Coffee 101: Quality
To this point in our Coffee 101 series, we’ve encouraged you to brew coffee in your home kitchen because we know from long experience that anyone — using a few golden rules — can learn to consistently brew better tasting coffee in their kitchen than they can purchase anywhere else..
In our descriptions of the process, we’ve used the phrase “Golden Rules” of brewing to describe the essential steps to guarantee coffee that always tastes good, or “golden.”
Our rules are similar to those published by the Specialty Coffee Assn. of America (SCAA). You can read more about the SCAA “Gold Cup” standards at their web site: www.scaa.org.
Our first four posts describe the basics of water quality, water temperature, grind consistency, and — paired with those three essentials - the length of your brewing process, by which you can ensure proper extraction in order to avoid the taste setbacks of under and over-extraction.
In future posts we’ll describe several brewing methods you can use — which will include our reviews of different coffee brewing machines — a process that should help you determine the best brewer/brewing method for your taste preferences. But first, let’s complete the process with a description of the most important step: the coffee itself.
At Hunter Bay we know from our 18 years of roasting coffee that no matter how carefully you brew your coffee, you still need a source product of high quality.
QUALITY COFFEE — No matter how accomplished you are as a home brewer, your most important step is to start with coffee that meets several standards of quality. Otherwise, your most consistent brewing efforts will result in coffee that — even if you brew it correctly — will fall short of your expectations.
Your quest to find the highest quality coffee should be an adventure. That’s because there are hundreds of coffees available from around the world… all of which have unique flavor. Your adventure will be your search to find the coffee or coffees that taste best to you.
Keep in mind that you might not certain coffees that other people love. In many ways, coffee is much like quality wine or beer… your taste preference should be your first step toward determining coffee quality.
Myths regarding quality coffee have always been abundant. So has false factual information. We’ve often found it difficult to describe quality coffee without debunking some false information and most of the myths. But we’ll save that for a future post and opt to describe as briefly as possible how you can consistently obtain coffee produced, blended and roasted to the highest culinary standards.
YOUR COFFEE ROASTER: Since you’re reading this “Coffee 101” series at HunterBay.com, we realize you recognize the most important step to ensure quality coffee — that is to obtain your coffee from a reputable roaster whose standards are widely known and who you’ve grown to trust. It is a responsibility we take seriously. Daily.
YOUR SOURCE COFFEE: Coffee - like grapes for wine and barley for beer and ale - will be only as good as the source product. That’s our job. We work only with farmers, producers and importers that consistently supply us the absolute highest quality product. We only purchase source coffee that has passed our own rigorous taste tests.
QUALITY ORIGIN COFFEES: Hunter Bay roasts a select offering of the highest quality origin coffees. You can be assured that any Hunter Bay Country of Origin coffee is — verified by our rigorous taste tests — the best coffee available from that country.
HUNTER BAY SIGNATURE BLENDS: We take deep pride in offering signature Hunter Bay blends which we have developed for the past 18 years using time-honored principles of coffee craft blending. Hunter Bay has developed a reputation as offering the most flavorful, perfectly balanced coffee blends available.
ROASTING by TRADITION: Hunter Bay observes time-honored traditions of small batch, slow-roast practices in a state-of-art coffee roaster custom-built for Hunter Bay by one of the world’s oldest and most famous Italian coffee roaster manufacturers.
HUNTER BAY PACKAGING: Hunter Bay roasts coffee and immediately packages it in quality one-way valve packages that protect and extend the our coffee’s fragile flavor and aromatic qualities.
OUR PRODUCT, OUR REPUTATION: Hunter Bay stands by every package of coffee it sells. If you have any questions regarding Hunter Bay Coffee, please send us an email or call. We always answer our mail. We always answer the phone.
