18
Lots of questions! Starting from the top...
Taste? Coffee cherries are mild in flavour and slightly sweet. The flavour is somewhat reminiscent of other red fruits, like a mild mix of fruits like raspberry, red mulberry, currant, cranberry, cherry, raisin. I've only had them dried, so they have a little bit of a "dried fruit" taste (e.g., as raisins are to ...
16
First I want to draw a comparison between how much caffeine is in a coffee bean versus a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, or a double espresso.
In a standard cup of coffee, there is approximately 150 mg of caffeine. In a cup of black tea, steeped for 3 - 5 minutes there is approximately 50 mg of caffeine. In a double espresso there is approximately 60 - 90 mg ...
16
I assume you are storing them for a later grinding (likely just before preparing your cups of coffee).
According to some sources 1,2,3, the main point is use it within a week. For more than that, it is preferable to freeze them, and in this condition, for no more than a month.
A brief summary:
For short term use (this week's coffee):
Do not refrigerate ...
15
In general, darker, arabica roasts have less caffeine. Arabica (as opposed to robusta) inherently has less caffeine in it naturally, and darker coffees have less caffeine since they have been roasted longer or at higher temperatures, essentially "burning" the caffeine out of the bean.
EDIT
For some science, Arabica is usually found to be about 1.2% ...
11
Short answer: Yes - up to a point
Long answer:
Ignoring things like Kopi Luwak etc, there is a cost associated with growing, harvesting and transporting arabica beans in a timely manner, roasting them while they're fresh, and getting them to somewhere you can buy them.
If you go below this price, corners will be cut. You may get cheaper robusta beans, or ...
11
Here's an opportunity to start refining your brewing process.
Coffee brewers, including myself, tend to use weight as our measuring unit as opposed to volume since bean sizes vary significantly already without accounting for origin or roast level. All of these factors will change the real amount of coffee you believe you have once ground and also change the ...
10
Yes, it does, but it's much more complex than that :-)
Harvest times vary greatly depending on the latitude, altitude and variety of beans being harvested. There is a very large table here which illustrates the variety of harvest/shipping seasons, as well as the optimum points of both.
In general, December-February is best, but some countries vary anywhere ...
10
Roasted coffee beans (from which you'd brew coffee as usual) are certainly edible -- chocolate-covered coffee beans are an example. They don't need any different or additional processing beyond ordinary roasting; I'm guessing that was what was in your bar. Chew a whole roasted coffee bean; does it taste similar?
If you're asking about green beans, a quick ...
10
Yes. Coffee grounds are simply the ground up seeds found inside the berry of the coffea plant, so eat up! Even after the beans have been ground and extracted into your favorite coffee beverage, they still contain plenty of caffeine and are perfectly digestible.
Before people learned to brew coffee, folks were eating the beans to get that coffee boost. ...
10
From a cooks perspective, I think it should be "espresso", or "caffè" not "coffee" in any good tiramisu recipe, which in turn would already suggest a type of beans and roast.
Note that the Italian term caffè denotes the strong black liquid you get from an esspesso machine or a moka.
The coffee in a tiramisu has to be concentrated to supply enough flavour ...
9
Coffee beans are freshest from about 12 to 48 hours after roasting until maybe one or two weeks later when stored properly in an airtight container. During the early portion of this period (immediately after roasting to three or four days later) beans will be still giving off some gases, thus the reason for one way valves on coffee bags. That being the ...
9
That is almost the opposite of my experience, after opening a bag of beans, they have noticeable less flavour after a couple of days. Coffee beans are more resistant than ground coffee though, as that decays in a couple of hours. Obviously, if beans are exposed to air for long enough, their quality is decreasing.
However there is an effect that improve them ...
8
I actually might say no.
This type of coffee is rather expensive at $100 to $600 per US pound. Yes, 100 to 600 USD. This is natural Kopi Luwak coffee at a normal price. The word blend sounds a little fishy to me, as it usually means that it is not entirely pure Kopi Luwak.
The thing is, it's really up to you to decide for yourself. If you can trust them, ...
8
I have a few different varieties of green beans that I have stored in freezer style plastic bags for going on 1+ year now and there is no mold present. I keep them stored at room temperate with as much air as possible removed from the bag. I roast a few batches a year and always get the same results out of my beans regardless of how long they have been ...
8
No. Not any substantial ones.
