Coffee: A Buying Guide
With prices hovering near a 50-year high, we'll help you find an ideal cup of joe
In the early days of my career, I found the idea of “knowing where my food comes from” thrilling. Every ingredient had a history, and the way it was cultivated — how and by whom — influenced its flavor and its impact on a warming planet. There was so much to be discovered.
I also remember the food, or rather the drink, that forced me to give up my crusade to know where all my food came from: coffee. It was a sunny morning sometime around 2013. I was standing in line at a Brooklyn “coffee lab” when, suddenly, all the variations felt more exhausting than exhilarating. Why did I need to know so much and make so many choices before someone would hand me some caffeine?
I picked a coffee that day. I liked it, and have been buying and drinking it at home ever since. It is my “forever coffee.”
A decade-plus later, climate change has arrived and coffee is on the run. There are predictions of perilous yield losses and the continued spread of coffee rust, a fungus that decimates coffee plants. Prices are hovering near a 50-year high. The market is increasingly crowded and complex.
So I called up Mark Prince to educate me. Prince is the founder and senior editor of CoffeeGeek, an online resource on coffee and espresso, as well as a World Barista Championship judge and all-around charming human. We covered the basics of origin, sourcing, roasting, and grinding (which is essential!) and their impacts on flavor and sustainability. The goal: to teach you just enough to find your forever coffee.
Let’s Start at The Very Beginning (A Very Good Place To Start)
Though there are seemingly a zillion beans to choose from, almost all belong to one of two coffee species: Robusta and Arabica. (There is a third species, Liberica, but you won’t generally find those beans for sale in the U.S.) Robusta is cheaper and easier to grow and has bolder (read: less interesting and nuanced) flavors. Robusta is funneled into commodity coffee, like Folgers and Maxwell House.
Premium coffees, the ones we are focusing on here, are Arabica, though Prince noted that if you use a Nespresso or Keurig pod coffee maker you may be vastly overpaying for inferior Robusta beans. (For what it’s worth, there are plenty of other compelling reasons not to use coffee pods, including the environmental impact of 56 billion pods ending up in landfills each year. For the full rundown, see this excellent article on CoffeeGeek.)
Arabica beans are grown all over the world, from Kenya and Ethiopia to Colombia, Peru, and Indonesia. Though we can buy coffee all year round, coffee is seasonal and perishable. African coffees are harvested in January or February, and start arriving on U.S. shelves in early summer. Central American coffees are harvested from October till March. Ideally, you’d know all this and choose coffees that are the freshest. But that seems like a lot of work. This is one of the many reasons why choosing a trustworthy roaster is important. They will either sell out or stop selling coffee if it’s past its prime.
Speaking of freshness: Prince admonished me to never buy a bag of beans with a “best by” date. Good coffee will have a “roast date” on it. If you drink espresso, look for a bag that is five to seven days past its roast date, which allows the beans to release carbon dioxide and deliver that lovely crema. But Prince will accept beans three weeks past the roast date. For brewed coffee, including Aeropress and pour-overs, where the grind is coarser, a month past roast date will do. (Full disclosure: I buy five-pound bags of coffee and keep it in an airtight container for two-plus months. Gasp! It tastes fine to me!)
Coffee Buying Basics
Okay, let’s run through all those claims you see on a bag of coffee beans, and which ones should get your attention.
Coffee buzzwords tend to fall into two categories. Some reflect how and by whom the coffee was grown. The rest tell you how the coffee was processed. Both will influence sustainability and flavor.
Shade-Grown: The Arabica coffee tree is a delicate plant. It likes some elevation, but does not like direct sunlight. Though it’s hard to generalize, the quality of shade-grown coffees tends to be higher.