Question: “Hey you said not to buy whole coffee beans from grocery stores but what if they sell starbucks whole coffee beans would that be ok? or should I go to starbucks and buy from them?” - Isaac Shrader

Answer:
This is an excellent question, and as Isaac will attest, it took me a little while to properly answer it.  In fact each time I tried, the scope of answering the question got more and more out of hand.  Like any of us, I used to buy all of my coffee pre-ground from the grocery store.  I’ll answer this question with another question: what makes coffee taste good?

Like anything perishable, coffee tastes best when it’s fresh.  Wherever you buy coffee, it’s at the end of a supply chain that started in a coffee growing country, and ends where you buy it.  The care shown at each stage throughout the supply chain will determine how fresh the coffee, and how good it will taste in your cup.

Before Fire Roasted Coffee Company started selling their coffee through the local grocery chain Loblaws, I would have never suggested that you buy coffee from any grocery store.  Better that you find a local roaster who is roasting small batches and very recently before you buy it – this is as fresh (and delicious) as it gets.  However, by making local supply arrangements, Fire Roasted was able to ensure freshness for customers and the continuation of its strong name and reputation.  They did it by their proximity and agreement with the grocery store.

I took a trip to my own local grocery store to see if whole bean coffee sold there provides any indication of how recently the coffee was roasted.  Starbucks coffee sold in either grocery stores or through their retail outlets does not indicate when exactly it was roasted.  That means you should be able to do better, either by buying from a local roaster or buying coffee from a grocery store where the same care has gone into freshness as Fire Roasted Coffee arranged with its wholesale customer.

This image is of a coffee mass-roasted locally in Portland, Oregon and distributed to grocery stores in the general area.  It’s considered fresh for the same reason that Fire Roasted could ensure the same with Loblaws.  I took this picture in January 2012 and the label indicates that it’s best sold nine months later.  The coffee is vacuum-sealed so I assume it doesn’t get any more stale that it was when sealed, provided you don’t open the packaging and let air in.  I’ve heard some criticism of vacuum-sealing affecting coffee freshness, and you won’t find local roasters sealing their fresh-roasted coffee in any way before it’s sold. 

I found this one even more interesting.  I’m a fan of Peets coffee, and here, they are clearly trying to ensure a quality standard to the coffee they sell in grocery stores.  They want to ensure that coffee is not sold any later than 90 days after it was roasted, but the same label shows it was roasted on September 19, 2011.  I also took this picture in January 2012, past the 90-day mark.  In other words, Peets has set a standard, but its grocery store partner isn’t monitoring or following it!

Isaac, a long-winded answer to your question.  Coffee flavor comes from coffee freshness.  Coffee starts to go stale as soon as it’s been roasted from it’s original green form.  Don’t buy coffee if you don’t know when it was roasted.  And, don’t buy coffee that wasn’t roasted recently.  I wish I could point you to a grocery store that handles coffee properly.  Coffee sold at a Starbucks outlet is a better option than the grocery store because it at least came direct from some centralized Starbucks roasting facility.  But you will find even this is no substitute for coffee purchased from your local roaster, or any other source that can show you that it was recently roasted.

Question: “How does McDonalds make such good coffee? All they would tell me is that its from special high altitude beans grown in Brazil. An employee even gave me a bag of it and I made it at home but it did not taste as good. I’m going to try something other than paper filters. Whats their secret?” – Ed F.

Answer: Thank you for the email.  It’s an interesting question, something similar was asked last year about the coffee chain Tim Horton’s and where their coffee comes from.

Read: Where Does Tim Horton’s Coffee Come From?

We can only go by what information the company chooses to share with us, and I’m actually surprised you were given some of their whole bean coffee to take home.

McDonald’s shares some information on their website.  Their Premium Roast Coffee is advertised as “a blend of Arabica beans grown in Brazil and the mountains of Colombia, Guatemala and Costa Rica,” brewed no more than 30 minutes before you buy it.  By comparison, Tim Horton’s limits it to 20 minutes.

