There’s something new and exciting happening here at Coffee Bean Direct: a new sister site, greencoffees.com. Perhaps you’ve noticed the new tab at the top of our home-page, or the link on the menu. Or our newsletter announcement and Facebook posts. Or perhaps you’re ignoring all that because what is green coffee anyway? Who is it for? Why would I bother with roasting at home? There are many reasons to give roasting a try and many, very accessible, ways to do it — see our DIY Guide for more on that. But first, we know there’s some confusion out there about green coffee, so let’s clear up a few misperceptions:

Green coffee is unripe coffee

Green can mean a lot of things, but in this context “green” refers to the color of the raw bean before roasting. Unlike a banana, green coffee is not unripe, just uncooked and bursting with potential. Raw coffee is greenish gray, yellow, or brown, and is covered with papery “chaff,” or skin. This burns off during the roasting process, as moisture is lost and sugars caramelize, producing the coffee color we know and love.

Clockwise from top left: Decaf Colombian, Sulawesi Kalossi, Indian Monsooned Malabar, and Sumatra Mandheling.

Green coffee is like green tea, with a delicious flavor all its own

We sell green coffee for roasting, not for consumption as-is. Unroasted beans are hard as a rock. Literally. If you’re familiar with the Moh’s scale of mineral hardness, it’s about a 5, somewhere between Apatite and Feldspar (we did the test, because you asked). Pulverization might be possible, but your home grinder is not up to that task, and neither is ours. Even if you were somehow able to brew it, it would probably taste horrendously bitter. Roasting lowers acidity, releases aromatic compounds responsible for deliciousness, and is an all-around wonderful thing.

Home roasting requires something like this in my basement

Like coffee brewing, coffee roasting equipment ranges from simple to high-tech. Fancy gadgets don’t necessarily produce a better end result — every method has its fans. Coffee beans have been roasted in a skillet, baking sheet, Dutch oven, popcorn popper, on a grill, etc. Heat and agitation are the main requirements. Chances are you already have what you need in your kitchen to give it a try.

Roasting is for coffee snobs

Roasting is for people who like fresh coffee. It’s easy to be a coffee lover without knowing much about what you’re drinking — many blends have names that reveal little about their ingredients (Breakfast Blend, Evening Fantasy, etc.). Home roasting is a great way to start exploring and discovering what you like. Flavor is partly the product of geography, and experimenting with single-origin coffees is a great place to begin. Starting with unroasted coffee allows you to experience how flavor develops as the roast progresses. You’ll gain an understanding of how each variable affects flavor, and how to produce the cup you want.

I don’t drink enough coffee to roast at home

If you can’t accommodate 50-lb burlap sacks in your kitchen, you should know that we also sell green coffee in 1-lb, 5-lb, and 25-lb bags. Unroasted coffee is less expensive per pound than roasted, and it has a shelf life of more than a year, as opposed to roasted coffee which, stored well, loses flavor after a few months. If you have the space for a larger bag, you can take advantage of bulk savings without worrying about your stockpile going to waste. Roast only what you need. Chances are, your home set-up will only be able to accommodate small batches anyway.

Coffee Bean Direct offers an abundance of affordable, fresh-roasted, coffee. The hard work of discovering the best blends and roast levels for each bean has already been done. I can’t improve upon perfection.

Perhaps once you’ve failed miserably at home roasting, you will forever appreciate just how amazing our roasted coffee is. But that’s not our objective. When it comes to roasting and blending, we know that what we offer is just the beginning. Like Liz, who keeps our office tremblingly productive with countless pots of coffee each day, you can get as creative as you want with blends like Yenya Rican (Yemen, Kenya, and Costa Rican) or Papua Guatzil (Papua New Guinea, Guatemalan, and Brazil). Some are hits, some are misses, but our palates are never bored and we’re wide awake.

New to roasting? Send us your questions or success stories!

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki

As you may have heard, Coffee Bean Direct is searching for beta-testers to sample and review our coffees and teas. Enthusiasm is the only requirement.

