Brewing a great coffee depends on what type of equipment you intend on using and matching the right style of beans to match. This page will discuss what you will need to be looking out for when picking your coffee beans.

Terminology

Single Origin: A single origin coffee will have coffee beans grown from a single farm or area, and won’t include beans from any other area.

Blend: A blend refers to a coffee that contains beans from several different areas or growing regions across the world, professional blenders will try different combinations together to give the coffee different characteristics.

Roast: Coffee begins as a green coffee bean and will be roasted in special equipment in order make it able to be used for drinking purposes.

Dark Roast: This means that the coffee bean has been roasted for a longer time, this gives the coffee a fuller flavour.

Medium/Light Roast: This refers to the beans spending less time in the roasting equipment, a lighter roast has had less time for the heat of the roasting equipment to caramelise and draw out the coffee’s oils, resulting in a sharper and more acidic coffee.

Extraction: the method of drawing out the coffee’s oils to bring you a nice flavored beverage.

Choosing the right coffee for your equipment

Believe it or not different coffee blends and roasts are suited better to different extraction styles. You may like to refer to my page on different brewing equipment as well to scrub up on the different types of equipment that are out there.

For a long extraction – in the case of a french press (plunger), percolator or drip filter you would look to select a single origin coffee or a medium roast coffee. You could therefore select a blended medium roast. The reason for this is that a long extraction (typically 3-4 minutes) means that there is a long time for the water to draw out the coffee oils and steep. If you leave a dark roast exposed to a long extraction like this you could draw out the bad tasting profiles within the coffee.

For a short extraction – in the case of espresso you would look to use either a dark roasted single origin coffee or a blended coffee. The reason for this is that the water and coffee are only in contact with each other for a short amount of time typically between 23-27 seconds, the process of extracting coffee in the espresso method is quickly and under a lot of pressure, this means that you will draw out the oils and flavors in the coffee quickly, therefore a more robust and fuller flavoured dark roast coffee is good in this situation. But be careful not to over-extract the coffee or you will have a burnt and sour tasting brew.

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