As a sidenote, McDonald’s even tries to introduce their own Juan Valdez in “Pedro Gaviña”, who apparently has been roasting coffee for McDonald’s for the last 25 years.  If that’s true, then their brewing or stocking practices have improved incredibly because their coffee today does not taste like it did even 20 years ago.  You can read his story here.

I hope that helps, it’s as much information as is released publically.  I say if you enjoy it, keep enjoying it.  It’s priced right compared to a Starbucks coffee which I consider to be slightly more flavorful, but much more expensive.  Their coffee maker may be coming closer to optimal brewing temperature than your home machine.  And, I do recommend a mesh reusable filter as it allows more coffee solids into the cup although it seems to me I see McDonald’s employees dumping ground coffee into paper filters in their restaurants.

One thing I really like about this website and blog is connecting with other coffee drinkers. Since I moved to Portland, OR a few months back, I’ve enjoyed some back and forth with a fellow coffee loving Portlander on Twitter.  He suggested I check out a certain cafe in Portland and today, I did just that.  I was in there just long enough to enjoy an excellent freshly-pressed coffee, eat the ginger cookie that the barista talked me into, and realize that I am just not a cafe guy.

If you look back onto coffee’s role in our civilization of North America, you’ll see that the cafe played a significant role.  Prior to the coffeehouse, the place for people to congregate to discuss the issues of the day and calls to action was the tavern.  The great thing about the tavern was that a little alcohol loosened the tongue and got some stimulating conversation going.  The downside was that after so much alcohol, the quality of conversation deteriorated.  The tavern was also a place of petty violence, so the intellectuals looked for somewhere different to meet.

They found it in the coffeehouse.  Coffee also started stimulated conversation but without the downside of intoxicating anybody.  Academics, writers, active citizens…they all found a forum in the coffeehouse where they could find common ground.  It’s a little-known fact (Normy) that Lloyd’s of London started as Lloyd’s Coffee House, developing into a banking and insurance company based on the clientele that was meeting for coffee.

But what I found today reminded me why I so enjoy sipping coffee at home, rather than sitting in a cafe.  There was no conversation.  Each other customer sat quietly with a laptop in front of them and buds in their ears.  I saw two ladies sitting at the back that I thought might be there as friends – and they may have been, but both were planted in front of their laptop without a word between them.  The barista that greeted me was friendly, which always prompts me to probably talk louder than I need to.  I was immediately self-conscious that besides the trance-like music that was playing, my conversation with the barista was the only other sound.  I didn’t bring my laptop with me, it’s pretty boring people-watching when everybody works silently, and there was nobody really walking outside except for the same two transients back and forth.  So I pulled out my Blackberry and passed the time until I finished my coffee and cookie.

I’d like to see the coffeehouse of old.  I’d like to see like-minded people meet in a cafe to energize themselves on caffeine, discuss the matters of the day, and agree on the calls to action.  The place I went today was little more than a hip library that allows food and beverages.  If the coffeehouse of old is no more, then it was a nice experiment but I’ll stick to brewing and drinking the same quality coffee in the comfort of my own home.

On a recent book signing tour stop in Madrid, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that the company has earmarked US $2 billion to invest in an “aggressive and opportunistic way”.  The company had been investing in the Asian market rather than Latin America, and that they would now shift attention.

This headline really caught my eye.  Like or hate Schultz, he was largely responsible for drawing attention to better-quality coffee.  I myself am drinking better coffee now than I was before the rise of Starbucks. 

I don’t want to infer that local roasters are not capitalists – after all, they are entrepreneurs and living off of their business.  But, Schultz has that definite air of being a capitalist.  This, in stark contrast to Planet Bean’s Bill Barrett who certainly strives to succeed, but has no broad expansion plans besides being his community’s leading expert in what he does, for the benefit of the community.