There is a methodology in place for tasting and reviewing coffee and tea, but you do not need to have experience with that. It’s referred to as cupping, a term that makes me slightly uncomfortable. Cafés, roasters, and independent organizations often host cupping events open to the public (so far, we cup privately here at CBD). For a beginner, they can be a great opportunity to learn what you like and how to find it.

Here are some notes I came across recently using a sophisticated smiley face scoring system. This is my preferred style of note-taking.

Notes courtesy of Michael Allen Smith, ineedcoffee.com

Unfortunately someone “reading” these would have trouble learning anything other than what I enjoy. Writing a review that’s not purely subjective takes some practice. You might want to read a few reviews online to see what kind of language you find useful. The cupping notes of experienced reviewers are fun to read for their imaginative descriptions alone. For example, here are some notes I came across for one of our coffees on http://www.coffeereview.com:

“A very light-roasted, naturally sweet coffee that stays just on the rich side of raw. Low-toned but intense aroma: nut notes (raw cashew?) with hints of flowers and butter. In the cup soft acidity with a shimmer of wine, substantial body, continued sweet raw nut notes with hints of butter, chocolate and flowers. Rich, long, slightly heavy finish.”

After reading a few of those, you might start to wonder if your oafish palette is up to the task of reviewing anything. Don’t be intimidated. While noticing what you taste and learning how to talk about it is important, a fresh, unbiased perspective is a valuable one. Also, we’re more interested in how our coffees and teas taste to you as you would normally prepare and drink them than slurped black from a spoon. So instead of going into the nuances of proper cupping technique, I’ll just relay a few things that helped me to move beyond “tastes like coffee”:

• Acids, sugars, and bitters are the principle components of flavor. Sugars are easy to identify. Acids create tartness or tanginess (think lemon). Bitterness is more difficult to describe, but it is commonly associated with a negative harshness (unsweetened chocolate), as opposed to acidity, which can be pleasant and desirable.

• A light roast is not necessarily less flavorful than a dark roast. A light vs dark roast level can highlight different flavors in the same bean. A light batch might be more complex, while a dark batch might have fewer, bolder flavors.

• Strong or weak coffee can be made at any roast level. Strength refers to the ratio of coffee solids to water in a cup of brewed coffee. A dark roast or a flavorful cup is not the same as strong, or concentrated, coffee.

• Body refers to the way the coffee feels, and is independent of flavor. Oils present play a large part in determining whether a coffee feels heavy or more viscous in body, or light/smooth. The more oil present, the heavier the body.

When describing flavor, I recommend using terms that seem accurate and have real meaning for you. They don’t need to be part of the popular cupping lexicon to be useful to readers. For instance, “tastes like night-blooming flowers” sounds lovely, but has little meaning for me. Tell me it tastes like fruity pebbles, and I’ve got a handle on it. If you need a place to start, check out my Pinterest collection of various charts and wheels used to identify coffee and tea flavors and aromas. Don’t be afraid to expand upon them, ignore them, or invent your own!

What exactly are we getting at with our new slogan?

The other day I discovered a dusty can of (non-Coffee Bean Direct, I’ll admit it) ground coffee in the back of my cabinet. Not only was it not past the date stamped on the can, but I still have another nineteen months to enjoy it at its “best.” How can this be? Working at Coffee Bean Direct, I’ve learned that roasted coffee is a perishable item with a shelf-life closer to lunch-meat than ramen. Bad coffee will not poison you however, which is why those mysterious best-by dates can range from 3 months from the date of purchase to more than two years.

This improbable freshness window is created with supermarkets in mind. Large stores typically order their coffee as needed from distribution centers where products sit for weeks at a time. A generous best-by date takes all that wait time into consideration. So when is coffee actually fresh? When it has flavor, and the closer to the roast-date the better the flavor. Packaged well, whole bean coffee can retain its flavor for six months to a year. How quickly coffee goes stale varies with the bean variety and roast level, among other things, but as a rule we never ship any coffee more than thirty days old, and grind it shortly before shipping.

Why does coffee lose its flavor with age?

