9 tips for making a decision

Reading time: 5 minutes. This article is a short blog post. You can find the detailed blog article here.

Everyone has their own individual taste. That is why there isn't THE one coffee for everyone. However, there are criteria you can use to find your favorite coffee. In this post, we provide you with 9 tips for making your decision.

1. Which coffee suits you? Espresso, Mokka, or filter?

If you are sure that you only want espresso, you can skip to the section "Which coffee for espresso".

Every coffee drink also has a psychological and social dimension. An espresso rounds off a delicious meal or provides a quick, zesty break. For a longer conversation, however, a filter coffee or latte macchiato is more appropriate.

Espresso

A concentrated espresso feels creamy and viscous in the mouth. 7-10% of the drink consists of dissolved coffee particles. An explosion of flavor in 25ml.

Filter coffee

A filter coffee consists of only about 1% dissolved coffee particles and 99% water. It feels tea-like and soft in the mouth. The flavor does not explode, but unfolds slowly.

Keep in mind where you place yourself. Espresso or filter? Or in the middle, with an Americano or café crème?

2. Light, medium, or dark roast?

Rule of thumb: The lighter a bean is roasted, the more nuances you can taste. The darker the roast, the more similar the different beans taste.

Light roasts are more complex and contain sweet, fruity notes. If they are too light, these coffees taste grassy and cereal-like. Dark-roasted varieties emphasize chocolatey, roasted notes. Coffees that are roasted too dark taste burnt.

The spectrum between light and dark roasts is very broad with many sub-nuances. These explanations simplify a complex topic, but they give you a good starting point.

3. Coffee beans for your happiness: Arabica or Robusta

There are two dominant raw coffee species: Arabica and Robusta (also called Canephora).

Robusta

Strong, earthy, and full-bodied—that's how you can describe the taste. It has a higher caffeine content and tastes more bitter. It is traded at a lower price and often forms the basis for instant coffees and inexpensive espresso blends. But that doesn't have to mean anything. Robusta beans or blends are suitable as a strong coffee or as a base for milk-based drinks. However, Robusta beans have developed enormously, especially in the area of post-harvest processing methods, and promise many exciting roasted coffees in the near future.

Arabica

Less bitter, fine acids, and more complex—that is Arabica. It is good for filter coffees or espressos. It is available as a single-origin coffee or as "mixtures," so-called blends.

4. Which coffee for filter coffee and French Press?

For the French Press or plunger pot, you can use the same coffees as for filter coffee. Since filter coffee only consists of 1% dissolved coffee particles, its flavor variations are more subdued. We recommend light roasts, which allow you to explore the flavor profiles of different growing regions very well. Central America or Papua New Guinea, Kenya or Ethiopia—it all makes a difference in the cup. However, it depends on your own taste! Try, try, try!

5. Which coffee for espresso?

Because espresso is so concentrated, it hardly forgives mistakes in preparation. If it is too bitter, this bitterness will pierce through you. If it is too acidic, it will almost knock your socks off. But if the espresso is spot on, it is phenomenally delicious!

The art is to integrate the acidity into the espresso and to put all flavor notes into an interesting, balanced ratio.

What type of espresso drinker are you?

If you like espresso like you get on holiday in Italy, then blends with Robusta content or pure Robusta coffees are what you are looking for. They taste dark, rather bitter, and strong. You will usually find these descriptions on the packaging from roasters. To make the Italian feeling perfect, the extraction should be short and crisp. 7-8 grams of coffee to 15-18ml of drink.

Slightly longer and more balanced espressos are the counterpart to Italian roasts. These often lighter roasts should be brewed with longer beverage ratios of 1:2.5 or even 1:3. Here, 9 grams of coffee result in 22.5 or even 27 grams of drink. This preparation brings out many nuances, and here you can hit the "sweet spot" of the coffee.

6. Reading coffee labels correctly or what you should not buy

The back of coffee packaging reads almost as poetically as a love poem. But don't be fooled by that. The more precise information you find, the better.

The minimum standard for buying coffee should be the roasting date (no older than 2 months), information about the origin, and the composition of the beans. Beyond that, there may also be information about the processing, the variety of the coffee, and even exact plantation details.

Unfortunately, this is not a guarantee that you will like the coffee, but only that you have bought a high-quality product. Now it's up to you: train your sense of taste. Try to taste exactly whether the coffee is too acidic or too bitter (this is often confused!). If this is not caused by brewing errors, you can start a conversation with the roaster and incorporate their recommendations. Some roasteries also offer tastings where perfectly prepared coffees can be tested. This way, you will quickly find your favorite variety in your area! If you really want to learn about it, you can also take a sensory training course.

7. Which coffee is healthy and easy on the stomach?

Whether coffee is explicitly healthy or unhealthy is a subject of debate. The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. There are health-promoting aspects as well as potentially harmful ones.

Whether the coffee is easy on the stomach has a lot to do with the quality of the coffee. Coffee should not be picked unripe or overripe. The ripeness of the fruit should be as homogeneous as possible so that subsequent problems (uneven fermentation, etc.) do not occur. Roasting uneven beans is also more difficult. Your coffee should not be roasted too quickly or too lightly. A roast that is too long or too dark also makes it difficult to digest.

8. The best coffee is freshly ground

One of the most important points, almost at the end. The coffee should be freshly ground before brewing. And really fresh at that. Grinding the coffee bean makes the coffee extremely susceptible to reactions with its environment. The aroma disappears in minutes. The second advantage of fresh grinding is that you can perfectly adjust the grind size and thus the flow rate and extraction of your coffee. So never buy pre-ground coffee; instead, invest in a grinder, enjoy the scent of freshly ground coffee, and prepare perfect drinks.

9. The best coffee in the world

You have surely heard of Kopi Luwak cats, which eat coffee beans and therefore filter out exactly the right degree of ripeness. But this "cat coffee," just like Monsooned Malabar or Jamaica Blue Mountain, is above all very, very well marketed. These coffees are not objectively the best in the world, but they have managed to establish themselves on the market as an exclusive luxury good through partly whimsical stories. With our tips in this post, however, you will also find very, very good coffees from local roasters that won't break your budget!