There are several listed questions around the topic of eating coffee beans. Ingesting roasted coffee beans without grinding/brewing them in some manner is quite common. Many companies sell them specifically to be consumed this way. Probably the main associated health risk would be caffeine overdose. However, it's roughly ...
8
This question is probably best answered in two directions:
If you feel the need to add sugar to your coffee, it may simply be that the coffee that you are drinking is not very good. Sugar makes a lot of things taste better in addition to the sweetness that it adds. There are many ways to improve the quality of your coffee, like buying better and fresher ...
8
There's no strain of coffee bean that has no caffeine when it is grown, but you can find whole-bean, decaffeinated coffee. "Decaffeinated" coffee has been treated to have most of the caffeine removed. Decaffeination is done when the beans are still whole, so you can certainly find whole-bean, decaffeinated coffee (though I suppose decaffeination could also ...
7
It doesn't actually matter!
The valve on the bag is there to let gas out without letting gas in. The reason for this is that freshly roasted beans will continue to give off a bit of CO2 for a little while. Coffee that's packaged immediately after roasting will give off a bit in the bag, hence the need for a valve.
Oxygen causes coffee to go off, which is ...
7
I'm going to focus on the "old-school" aspect of your question.
From my perspective/experience, the classic way of producing "camp coffee" is a percolator. To use this device, you put grounds in a basket on the top, water in the bottom, assemble the apparatus, and put it over a heat source (e.g., camp fire, stove, etc.). If you want a stronger brew (as it ...
7
This seems to suggest that there is approximately 7mg of caffeine per coated bean. I've no idea how much those weight per piece, or how many are in a bag, but the math should be fairly easy if you have access to such things.
I found another manufacturer of a similar product which claims 40g for 28 pieces. Extrapolating that for your 150g bags gives roughly ...
7
I'll say yes it's "real" and it's "clever" marketing. If one had a coffee plantation with wild palm civets running about, it would be easy enough to have some folks collect some "civet processed" beans and roast and blend them with some of your regular stock. The result of this could be sold with bright stickers to the unwitting for a much higher price to ...
7
Typically after roasting coffee there is a rest period during which you don't want to use the coffee.
Roughly 85-90% of carbon dioxide contained in a coffee bean after roasting will be released in the first 24 hours. You CAN immediately brew coffee with fresh roasted coffee, but the flavors will not be fully developed, and you might get a metallic taste in ...
6
My findings are that it's actually exactly the same. Peaberry beans occur in almost all coffee in some percentage. They aren't grown separate, they are the exact same coffee that's been sorted out of the processed beans so that the lot looks more homogeneous and sells better. I've actually been lucky enough to at one time have peaberry, oversized and "...
6
With a blade grinder, yes. They already just chop the pieces smaller and smaller until you stop, anyway. With a burr grinder, it may be. But I make no promises that it won't clog the feeder. It's possible that the inflow may be greater than it can handle.
6
Freezing will not affect the coffee beans chemically. Thawing may affect them though.
When you thaw the beans, small amounts of water (that were frozen as small amounts of air humidity) will melt and it may collect together and cause some very small extractions in the bean. This is probably quite minimal due to the fact that you have vacuum packed the beans ...
6
Rather than playing with electricity and wiring you could actually just move the roasting bed/area away from your heat source and accomplish close to the same thing.
I started roasting with a popper as well. The hole in the popper was roughly 3 inches so I got a 3 to 4 inch duct adapter, a 4 inch flour sifter and mushed it all together, similar to this. ...
6
The single biggest factor in the size of a coffee bean is the botanical variety of the plant. There is no amount of nutrition or growing conditions that can overcome the effect of genetics.
In this picture from our garden at Coffea Diversa you can see two examples at the extreme.
On one hand you have mokka, this variety has the smallest bean of all
...
6
What I have seen online suggests that it is what one would think of as severely under roasted (by coffee standards) coffee. The flavor profile is very different than traditionally roasted coffee and much closer to tea with a lot of bitterness from compounds that are generally roasted off.
Sweet Maria's Green Coffee Cupping
5
There are a number of concrete factors that will impact the stimulation you get from a cup of coffee, but it probably boils down to the amount of caffeine (and any other stimulants) that are in your cup that get extracted from the beans. Here's a few factors that affect the caffeine content of coffee, with links to other related questions on this site:
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