Are you buying the right Coffee Beans? (Beginner's Guide to Coffee)

Summary by Krater

An in-depth guide to buying and understanding coffee beans, explaining the coffee hierarchy of growing, harvesting, processing, and roasting, and why traditional light, medium, and dark roast labels are unhelpful.

From the video

Answers: How do I choose and buy coffee beans when roast labels like light, medium, and dark are unreliable?

• coffee bean roasting fundamentals
• coffee pricing and green coffee cost
• coffee processing methods
• coffee bean varieties
• coffee tasting and cupping

What it concludes

• Coffee buyers should stop purchasing coffee based solely on light, medium, and dark roast labels due to lack of standardization and vast differences in green bean varieties.
• The roasting process has a constant production cost, meaning the final retail price is primarily driven by the cost, quality, and volume of the green coffee used.
• Specialty roasters pay higher prices for green coffee because they source lower volumes of higher-quality beans from specific origins.
• Green coffee loses 15% to 18% of its weight during the roasting process, requiring about 1.3 pounds of green coffee to produce 1 pound of roasted coffee.
• Single-origin coffees and relationship or direct trade models provide significantly higher price transparency compared to mass-market and commodity coffees.