S3: Episode 6: Taking The Stress Out Of Gifting Coffee
Buying a great coffee as a gift for a coffee loving friend or relative will score you brownie points and gold stars, but can be a stressful process if you are not into coffee yourself. In Part 2 of my festive gift guide, this week I give you key tips to ease the buying process and help you buy something they will (hopefully) love. This week’s FACQ tackles the issue of just when to buy that coffee so that they will experience it at its best.
Quick tip: know the answers to these questions before you hit the store:
Beans or ground?
What brewing method do they use?
What flavours (or country of origin) do they like?
Get in touch!
Please note that although I read all texts, I don’t have the facility to reply to them, but you can also get in touch via Instagram and email.
Email: thecoffeedrinkersguide@gmail.com
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Hello and welcome to The Coffee Drinker’s Guide, a podcast for the coffee curious where I explore and explain the world of specialty coffee to make your daily coffee better and more satisfying.
I’m Angela Holder a coffee roaster and writer on a mission to fight back against bad coffee by giving you the knowledge you need to help you get good coffee and a happier (coffee) life in coffee-break sized episodes. So grab your coffee, pull up a chair and take a break…
In part two of my festive gift guide, this week we are tackling buying coffee as a gift…and later I’ll be answering a question about when you should buy coffee so that it still tastes great on the day they open it so stay tuned for that…
In last week’s festive gift guide we covered coffee equipment and kit that would be most appreciated by coffee loving relatives and friends. This week it is the turn of the coffee itself. If you are struggling to find the perfect gift for the coffee lover who has everything, buying them some great beans will definitely earn you Brownie points and gold stars. But having worked on the bean counter of a roastery at Christmas time in London, I know first hand that buying the right coffee as a gift is not as simple as it first appears. It’s not difficult but it does require a little inside knowledge if you want to give them a coffee that they will love and use rather than one that gets consigned to the cupboard of lost gifts….
So firstly buying beans and the brew
When buying a bag of coffee for someone else it really does pay to undertake a little research before plunging into the bean buying process. I absolutely guarantee that you will need to know the answer to the following question: beans or ground? Hard on the heels of that one will be: what brewing method do they use, cafetiere, filter, espresso? Quickly followed by: what flavour do they like? If you don't at least know the answer to the first one, your quest is pretty much dead in the water. If you give whole beans to someone who is without a grinder, they may as well use them for pot pourri. The answer to the second question is just as important. For if you cunningly decide to skip the grinder issue altogether and simply give them ground coffee, you still need to know what grind size to choose. Give espresso ground coffee to a cafetiere user, and the cafetiere is likely to explode under the pressure required to depress the plunger; while cafetiere ground coffee made through an espresso machine will result in a thin and nasty brew. If you successfully negotiate the first two questions, you have the basis of a useful discussion with the retailer. Which leads us to the last question …
Next buying beans and the taste
Coffee can vary widely in flavour from light, bright fruity and funky to heavy, smooth, chocolatey and nutty. The flavour of a coffee can also be affected for better and worse by the way that coffee is brewed. Fast brewing methods like espresso emphasise the sharp, sour flavours of light roasted fruity coffees while slower brewing methods like cafetière can highlight the bitterness in darker roasts. Unless you know someone’s preferences selecting a coffee for them can be stressful, especially if you really want them to like it. So instead of buying a large bag of one coffee, consider buying smaller bags of three different coffees. The difference between the coffees can be by country of origin, the green bean processing method or roast level. Even if in the end they don’t like one of the coffees, there is value in comparing the flavours. Plus, you may just help them stumble onto their new favourite brew.
Finally buying beans and the bean
Last week I talked about not wasting your hard earned cash on novelty coffee-adjacent gifts. This week its the turn of novelty coffee itself. Now, I know what you're thinking: is that a coffee that comes with a little plastic gift? No. The way that you can spot a novelty coffee is that it costs a fortune for a very small amount and you can't try it before you buy it. It is tempting to equate price with quality and in the coffee industry it is true - up to a point. Better quality coffee does command a higher price due to the time, effort and skill involved in its production. But beyond the quantifiable factors of cost of production, shipping, roasting and the premium paid for better flavours as analysed by professional cuppers, there lie the murky waters of marketing which have little to do with actual quality. Two tell-tale signs of a novelty coffee are peculiar production methods employed for the sake of being amusing - such as any coffee that has passed through the digestive tract of an animal - and selection based solely on the shape of the coffee bean. Neither of these are de facto indicators of high quality coffee but they command premium prices. Ultimately, there is no substitute for tasting a coffee in order to understand if it is worth the price you are being asked to pay for it. In blind tasting sessions I've attended where some well known, heavily marketed and very expensive coffees have been on the table, no-one has ever selected one of them when asked to pick out the coffees that tasted the most expensive. Now there's some food for thought.
And now its time for a Frequently Asked Coffee Question…
And this episode’s question is…
When is the best time to buy coffee if you are giving it as a gift?
Coffee tastes best when it is freshly roasted. So try to buy the freshest coffee you can - or in other words as close to the day that it was roasted as possible. Freshly roasted coffee in whole bean form can be bought up to 2 weeks before the day you actually give it as a gift and it should still be great. But if the coffee needs to be ground, try to buy it as close as you possibly can to the day that you give it as it stales faster when ground. In the days when I worked on the bean counter at Christmas we used to tell people who wanted to buy ground coffee as a gift to come back in Christmas week if they were trying to buy the coffee in early December. It might sound odd that a retailer would push a sale away but we knew that the coffee would do the business no favours if it was stale when it was finally drunk!
Thank you for listening to this episode of The Coffee Drinker’s Guide and that was all about buying coffee as a gift. I hope these last two episodes have helped to make gift buying just a little bit easier this season. If you have had any coffee buying SNAFU’s you’d like to share get in touch on Instagram @thecoffeedrinkersguide, email me at thecoffeedrinkersguide@gmail.com or leave me a text message using the link in the show notes. In the next episode we’re taking a look at the influence of bean size on your brew which unlike the bean shape is an indicator of quality. If you haven’t already, don’t forget to hit follow so that you don’t miss it. Also it really helps the show if you’d tell your coffee loving friends about it and rate and review this podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts to help other coffee curious people find the show too. Thanks to my executive producer Viel Richardson at Lusona Publishing and Media Limited. You can find him at lusonapub.co.uk. Until next time I’m Angela Holder thanks for taking your coffee break with me - the best way to tackle life is one coffee at a time and here’s to better coffee!
The Coffee Drinker’s Guide is a Blue Sky Coffee Project