Starting your day with a cup of delicious, aromatic drink is the best option. Despite the fact that granulated, instant coffee is more popular than grain coffee, many people prefer to choose high-quality beans and brew them in a Turk or coffee maker. Manufacturers offer a huge selection of coffee beans, but to get a tasty drink, you need to choose a product, taking into account some characteristics: price, country of origin and composition. The rating presents only the best products that can be purchased both in regular grocery stores and in online stores.
Arabica or Robusta, what's the difference?
One of the fundamental characteristics is the ratio of Arabica to Robusta. These are different types of coffee beans.
Arabica gives almost all the flavor shades. Robusta – for richness, bitterness, strength.
The caffeine content in robusta is on average 2 times higher than in arabica. Robusta has no sourness. Robusta is also responsible for the height of the cream foam, so robusta is usually added to espresso mixtures - with it the foam is higher. I have specialized material about robusta.
Arabica can have many shades and facets, differences in the country of origin (terroir, climate in which coffee trees grow), processing of green beans, and roasting. By the way, who didn’t know, coffee is a berry. The higher the variety grows, the denser the grains, the richer the taste, the greater and more varied the sourness. By the way, sourness gives variation in taste, although in Russia, as a rule, they don’t like it.
100% Arabica means that there is relatively little caffeine in the mixture, but there is a lot of flavor variability. To highlight some specific shades (citrus, cocoa, floral notes) you need to switch to single varieties. What it is?
Monosort is grains collected in one country, on a specific territory, plantation. And therefore, in one more or less uniform climate with characteristic taste incarnations. Monosort, with rare exceptions, is only Arabica; the pack must contain beans from the same harvest.
For example, grains from Kenya, Ethiopia and Mexico have the greatest sourness. Soft berry sourness with a peppery hint from Jamaica. Brazil – roasted nuts and cocoa. Vietnam and Uganda – dark chocolate. Arabica beans from Cuba, the Dominican Republic and a separate variety from India, “Monsoon Malabar,” are considered the least acidic. In the latter, the sourness is literally “eroded” by the strong monsoon winds to which the coffee is exposed.
Personally, in the case of automatic coffee machines, I am more impressed by mixtures in the ratios 90/10 – 70/30. For espresso from carob coffee makers with single-bottom baskets, it is better to use 100% Arabica coffee. Funnels/Aeropress/drip coffee makers – also only Arabica.
There are also nuances in the grain size (screen), the initial quality of a specific green raw material (the number of defects per sample, “grade”), but this, as a rule, is no longer so relevant for buyers of automatic coffee machines (although it still has some impact on the taste in a cup) and is beyond the scope of this material.
If you want to buy a few different coffee blends immediately after purchasing a coffee machine in order to decide on “your” bean, then there used to be a good inexpensive option - take several packs of different blends from Lavazza. Lavazza Crema e Gusto is a composition of 30% Arabica and 70% Robusta, classic Italian espresso, with a strong bitterness, but for Russian tastes it can be bitter if you are not used to it. Crema e Aroma – a little “weaker” – 80/20. Caffe Espresso and Qualita Oro are different blends of pure Arabica. That is, with more sourness. But in recent years, Lavazza has seriously lost ground. In general, I personally consider all store-bought coffee to be second-class. I will repeat once again: you need to drink freshly roasted. However, among the store-bought and widely distributed brands they keep the Jardin brand (especially varieties with names for specific countries, such as Columbia Supreme), Paulig (exclusively for its promotional price, which tends to 600 rubles/kg), Julius Meinl, Bushido (this brand might even be in the big league of store-bought coffee, not far from Illy).
So, to understand your preferences as a first approximation - sour-balanced-bitter - it is better to take a sample set of different freshly roasted coffee. Such sample boxes are offered, for example, by Tasty Coffee, Bravos, Neva (in all cases the promo code 101KOFE , giving from 10 to 20% discount).
