Is coffee supposed to be bitter?
If you pick up some Folgers, Maxwell House, or even Starbucks from the store, the coffee all tastes bitter. Granted, they all taste bitter at varying levels but they are all bitter nonetheless.
Most people dislike coffee because it’s bitter. I actually disliked it when I tried my Dad’s coffee growing up. At the time he was drinking Folgers from one of those big cans.
As I learned more about coffee, purchased different coffees, ground them myself and tried varying brew methods, I learned that coffee ISN’T supposed to be bitter. Or at least not the bitter we all think of when we think of coffee.
The coffee bitterness you’re probably used to is actually a flaw.
What’s the flaw?
The beans were over-roasted… sad :(
Over-roasted beans are oily and slick. You can grab any bag of Starbucks whole bean coffee, rip it open, grab a few beans and notice the oily/slick texture.
The reason over-roasted beans are oily is due to the oils contained within the bean (which contain the wonderful flavor) are extracted when the bean gets too hot and is over-roasted.
So instead of the oils remaining in the bean and extracting when you grind and brew, the oils are already released and the bean loses its flavor.
And now you have generic, bitter coffee.
Here’s an analogy — go buy a Coke or Pepsi, whichever you prefer, open it and leave the cap off the bottle for a week. Return to it and take a sip. It’s terribly flat, right? No one wants to drink that.
The same is true for coffee, except a lot of people still drink it (granted, people are used to it by now).
But just as the Coke or Pepsi loses its flavor and goes flat, so does a coffee bean when it is over-roasted. The flavor escapes and you can’t get it back.
How do you get coffee that isn’t nasty bitter?
Step 1: purchase coffee that isn’t over roasted. Now that’s hard to detect if you purchase coffee that is already ground.
I understand a majority of you don’t have a coffee grinder at home or a brewing method other than a traditional drip/pot or Keurig. But what you can do is find locally roasted and ground coffee — these coffees are typically NOT over-roasted because smaller batch roasters actually care about the roasting process.
Your alternative here is to purchase whole bean coffee at a store like Whole Foods where you can grind whole beans in the store. I recommend this method because you don’t know how long ground coffee has been on the shelf. At least when you grind the coffee in the store, you know when it was ground and it’s a bit more fresh.
What about step 2?
Well, that’s really all you need for now. Let’s not get too far into the weeds if you’re just starting out and want to drink less bitter coffee.
In the next posts and videos you’ll learn about brewing methods, grinding and grinders, and how to slowly equip your yourself for better results.
All right, now go get some NOT over-roasted coffee!
Cheers
