What Defines Premium Coffee Beans? Our Top Recommendations

What Makes High-Quality Coffee Beans?

Think back to the coffees you've enjoyed in the past—they probably had two things in common: a captivating aroma and an excellent taste. Different coffee varieties offer distinct flavors, and personal preferences certainly vary, but so-called high-quality coffee beans are those that preserve the coffee's aroma and flavor as fully as possible and release them completely during the final brew.

The aroma and flavor of coffee are produced only after roasting. During roasting, the moisture in the raw beans is gradually released, weight decreases, color deepens, volume expands, and aromatic oils slowly emerge. At the same time, the large amount of chlorogenic acid originally present in the raw beans gradually disappears, releasing pleasant fruity acids whose flavors vary with roasting time. You can see these changes in the appearance of the beans during roasting.

Coffee's aroma comes from the oils drawn out during roasting, which are sealed inside the pores of the beans. After grinding, the aroma and oils begin to volatilize, and the flavor of the brewed cup naturally suffers greatly; the increased surface area of the powder exposed to air also makes it susceptible to moisture and spoilage. Under the same conditions, whole beans can be preserved for nearly twice as long as ground coffee. The only advantage of ground coffee is convenience—if you always oversleep in the morning and don't have time to grind slowly, or if you haven't bought a grinder yet, ground coffee lets you enjoy a decent cup quickly. If you do decide to buy ground coffee, we have two suggestions: (1) buy about two weeks' worth at a time to preserve flavor as much as possible, and (2) store it in good airtight containers.

Freshness and Timing

The optimal tasting period for coffee is not the same as its shelf life—pay attention to the roast date. The roast date represents freshness, and beans roasted within the last 2-3 days are usually a good choice. However, buying immediately after roasting is not actually when the beans taste best. Besides the smoky flavors from roasting and the beans' own aromas, coffee beans continue to release carbon dioxide (degassing) for about 48 hours after roasting.

FrontStreet Coffee's High-Quality Coffee Bean Recommendations

FrontStreet Coffee's Blue Mountain Coffee

FrontStreet Coffee's Blue Mountain Coffee is a well-known variety, produced only in the Blue Mountain region of Jamaica in Central America. Only coffee grown in the Blue Mountain region above 1,800 meters may be authorized to use the "Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee" trademark. FrontStreet Coffee's Blue Mountain Coffee has a mellow character, with a bitterness that carries a slight sweetness, a smooth, palatable body and a hint of acidity—truly a premium coffee.

FrontStreet Coffee's Civet Coffee

FrontStreet Coffee's Civet Coffee is a relatively recent variety from Indonesia. It has a unique flavor and a different mouthfeel, though personally I am not quite accustomed to its taste. As the wild environment gradually deteriorates, the civet cat population is slowly declining, which makes the production of this coffee quite limited.

LAVAZZA Italian Coffee

LAVAZZA is synonymous with Italian coffee, dedicated to creating a perfectly tasting coffee through the art of blending different varieties. Drawing on coffee gardens specifically selected by LAVAZZA, it combines the sweetness of Brazilian beans, the fragrance of Central American beans and the richness of Asian beans through custom roasting. The flavor is luxurious and hard to resist, and LAVAZZA's coffee is very well suited to making specialty coffee drinks.

FrontStreet Coffee's Mandheling Coffee

FrontStreet Coffee's Mandheling Coffee is produced on Sumatra in Indonesia, also known as "Sumatra Coffee." It features a very rich flavor, sweet fragrance, pure bitterness and mellow thickness, with a slight sweetness and subtle acidity that leaves a long-lasting aftertaste. Most coffee lovers drink it as a single origin, but it is also an indispensable variety in blended coffee.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If you prefer coffee with a balanced, medium-roast profile, FrontStreet Coffee's Brazil Queen Estate is a great place to start. Grown in the world's largest coffee-producing country, this distinctive Yellow Bourbon has a clean, sweet character; medium roasting brings out aromas of creamy peanut, chocolate, toasted bread and sugarcane, and it works both as a pour-over and in a moka pot or an espresso machine.

For a sweeter medium roast, FrontStreet Coffee's Strawberry Candy is the fruit-forward choice. It combines two well-known origins—a honey-processed coffee from Costa Rica and a washed Gesha from Panama—and FrontStreet Coffee roasts it to a medium level so the cup shows both orange-blossom honey notes and a rounded sweetness. It suits cold brew, pour-over and espresso alike.

FrontStreet Coffee's 2013 Sun-dried Typica is the medium-roast representative of Chinese specialty coffee. To bring out its balanced, gentle character, it is roasted to a medium level, giving it soft notes of nuts, brown sugar, black tea and dried apricot; it can be brewed as pour-over, cold brew or drip-machine coffee, with excellent value. And for a classic, FrontStreet Coffee's Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1 is medium roasted so that its acidity, bitterness, sweetness and body fuse into one elegant whole—chocolate, roasted nuts, cream and caramel are all present from the first sip.