This post will explain some of the reasons cheap, commodity coffee generally tastes bitter and unpleasant. After this there will be a blog post about high quality, specialty coffee. Hopefully the contrast between poor quality and specialty coffee will then be very obvious.

People have been drinking coffee for several hundred years, while really high quality coffee that’s traceable to the exact farm or farms within a country is something that’s only been around 10-20 years. In America specifically, the general public was drinking some really foul coffee in the 20's through the mid 60's, and especially in the 50s. Companies like Maxwell house and Folger’s dominated the market and competed on price, not quality. In order to sell their coffee at lower and lower prices, they included more and more yIucky Robusta in their blends, which is cheaper than Arabica coffee.

(I’ll talk more about the differences in Robusta vs. Arabica coffee sometime in the future, but for now just know that Robusta coffee is generally cheap and gross, while Arabica coffee is generally more expensive and better tasting. Thats not to say that there isn’t bad Arabica, but the potential for tastiness is much higher in Arabica coffee.)

These days, the commodity coffee you find in the supermarket usually has no Robusta coffee in it, so its not as bad as it has been before, but it still suffers from one or more of several flaws. (I’m not including instant coffee, which often does have Robusta in it.) The coffee is most obviously old; It was likely roasted months and months ago and sat in several warehouses before it got to the grocery store, where it sat some more in the back and then on their shelves. After that it may sit for several more months on a shelf in the pantry. Any redeeming qualities the coffee may have had when it was still freshly roasted are long gone.

Secondly, the cheap coffee you find at the grocery store is, and this may sound very obvious, cheap. In order for roasted coffee to be sold at whatever insanely cheap price it is sold at ($3 per pound maybe?), the roasting company must have bought the green, unroasted coffee beans at a price several times cheaper. The coffee is bought with little regard to where it comes from or how it tastes; the company buys more of whatever coffee is cheapest at the time.

Supermarket coffee is inexpensive because of its low quality. The green coffee is cheaper because it has not been sorted multiple times to remove defect beans. The green coffee is cheaper because unripe and ripe coffee cherries are mixed together. Unripe coffee cherries eventually lead to brewed coffee with a harsh, astringent quality. Cheap green coffee is processed poorly which can lead to a literal dirty taste in your cup. The green coffee may have been harvested a year or more prior, which is considered past-crop, and often has a woody taste.
All of these flavor taints and defects bring down the quality of the brewed coffee you drink. These cheap, poorly processed beans are roasted and sold to the public. Often these beans are roasted quite dark in an attempt to partially hide these flavor flaws. Once brewed, this coffee gives you a cup of coffee that needs to be masked by cream and sugar. The coffee is often dirty tasting, harsh, musty, woody, and generally dull.

Even if you are lucky and end up with a coffee fairly free of defects, you are still left with coffee that has no unique flavors or aromas.

I don’t mean to shame anyone who drinks cheap, supermarket coffee. If you can stomach the bitter brewed coffee, more power to you. I know I still have to drink coffee like that depending on whose house I might be at. All of this simply shows that you get what you pay for. When you buy cheap coffee, you get poor quality coffee, simple as that.

You can read about high-quality specialty coffee on the next blog post, and if you want to take a leap and try some delicious freshly roasted coffee at home, you can find several kinds in our shop.