Looking For More Flavor In Your Coffee?
With so many brands and fast alternatives to caffeine, finding a good cup of coffee can be hard if you're not part of some chic, food and drink connoisseur culture. There are a lot of beans, a lot of brewing methods, a lot of packaging techniques, and so many ways to get things wrong. To cut through a lot of the choices, here are a few flavor profiles from coffee beans and brewing processes to help you get to the right taste and experience.
Sweet, Berry-Like Coffee
Do you like a taste of berries to go with your cup of coffee? Coffee beans are actually a misnomer, since the name comes from its appearance and similarity to beans instead of its biological function: a berry.
Like cherries, coffee is consider a stone fruit and they're very much berries with complex flavors. These flavors stand out in varieties from countries such as Kenya, or a more citrus-like flavor from Tanzania. The flavors come from a combination of the growing conditions and the specific coffee variety.
These flavors aren't just hints underneath what America knows as a basic cup of coffee. Kenyan and Tanzanian coffees have a distinctive taste that adds a fruit flavor that mellows with the known coffee flavor, creating an almost completely different product. Looking for an even more mind-blowing taste? Ethiopia's citrus-noted coffee berries are even stronger.
Creamy Without The Cream
If you'd love coffee without the biting, stinging taste, a mellow roast is what you're looking for. Acrid is also the word you're looking for, as the bitter taste associated with many mass-produced coffees is actually a feature that many coffee drinkers seek to clean their palate. Some people just like the burn.
To avoid that burn, try some of India's coffees that are more mellow. Monsoon Malabar, for example, is a processed applied to some Indian coffee beans to get rid of the acrid profile. The berries are dried in the sun, then exposed to monsoon weather conditions in warehouses for a few months.
The process mellows out the acrid flavor by leeching some of the fatty acids. As opposed to brewing coffee completely in hot water to get everything inside the berry in your drink, you're losing a specific edge of the coffee while still retaining a lot of flavor.
Cold Brew Coffee For A Smooth Sip
No matter what kind of bean you use, there's a way to make it less acrid. As a more drastic answer to the Monsoon Malabar humidity leeching process, cold brew offers a leeching process that produces faster results. It's not the same results, as specific brewing techniques will usually have a unique flavor difference, but this is all about reducing the bite of coffee.
The cold brew process involves steeping coffee grounds—not just processed beans, but ground coffee—in cool water for long periods of time. Twelve hours at least is necessary for a strong, full body of flavor instead of a watered down taste because heat isn't accelerating the brewing time. Some packaged brands advertise 48 hours or more, although clean conditions must be maintained to avoid bacteria growth.
With every flavor profile available, there's an easy way to get a quick test of taste. Keurig K cups, for example, can brew many different flavor packages of coffees, and unique blends enter the K Cup market often. Contact a coffee expert to talk about unique brews, K cups, and convenience for a flavorful cup or click here for more information.
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