[Music] welcome to today's video and the beginning of a series of sorts a beginner's guide to coffee and this video is a beginner's guide to coffee buying now i know you know how to buy coffee but what today's video is all about is helping you explore the world of coffee more easily more enjoyably with less mistakes here's the thing if you have found a coffee that you love be it a coffee roaster or a coffee brand that's great i don't want to stop you drinking that thing i'm not going to tell you what to drink today but part of the joy of coffee is the diversity of flavor and whatever you're enjoying now there's something something out there that i think you could enjoy even more but what i don't want you to do is experiment gamble buy something that kind of looks good and then hate it that's the goal today help you buy stuff that you're likely to really enjoy and avoid stuff that you're likely to really dislike we're gonna break this down into three sections part one is gonna be the kind of golden rules of buying coffee part two will be where to buy coffee and the pros and cons of each and then part three will be about kind of decoding a bag of coffee decoding the label on a bag of coffee what are they trying to tell you and how do you match that marry that up to what you want before we begin i should disclose a couple of very important ways in which i am biased firstly i have a strong preference and i'm a big advocate for specialty coffee if you're watching this and you don't like specialty coffee that's okay this is still a useful video for you but just know that i have a very strong preference towards it secondly i also co-own a coffee company now none of our products are in the video today there are no links to our products in the description down below but you should know and i should disclose this right at the start so let's begin the golden rules for buying coffee and the first one you probably know buy fresh but what does fresh mean now coffee after roasting declines in a pretty steady way over time it loses its aromatics they kind of float off into the atmosphere and escape and you also develop some unpleasant flavors things go stale and they begin to oxidize and so a combination of those things is is what happens when coffee stales and goes off it's food safe for a really really long time some of you might have seen i've drunk coffee from the 1950s and while i wouldn't necessarily recommend it yeah coffee lasts a really really long time but it's not at its best now typically coffee will be dated in one of two different ways specialty coffee typically will offer you a roast date the day on which it was roasted and that's pretty useful you know how old the coffee is exactly however if you're selling a product through a supermarket supermarkets don't want you to put a roast date on there they hate roast dates they want a best before date this is often 12 even 18 sometimes 24 months after the roasting date so you don't really know when the coffee was roasted this is not a choice that the roasters get to make really this is a choice from supermarkets in fact here on the table i've got the same coffee one from a supermarket and this has a best before date and the same roaster same coffee bought directly from them has a roasted on date so understand this is a little bit confusing way you buy it will impact the information that you have more on that a little bit later on today we're going to cover coffees for both filter coffee drinking and for espresso and what gets confusing about the messaging of fresh is that fresh isn't always the best now when you roast coffee a lot of co2 comes out that's why any bag of coffee will have a little valve on it that you can squeeze the gas out of now when it comes to espresso in particular fresher isn't always better because there's a lot of co2 in very fresh coffee beans when you try and brew them as espresso a lot of gas comes out in this pressurized environment and it can make for a disrupted brewing process it's harder to brew really really fresh coffee and many people rest the coffee for seven to ten days sometimes two weeks if not sometimes longer to make it a little easier to brew for espresso with filtered coffee it's less of a concern a day or two fine you know it's pretty easy to brew from that point onwards it gets a little bit easier the older it is when you're trying to hit a kind of window of anywhere from a week to six weeks in which it's going to be at its best and speaking of at its best we need to talk also about ground coffee versus whole bean i will always always always advocate for whole bean coffee for a couple of reasons firstly it's better value for money with ground coffee they'll often pack it in a protective atmosphere but once you open that bag and air gets in the clock sticking and you might have one or two days to enjoy it at its best yes it's still drinkable yeah it's probably okay for a little while more but you're not getting what you paid for whole beans last much longer and when you grind them they begin to degrade but if you grind before you use them you're just gonna have a better time it's better value for money to buy whole beans and secondly grinding coffee is one of the great pleasures of life you know i don't want people to miss out on having their morning be that little bit more aromatic and enjoyable as final guidance for hobby and coffee anything that's a kind of light medium roast i think is generally fine four to six to eight weeks after roasting depending on how you're storing it if it's pre-ground it's not gonna be that case and if it's a darker roast i would say maybe four to six weeks maximum because darker roads go stale a little bit quicker the second rule i'm going to give you is to buy traceable coffee buy coffee from as distinct a