Roasted Coffee Beans 1kg + 1kg $49.99 Free Delivery @ Agro Beans Australia

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Agro Beans

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  takemymoney on 14/12/2020 - 21:04

  +2

  No origin no Deal…that's me though

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  [Deactivated] on 14/12/2020 - 22:49

  +1

  You could at least tell us what beans are in your blends. We should be able to trace from Cup to Grower.

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  frowny on 14/12/2020 - 23:48

  +4

  After giving a few different companies grief about this, I think I should just have a standard write-up to copy and paste into these coffee deals. However - I will concede that at these prices, you're essentially competing with supermarket coffee (which is kind of a different ballpark)

  Why you should care about transparency in coffee

  TL;DR:

  • Coffee tastes like the place you grew it in.

  • Coffee taste depends on things like how it was processed, and variety;

  • If they can't provide this information, your coffee is probably 'crap' - they've also super likely toasted the shit out of it; and

  • If they can't provide this information, your coffee is probably unethical.

  CAVEATS:

  • For some people, super darkly roasted or instant coffee is good. That's not a bad thing, it's all preference - however objectively it's also fair to say that Vue de Monde is 'better' than a Four n Twenty.

  • Not every can care about being ethical in everything they do in life - that's also fine, pick your battles.

  Coffee & Terroir

  Terroir, or taste of place, is a term used to describe the enviornmental impacts of growing a product on the final taste. Coffee as a crop inherently develops a large amount of its taste from:

  • where it is grown (location);

  • what was grown (at a high-level species of coffee, such as Arabia or Robusta (Robusta is generally trash), then at a more micro-level, variety, for example Bourbon, Caturra etc.);

  • how it is grown (whether pesticides were used) and picked (by hand, by machine, the entire tree at once, or only the ripe fruits);

  • when it was grown (coffee is a very difficult crop to grow, and generally producers have a few months to harvest their crops);

  • who it has been grown by (there are known producers and regions in the world that are renound for their coffee - an example may be the Aricha washing station in Ethiopia as a known producer, or Yirgecheffe in Ethiopia as a known coffee growing region); and

  • why it was grown - was the producer looking to grow to sell at auction at the Cup of Excellence or are they just trying to scrape by and get C-Market prices.

  All of the above factors will the taste of the coffee that you brew. This is why Melbourne coffee tastes so different from Itallian coffee, even though most of our machines come from Italy (Simoneli and La Marzocco) - as a city, we buy good quality coffee, and roast it well.

  Coffee and Location / Processing

  To focus on two important factors influencing taste - location and processing:

  Location
  The location a coffee is grown will have a huge impact on taste. Not only do specific coffee growing countries have their taste (Ethiopians generally being very 'pretty' and 'floral' in nature), whereas Indonesian coffees being 'strange' and 'quirky', but other factors such as altitude will impact the coffee in subtle ways. Depending on the altitude, the coffee may be more/less dense, impacting how the coffee 'cooks' during roasting.

  Processing
  Broadly, the two main ways of processing coffee is 'washed' or 'natural'. Washed coffees have the fruit pulped and washed off by water, leading to a very 'clean' taste in the cup. Natural coffees are dried in the sun with the fruit being allowed to rot and ferment off, leading to very 'jammy' and 'stewed fruit' flavours in the cup.

  Transparency

  Well if the above is true how can companies sell me a year's worth of International Roast for $5? Because they're selling you bottom of the barrel product.

  They do not care about quality. If this is true, why care about any of the fluff? When you roast everything to a crisp and zombi-fy it to sit on a shelf for two years who CARES what it was? That information is worse than worthless - it's expensive.

  When you've got producers carefully growing coffee, picking by hand when ripe, and spending lots of money on carefully washing their coffee for best cup possible, they ONLY do that for a payout. If the pay was the same it'd be a race to the bottom to cut costs.

  So here's the thing:

  It is only worth being transparent about your methods (i.e. providing information about the country / variety / altitude / producer / processing method) when the product is high quality, and when these attributes are part of the 'selling points' of the product.

  Furthermore:

  If you do not provide this information, it is almost guaranteed that you are selling a sub-par product.

  Not only that, but coffee selling is based on the old imperialistic structures set up to rip resources out of less fortunate countries. While there has been some efforts to change this in the past, the only real way to make a difference is to have competition for the most valuable products, so that these producers who are spending the time and effort and investment to aim for quality are rewarded.

  If you don't provide transparency - it is almost guaranteed that your product is not sustainable or ethical.

  • 

    Martyroz on 15/12/2020 - 06:51

    +2

    You were going great until you misspelt renowned.

    • 

      frowny on 15/12/2020 - 07:19

      +1

      Oof that was a bad one, I shouldn't be typing on my phone past 11pm

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  compound on 15/12/2020 - 01:25

  Bought 4kg for my dad. TBH wasn't impressed.

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  DmytroP on 15/12/2020 - 08:04

  Thanks for the deal.
  Ordered last time, really liked for espresso, would certainly order again.

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  minniethemoocher on 16/12/2020 - 20:58

  Bought the espresso and crema . Both were good but preferred the crema.