Uncle Bean, Rose, FrontStreet Coffee, and Minority all roast fresh. Even so, you will sometimes find the same brand tastes great one time and mediocre the next. That comes down to green bean quality and countless variables in the roasting process. The sensible approach is to try gradually and settle on what you like.

Specialty coffee's popularity in China keeps rising. In Shanghai, besides Peet's Coffee, which opened its first store in August 2017, Blue Bottle was also reportedly planning its first China store in 2018.

%Arabica, the popular café from Kyoto, Japan, opened in Shanghai before the 2018 Spring Festival even without a food and beverage license, becoming a hot topic in coffee circles for a time.

Competition among domestic brands is equally lively, all under the specialty coffee banner.

Luckin Coffee, which originated in Beijing, opened its first store in October 2017 and has since expanded to 11 cities with nearly a hundred stores.

Meanwhile Seesaw and GREYBOX have received tens of millions or even hundreds of millions in investment; Youxin Coffee focuses on office buildings; and influential Shanghai brands like Mailong, Zhiguan, Eagle Coffee, and Lutianjia are all gradually emerging from independent café roots to break out of their niches.

Behind all of this is smart capital, and no large business makes decisions without rigorous analysis. It points to one thing: demand is huge, and consumers are waiting for stores to open.

According to statistics, China's coffee consumption is growing at 20% annually—about 10 times the global growth rate. Asia, with half the world's population and one-third of coffee production, has become a new engine driving the global coffee industry and consumption market.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Since brand alone can't tell you what to buy, it helps to shop by variety and origin. There are three great coffee species—Arabica, Robusta, and Liberica—and nearly everything you drink as specialty coffee is Arabica, prized for its complex, pure flavors. Here are some standout Arabica picks from FrontStreet Coffee's range.

The FrontStreet Huakui (Flower Queen) is a natural-processed Ethiopian heirloom: mixed-variety beans of uneven size carrying elegant florals and pronounced fruit—cream strawberry, mango, jackfruit, citrus, and blueberry, with the ripe tropical-fruit character typical of Sidama naturals. That heady berry fragrance won first place in that year's TOH green bean competition, and it remains a rare bean that combines flavor and price in equal measure.

The washed counterpart is the FrontStreet Yirgacheffe Guodingding Cooperative: top Ethiopian G1 grade, washed-processed, with clean, transparent lemon-citrus notes, white florals, and a green tea finish.

For classic balance, the FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 grows Typica—Arabica's flagship variety, transplanted from Martinique to Jamaica's Blue Mountains in the 1820s, where over 200 years it developed better disease resistance and a sweetness that cannot be replicated elsewhere. FrontStreet's cupping notes: a balance no other origin has been able to match.

For the pinnacle of Arabica, the FrontStreet Panama Esmeralda Red Label Geisha from Boquete, Chiriqui, offers rich florals, citrus, peach, and layered fruit acidity with a cream-smooth body and an oolong-tea finish—so refined it drinks like fragrant fruit tea. And for a soft, easy-drinking everyday option, the FrontStreet Brazil Queen Estate yellow Bourbon yields cream, peanut, toast, and sugarcane notes, working equally well as pour-over, moka pot, or espresso.