place as you can that might be a single farm that might be a cooperative of growers that might be a region in some cases but historically coffee was just sold by country of origin and you'd be skeptical if the wine you bought on the shelf just said france that's not enough right you would want more which region is this from at the very least same with coffee just because the coffee is from guatemala or colombia well it doesn't really tell you that much about how it's going to taste there's huge variation within just about every single producing origin of flavor of styles so knowing what country it's from isn't that useful to you it's a little useful but it's not that useful if you can't tell where in a country a coffee is from it's not particularly traceable now the secret sort of shortcut of traceable coffees is that adding traceability to a coffee keeping it separate all the way from a farm or a co-op to you the consumer costs money it adds cost to that product and that will only be done in situations where that coffee is good enough in terms of its taste and its quality to merit a premium price there's no point keeping a coffee that doesn't taste very good traceable all the way through because it doesn't have the value necessary to kind of return on that investment so that's why traceability i think is a nice little shortcut to quality i don't want to tell you how much to spend on coffee but i would say that spending more buys you generally better quality better tasting coffee and more of that money is likely to go back to the producer so i'd obviously encourage you to invest a little bit in the coffee that you drink this last tip it's not really optional but it's kind of complicated tip and that's to buy seasonally here's the deal different countries around the world harvest coffee at different times this means that the raw coffees are arriving into kind of consuming countries at different times of year raw coffee lasts longer generally than roasted coffee and a roaster may carry a coffee from anywhere from a few weeks to six to eight months classically roasters would carry a coffee all year round right they would have a guatemalan offering 12 months of the year even though for three four sometimes five months that coffee wasn't very good because the raw coffee was a little bit old specialty has embraced seasonality which means that you may only see coffees from certain origins for six months of the year i'm not going to ask you to pay attention to which country is harvesting when or understand shipping dates or that kind of stuff but do look to buy from places where the offering changes reasonably regularly if they're doing that if they have different products on the shelf quite often while that can be initially frustrating it's actually a good thing it means the raw coffees are nice and fresh and you're gonna get the best possible experience now let's talk about where to buy coffee for this i'm gonna say there are three kind of places to buy coffee one is the supermarket two would be a cafe or coffee shop or a shop on the high street let's say or in your neighborhood and the third place would be online we need to talk about each of these because they impact the offering and your options and the way you should approach buying in those places so let's start with the supermarket right it has a couple of big advantages firstly for most people it's incredibly convenient they're often visiting or buying for supermarket online or you know it's a part of your week it's part of your kind of routine day to day and secondly things there are generally cheaper supermarkets compete with each other they're happy to use their size and their scale to diminish their profits and so typically products in the supermarket are as cheap as they're likely to be anywhere that's the good news here's the bad news supermarkets do not treat coffee like fresh food as i said before they don't want you to think about when that coffee was roasted because you might pick up a bag and think oh this is two months old but if they give you a best before date well you might think oh i've got 10 months left to use this product now the way supermarkets work is that they may buy from a single supplier that goes into a centralized distribution center then eventually goes to the individual supermarket goes onto the shelf works its way slowly forwards to the front of the shelf and it can take months from it being produced to it being sold so freshness is really really really difficult you can buy good quality traceable coffees there well roasted coffees that i would say are good coffee is definitely worth drinking but know that the trade-off is freshness so now let's talk about coffee shops and right now as coffee shops around the world begin to reopen in many places this is a great way to support them i just want to put that out there now now coffee shops have some advantages one you you often go to them so there's a convenience factor there two there's the opportunity for a conversation you can talk to someone and say i like this kind of coffee this is a brand i like or this is an experience i had that i liked what can you recommend and a good coffee shop should be able to help you now in terms of freshness their product typically will be actually pretty fresh it may not be as fresh as buying online we'll come to that in a second but if you need coffee to use right now coffee shops are perfect chances are that coffee is five six seven days old and they certainly will have something that old that you can buy it's beautifully fresh perfectly ready to brew and you can take it home and have a delicious cup of coffee one more thing don't forget that coffee shops are often serving the coffee they retail you know there may be an opportunity to try before you buy taste