Seed to Cup
Seed to Cup - Brew Methods
We are of the general opinion that you should do you when it comes to coffee, and brewing is a perfect place to display your preference. Drip, pour-over, French press, espresso, Aeropress, and steeped (yes, steeped coffee)—you should use whatever works for you and leads to the best-tasting cup for you.
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Seed to Cup - Grinding
In our last installment of Seed to Cup, we discussed coffee freshness and how to store beans to slow the staling process. That’s the perfect lead-in to discussing grinding coffee beans, because grinding is one of the biggest accelerants of staling. Remember that light and oxygen negatively affect roasted beans, and grinding exposes more surface area to those elements.
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Seed to Cup - Keep it Fresh
No matter how a coffee is processed or roasted and regardless of whether it is single origin or a blend, once it is roasted, all coffee is extremely perishable. Beans reach their peak flavor only about two to three days after roasting. That peak is steep; beans start to degrade in quality almost immediately after.
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SEED TO CUP- BLENDS VS SINGLE ORIGIN COFFEES
After the roasting process, a Roaster will decide if a coffee will shine best on its own or work better as an accompaniment in a blend.
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Seed to Cup - Roasting establishes flavor.
Think about roasting marshmallows. Some people like to just heat the marshmallow up ever so slightly, lightly browning the outside and warming the inside. A lightly roasted marshmallow still has a lot of the same sugar sweetness and flavors it had before roasting. Medium roasting the marshmallow will move away from that straight sugary sweetness and yield more of that toasted caramelized flavor. And then there is the dark roasted marshmallow, where some sweetness may exist, but the flavor you are really after is that smoky char. Everyone has a marshmallow roast preference, and most people have a coffee roast preference too.
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Seed to Cup - Coffee is a Fruit!
Coffee is a fruit!
The coffee bean that you grind and brew at home is actually the seed of a cherry - cherries that all ripen at different times on the tree and need to carefully be picked by hand in several different passes in a season.
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