The taste of coffee beans does not vary according to size.

Raw beans before selection

I agree that apples don't taste different because of their size, but when it comes to roasting coffee beans, "it's all heated anyway, and it doesn't matter if the coffee beans are different in size." I can't agree. Coffee beans harvested from the same tree, regardless of particle size, mature or immature, will produce uneven baked products if they are all baked in the same pot.

When thick beans are baked with thin beans, the heat permeability of beans with thick beans is poor, and the center (the part of the bean that has not been removed) will be in a "cored" state that cannot be baked. When cooking spaghetti, it will be "cored" in order to have a moderate taste; but the "cored" state is only allowed to exist in the world of spaghetti, and the world of coffee does not work.

The appearance of the "cored" coffee can not be seen, only the beautiful surface of baked beans can be seen, but it is clear when cut open. The beans are divided into baked and unbaked parts. The coffee liquid extracted from the cored coffee will have a strong smell of choking throat.

To get back to the point, when choosing raw coffee beans, beans with uniform shape, thickness, size, color, central line and so on are all the best. In short, average beans are good beans. Unfortunately, such beans are extremely rare.

People often ask me, "what tastes better, big granulated beans or small granulated beans?"

I replied, "Coffee beans with large grains are highly valued in the place of production according to their size." It is also said that the French taste of the sieve size (coffee bean size) has nothing to do with it. Now the Nordic countries, which are advanced coffee countries, purchase the most advanced coffee beans in Brazil and other places, mainly buying small pellet beans with a sieve size of 13-16. They avoid buying high-priced large granulated beans and buy cheap small ones instead, perhaps because they value quality over reputation.

But strictly speaking, large granulated coffee beans have a better flavor. In fact, the beans collected from the same coffee tree are baked and extracted, and the taste can be obviously compared after the cup test. Beans with large grains and smooth growth taste better.

When it comes to large-grained coffee beans, there are often high-quality beans like Marago Gippe (large granulated beans above sieve 19, also known as beans), which are twice as large as ordinary beans, which can cause uneven baking. therefore, it is recommended to pick out by hand in advance: but this is not to pick out defective beans, but to gather large grains of beans together and bake them separately.

When it comes to baking, rather than paying attention to the relationship between bean size and taste, the consistency of bean size is more important. Beans of different sizes should be separated from each other and should not be mixed and baked. Otherwise, it will inevitably lead to uneven baking results.

There is less water on the left and bluer on the right, which means more water.

Similarly, it is better to have the same color of beans. The colors of raw beans are cyan, brown and other colors, and the color of beans represents water content, so it is easier to bake beans with the same color. Generally speaking, cyan and green indicate more moisture, while brown almost white represents less moisture.

The beans on the left are thin and the beans on the right are thick.

Then there is the shape of the beans, and the meat should be thick. Even if the grains of beans are large, those with thin meat tend to taste thin. The flavor is rich and deep, generally speaking, only the fleshy coffee beans produced in the highlands. Kenya, Colombia, Tanzania and other Elaraby plus washable coffee beans are classified as "Colombian fresh and bright coffee" by the New York market; the meat is thick and the moisture content is high, so it is not easy to heat transfer in the center when roasting, but through excessive baking, it can lead to rich and varied flavor.

The last thing to mention is the central line (the longitudinal rill in the center of the coffee bean). Beans with a clear and clear central line are of high quality. In addition, the silver skin covered on its surface is literally silver. Most of the tea-brown ones with silver skin are defective, except for the well-managed natural drying beans.

What is hand-selected?

Hand selection: is the step of removing impurities and bad beans attached to delicious coffee beans. Coffee beans are often mixed with foreign bodies, such as stones, sawdust, pieces of metal, grains of soil, fruit of trees, and sometimes coins and glass.

In coffee production areas, specific gravity bean selector (using wind power to classify according to particle size and weight) or electronic bean selector (removing defective beans according to color) will be used to prevent impurities and defective beans from mixing, but it is only natural that they cannot be prevented. It still has to be chosen by human hands.

In particular, unripe beans are difficult to remove by machine and must be removed by hand. And these unripe beans will have a very bad effect on the taste of coffee. Defective beans in addition to unripe beans, there are dead beans, worm-eaten beans, black beans, moldy beans, shell beans, fermented beans, broken beans, shell beans, cocoa and so on.

