A Beginner's Simple Guide to Coffee - How to Buy Home Coffee Beans? How Much Does a Bag of Home Coffee Beans Cost?

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Home brewing has become a trend, and many people are starting to care about the primary condition for drinking coffee at home - how to buy household coffee beans? What are the differences between coffee beans and coffee powder? Coffee beans and coffee powder that previously had to be purchased from professional coffee shops can now be found in many high-end supermarkets. What are the essential knowledge points for selecting household coffee beans?

Essential Purchase Guidelines

Buy Beans or Powder?

The flavor of a cup of coffee begins to form during roasting, starts to deteriorate during grinding, and changes every day. Freshness is almost the greatest indicator of coffee aroma. Therefore, when considering whether to buy coffee beans or coffee powder, the primary consideration is how to maintain freshness.

If you're not a coffee enthusiast pursuing ultimate tasting experience but rather treat coffee as a daily beverage, experts' flavor preservation period is generally: one month for coffee beans (roasted beans) and one week for coffee powder under home packaging storage conditions.

Coffee raw beans must undergo different roasting processes to bring out their flavors, but roasting is somewhat complex and professional for general enthusiasts. Therefore, unless you're someone who wants to manually control the roasting process yourself, there's no need to buy raw beans.

When coffee raw beans are roasted, various flavors and aromas begin to disappear as moisture and carbon dioxide evaporate. Therefore, it's generally believed that coffee beans are best consumed within one month after roasting to maintain optimal aroma. When roasted coffee beans are ground into powder, the surface area exposed to air increases, and the flavor quickly deteriorates. Therefore, experts recommend consuming ground coffee within one week under home packaging storage conditions.

Single-Origin Beans or Commercial Beans?

So-called commercial beans are actually defined in contrast to single-origin beans. For coffee enthusiasts, single-origin beans allow them to experience the distinctive flavors of different coffees. Commercial beans, however, blend single-origin beans of different flavors in various proportions to create a balanced, pleasant-tasting final product. This is similar to the different appreciation points between single malt whiskey and blended whiskey. If you want a more convenient method and more consistent taste for daily drinking, commercial beans from major brands might actually be good choices.

Traffic Volume and Freshness are King!

For a cup of coffee, aroma is the most direct indicator. Freshness is the important factor that ensures you taste the coffee's proper aroma.

For pour-over coffee enthusiasts, buying single-origin beans with different flavors and grinding them fresh before drinking is certainly the best option. However, not everyone has the time and equipment to grind fresh coffee each time. So to achieve a balance between aroma and convenience, buying vacuum-sealed or inert gas-packaged coffee powder is a compromise. But once vacuum packaging is opened, coffee powder will come into contact with air, so estimating your purchase based on 2-4 weeks of consumption is the most cost-effective solution.

If you're this type of buyer, commercial coffee powder is a relatively high-value choice. Because of fast turnover and fresh beans, it can maintain flavor with relatively guaranteed quality, and costs are reduced due to large-scale standardized production, improving cost-effectiveness. For example, illy and lavazza, and even Starbucks' selected beans, have relatively stable bean quality, with 250g mainstream prices around 100 yuan, offering good value.

Practical Tips: How to Read Labels?

When buying coffee beans (or powder) at the supermarket, do you read the labels? Origin, roast level, and production date are all important information about coffee beans and are clearly listed on the labels.

Origin is Important!

Is origin important? Coffee, as an agricultural product, indeed has very significant origins. Different origins reflect different terroir characteristics, and different regions vary from bean characteristics to sun-dried or washed processing methods. On coffee bean packaging, besides the origin, the sun-dried or washed processing method is usually clearly marked and worth noting.

The sun-dried method, widely used in origins such as Brazil, Africa, and Asia, is currently the most common in the world. Generally, sun-dried coffee beans have richer, more full-bodied flavors, while washed beans have brighter, more prominent acidity. However, this doesn't indicate that one is superior to the other. For example, Ethiopia's premium coffee Yirgacheffe mostly uses the washed method.

Roast Level Reflects Personal Preference

Roast level is also an essential item on the label. The color and flavor of beans deepen and intensify as the roast level increases, but darker roasted coffee is not necessarily more aromatic.

A global coffee roasting master once reminded in an interview with Yangcheng Evening News reporters that because coffee is roasted too deeply, the rich burnt aroma often masks some undesirable off-flavors. Therefore, some lower-quality coffee beans often use this method to "hide shortcomings." Lighter roasting instead allows for better appreciation of the subtle flavors of the coffee beans themselves. However, overly light roasting cannot release the coffee beans' aroma. Therefore, coffee beans from the same origin will have very different flavors with different roast levels. How to choose and control the roast degree is like bartending - it requires experience and different personal taste preferences.

Household Coffee Bean Brand Recommendations

FrontStreet Coffee's roasted single-origin household coffee beans: washed Yirgacheffe coffee, Kenya AA coffee, Panama Geisha coffee, etc., all have full guarantees in terms of brand and quality, suitable for brewing with various equipment. More importantly, they offer extremely high cost-effectiveness. A half-pound (227-gram) package costs only around 80-90 yuan. Calculating at 15 grams of powder per cup of pour-over coffee, one package can make 15 cups of coffee, with each cup of single-origin coffee costing only about 6 yuan. Compared to the dozens of yuan per cup typically sold in coffee shops, this offers excellent value.

FrontStreet Coffee: A roastery in Guangzhou with a small shop but diverse bean varieties, where you can find various famous and lesser-known beans. Online store services are also available. https://shop104210103.taobao.com

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473