something or buy something drink it really enjoy it go back and take a bag of that home to enjoy in the morning big fan of buying from coffee shops let's talk about online now online gives you probably the most variety it's often competitive in price you're buying directly from a roaster and that means in many cases though not all but in many cases they will roast your coffee once they receive your order they'll ship it often the same day and it will come to you a day or two after after being roasted incredibly fresh but like we said fresher isn't always better if you're kind of managing the freshness and you know you've got like a week left on this bag great time to buy online you know like that's that's a good decision it'll come it'll be nicely rested you can go into that bag next life is easy but it requires a touch more organization now often roasters will offer things like subscription services i think those are generally a great way to go it sort of takes away having to remember to do something coffee just arrives through your door that i think is a great thing to do and often for many people they'll go through more than one bag a month and so a great way to set up life is to have one bag come on a subscription from a roaster and then buy one bag on top of it from a different place or from a cafe or from wherever because the whole point that i keep coming back to is that coffee is really really fun and tasting different stuff is really really fun so those are my recommendations and those are the impacts of buying on each of those different places now before we move into the third section where we decode a bag of coffee there's a short ad from this video sponsor which is skillshare skillshare is an online learning community full of thousands of classes for creative and curious people like you and me it's a great place to explore new skills or deepen existing passions now recently i've been enjoying two classes from zach mulligan i've been wanting to refresh my cinematography skills and both of his classes have been fantastic now with an annual subscription skillshare is incredibly affordable it's less than ten dollars a month and that's unlimited access to all of the classes and there's new ones being added all the time but even better the first 000 of you to click the link down below can get 30 of an annual skill share membership making it superb value so go click the link in the description and enjoy a year of learning and creativity thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video so let's talk about all of these bags of coffee here and work out what they're trying to tell us about how they taste now to kind of get a wide coverage of coffee for the video today it required a trip to the supermarket which was always good for me to go back and look at that enormous wall of choice and try and work out what i wanted to buy and that's kind of what we're thinking about here right you walk up to that big wall of coffee you pick up a bag and you're like will i like this so the first thing we're going to talk about is going to be roast degree how darkly a coffee is roasted generally we talk about either light or medium or dark and in the case of supermarket coffees often they don't use that language often they use strength they'll say strength five strength three now they don't generally put anything down a strength one or two because no one wants weak coffee so the functional range is generally three through five which is kind of absurd but it is what it is now specialty coffee gets very angry about the use of the word strength on the front of a bag because strength means something else strength is how much coffee to how much water you know i mean the more coffee you use to brew a cup the stronger that's going to be that's the correct usage of strength but in the defense of the supermarket coffees at least they're trying to properly communicate roasted degree to some extent for people specialty coffee often does not describe roast degree now it does occasionally there's a bag here that has along the bottom here medium roast right that's that's that's nice but that's not common in specialty coffee the most common thing to see is a description about whether it might be used as a filter coffee or as an espresso coffee now when it comes to the term roasted for espresso that tells you a little bit regarding the coffee from that particular roaster right most roasters will roast their espresso sort of focused products a little bit darker a little bit deeper than they would do their filter coffee roasted products however some people in specialty use what's called an omni roast where they're kind of roasting for both at the same time it's a kind of philosophy thing for many roasters their approach to espresso to filter coffee to roasting as a whole but if you are buying specialty coffee and it does not have any indication of roast on it it is a light to medium roast that's the default on the occasions that they don't roast that way they tend to signify that if there's a description of roast beer by country description which doesn't really mean anything like french roast or just dark roast then you know it's different but otherwise you can presume it to be light to medium roasted with the supermarket stuff the higher the strength the darker the roast and generally speaking the lighter the roast of coffee the more acidity it will have the darker the roast the more bitterness it will have and the less acidity it'll have and you know specialty feels that light to medium gives you nice sweetness a little bit of acidity not too much bitterness and tons and tons of flavor of where the coffee comes from which is why that's such a popular roasting style choice for specialty companies now we need to talk about the descriptors and generally