Where to Buy Coffee Beans in Guangzhou? Guangzhou Coffee Bean Prices per Pound - Price Range Guide

Which coffee beans to buy in Guangzhou really comes down to the price range you have in mind. At the low end, head for Yide Road: once you get there, almost any shop selling seasonings will stock them, and the middle stretch of the street has the highest concentration of stores. I'll leave the specific shop names out. For the mid-range, the imported-food supermarkets are your best bet, and Metro is a solid choice for coffee beans, carrying brands such as Lavazza, illy and UCC. If you're shopping mid-to-low, you'll also find beans from ZRONG and Metro's own private label, with a fairly complete range. (A word on Starbucks coffee: it's not that impressive.) For anything higher-end, you're looking at artisan coffee roasters, some of which will even roast to order, guaranteeing both quality and freshness.

1. Don't chase small bargains; buy only what you can finish within a month of the roast date

Freshness starts counting from the moment the beans are roasted. Freshly roasted coffee begins to degas (mainly carbon dioxide), and that process continues for about a week. Once the gas is fully spent (roughly 2-3 weeks), the beans are no longer fresh!

2. Buying coffee beans with clearly marked dates is the smart choice

Most food is judged by its shelf life and best-by date, and coffee beans are a food product too. Some large coffee companies roast centrally and mass-produce, which gives their beans a shelf life of 12 to 18 months. But shelf life and freshness are two different things. With coffee beans, what really matters is the best-by date. The fresher the beans, the better the coffee brewed from them will taste!

3. Don't buy coffee from unknown sources or with unclear labeling

Under pressure from price competition, many coffee merchants can only afford low-quality, cheap green beans to roast, so they don't dare label the coffee's identity clearly. Truly high-quality coffee, by contrast, carries a clear and complete identity, so you can buy with peace of mind and drink with confidence.

Guangzhou Coffee Bean Brand Recommendation

Located at Dongshankou in Yuexiu District, the Guangzhou coffee bean brand FrontStreet Coffee offers a range of freshly roasted specialty coffee beans with full guarantees on both brand and quality, suited to brewing with all kinds of equipment. More importantly, the value is outstanding: a 227-gram bag of single-origin beans costs only about 80-90 yuan. At 200ml per cup and a 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio, one bag makes about 15 cups of specialty coffee, working out to roughly 6.6 yuan per cup - excellent value next to cafes charging well over a hundred yuan a cup.

FrontStreet Coffee is a Guangzhou roastery with a small shop but a diverse selection of beans, where you can find both famous and lesser-known varieties.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If you're after a balanced, easy-drinking everyday bean, FrontStreet's Brazil Queen's Farm is a great place to start. Grown in Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, it's a distinctive Yellow Bourbon. Medium roasting draws out cream peanut, chocolate, toasted bread and sugarcane sweetness, and it performs just as well as pour-over as it does in a moka pot or espresso machine.

For a little more depth, FrontStreet's Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 is also roasted medium, so its acidity, bitterness, sweetness and body knit together into a smooth, elegant cup layered with chocolate, roasted nut, cream and caramel notes.