This week, I’ll roast over the weekend and deliver and ship on Monday the 18th. Please send your orders by Saturday night to be sure of getting your favorites. Coffees for this week are shown on the website (www.freeportcoffee.com). We also have a few bags here if you need something before then.
Shown below is a very cool café menu my friend Bob just sent from his trip to Japan. There are no more fanatical coffee drinkers in the world than in Japan, and if you look closely at the small English printing on the menu, you’ll see some pretty awesome origins among their offerings. Thanks, Bob for sharing!
BTW, if you see any cool stuff like this when you travel and want to send it to us, I’ll be sure your contribution is given a place of honor on the wall of roastery. And speaking of the roastery, let Tanji or I know if you’d like a tour sometime – this is a fun thing to see if you’ve never had a look at how coffee is roasted.
Last week, I asked you all to send your “ask the roaster questions”, and I’ve picked one of these to write on this time. The question comes from James in Portland.
“Why don’t you roast flavored coffee?”
I thought I’d use this occasion to unravel the mysteries of flavored coffee, and its less evil twin, coffee with flavor in it.
First, let me correct the unintended misnomer in the way the question was asked. No one actually roasts flavored coffee, or adds flavor during the roasting process. For what we know as “flavored coffee”, the flavors are added after roasting (and usually after cooling) the beans.
So the better way to ask this is, “Kent, why don’t you flavor your roasted coffee?”
Snarl.
Never, never, never, never in a million years will I flavor the divine beverage that is good coffee. The coffees of the world on their own right present a spectrum of flavors ranging from wine to citrus fruit to lush ripe berries to every variety of chocolate to nuts to broth to flowers and on and on . . .
But I also think that, for those who want or need to add flavors other than milk and sugar to their coffee, “flavoring” the beans is the wrong way to go about it. I’ll tell you a better way at the end of this newsletter.
To illustrate, imagine the tastes of the following . . .
The romantic’s favorite, the chocolate-dipped strawberry.
From your youth (or shhhhh, even now), the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
The complex wonder of chicken molé.
Those who “flavor” coffee might prefer a different arrangement. Chocolate flavored strawberries. Jelly flavored peanut butter. Molé flavored chickens!
I wouldn’t be surprised, as flavored coffee producers have no shame. In a quick Google search for this article, I found a site (http://www.coffeeam.com/flavoredcoffee.html) with an astonishing 123 DIFFERENT flavors of coffee, to include everyone’s favorites, Auld Lang Syne (which translates as “old long since”, by the way), Caramel Pecan Roll, Country Christmas (perhaps including Stuffing flavor?), Daffy Taffy, Jack Frost, King Cake, Kozy Fire (watch for splinters!), Mistletoe Joe (Wikipedia: “the common name for a group of hemi-parasitic plants in the order Santalales that grow attached to and within the branches of a tree or shrub”) and Cupid’s Kiss.
So, how is coffee “flavored”?
Most “flavored” coffee you will encounter uses a base of flavoring oils that have been compounded by professional flavor chemists using both natural and artificial ingredients (watch for my favorite, 2,5-Dimethylpyrazine, which lends a nutlike flavor . . . artificially, of course).
As one website I researched stated: “Marketers have found that consumers prefer coffee flavors with sweet creamy notes. The ideal flavor should mask some of the harsh notes of the coffee yet not interfere with its aromatic characteristics.”
(This appears to be code for “we are trying to hide the flavor of the coffee.”)
These oils are highly concentrated, and to get them to the strength needed for blending with the coffee beans, they are mixed with solvents that include water, alcohol, propylene glycol, and fractionated vegetable oils.
You can therefore settle down to your morning New York Times with a cup of Peanut Surprise coffee that includes both the delicious 2,5-Dimethylpyrazine AND traces of propylene glycol (aka the active ingredient in antifreeze).
Once diluted, this tasty stew is blended with the roasted coffee in an isolated room (lest the concentrated nastiness pollute the smell of the real coffee in the other room) using a large rotating drum that looks like a big plastic cement mixer.
Oh. And because, as we learned above, these flavors are scientifically designed to hide some of the flavors of the coffee, any and all coffee can be used as the base for a “flavored” coffee. This includes old coffee, low-grade coffee, extra coffee, etc. Don’t look for Panama Hacienda Esmerelda in your next cup of Cupid’s Kiss.
But as you might imagine, these flavoring oils, solvents and fancy mixers are beyond the reach of smaller roasters, so there is another tool at their disposal.
Kettle drums rumble . . .
POWERBEAN!
I agree, it sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon character . . . an animated pinto bean with a big “P” on his chest who fights crime and rescues damsels and so forth. But no, the POWERBEAN is a hyperconcentrated (again, not such high quality) coffee bean that has been soooooooooooooopersaturated with FLAVOR! The roaster keeps a supply of these in his or her quiver, then combines them in a ratio of 1:8 with regular coffee, stirs gently, then grinds the resulting blend and sends it off to the customer.
Intrigued? Read more here.
Some among you who enjoy flavored coffee may be getting the sense that I am picking on you. I’m not – I am more explaining why I will don’t want to get involved with the conventional ways of adding flavor to coffee.
If you DO like to add flavor to your coffee, I’d recommend instead you use flavor syrups or sauces such as those made by Monin, Torani or DaVinci. You see these a lot in cafes, and they are often used to flavor Café Mocha, seasonal milk drinks and the many summer variations of iced or blended coffee drinks. Some flavors are also available in the supermarket, and you can order them online from Amazon or other sources. Offerings include many flavors, organics and sugar-free variations.
With these syrups and sauces, you get much more pure flavors (in “flavored” coffees, the effect is more of an aromatic than a taste), and you get to pick the coffee! You can add your flavors to light roasted, dark roasted or decaf coffees, and if you want to name a flavor combination after a sports hero, lover or niche holiday, its all up to you.
But, please somewhere along the way give the coffee a chance all by itself, with no flavoring, no milk and no sugar. You may be pleasantly surprised.
Thanks for all your support, folks – enjoy the weekend!
Kent