specialty companies and in fact more and more commercial companies will offer you maybe three sometimes more descriptive words now these are doing two different jobs and i think people can forget about this firstly they are trying to describe in some way the taste of the coffee and secondly they're trying to entice you the buyer to buy that bag of coffee it's half use and it's half sales and it's important to remember that in some cases descriptions could be so odd or unusual or kind of contrary and clashing that that really doesn't work but in many cases it does and things sound completely delicious those words promise a great deal if you tell me my coffee is going to taste of caramel well i expect it to taste almost as if you've put caramel in the bag and it leads to further confusion with the consumer who thinks oh is this like a flavored coffee is this like a caramel flavored coffee because those exist but often no it's not they're trying to communicate something about the coffee's taste to you with that word we'll come to that a bit more very soon one other quick tip specialty coffee is a little bit like wine except for one thing the very highest priced wines are often the most elegant the most kind of classic the most beautiful wines but they would be familiar and enjoyable to most people the highest priced coffees tend to be the most unusual the least kind of coffee tasting coffees so it's just one to bear in mind if you're looking at a more expensive coffee have a look at those words are they promising you a very unusual experience and is that what you want in some cases yes it is and in other cases no it's not one other thing to bear in mind is that often these roasters come up with their descriptions for coffees through comparative tasting they're not just tasting that one coffee on its own they're comparing it to other coffees that they're also roasting and serving now we've talked a lot on this channel about learning to taste there's some information up here if you want to develop your tasting skills but comparative tasting is really useful for kind of breaking apart the flavors of coffee but if you the consumer don't have that comparative tasting experience when you drink it it can feel harder to pull out the berry qualities of a coffee or the the kind of ripe pear promised by the roaster but if you were comparing it to something else oh the differences would be more obvious and yeah this is kind of more pear-like in its way in its flavor compared to coffee b or c or d so know that there is an element of frustration that's almost inevitable because you won't have had the same comparative experience as a coffee roaster but generally they're doing their best to broadcast some key information to you to help you really find out if you're going to enjoy that coffee or not now what i can't do is know what your personal preferences are around what you really really like what i can do however is understand some things that you really really dislike and give you some guidance there there are three categories of kind of coffee experience that really trigger dislike for people i'll explain some people cannot stand it when a coffee is quite light bodied quite delicate quite tea like almost it doesn't taste like coffee to them and and i want to help you avoid buying coffees like that if you feel that way now generally specialty coffee is often of a certain roast degree as we said it's a kind of light to medium roast and the kinds of coffees that are typically bought by specialty companies are often as a default kind of medium-bodied generally they'll use language to highlight the texture of the coffee if it is not a kind of medium-bodied coffee if it's quite light-bodied look for words they'll use like delicate or elegant or often explicitly tea like look for descriptors of things being quite floral you know those kind of words suggest lightness to you and that's what they're trying to say and if they use kind of creamy or rich or those kind of words then they're suggesting it is a fuller-bodied coffee in that way but if there's no texture words i would say as a kind of vaguely useful rule it's a medium-bodied coffee now the second one i think is a much easier one to kind of decode and it's a much bigger love hate aspect for a lot of people with the coffee they drink and that is the sensation of acidity some people do not want any acidity in their coffee the idea of an acidic coffee is genuinely repulsive to them and that's completely okay there are other people who want all the acidity in their coffee they want it to be bright and juicy and vibrant how do we help you there well it's going to be fruit words if you see fresh fruit words in the descriptors there may be berries there might be apple right those kind of fruit descriptors if they are referring to fresh fruits that coffee is going to have a reasonable amount of acidity if you see berry fruits i'd expect a lot of acidity if you see citrus fruits i'd expect a lot of acidity if you see things like apple or pear yeah i would expect a good amount of acidity if the words are fruit words but they're kind of transformed if they're cooked fruit words if it's described as jammy or candied orange for example then i would expect a little acidity but not a lot if a description has no fruit words then i would expect very low acidity from it if they're using other words like caramel or treacle or nuts or chocolate those are non-fruit words and they are suggesting low acidity in that regard so that will help you kind of decode how much acidity do i generally expect the third kind of key aspect around sort of love hate with coffee is what i would call fermented fruit flavors that sounds a bit odd but there are styles of coffee they're often dry or natural processed coffees where