Hand selection is carried out once in the raw bean stage, and again after baking, which means once before and after baking. The proportion of defective beans is surprisingly high, good coffee beans generally contain about 20%, and mocha with low precision system is more than 40%. That is to say, only about 60 to 70% of the coffee beans can be used after roasting. In other words, there will be 30 to 40 grams of failed beans in 100 grams of raw beans, which is quite wasteful. To reduce the roasting failure rate, you must buy high-precision and high-quality coffee beans as much as possible; if you are still afraid of roasting failure, the steps to remove defective beans should not be lazy. Defective beans are fatal to the taste of coffee.

When the ripe and red coffee fruit is picked by hand, the mixing rate of defective beans should be much lower, but in fact, it will be picked along with the cyan immature fruit during the harvest, and sometimes, even the branches will be broken off in pursuit of harvest efficiency. The water-washed coffee because the refining process must be washed many times, so it is more difficult to mix with stones, glass sheets and other impurities, but if the non-washing natural drying coffee, the degree of impurity mixing is quite high.

When roasting coffee mixed with too many defective beans, the finished coffee will be mottled in color. Compared with normal beans, defective beans oxidize very quickly and appear white after baking. Cheap coffee beans are often sold in stores such as supermarkets or coffee shops, and when you open those packages, you can find that there are quite a lot of unevenly roasted beans, all as a result of omitting the manual steps of direct baking.

The quickest way to understand the importance of hand-selected steps is to bake coffee liquid extracted with defective beans. After drinking it, you will find that your tongue will remain paralyzed for hours. It can be proved that hand selection is an indispensable and important step in making delicious coffee. I think it is a pity that people often regard hand selection as monotonous, boring and meaningless behavior. But I hope you understand that the taste damage caused by defective beans cannot be hidden no matter how clever the baking technique is. In order for the baking to proceed smoothly, it is important to select the steps by hand in advance.

Next, I would like to introduce several kinds of defective beans.

Moldy bean

Moldy beans: because of incomplete drying, or damp in the process of transportation and storage, cyan and white molds grow, which sometimes make the beans stick together. If these moldy beans are not removed, they will produce moldy smell.

Dead bean

Dead beans: beans with abnormal results. The color is not easy to change because of baking, so it is easy to distinguish. The flavor is thin, as harmful as silver skin, and will become a source of peculiar smell.

Immature bean

Immature beans: beans picked before they are ripe have a fishy, disgusting taste. Leaving raw coffee beans for years is a strategy to deal with these immature beans.

Shell bean

Shell beans: produced by poor dryness or abnormal mating; the beans break from the central line and the inside is turned out like a shell. Shell beans can cause uneven baking and are easy to catch fire during deep baking.

Moth-eaten bean

Moth-eaten beans: moths invade and lay eggs when the coffee fruit is ripe and red, and the larvae eat the coffee fruit and grow, leaving traces of moth on the surface of the beans. Worm-eaten beans can cause the coffee liquid to be cloudy and sometimes produce a strange smell.

Black bean

Black beans: beans that mature early and fall to the ground and ferment and blacken when they come into contact with the ground for a long time. It can be easily removed by hand-selected steps. Coffee mixed with black beans will smell rotten and cloudy.

Dried beans (cocoa)

Cocoa: it is caused by natural drying that the pulp remains and the pulp is not fully shelled. With iodine flavor, soil flavor and other flavor, it will give off a bad smell.

Shelled bean

Shell beans: endocarp covers the inside of the pulp of coffee beans and remains on the washed coffee beans. The poor heat permeability when roasting and sometimes burning is the reason for the astringent taste of coffee.

Others include broken beans, red peel beans (beans that rain naturally and taste dull), stunted beans (small grains of beans that stop growing due to lack of nutrients, strong flavor), and sometimes mixed with corn or pepper, and so on.

Stone

Stone: beans harvested are easily mixed with stone or sawdust because of natural drying.

Hand selection order:

1. Take the right amount of raw beans and put them in a tray

two。 Select raw beans until they are flawless.

3. Don't just stare at one side of the bean, but pick it up and see its color and shape. Don't miss any one, move your eyes from the right to the left.

4. Repeat the same steps over and over again

5. It is known that the average of picking out defective beans.