Coffee Facts
An excellent cup of coffee is like a fine wine or quality cigar. It’s the type of coffee bean that determines which flavors the blend presents for the coffee connoisseur.
Many coffee makers blend a combination of the lower-cost Robusta beans with the more expensive Arabica gourmet beans. The Arabica beans have a finer aroma, a richer flavor, and more body than the less expensive beans.
Therefore, the quality of the coffee is dependent on the proportions of these beans. Often, a coffee might be advertised as a “blend” of gourmet beans and lower grade beans when, in fact, there are only small traces of the gourmet beans in the blend.
The gourmet beans gain much of their flavor from the soils they are grown in, with the best beans coming from volcanic regions where the rich soils produce the best-tasting beans.
Coffee should always be made from fresh beans as the quality diminishes rapidly with age. This is quite noticeable when comparing a supermarket grade coffee with a coffee made from freshly ground beans at a coffee shop. Supermarket coffees generally have a lower blend quality and, in many cases, the blends also have a significant proportion of older beans to reduce production costs.
The only way you can be assured of quality and taste is to buy fresh, gourmet quality coffee beans. Once you have acquired the taste for gourmet coffee you might never want to drink commercial grade coffee again.
You can buy coffee from many different regions throughout the world and each one has its own unique flavor.
Coffee aficionados can determine the region where the coffee bean was grown just by tasting it. The method of processing the beans also has an effect on the final flavor so you can’t always assume that a coffee will be good just because it came from a particular region.
Coffee is one of the world’s most popular beverages and more suppliers are catering to the needs of this ever-growing demand.