Why high quality coffee tastes better
What’s it take to get great coffee in your cup
One common question people ask me is, “Why does Badlands Coffee cost so much more than the coffee I buy at the grocery store?” Badlands Coffee is high quality coffee, and high quality coffee doesn’t just happen by accident.
Coffee is actually a fruit with many distinct varieties that can all taste slightly different from each other. The roasted coffee “beans” we are familiar with, actually come from the seed/ pit inside a little coffee cherry.
The seeds inside a coffee cherry have to be processed, dried and roasted, otherwise you can’t make brewed coffee out of them. There are several ways to process coffee cherries; The three main methods are Washed, Semi-Washed, and Dry Process. I’ll write more about the different processing methods at another time.
After the coffee cherry is processed at a mill, it is dried for several days. The dried beans must rest before they are ready to be shipped worldwide to coffee roasters. After a coffee roasting company roasts the beans, they are packaged and shipped to the consumer, who grinds the beans and brews them.
Here’s the reason that most coffee drinkers in the developed world havn’t ever had high quality coffee; It is very difficult to harvest and process and ship and roast and brew coffee without anything in that process going wrong. There are hundreds of steps along the supply chain from farmer to coffee drinker, and if something goes wrong in any of those steps, there is a loss of quality.
You previously read here about cheap, commodity coffee. Common, commodity coffee includes the bulk of the poorer quality coffee, where ripe and unripe cherries are mixed together in the name of high quantity. Specialty coffee is only the cream of the crop, grown at high elevations and picked when perfectly ripe.
All coffee is processed in one of those three ways, but Specialty coffee is processed with a more demanding eye towards detail and quality of taste. Specialty coffee is sorted many times, keeping only the best, while the lesser grades are left for large commodity coffee roasters.
Commodity coffee roasters take this inferior product and usually roast it very dark to mask the defects. This darker roast gives the coffee a more uniform roasty, bitter flavor. Specialty coffee roasters want to bring out the unique sweetness (Yes, there are different sugars found in coffee beans) and acidity that their high quality coffee possesses, so they usually roast it a bit less. The unique flavors and aromas are highlighted by the roaster, rather than hidden.
Once roasted, coffee loses its flavor over time. If coffee is not ground up and brewed within 15-30 days after roasting, the unique flavors that so many people have worked hard to preserve are mostly gone. This is why specialty coffee roasters will mark on the package when their coffee was roasted, so the consumer knows when to brew it by. Specialty coffee roasters will make an effort to ship their coffee quickly to the consumer, while commodity coffee often sits for months before it reaches the consumer.
All of these steps mentioned take extra time, effort and money, which is why specialty coffee might cost $10 to $25 per pound, rather than only $4 per pound like some big brands you find in the grocery store.
After all of these steps are taken to preserve the quality of the coffee, it would be a shame if at the very end, the coffee was brewed using unfiltered water or a dirty brewing device. The special flavors and aromas that so many people have worked to preserve, can be lost if the water isn’t hot enough or if the coffee isn’t ground to the proper coarseness/fineness.
So that is why specialty coffee like Badlands Coffee costs more, and that is also why I want to explain how to best brew your coffee in future posts. Just like you wouldn’t pay top dollar for an expensive ribeye and microwave it, you wouldn’t want to buy a high quality coffee from Guatemala, for example, and brew it in a dirty coffee pot that fails to get the water hot enough.
So the next time you have a mug of coffee in your hand, take a moment to enjoy and appreciate it. If it tastes great, you’ll know just how much hard work it took to produce that one cup.