After roasting, coffee beans go through a “de-gassing” period during which they release CO2. The fresher the coffee, the more gas it produces, and these gases contribute to the aroma and the flavor of the coffee. Eventually coffee beans stop producing gas and can be considered stale. Exposure to air, heat, moisture, and even light speeds the whole process along. Sealed bags with one-way valves indicate that coffee was packaged while fresh, allowing CO2 to escape without admitting oxygen. Coffee in other types of containers—like k-cups or vacuum-sealed packages—were allowed to de-gas before sealing (those k-cups would explode if packed with freshly roasted coffee). What you’re getting is a product that is unlikely to change much in terms of freshness, because it is already stale.

Is fresh coffee worth seeking out if stale is all you’ve ever known?

That depends on whether or not you care about how things taste. If you enjoy coffee because it is brown or because it is caffeinated you’re in luck – those qualities won’t change much with age and any coffee will do. To me, stale coffee is flat and dull and I don’t know why people stand for it. It’s as if we’re training our mouths to accept the realities of a post-apocalypse diet of food from the bunker. As for that can in my kitchen, I’ll probably hang on to it in case of emergency. Caffeine fills me with magnanimous good cheer, which might be in short supply post-apocalypse, along with potable water. But until the day comes when I have to gnaw old grounds like an animal, I’ll enjoy the fresh stuff!

What’s lurking in your kitchen? Check out the dates on your coffee, new or old, and let us know what you find!

P.S. If your coffee happens to be from us, we label our bags with a five-digit roast date, known as the Julian date. The last two numbers indicate the year, and the first three the day from 001 to 365. To easily match the code on your bag with a month and day, check out this handy chart!

We’re totally about to “nerd” out on the Olympics.

Name dropping like Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt has been going on for weeks and now we have begun arguing about which events are best.  Beach volleyball advocates have been going at it with basketball fans while the gymnastics supporters refuse to talk to the swimming/diving peeps.

We have even been arguing over which office pet would do best in the Summer Olympics.

Our excessive enthusiasm is about to work in your favor.  We are celebrating the 2012 Summer Olympics with a slew of fun stuff coming your way. 

The games run July 27th thru August 12th – everyday during the games we will be celebrating on Facebook.  Look for:

• Coupon codes like the $5 off promo in the pic above
• Free coffee and tea giveaways
• Exclusive Olympic-themed flavors
• More fun prizes and surprises!

Make sure you like us on Facebook and check our page every day so you don’t miss out.  We are even giving away prizes for answering Olympic trivia as we anxiously wait for the Opening Ceremony.

Many of our Facebook friends have been asking about the Ekobrew K-Cup reusable filter.  One of the big questions is whether or not they’re easy to clean.  The makers of Ekobrew use its ability to be quickly cleaned as one of its main selling points, but we weren’t going to simply take their word for it — We put it to the test.

The first thing we noticed is that the bottom of the Ekobrew has no cracks, crevices or smalls spaces for wet grinds to get crammed in, trapped forever.  This is very different from other brands we tested – brands that left us rinsing, re-rinsing, and rinsing some more.  After all, the little cups are too small to scrub so we had to scrape the grinds out of the cracks with a fork like some sorta early primate that just learned to use tools.

Next we filled our Ekobrew and made a quick cup of coffee on our office Keurig (yes, even we have a Keurig but if you call us out on it we will claim it’s only for research purposes).  The photo below is the Ekobrew immediately after brewing, filled with wet grinds.

Step 1 to cleaning the Ekobrew: 1 quick tap over the trash (or storage container if you reuse your spent grinds for  composting) to get the majority of the grinds out.

As you can see, there is a layer of grinds still on the bottom.  Worried?  Don’t be…

Step 2: Rinse.  I held the Ekobrew under the faucet while Marcie timed me.  I let the water fall down into the cup first, then turned it around a few times letting the water flow through the mesh on the sides and bottom of the cup.  The filter was completely clean after 25.5 seconds.

Completely clean in under 30 seconds with no scrubbing or scraping with make-shift tools necessary.  That’s not too bad, especially if you’re like me in the morning –  Before I get that first cup of coffee I make early primates look like Einstein.