This week... coffee beans

Wake up, and – well, you know the rest. Xanthe Clay seeks out the best beans in the shops right now

What a difference a couple of decades make. In the 90s I worked in a pub where the landlady thought nothing of filling up the bulbous glass coffee pot with instant, before sticking it back on the filter machine. No one commented.

These days it’s all about beans, ground beans and pods. Espresso, and its kinfolk cappuccino, macchiato, cortado, caffè latte and flat white, are the mainstream. Coffee nerds have had to move to higher ground to demonstrate their superiority: Chemex, pour-over and siphon are the new buzzwords.

But regardless of how you make yours, beans count. Supermarkets stock shelves of varieties, promising flavours from cherry to chocolate, earthy to floral, and at price points from a couple of quid for a 227g bag to the equivalent of over four times that. The cost of a cup of black coffee ranges from an everyday 12p, to a far more spendy 50p. Is it worth shelling out for the top end? I gathered samples from the big retailers to find out.

Tasting coffee is a specialist business, involving lengthy training, so I enlisted the help of Alex Zeal of top-end Extract Coffee Roasters. Zeal is an experienced coffee judge, and Extract doesn’t sell into the supermarkets, so there’s no conflict of interest.

In fact, supermarket coffee is usually a lower grade than that sold by specialist importers. The best coffee is singled out as “speciality” and is awarded a grade above 80 out of 100 in tastings by the Speciality Coffee Association. Most supermarket coffee has not reached this bar, although in the last couple of years a few speciality roasters like Union have started to sell through supermarkets.

The full definition of speciality coffee is hard to pin down, and harder to quantify, but the SCA says it promotes ethical practices, high levels of expertise and fair prices along the coffee chain from grower through to buyer, roaster to coffee shop. In terms of drinking, it’s likely to be complex flavoured, and have a high acidity that’s much prized by coffee-heads.

Zeal arrived on my doorstep with a huge coffee grinder, as well as glasses for brewing up and what looked like child-size soup spoons to slurp the coffee from. This was clearly going to be a proper coffee tasting, or “cupping” as it’s known in the trade.

With dozens of varieties available, we decided to stick to whole coffee beans for this tasting; the flavour is improved by grinding fresh (pre-ground coffee loses its aroma and stales very fast). 10.5g was weighed out from each of the 25 coffees (plus a double of one, to keep us on our toes) and labelled from A-Z. No cheating, no peeking: we had no idea what brand we were tasting.

Before grinding, Zeal sniffed and shook the different beans. “This one is badly graded – look at all the different sizes. And this one, ebony dark and shiny – when you roast very dark the oils escape.” Roasting very dark is a good way to mask faults and inconsistencies, he explained, but it also ruins any complexity or delicate flavour nuances. “This one has damaged, broken beans, and there’s a lot of tipping – it’s like when you rip a piece of bread and toast it, the edges burn. Same with beans, and it gives a kind of ashy flavour.” It wasn’t all bad though. Zeal picked out a pale teak-coloured batch, with a matte finish. “These are good, and a uniform size too.”

Zeal ground each coffee in his sleek grinder and tipped them into glasses, then topped up with just-off-boiling water. 15ml of water to each gram of coffee is the optimum for tasting, apparently. They were left for four minutes, by which time the grounds had risen to form a thick crust on the top of the coffee. Next came “knocking” through the crust, essentially sticking in a spoon so that the grounds sank slowly to the bottom of the glass, leaving the coffee clear.

Time to taste. We armed ourselves with diminutive soup spoons and slurped up the coffee. At least Zeal did, making an impressive noise as he sucked in air as well as liquid, ensuring the aromas from the coffee flowed up the back of his throat to the nasal cavity, so he could get the most flavour from the coffee.

And wow, were there a lot of flavours. Take acid – turns out that it isn’t just sour, but malic (apple-y) sour, citric sour, tartaric (wine sour) and acetic (vinegar) sour. We descended down a rabbit hole of descriptors: some good, like cherry, caramel, savoury; some less so – rubbery, tannic, medicinal, burnt. Vegetal isn’t generally a good thing but we agreed that a scent of sage can be appealing.

The best ones earned an approving nod from Zeal. There’s great coffee out there on the aisles. But those oily black beans? Starbucks, I’m looking at you.

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