Just Starting with Pour-Over Coffee: What Kind of Coffee Beans Should You Choose?

As a newcomer to pour-over coffee, you've likely faced the overwhelming choice of coffee beans. Which country, processing method, roast level, or flavor description should you choose? Let FrontStreet Coffee help solve this dilemma.

Choosing Origin/Region

Between 25° north and south latitude lies the coffee cultivation belt, where 79 countries and regions grow and produce coffee. Different countries/regions form distinct climates and terroirs due to their geographical environments, resulting in varied coffee flavors. Therefore, when choosing coffee beans, we must start with selecting the right continent and country.

When selecting, we can first roughly determine what flavor profile we prefer in coffee - acidic, bitter, or more balanced.

If you want bright acidity with floral and fruity notes, choose light to medium-roasted coffee beans from African countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, or Panama. If you prefer rich body and can accept bitterness, try Brazil, Indonesia, or Jamaica, which typically use dark roasting and generally display nutty, dark chocolate, and hot cocoa flavors. For coffee beans that are neither too acidic nor too bitter, try Papua New Guinea, Yunnan China, or Costa Rica. These beans typically offer balanced flavors with subtle fruit acidity, making them very pleasant. (So, choosing origin to some extent also determines the roast level.)

Choosing Processing Methods

Even after determining the origin, you'll find that beans from the same estate/processing plant still have different processing methods.

Different coffee processing methods result in different flavor profiles. Traditional methods include natural, washed, and honey processing, as well as more recent common methods like anaerobic processing, enzyme fermentation, and barrel fermentation.

Natural processing involves drying the entire coffee cherry under the sun after sorting ripe, full cherries, until the moisture content reaches 12%, after which they are hulled and stored. Therefore, natural-processed coffee beans retain more flavors, with noticeable sweetness and richer, fuller layers.

Washed processing requires removing the skin and part of the pulp from the coffee cherry, placing them in fermentation tanks or barrels, using fermentation to remove the mucilage layer, and finally drying to 12% moisture content. Washed coffee beans result in higher acidity and cleaner flavors.

Honey processing can be simply understood as removing the skin and pulp of the coffee cherry while retaining the mucilage for sun drying, with no water involved throughout the process. Due to the removal of the skin before sun drying, the drying time is shorter. Honey-processed coffee beans have relatively higher sweetness and are smoother.

Anaerobic processing involves placing coffee beans with their mucilage layer in a sealed container after removing the coffee cherry pulp, extracting oxygen, leaving only carbon dioxide, allowing anaerobic bacteria to assist in fermenting the coffee beans for a period. Anaerobic-processed coffee typically displays highly distinctive berry and floral notes.

Barrel fermentation processing involves placing coffee beans in barrels for fermentation. Barrel-fermented coffee typically exhibits barrel wine notes and chocolate flavors.

FrontStreet Coffee suggests that beginners start with the most traditional processing methods: natural and washed. For the same region, washed processing represents the basic and primary flavors of a bean, while natural processing adds aroma on top of washed processing. This is why FrontStreet Coffee prioritizes washed-processed batches when customizing daily coffee selections.

Choosing Roast Level

For the same coffee, different roast levels result in significantly different flavor profiles. Different green coffee beans have different optimal roast levels based on their inherent characteristics.

For example, FrontStreet Coffee uses light roasting to highlight the distinctive lemon-citrus acidity and rich floral and fruity aromas of Ethiopia Yirgacheffe. Medium roast achieves the perfect balance of caramelization and Maillard reactions while retaining some acidic aromas, resulting in more balanced overall flavors. For instance, FrontStreet Coffee's Papua New Guinea Paradise Bird uses this roast level, featuring toasted bread sweetness, nutty sweetness, subtle fruit acidity, with rich layers of sweet and sour, delivering a rich and balanced taste. Dark-roasted beans, with longer roasting times and higher temperatures, exhibit more pronounced bitterness. FrontStreet Coffee's Indonesian Gold Mandheling is a heavyweight representative of dark roast, with strong caramel flavors and full, smooth, rich body.

Choosing Price

As a beginner, if your brewing theory isn't solid, your technique isn't stable, and your flavor appreciation ability is still developing, you might worry about wasting expensive beans by not brewing them well or not recognizing their flavors. However, you still want beans that can help you practice, making cost-effective beans particularly important.

Based on FrontStreet Coffee's experience, rather than challenging expensive estate beans, beginners should start with representative and relatively affordable batches. This way, you don't have to worry about brewing failures, and they can serve as your daily coffee. Once you've mastered brewing techniques, you can continue to explore your favorite regions or estates, trying higher-priced (grade) beans, and develop your own personal bean list.

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FrontStreet Coffee

No. 10, Bao'an Qianjie, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province

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Tel:020 38364473