Green Coffee Beans At Heart Of Beverage's Flavor
For most coffee drinkers, green coffee beans are something they are not accustomed to seeing or considering when they are looking for a cup of their favorite brew. Yet, it is the quality of the green coffee beans that are at the heart of the drink's flavor. Although unusable at brewing coffee until roasted, the ripened beans can have a storage life of about a year, significantly longer than roasted beans and much longer than ground coffee.
With the price of some coffee it may be hard to believe it grows on trees, but the process of coffee production is labor intensive. Beans are usually picked by hand by selecting only the ripe cherries off the tree or by stripping all of the fruit at one time. The cherries have to be processed to produce the green coffee beans that are sold and shipped for further processing.
Methods of removing the outer hull and the inner parchment surrounding the beans can be a long process, and many smaller companies leave the beans lying in the sun to dry before washing off the inner materials. Once the green coffee beans have been cleaned and dried, they are bagged for shipment to coffee roasters. The price of the beans reflect not only their appearance and size, but also the plantations on which they were grown and the region in which they were produced.
Coffee Roasting Is Tedious Process
To prepare green coffee beans to make coffee, they have to be roasted and the amount of time they are exposed to the heat, determines the overall flavor of the coffee. When beans are lightly roasted they exhibit the flavor of the area in which they were grown. For example, the beans drown in Kona, Hawaii or in Java are usually lightly roasted and maintain the flavor of the soil in which they grew, which is often distinct.
As the green coffee beans are roasted longer, they turn color and often have a coating of oil on the outer part of the bean. Roasting removes most of the inherent flavoring of the growing region making it virtually impossible to determine where in the world dark roasted beans may have been grown.
The type of heat source will also affect the flavor of roasted green coffee beans and the temperature of the roasters can change the taste as well. Additionally, the quality of the beans will begin to deteriorate at the time of roasting and until vacuum packaging of roasted coffee was developed, most roasted beans were discarded if not used in about two weeks.