the whole cherry was dried in the sun instead of the seeds being squeezed out and sort of washed and kind of cleaned of their fruit before being dried if it's been dried inside the fruit then a little fermentation can go on and you can get these kind of funky very unusual flavors that are often described on bags of coffee as tropical fruit if you see pineapple if you see mango if you see strawberry even chances are there's going to be some fermented fruit qualities to the coffee in the bag if it says dry process or natural process on the bag expect those flavors now some people love those flavors they are fascinating they are unlike any other coffee flavors they are easily identifiable they're just kind of fun other people are completely disgusted by them and they hate them for that reason it's really important to me that people understand how to not buy those or to buy those on purpose and never make a mistake if you don't like fermented fruit flavors and that in my experience is around 40 of people then i would strongly avoid dry or natural processed coffees unless they're making a lot of promises around how clean it tastes there's no weird fruit flavors on the bag if they're saying it's just like clean or sweet or chocolate or nuts maybe but if there's any kind of fruit on there chances are that's not going to be to your tastes and it's just a bit of a gamble which i want you to avoid now i've talked a lot about the sort of theory side the reason i bought a bunch of coffee is to use some sort of practical examples here right let's take what we've discussed so far and apply it to some real world examples this is a canyon coffee it's from the supermarket strength three so it's gonna be the lighter roast that you would get at a supermarket because two and one don't really exist it's saying zesty citrus and blackberry they are broadcasting to you that this is going to be a light to medium-bodied coffee it's going to have for them a lot of acidity but those fruits are kind of clean fruit tastes it's not kind of funky fruit that's what they're telling you about this coffee and from that perspective you may love or loathe the experience that is coming now this lavazza rosso very popular with a lot of people description rich and full bodied with chocolate notes so they are saying to you this is a heavy bodied coffee right there's going to be very little acidity there's no fruit words in here whatsoever so they're saying no to low acidity lots and lots of body lots of texture uh they're saying intensity five out of ten roasting medium so you're not expecting a ton of kind of bitterness or kind of harsher more kind of developed roast flavors but it's still going to be a big kind of heavy-bodied experience back to this bag which i picked up before it's a coffee from china which is interesting now this is described as kind of nutty and sweet here they say cherry almond candied orange and caramel right it's a medium roast so what i'm expecting is reasonable texture actually like a some nice body it's a washed coffee but i wouldn't expect it to be light-bodied in addition it has some fruit but they're pushing towards kind of cooked fruit candied fruit in a way so i would expect some acidity but not that much and i wouldn't expect any fermented flavors in this from their particular description so you know i can kind of understand am i likely to enjoy this or am i not so this one is really interesting to me because this is a very big coffee company called taylor's of harrogate very large uk company one of the biggest roasters in the uk doing specialty coffee now this is listed right in the front as a natural so straight away we know we're in for some funky flavors we look at the back of the bag yeah it says pineapple coconut and whiskey this is going to be a strongly fermented tasting coffee right it says natural process it's roasted for filter it tells us that and it also says it's a light roast so we've got a lot of information natural processed coffees don't often have the same acidity as washed coffees but still if you don't like acidity they're saying probably avoid this coffee and if you don't like fermented flavors then probably avoid this coffee but if you like those two things this might be a pretty safe bet if you know if you're buying it off the shelf especially if you're spending a little bit of money now in some cases you may not have any descriptors on a bag but generally speaking specialty roasters are wise enough to the whole fermented flavors thing that they will say if it's a natural or not and so here we know that it is a natural processed coffee so from that word alone you can make a pretty informed decision around your preferences around those styles of flavors and then one more one more so here it's an espresso roast so we'd expect it to be darker and it is strength four so they're suggesting it's gonna be pretty darkly roasted not all the way to very [ __ ] roasted but pretty dark descriptors of rich chocolate spice and toffee so no fruit words there whatsoever we're gonna expect really pretty low acidity they're offering you know by the description some kind of sweetness there but ultimately it's not going to be a you know a fruity or in any way acidic espresso i think it's going to be more kind of medium-bodied but relatively high bitterness and low acid that's the sort of subtext of this whole thing so that i hope is a really useful guide to help you buy better coffees but now i want to hear from you down in the comments below what did i miss out on what more information would be useful to you when it comes to buying a bag of coffee and feeling confident that you're really going to enjoy it let me know down in the comments below but for now i'll say thank you so much for watching and i hope you have a great day
