If you’re planning on roasting raw coffee beans at home, you’ll need to think carefully about your preferences. Use these simple guidelines as a general rule of thumb:

• If you prefer milder coffee, purchase Central American green coffee beans.
• For the most fantastic espresso, set your sights on the best organic coffee from Brazil.
• Kenyan coffees are notable for their brightness and pronounced acidity.
• Roast your own Ethiopian green coffee beans at home for a fruity flavor with chocolaty undertones.

Of course, much of the fun lies in experimentation…don’t limit yourself to just one type of coffee for home roasting.

The jury is still out on this one, but there’s evidence to suggest it could indeed be the case. Scientific studies have confirmed various therapeutic benefits associated with regular coffee consumption. With unroasted coffee beans, you’re simply looking at the raw product that hasn’t yet been excessively processed. Hence, if roasted coffee beans are good for you, it stands to reason that green coffee beans could be even better for you.

Part of the fun of roasting your own coffee beans is experimenting with green coffee concoctions at home. Some of which can be downright delicious.

It’s generally recommended that green coffee beans are used or roasted no later than six months after being purchased. Of course, it all depends on how long they’ve been sitting around in the store before you bought them. Some store-bought green coffees may only have a shelf life of around three months at the most.

The fresher the green coffee beans, the longer they last. In fact, some independent coffee producers claim that their raw coffee beans are good for up to a year after being purchased.

For the most part, it’s a case of following the same basic rules as those that apply to roasted coffee beans. Keep your green coffee beans in a cool and dry place at room temperature, in a hermetic recipient, and protected from direct sunlight.

Under no circumstances should raw coffee beans be stored in the refrigerator or freezer, due to the elevated humidity levels.

Contrary to popular belief, the finest raw coffee beans on the market are not necessarily very expensive. In fact, they can actually be cheaper to buy than their roasted counterparts. Something that makes sense when you think about it, given the reduced effort required on the part of the supplier and the fact that raw coffee beans lose about 15% of their original weight after being roasted.

Even if it turns out not to be your thing, experimenting with green coffee beans isn’t something that’s going to cost you much money. Plus, you really can’t call yourself a committed coffee connoisseur until you’ve given home roasting a try!

For beginning home roasters, I think it is best to start with a Green Coffee Sampler which gives you a range of origins and processing methods so you can start to hone in on what you like. While the type of roast you use will greatly influence the flavor (all coffees come with roast recommendations on the label), the origin flavor sets the parameters for the flavors in the cup.

Coffees produced around the world can have an incredible variety of flavors; there are, however, some general characteristics of different regions. These may be due to climate, soil, altitude, or the processing method (turning coffee fruit from the tree into green beans for export).

It’s really a combination of factors, not a single one. In marketing information, roasters and suppliers like to play up the Variety / Cultivar of the coffee plant. But coffee isn’t like wine, and (with a few exceptions) variety isn’t producing a huge difference in taste as it would with wine. Terroir, soil, and climate matter, but again it’s a wine term that does not apply precisely. If I had to pick the factors not emphasized enough in the way people talk about coffee, I would say human labor, the huge effort to select ripe fruit and sort it, and the processing method used to convert fruit to green beans, are the two most significant.

For me, Central American coffees have a classic, clean, crisp taste with a balance of brightness, the body associated and Aftertaste They are crowd-pleasing coffees, the kind you want to drink again and again. For us, our Guatemalas are the best Centrals, but it would be a shame not to search for those great flavors in Honduras El Salvador Costa Rican Nicaraguan and others. When Centrals are out of season, you need to try Burundi  and Rwanda! These are incredible coffees in the same vein as Guatemala… but better!

This can depend a bit; for a lot of body and low brightness (acidity), you might like Brazilian coffee, or Indonesians like Sumatra But we find that some of the best coffees that roast dark happen to be the best at any level, coffees with brightness that lingers through into the darker levels, and help keep a darker roast from tasting flat and ashy
Dense, High Grown coffee is always better at any roast level. In fact some, like Kenyas, that can be Sour in light roasts turn to Blackberry / black currant notes at darker levels. Fantastic!

Roughly speaking there are 2 kinds of “fruited coffees.”
There’s a clean fresh type of fruit in coffee found in the best wet-processed coffees from high altitudes. Ethiopia coffees from Sidama, Yirga Cheffe, Shakiso or Agaro are great for this type of fruit. It’s also what makes kenya from Nyeri, Kirinyaga, or parts of Kiambu and Muranga so wonderful.
But for more intense Rustic fruit, flavors like dried mango and apricot, look for dry-processed coffees (also called “naturals” as they are simply dried in the fruit skin right off the tree). Again, it’s Ethiopia that has some of the most intensely fruited dry-process lots. But we now offer this type of coffee from many other regions around the world, and each is different.

Our coffee buyer travels to different coffee farms and mills around the world looking for good quality coffee, and checking our suppliers. In many cases we have direct contact with the farm or coop that produced the coffee, usually buying small lots ranging from 15 to 50 bags from one supplier. Other coffees we source from our exporter / importer network, but this represents a smaller amount of our purchasing volume.

As mentioned above, we have a drop-down menu at the top of listings on the Green Coffee Offerings that allows you to view only those coffees that are organic, farmgate, recommended for espresso, wet or dry processed. In many regions, specialty coffee comes from smaller traditional farms and farmers are unwilling or unable to pay for organic certification. Specialty coffee in general does not see the wholesale use of herbicides that are seen in other crops. The largest-scale producers tend to use more inputs on their crops because … guess what … they can afford them! Small-scale producers often can’t and look for alternatives. Lucky for us, we focus our buying on small-holder farmers and coops, not big agribusiness coffee operations.

(Tom addresses this question in the video linked above but here are some additional notes.) This happens all the time – mostly because we are dealing with small, specific lots of coffee. We carry not just coffee from a specific farm, but very often a specific cultivaror picking or processing method. These are very limited lots of coffee, sometimes just a few bags, and often very unique, so we can sell out within a couple of months or faster.
When this happens, in most cases you want to look for a coffee from the same region or a nearby region. Then consider the processing method – this will greatly impact the flavor. A dry processed Ethiopian coffee will taste more like a dry processed Yemeni coffee, for example.

The flavor of unroasted coffee is fairly stable when stored in a cool, dry place. Green coffee will not have a drop in cup quality from about 6 months, even up to 1 year from arrival date (every coffee we sell has an arrival date in the review). Compared to roasted coffee, that starts to fade in 7-14 days after roasting, that’s pretty good!

It is more of a marketing name than anything. In Brazil they called in “pulp natural process” for decades. Honey processing sounds sweeter though, no? But it has nothing at all to do with honey from bees! It means the coffee is pulped of its skin, but the fruity layer is left on the seed as it dries, not fermented off like in wet-processing. So honey process is something between wet- and dry- processing. Flavorwise too, it is in between the others, with less aromatics than some wet process, and more body and fruit … but not as much as full dry-process. Honey is called “miel” coffee in Spanish.