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I learned to drink coffee when I was in college as a tactic for surviving finals week. Needless to say, I didn't learn the principles of coffee buying there. I simply developed the habit. When buying coffee, I grabbed Folgers perk grind, filled up the basket in my percolator and let it do its thing. Whatever came out was coffee.

Only much later in life did I learn that there was any art to buying coffee. Like me, many people never treat coffee as a food, and they never discover that their coffee experience can be an adventure. Even if they buy coffee at Starbucks they may not move beyond that to exploration of coffee at home. Believe me, drinking coffee attentively can be like going on safari.

If you want your coffee experience to be an adventure, there are three key elements to buying coffee. (If a supermarket brand in perk grind meets your needs, you can stop here.) Because coffee is a food, freshness matters. Because coffee is a flavor, roast matters. Because coffee can be delivered by a bewildering variety of techniques, grind matters.

If you decide that you want to know all about coffee, you will find a treasure trove of web sites where there is more information than you can possibly absorb in one pass. You will discover that knowing about coffee is a lot like knowing about wine: origin, cultivation, harvest, processing, grading, blending, packaging, and so forth. When discussing the flavor, you will hear a lot of terms you have seen in wine reviews. However, after you have done all your research, it can still be reduced to these three principles: freshness, roast and grind.

For any food, freshness begins to degrade as soon as the product is harvested. Fortunately, the harvested coffee bean, like most seeds, has a long shelf life. Unfortunately, the same roasting that produces the complex, rich flavor coffee drinkers want immediately begins to hasten the day when the flavor will be gone. When buying coffee, it is wise to purchase it soon after it is roasted.

The roast itself is the result of decisions made by a master taster who checks the blend of beans and the timing of the roast to achieve specific flavor goals. Every coffee buyer needs to know the roast that produces the desired flavor.

The right grind is determined by the coffeemaker being used. Press pots require a coarse grind. Espresso machines require a powder-fine grind. Other coffeemakers fall somewhere along the range between those extremes. The buyer must know what coffeemaker will be used in order to choose the right grind.

If you become seriously interested in coffee, the learning never ends. But on your personal coffee buying safari, you will find that the keys to a successful cup are always freshness, roast and grind.

Learn more about this author, Katherine Harms.
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