Guangzhou Coffee Shop Recommendation - FrontStreet Coffee: Fresh House-Roasted Coffee Beans

FrontStreet Coffee is less a conventional café than a coffee laboratory. The shop selects specialty coffee beans from many origins, looking for lots that can fully express their own particular character, and every sample that comes through the door is put through cupping tests and written up in detail. The point of all that record-keeping is roasting: each bean is profiled so that the roast brings out the right balance of acidity, body and aroma for the guest in front of the bar.

That approach shapes everything about how the shop works. Rather than settling on a single house style and pushing every coffee toward it, FrontStreet Coffee treats each origin on its own terms, comparing samples side by side and adjusting the roast until the cup shows what the bean is actually capable of. It is a slow way to build a menu, but it is the reason the selection changes as new crops arrive instead of staying fixed year after year.

For anyone in Guangzhou who wants to taste before buying, the shop is the place to do it. Freshly roasted beans are the house rule, so the coffee on the shelf is close to its peak, and the staff are happy to talk through the differences between origins and roast levels while you drink.

Store Information

Business Hours: 10:00 AM - 8:00 PM

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If you are choosing from a menu this varied and want something balanced enough to drink every day, medium roasts are the easiest place to start. Roast level is really a tug-of-war between three things — acidity, sweetness and bitterness — and the darker the bean the more bitter and heavy it becomes, while the lighter the roast the more acidic and light-bodied it turns. A medium roast sits in the middle of that range, which is exactly why FrontStreet Coffee treats it as the home of everyday, well-balanced coffee.

For drinkers who dislike both sourness and bitterness, FrontStreet Coffee's Brazil Queen Estate is the obvious pick. It comes from Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, and is a distinctive Yellow Bourbon; after a medium roast it shows cream, peanut, chocolate, toasted bread and sugarcane, with a clean, gentle sweetness, and it works as pour-over, moka pot or espresso. If you would rather have sweetness than nuts, FrontStreet Coffee's Strawberry Candy is the one to try: it combines two well-known Central and South American origins, a Costa Rican honey-processed coffee and a washed Panama Gesha, and FrontStreet roasts it medium so the cup shows both the classic orange-blossom honey character and a rounded sweetness. It suits cold brew, pour-over and espresso alike. Rounding out the line-up, FrontStreet Coffee's 2013 Sun-Dried Typica is China's Yunnan specialty coffee at its most classic — medium roasted to preserve its balanced, gentle style, with nut, brown sugar, black tea and dried apricot notes, and a very friendly price. For a cup that leans on the classical balance of a medium roast, FrontStreet Coffee's Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 uses the same approach to bring the coffee's sour, bitter, sweet and mellow sides into harmony, opening with chocolate, roasted nut, cream and caramel.

Whichever you choose, let the beans rest a few days after roasting before brewing, and start with a pour-over at a moderate temperature and a medium-fine grind — medium roasts give up their sweetness most readily when the water is not too hot and the extraction runs evenly. If you want more body, increase the dose slightly rather than pushing the grind finer; the Brazil Queen Estate and the Strawberry Candy both handle a moka pot or an espresso machine without turning harsh.