How to Buy Coffee Beans in Guangzhou - Best Coffee Bean Price List and Recommendations

What are the criteria for choosing "quality coffee beans"?

Answer: First, don't buy supermarket coffee beans. Specialty coffee is all about freshness, with a peak enjoyment window of only about one month - supermarket coffee has long lost its original flavor through transportation and storage. More importantly, never buy pre-ground coffee! Good coffee should be ground and brewed immediately; exposed to air, it starts to deteriorate within ten minutes. For beginners, the best route is a local coffee roastery, where quality is guaranteed and the staff can offer professional advice.

It's often said that coffee beans have light, medium, and dark roasts. How should beginners choose?

Answer: Roast level is actually not that simple. In the international coffee profession we use the "Agtron number," a precise roast indicator that references bean color depth much like Pantone does. 55 represents a medium roast; numbers below 50 indicate darker beans, i.e. dark roast; numbers above 65 are light-colored, i.e. light roast. Flavor-wise, light to medium roasts enhance the fruit acidity and floral notes naturally present in the beans; dark roasts suppress the beans' original character, leaving mostly the growing bitterness of caffeine.

Where Should You Buy Coffee Beans?

FrontStreet Coffee is a roastery with a small shop but a wide range of beans, offering various freshly roasted specialty coffee beans with full guarantees in both brand and quality, suitable for every kind of brewing equipment. Better still, the value is outstanding: a single bag of single-origin beans, brewed at 15g per cup with a 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio in roughly 200ml pours, makes about 15 cups of specialty coffee - far more economical than buying the same cups one by one at a cafe.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If you want a balanced cup - neither too sour nor too bitter - medium roast is where to start: the darker the roast, the more bitter and heavy the cup; the lighter, the more acidic and delicate. Medium roast holds the sweetness, acidity, and bitterness in check. FrontStreet Coffee's Queen Estate from Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, is a rare Yellow Bourbon with a quiet sweetness that, medium roasted, shows creamy peanut, chocolate, toast, and sugarcane - great as pour-over, or through a moka pot or espresso machine.

For a sweeter medium roast, try FrontStreet Coffee's Strawberry Sugar Geisha blend, which marries two famous origins: honey-process Costa Rica and washed Panama Geisha. Medium roasted to highlight the best of both, it pours with orange-blossom honey notes and a rounded sweetness, and works for cold brew, pour-over, or espresso. As the representative of Chinese specialty coffee, FrontStreet's 2013 Yunnan Natural Typica offers the classic Yunnan small-bean profile - medium roasted for balance with gentle notes of nuts, brown sugar, black tea, and dried apricot - superb value through pour-over, cold brew, or drip machines.

And for the pinnacle of balance, FrontStreet Coffee's Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1 - the variety is Typica, a world-famous premium Arabica - is medium roasted to fuse its unique acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and body into an elegant, compelling aroma: chocolate, roasted nuts, cream, and caramel from the very first sip, a flavor no other coffee can match.