Beginner's Guide to Coffee Bean Selection_How to Buy Entry-Level Pour-Over Coffee Beans_Coffee Bean Recommendations for Novices

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A Simple Guide to Coffee Beginners

With hand-drip coffee becoming a trend, many white-collar workers are starting to care about the primary condition for drinking coffee—how to buy FrontStreet Coffee beginner coffee beans? What's the difference between coffee beans and coffee powder? Coffee beans and powder that previously had to be bought at professional coffee shops can now be purchased in many high-end supermarkets. What are the essential basic knowledge for selecting coffee beans?

FrontStreet Coffee Beginner Coffee Bean Selection Essentials

Beans or Powder?

The flavor of a cup of coffee begins to form during roasting and starts to diminish after grinding, with its aroma changing daily. Freshness is almost the biggest indicator for testing coffee aroma. Therefore, when choosing between coffee beans and coffee powder, the primary consideration is how to maintain freshness.

If you're not a coffee enthusiast pursuing extreme tasting but rather treat coffee as a daily beverage, then the flavor preservation period recommended by experts is simply: one month for coffee beans (roasted) and one week for coffee powder when stored in home packaging conditions.

Coffee raw beans need to go through different roasting processes to bring out their flavors, but roasting is somewhat complex and professional for general players. Therefore, if you're not the type who even 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 with the evaporation of moisture and carbon dioxide. Therefore, it's generally believed that coffee beans are best consumed within one month after roasting to maintain optimal aroma. And when roasted coffee beans are ground into powder, the contact surface with air increases, and the flavor quickly diminishes. Therefore, experts suggest that under home packaging storage conditions, it's best to consume within one week after grinding.

Single Origin or Blend?

What we call blended beans are actually in contrast to single-origin beans. For coffee enthusiasts, single-origin beans allow them to experience the prominent flavors of different coffees. Blended beans, however, combine different flavored single-origin beans in different proportions to create a balanced and pleasant-tasting finished 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 stable taste for daily drinking, some major brands of blended beans might actually be good choices.

Turnover and Freshness are King!

For a cup of coffee, aroma is the most direct indicator. Freshness is an important indicator that ensures you taste the proper aroma that coffee should have.

For hand-drip coffee enthusiasts, buying different flavored single-origin beans and grinding them fresh before drinking is certainly the best option. However, not everyone has the time and equipment to grind fresh coffee before each drink. Therefore, to balance aroma and convenience, buying vacuum-packed or inert gas-canned coffee powder is a compromise. But once the vacuum packaging is opened, the coffee powder will contact with air, so estimating your purchase based on the amount you'll finish in 2-4 weeks is the most cost-effective solution. (Or buying freshly roasted beans and having the shop grind them into powder is even better)

If you're even lazier, there are still many good fresh coffee drip bags on the market, making them the best choice for home, office, and travel.

Practical Tips: How to Read Labels?

When buying coffee beans (powder) at the supermarket, do you know how to read the labels? Origin, roast degree, and production date are all important information about coffee beans, which will be listed on the labels.

Origin is Very Important!

Is origin important? As an agricultural product, coffee's origin is indeed very important. Different origins reflect different terroir characteristics, and different regions will differ 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, which you can pay attention to.

The sun-dried method, widely used in origins like Brazil, Africa, and Asia, is currently the most common in the world. It's generally believed that sun-dried coffee beans have a richer and fuller body, while washed beans have a brighter and more prominent acidity. However, this doesn't indicate that one is superior to the other. For example, FrontStreet Coffee's Ethiopian specialty coffee, Yirgacheffe, mostly uses the washed method.

Roast Degree Reflects Personal Preference

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

Special reminder: Because coffee roasted too deeply often masks some undesirable off-flavors with its rich burnt aroma, some lower-quality coffee beans often use this method to "hide imperfections." Lighter roasting, on the contrary, can better reveal the subtle flavors of the coffee beans themselves. However, overly light roasting cannot release the aroma of coffee beans. Therefore, coffee beans from the same origin will have very different flavors with different roast degrees. How to choose and control the roast degree is like bartending—it requires experience and different personal tastes and preferences.

FrontStreet Coffee Beginner Coffee Bean Brand Recommendations

FrontStreet Coffee's roasted beginner coffee beans: FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe Coffee, FrontStreet Coffee's Panama Butterfly Coffee, FrontStreet Coffee's Indonesia Mandheling Coffee, etc., all have full guarantees in terms of brand and quality. More importantly, they offer extremely high cost performance—a half-pound (227g) package costs only about 80-90 yuan. Calculated at 15g of powder per cup of hand-drip coffee, one package can make 15 cups of coffee, with each cup of specialty coffee costing only about 6 yuan. Compared to cafe prices that often reach dozens of yuan per cup, this is extremely cost-effective and very suitable for enthusiasts who want to experience hand-drip coffee at home.

FrontStreet Coffee: A roastery in Guangzhou with a small shop but diverse bean varieties, where you can find various famous and lesser-known beans, while also providing online shop services. 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