Are you Actually drinking Gourmet Coffee ?
So you bought gourmet coffee from the supermarket and found it taste worse than your regular coffee ? Are you a victim of wrong marketing ?
Online, May 6, 2014 (Newswire.com) - If you are a coffee enthusiast, you must have already been bombarded by several coffee brands claiming to provide the “best Gourmet Coffee”. But is that Coffee really gourmet or made from the cheapest available varieties of coffee beans? Answer to this question could be shocking!!!!
In the times of high inflation, tactic used by most of the coffee shops is to create blends of high quality coffee with cheap coffee beans to lower the price of their final product. Most of the coffee consumers ignore this fine print and fell prey to this marketing strategy and end up paying more for a sub-standard coffee which deviates far from the original taste of the high quality coffee. Even an innocent 10% blend with a sub-standard coffee can overshadow the juicy and chocolaty taste of original coffee.
We bought this ******* gourmet coffee online , but it tasted worse than my decaf. I researched and found this list useful http://typesofcoffee.biz/top-gourmet-coffee-brands
Sara Bach, Coffee Consumer
In the absence of any clear cut definition of gourmet coffee, unfortunately most of the popular brands pass of low quality coffee beans which don't even satisfy the meaning of gourmet i.e. " something which is specialized, fancy and prepared in an elaborate process " as gourmet, So before we learn about gourmet coffee, it would be better to know about the basic difference between high quality and low quality coffee seeds.
As a rule of thumb, seeds of Coffee Arabica plant are considered to be of higher quality than Coffee Robusta and Coffee Liberica plants. But there are some exceptions to this rule , Coffee Robusta plants grown in certain parts of South East Asia which produce popular espresso coffee beans . Almost all coffee beans listed in the list have following qualities: - First coffee should be produced mostly by hands with minimum use of machinery similar to how most of the other gourmet foods are produced. Secondly, coffee should be produced in only in its native region for e.g. Blue Mountain coffee should be produced only on the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and finally, the process of producing the coffee should be rich and extensive to preserve the original quality, taste and aroma of the coffee beans.
However there is another alternative to the gourmet coffee cliché called the specialty coffee. It is controlled by an agency SCAA-Specialty Coffee Association of America, which issues certificates to coffee beans if they qualify a certain criteria. So till there is an agency to govern the use word gourmet you could rely on “Specialty Coffee” .