Learning About Specialty Coffee

Specialty Coffee?

  Coffee has been a part of my daily life since I was a teenager. I grew up sneaking cups of coffee from my mom's old percolator brewer that she made with ground beans in those huge coffee tubs made from tin back in the day. I might have just dated myself, but back then, I thought coffee was supposed to taste burnt and awful. After joining the military, the coffee only worsened, but I thought that was okay. I never had a great cup of coffee to begin with, so the instant non-branded coffee that came with the MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) was just fine. I would even pour a packet of it in my cheek for that ultimate jolt of caffeine during missions where we were often awake for multiple days. It was not until I tasted an African bean while downrange that changed everything! That bean woke me up to the fact that coffee is supposed to be enjoyable, that freshness matters and so many other things need to come together before you can have that life-changing cup of coffee. That cup of coffee I was drinking blew every bean I had ever bought out of the water; from the Starbucks beans to the organic beans I was getting. I thought because it was Starbucks, I was getting the best there was; after all, most people like Starbucks, right? Wrong. After several restless nights of being unable to sleep, I sat at a computer in the TOC (Tactical Operation Center) researching why I was so misguided about the beans I had been using. There are two things I learned:

1 Freshness Most store-bought coffee takes an average of six months from the time it is picked to the time it makes it to the shelves of your local store! That is a crazy amount of time for your beans to sit and go stale. It can be sold for up to a year on the shelf even though optimal time for flavor is two to three weeks from the day it is roasted! With specialty roasters like COV (Coffee Of Valhalla), your beans are roasted the day they ship to you and you get them within two to three days of roast, ensuring it's the best quality.

2 The Beans This is as important as the two to three weeks freshness rule. If you roast garbage, at the end of the day it's just hot garbage. A specialty coffee is required to have a cupping score of eighty or higher. I’ll write more on this later. The locations and care that the farms put into growing the coffee are incredibly important as well. I will also write a post about this later.

Your supermarket is commodity grade coffee, bought at low wholesale prices and batch roasted in massive quantities, lessening the ability to get that perfect roast on them. They are then blended together to get the consistent flavor across all batches and shipped out. I challenge you to make a cup of our specialty coffee and a cup of coffee from the supermarket and see what coffee you think is the best. I bet you will not be able to go back to that pre-ground garbage. You start your day with a cup of coffee… and if you start it with garbage coffee, how good is your day going to be?

If you want to try a variety of specialty coffee, get the sample pack here --> use code tenoff for a 10% discount or subscribe and save 15% off.