Before you grind your coffee beans it is important to assess their quality. If your coffee beans are not properly roasted then the coffee beans will not produce high quality coffee. You should ensure you are buying from a credible source as it will be much harder to return low quality coffee beans to a foreign country than simply going back to a shop with a receipt! Read on below to find out some ways on how to check the quality of your coffee beans.
Freshness
If you open your bag of coffee beans and are not instantly hit with a gorgeous aroma of fresh coffee, then this is a sign that your coffee might not be as fresh as it needs to be. Fresh coffee beans are extremely pungent, so if you smell very little when you open your bag it may mean that your coffee beans are not fresh! In this case they were probably roasted more than 10 days ago and so you should not use these beans to brew any coffee as you will not get that taste you are wanting.
Valve
High quality freshly roasted coffee beans will release carbon dioxide for quite some time after. Due to this, fresh coffee is shipped in bags that contain a one-way valve, this lets the carbon dioxide escape the bag without impacting on the freshness of the high quality coffee beans. Whilst it is true that in in fact all coffee releases gas after roasting, if coffee beans are not freshly roasted when they are packaged into a bag you may not see inflation.
Residue
Another way to check the quality of your coffee beans is residue. Grab a good handful of your coffee beans and proceed to squeeze your hand very slightly, proceed to then put the beans back and look at your hand. If your hands are slightly oily then this is a good sign that the coffee beans have been freshly roasted. The one thing to watch out for however is that this varies between roasts. If you have purchased a bag of dark roasted coffee beans however, then you will have a lot more residue than lighter roasted coffee beans.
If you were to buy darker roasted coffee beans you are in fact paying a premium for them! Since coffee is sold by weight, the longer coffee beans are roasted the more moisture (weight) is lost and the more expensive they become! Some coffee can lose as much as 25% of its weight during the roasting process.
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