Read: Profile on Planet Bean

The reason I found this news so interesting is because all but a handful of the best coffees we drink come from some of the poorest places in the world.  The coffee farmer at the source lives poorer than anybody else in the chain, including the consumer at the very end of it.  These farmers can’t afford not to sell all of their best coffee to an exporter, so they drink the worst of their own product.

While Starbucks’ expansion into Latin America is focused on the large economy of Brazil, I wonder what impact it will have on the general quality of coffee enjoyed in that part of the world.  It’s of little development if the coffee is too expensive for most people to enjoy.  Starbucks’ rise in the developed countries of the world has done little to address concerns of poverty in growing countries, unless sales of Fair Trade coffee have been motivated by the support of local roasters that has developed in response to Starbucks’ growth.  Perhaps the only good that can come of this is a better appreciation of their own product in these growing countries as more of their product stays home instead of being exported to richer markets.

I’d love to hear what an economist has to say about this.

An amazing story about coffee, or a story about amazing coffee?  Both.

I had my first coffee at Coava Coffee Roasters in April when I visited Portland, Oregon for the first time.  I was deciding if I wanted to live here or not, and maybe Coava helped that decision along, because here I am.  It was the second time in my life that coffee was served to me by pourover, so it was still relatively new to me.  The first time was at Planet Bean in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. 

Read: Profile Planet Bean Coffee
Read: Portland’s Big Coffee Scene

I woke up one morning, and like so many of us, started the day by making sure everything was still right in the world through my mobile device.  I checked the Twitter world, and now that I’d moved to Portland, the city’s name caught my eye in a tweet.  I learned that the esteemed Coffee Review coffee rating service had granted an almost unprecedented score of 95/100 to coffee roasted by somebody right here in Portland.  It was Coava.  The coffee, a Guatemalan Bourbon grown in the Xeucalvitz Community.

The rating of 95/100 by Coffee Review is a big endorsement.  Rating coffee is subjective by nature, but to the best of my knowledge, it is not a service biased to certain roasters.  In other words, if they’re giving out a rating this strong, it’s good coffee, go get some!  I had only heard of a rating that high being given out for the Hacienda La Esmaralda from Panama that sells literally for hundreds of dollars a pound, and for which the book “God in a Cup” was written.

To think I could get a pound of similarly rated coffee for the price of a normal pound, I decided I was getting some that day.  I’m only about a ten minute drive from Coava‘s Grand Avenue location, and I will admit I had a touch of the hysterics as I was driving there.  In fact, I may have parked on the sidewalk.  Part of me was expecting it to be sold out when I got there since the Coffee Review tweet had been posted that morning.

When I walked in and turned to the selection of bulk coffee, I saw the Guatemala Xeucalvitz and reached for the very pound you see in the picture above.  I turned to the gentleman behind the counter for the following exchange…

Me (holding up the coffee, wide-eyed): “This is it!”

Coava employee (nowhere near my excitement): “Yes, it is.”

Me: “This is the stuff that Coffee Review rated.”

Coava employee, nodded his head.

Me (almost incredulous): “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Coava employee: “Yes I do, will that be all you need today?”

I couldn’t decide if he really did know, or if he was so sure of his company’s product that he didn’t need to make as big a deal of it as I was.  The woman pictured here offered to brew me a cup by pourover as you see in the picture, and I accepted without hesitation.  I know I was only ten minutes from home, but I just really wanted to try this coffee.

When I got home, I understood the first employee’s response to my excitement.  He DID know just how good their coffee is.  I’m not saying that because the cup they served me was amazing.  Or, because the cup of it I made for myself at home was amazing.  I say that because when I visited Coffee Review‘s website to learn more about Coava, I counted a total of FORTY ONE coffees roasted by Coava with a score of at least 90.  Among them, a total of three coffees rated 95/100! 

You’ll be hearing alot about Coava Coffee Roasters to come.  I’ll be trying alot of their coffees, and you can order them at their website online.

Check out: Coava Coffee Roasters
Follow me on Twitter.