Last week we covered the “Don’t’s” of coffee-making. So you’ve made the necessary changes to your brewing equipment, turfed out the cheapo-Robusta coffee & are headed towards your local Coffee Shop. But, which Coffee Shop? Which coffee bean to buy?

Be bold & don’t be in a rush to decide on a particular coffee or a particular Coffee Shop. Avoid blindly walking into the nearest well-branded & marketed National Franchised Coffee Shop. Some of the smaller owner-operated Coffee Shops often pay a lot more attention to quality than the higher volume Franchised Coffee Shops.

Ask where the Coffee Shop sources its roasted bean. Ask them about their range of Coffee beans on sale. Ask for a description of the characteristics of each roast. Ask to sample what they have brewed & compare the taste with what you have been told.

By now you should be getting an idea of how committed the Coffee Shop is to quality & their knowledge about their product. If you find the answers vague or you feel the Coffee Shop is selling Robusta coffee at Arabica Coffee prices, then head out the door & look for another Coffee Shop.

The process of finding good quality coffee beans is ongoing. For example, you may enjoy the Safari Cup’s Tanzania Peabody. However, our roaster will not buy coffee beans at the end of a growing season. The quality of the harvested bean late in the season is not as high as it is earlier in the season. So we may be out of Tanzania Peabody for a couple of weeks or months until next years crop is harvested. This may be a good time to enjoy an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe or Kenya AA.

After all the questions & answers, always remember to smell the coffee beans before you buy them. This will give you an indication of how fresh the roasted beans really are. No matter how great the coffee beans may be, if more than two weeks has passed since the roasting date, the aroma & flavour of the bean will have been affected.

Finally, if you are able to pass by the Coffee Shop on a regular basis, ask them to grind your beans. Tell them what kind of filter (flat bottomed or cone-shaped) you use at home or in the office. Or you may use a French Press. The size of the ground beans should be adjusted according to the type & shape of your brewing equipment. Don’t have the beans ground if you need to buy more than a week’s supply of coffee.

It’s easy-beans from here. Once you have the right equipment & your coffee choice of the week, it is a matter of adjusting the amount of ground beans you add to your brewer to make the perfect cup or cups of coffee. Read the instructions on the brewer……...as my wife always reminds me. And don’t expect the brewed coffee to stay fresh for longer than two hours. No matter what the Airpot manufacturer may say.