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Friends have been sending photos to FrontStreet Coffee asking, "Is this a defective bean? Is that one a defective bean?" When it comes to finding defects in roasted beans, many friends transform into Leeuwenhoeks, not letting any single defect escape notice. However, among the photos FrontStreet Coffee has seen, 90% don't actually contain defective beans.

This major misunderstanding stems from two main reasons. First, consumers who have only encountered roasted beans rarely see actual defective beans. Second, people treat coffee beans as if they were products from an industrial assembly line, believing there should be a very formulaic standard for how coffee beans should look.

With today's advanced information dissemination, a quick online search can reveal content about coffee defects—such as insect-damaged beans, moldy beans, shell beans, and quaker beans (white-eyed beans). Although these online resources often include example images, without seeing the actual physical beans, the concepts remain quite abstract. In the end, people can only remember the names of defects and their simple definitions.

Most defects are manifested at the green bean level. For instance, many coffee-producing countries have established coffee grading systems that specify allowable defect amounts in green coffee beans. Take Ethiopia's G1 grade, for example: in a 350g sample of green coffee beans, no more than 3 defective beans are allowed. Converting this, it means no more than 3 defective beans per approximately 2,300 beans. Blue Mountain coffee, graded by bean size, also has a defect rate requirement of no more than 2%.

Therefore, the proportion of defective beans at the green bean level is already quite small. When we reach the roasting stage, additional defects might occur during the roasting process, such as meteor crater beans that appear on over-roasted surfaces, or white-eyed beans that were difficult to detect in green beans but appear much lighter in color after roasting. There are also some false shell beans that appear complete in their green state but split apart after roasting.

Facing these situations, FrontStreet Coffee's practice is to manually screen every batch of coffee beans after roasting is complete, removing these defective beans. Consequently, by the time coffee reaches end consumers, it's already difficult to find what the coffee industry considers major defective beans. (Here, it should be specifically noted that some minor defects may still exist, such as broken beans, because after roasting and packaging, the coffee must go through transportation before reaching consumers, and collisions during transport may cause a small number of broken beans, but these won't significantly affect the coffee flavor.)

Common Cases of Misidentification as Defective Beans

Below, FrontStreet Coffee will share some situations where consumers often mistake normal characteristics for defects!

Peaberries

Friends who have purchased a whole bag of peaberries (PB) might find this question perplexing. However, it's quite common for friends to pick out peaberries from a bag of flat beans and ask, "Is this a defective bean?"

Normal coffee cherries contain two coffee beans (seeds). One side of flat beans is flat precisely because they originally formed as two flat beans comprising one fruit. Peaberries are quite special—they occur when environmental factors or genetic influences prevent one ovule inside the fruit from being pollinated, thus providing double the space for the other ovule to develop, resulting in a fruit with only one coffee bean.

Therefore, peaberries are not defective beans. Some producing countries (like Kenya and Jamaica) specifically separate peaberries for individual sale, while most countries don't practice this. So finding several peaberries in a bag of coffee is completely normal.

Split Open Coffee Beans

This issue was also raised by the friend mentioned at the beginning. Some coffee beans have split open, appearing incomplete and easily mistaken for defective beans. Actually, these are normal coffee beans—they simply have high density, absorbing and storing more heat during roasting. When they reach first crack, the rupture is violent, causing them to burst open. Although they may not look aesthetically pleasing, they don't affect coffee flavor and may even make the coffee taste better because of their presence.

Uneven Surface Color on Coffee Beans

Some friends see coffee beans with uneven colors and pick out the lighter ones, asking, "Why are there so many quaker beans?"

First, let FrontStreet Coffee explain what quaker beans are. They are actually unripe coffee cherries that are difficult to distinguish after processing, only revealing obvious color differences after roasting.

Except for Brazil's highlands, which use large-scale mechanical harvesting, most other regions still use manual harvesting with small mechanical assistance. Today, most high-quality coffee beans emphasize harvesting of fully red cherries. This means finding a large number of quaker beans among roasted beans is a low-probability event.

So what are these light-colored coffee beans? FrontStreet Coffee has observed that friends who ask these questions have typically purchased coffee beans from Costa Rica or Colombia. Coffee beans from these countries often undergo heavy fermentation processes like honey processing or anaerobic processing, causing some beans to have more sugar附着 on their surfaces while others appear cleaner. Through the caramelization reaction during roasting, areas with more surface sugar appear darker, while cleaner areas appear lighter, creating a situation where two distinct colors are evident in a single batch of roasted beans.

Shriveled Beans with Black Spots and Stripes

Finally, there's one more situation that most friends consider defective—beans that appear shriveled and dry with many spots on their surface, not matching the appearance of classic coffee bean images.

Although these beans may not look appealing, they are delicious and definitely not defective beans! Coffee beans showing this phenomenon are typically high-altitude, light-roasted coffee beans. High-altitude beans have high density; during roasting, when moisture evaporates, they shrink and develop wrinkles. Because of the light roast, the coffee beans are removed from the roaster before they have time to expand fully. This preserves the shriveled stripes after contraction, making them appear dry and shriveled.

In fact, making the surface smooth is simple—just continue roasting to allow the coffee beans to absorb enough heat to expand, and the surface will become smooth. However, the flavor will definitely be off.

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Tel:020 38364473