Recipe for “Italian espresso”: strong, invigorating, thermonuclear charge
By the way, if you don’t like bitterness (read: robusta), perhaps you just haven’t tried good blends with it.
Then, for an experiment, I can recommend buying Caffe Selezione Nobile Espresso from Saeco (well, not from them, of course, this is repackaged coffee under the Saeco brand from a small Italian factory). This is one of the striking examples of “factory” coffee, which on a home automatic coffee machine produces espresso, similar to the one that is loved and prepared in Italy itself using professional coffee horns. They respect mixtures with Robusta and know a lot about them (and know how to prepare them). The shop was closed, Saeco no longer supplies this coffee to us. Then another option is to try a good blend with Robusta. It’s not so easy to find a ready-made composition, so that they don’t skimp on robusta (well, that is, they don’t use the most shameful one), and Arabica without pronounced sourness, above-medium roast. Therefore, I can suggest making this mixture yourself:
- You buy 1 kilogram of a mixture codenamed “Black Candy” - 100% Arabica from Brazil and Colombia, dark roasted.
- Buy 250 grams of 100% robusta from Uganda.
- Pour everything into a large bowl, a plastic 5-liter bottle of clean water works well, close and mix evenly. As a result, you get a freshly roasted, balanced Italian-style blend of “80% Arabica + 20% Robusta.”
- It is better to set the grinding not to minimum (there will be too much bitterness), but closer to medium; I do not recommend pouring more than 30 ml. The temperature in all machines except Delonghi is the highest; in Delonghi it is better to cook on medium.
Washed or natural, dry? Methods of processing coffee, how it affects taste
This information is “second level” and is applicable only for freshly roasted beans, since such details are simply not written on store packaging. Almost all roasters indicate what kind of processing the coffee berry has undergone. This processing is carried out locally immediately after harvest, either by the farmers themselves or by coffee cooperatives/exporters. Roughly speaking, “processing” is removing the grain from the berry. In total, the original berry has 6 layers: peel, pulp, pectin layer (muselage), parchment shell (pachment), silver skin (silverskin) and grain.
There are two classic, most common treatments and quite a few “experimental” ones. Different methods require different time, effort, money, and the dryness/humidity of the environment and the availability of water have a big influence. The choice of method was initially based on the climatic characteristics of the coffee growing region, economy, and infrastructure. More recently, taste has begun to influence the choice of processing, because it directly depends on it, and manufacturers are paying more and more attention to this. However, processing is still typical for the country as a whole. For example, in Colombia almost all coffee is “washed”. All roasters have classic treatments:
- Dry/natural are synonyms. The grain is dried as is, right in the berry, along with the pulp. This method is suitable for dry climates and requires much less water. For the consumer, it is notable for its lower acidity and greater sweetness - sugars from the pulp remain in the grain. Taste descriptors contain more sweet fruits, cocoa, chocolate, vanilla. The body of the drink, all other things being equal, turns out to be denser than from similar washed grains.
- Washed/wet processing . Drying takes place in a parchment shell (pachment), the skin, pulp, and muselage are removed. The skin is removed by depulpation. The pulp is removed by fermentation and washed off with water. Some of the sugars simply have time to dissolve in water, and the grain, deprived of pulp during the drying process, begins to prepare for germination, because of this, metabolic changes occur in it with the formation of amino acids. As a result, the taste is purer and more acidic, and the descriptors are dominated by berries and flowers, the aroma is more complex, the body of the drink is lighter and more drinkable.
There are many experimental treatments, but they are much less common: honey (honey - honey (English), before drying, only the skin and part of the pulp are removed, example from Torrefacto), half-washed (all the pulp is removed, but muselage remains, example from NEVA), vet -hull/giling-basah (these are synonyms, the parchment shell is also removed before drying, the method is typical for Indonesia, an example is from Bravos), anaerobic fermentation (during washed processing, the pulp is removed in water tanks without access to oxygen, here is a typical example from Tasty) etc. Everyone can get to experimental treatments themselves if they deem it necessary
