February 23, 2017

Buying your beans [topic: general]

Let's start from the very beginning (♫ cause that is a very good place to start ♫) ...

The first essential objective of good coffee making is the buying of beans. It is very similar to the experience of buying your greens from a local market, where you get to know the shop keeper (as here it is normally a small family run business) and also s/he gets to know your tastes. Get to know their system and also their suggestions. By time your relation will no longer be seller-client but a coffee lover to another.

Get to know the place ... get to know your taste!

If you still haven't started this experience, I suggest you go for small quantities at a time. Don't hesitate to ask yet don't rely on their selling tips as yet. Get to know them first, kind of testing the market. I'm not much in favour of buying ready-made mixtures and blends, especially when the beans are ground in advance - coffee tends to lose flavour by time, literally from the minute you ground the beans.

To be quite honest, the coffee shop I buy my beans from sells an Italian coffee mix which is quite their own blend of beans and I always fall for it as they know their stuff!

I like it the traditional way

As a rule of thumb, I buy beans and not ground coffee. I make use an old-style manual coffee grinder and grind a handful at a time so as to always keep my coffee fresh. A handful serves 1/2 brews, not more. If you don't have the aptitude yet to get a coffee grinder, I suggest you don't buy more than 100gr of ground coffee at a time so as to keep things fresh :-)

Stay tuned! In the mean time, keep spreading the love for the BEAN!