Should Your Coffee Taste the Same Year After Year?

We all like consistency. A diet Dr. Pepper should taste exactly the same every time you drink it. But unlike the consistent taste of a soft drink or a Chick-fil-a sandwich, neither single-origin coffee nor vintage wine taste the same year after year.

As agricultural products, wine and coffee appearance, crop yield and flavor profiles change with each crop. Environmental factors such as rainfall and sunshine, and the length of the growing season change year to year, sometimes dramatically. 

BeechCreek Coffee Roasters offers several blends and we are committed to keeping their taste profiles consistent year after year.There are several ways to get blends to taste the same year after year. A breakfast blend or a great espresso, for example, may be a blend of three, four or even five beans. Well planned blends stay within their flavor profiles by simply changing the component ratios as a new crops of beans replace the prior beans.

Single-origin coffee should be approached quite differently from blends. We see each coffee as a jewel in the rough. Our job is to bring out the hidden diamond. We profile-roast every new coffee to somewhere between six and ten different roast levels. Each roast is carefully evaluated to determine which roasts best highlight a coffee's flavors. After that initial profiling of the coffee, its roast levels are further honed to produce the best cup possible.   

"High end" coffee offered in grocery stores and the mega national chains shoot for identical flavor profiles in all of their coffees year after year. They do that so that no matter where you buy their coffee it will always taste the same. And they roast so much coffee it is almost impossible to o that. The easy ways to get any coffee, blend or single-origin, to taste the same year after year is to over roast them. The darker you roast the more all coffee tastes the same. That's the easy way to produce consistent flavor. But the result is a product line of over-roasted and often burnt tasting coffee. That's like taking every diamond-in-the-rough and turning them into identical size and quality gems. Now that is sad! 

Single origin coffees' flavor profiles certainly vary each year - maybe a little, maybe a lot. A roaster's job is to highlight the flavor nuances inherent in a coffee seed, not to hide or diminish them.

I hope you increasingly appreciate the luxuriant flavors found in coffees, especially single origin coffees.