'Only freshly-roasted bean coffee, ground to order, gives you all the superb flavor of premium-quality coffee' (A&P advert)
I remember the days when I was a kid growing up in the 1980s, my dad would regularly buy Eight O'Clock Coffee at A&P. Before this had become his habit, I always assumed coffee only came as grounds. (After all, I was only about ten-years-old back then.) He insisted their whole bean coffee was always the best. Back then, although I didn't drink coffee, he taught me to make it for him; and it was hard to deny that the coffee which was sold whole bean always smelled better -- especially as he was putting it through those big, mammoth-sized coffee grinders at the front of the store. Naturally, I assumed that it tasted as good as it smelled. And why wouldn't it? After all, all of coffee's more complex flavors are contained in the carbon dioxide (CO2) which is trapped inside the beans; and as we all know, CO2 is a gas. As Ted R. Lingle, one of the founding co-chairmen of what we now know as the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), put it in The Coffee Cupper's Handbook: 'If something does not become a gas, we cannot smell it.' As we learned in our grade school health classes, we taste with our tongues. Again, this is very intuitive. What we tend to overlook, however, is that our perception of complex flavors -- fragrances and aromas -- comes to us primarily via our noses. It only stands to reason, then, that once coffee beans have been smashed, broken, and pulverized into grounds, they begin to lose their CO2. At this point, they being quickly to lose their flavors -- fast. According to the SCA's protocols for cupping coffee: 'Sample should be ground immediately prior to cupping, no more than 15 minutes before infusion with water. If this is not possible, samples should be covered and infused not more than 30 minutes after grinding.' That's how quickly coffee loses flavor once it's been ground: Only thirty minutes -- if covered. Consider then, knowing this, that the coffee we buy in supermarkets has commonly been on shelves for weeks, months, and sometimes even a year! And we should also note that this loss in quality is not merely perceivable to those with highly-tuned palates, either. Nor is it a newly created fiction which stereotypical millennial coffee snobs promote to impress their friends. As I noted above, even back in the days of what we commonly call 'first wave coffee,' supermarkets promoted the superior quality of whole bean coffee; and this superiority was perceivable to people like my father, a Vietnam veteran who had been in the a sergeant in the U.S. Army for twenty years -- a member of what we now call the 'Silent Generation.' I'd say that's pretty far from a being millennial. No, he didn't prefer whole bean coffee because he was pretentious snob. He preferred it because he was a human being who could easily taste the difference between good coffee and not-so-good coffee. Of course he would choose good coffee every time. It's not snobbery. It's common sense. I grant that Eight O'Clock Coffee is quite far from being specialty grade coffee, but coming in its whole bean form, it's still noticeably better than the same grade of quality one would purchase pre-ground. Further, if one is going to spend the additional cost to get specialty-grade quality, why would we want to immediately diminish that quality by buying it pre-ground? Over the years, specialty coffee has grown in popularity to the point where not only can we buy our coffee whole bean, but we don't even have to grind it in stores. It's relatively easy to invest a little money into purchasing our own coffee grinders to use at home. It should be noted that I'm not talking about those little whirly-blade spice mills some companies try to pass off as coffee grinders, but actual coffee grinders with burrs! A good manual hand-grinder costs normally around $40 to $50. If, however, you'd like a nice entry-level electric grinder, I recommend the Baratza Encore ($139). If you think you love coffee now, just wait until you spoil yourself with delicious freshly-ground coffee! I'm certain you won't regret it.
Dutch Hedrick is the founder and head roaster of Rube's Good-Brain Coffee. He has roasted coffee since 2003 and has previously roasted for Counter Culture Coffee and Joe Van Gogh. He began his career in specialty coffee in 1993.
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