G is for Green Beans

You know... green beans! To a lot of people, green beans are something you eat with some butter and salt (if you're raised by a former farmgirl, I guess). They are long and skinny and you have to snap off the ends, which is an annoying chore but goes by quickly if you have a snapping-partner. Then you two can talk and pretend that you're really just talking instead of preparing dinner. But to coffee nerds like me, green beans are the unroasted seeds of the coffee cherry, just one quick roast away from becoming that hot commodity with the instantly recognizable aroma.

I was mucking about the roasting area at my favorite local roastery (as I am wont to do) and decided to learn a little bit more about these semi-precious gems. Many thanks to the roast-boys for their help. In the interest of journalism, I decided to eat a green bean and spent the next 20 minutes trying to chew my way through it. Save yourself the trouble and take it from me: green coffee beans taste sort of like unpopped popcorn kernels, and the texture is the same, but there is a very slight coffee aftertaste. One of the roast-boys caught me eating out of the bin and lassoed me into roasting a quarter-pound batch on the sample roaster in the corner. He explained how the heat and agitation inside the roasting machine changes the chemistry and physical make-up of the bean itself. He then instructed me to listen for the tell-tale "first crack" and "second crack" popping noises that indicate the progress of the roasting. The pops are much like in popping corn, and are also the result of the plant-cell's contents expanding with the heat and rupturing the cell wall. In very little time (a matter of minutes!) we had some lightly-roasted (city, maybe?) Ethiopia Yirgahachi (not its real name, even coffee has an alias sometimes). Hooray! I roasted some coffee! And I didn't catch anything on fire.

Coffee can stay fresh for months in its green form, but once roasted its peak freshness lasts for days and then its quality declines quickly. I guess since I have been a part of the specialty coffee world since I was a teenager, I assume that EVERYONE knows facts like this, and yet I see so many coffee drinkers do things like pull months-old coffee from their freezer and BREW IT for DRINKING! They'll even serve it to guests, even to their own MOTHERS! To me that's like eating wilted nasty lettuce. It's lost all flavor and texture, but what the hell, let's eat the slimy green stuff anyway. I suppose that since fresh coffee doesn't look very different from old coffee (to the average jane and joe, anyway) then it might be easy to assume that the product itself holds up indefinitely, unlike lettuce. But coffee is a food, and an agricultural product, and it "goes off" just like anything else. Old coffee is sad coffee.

In my relatively small Metropolitan Statistical Area, there are almost ten roasters that I can think of off the top of my head. With selection like that, it's not that hard to find good, fresh coffee. I would beat people over the head about this, but I still see folks drinking Miller Lite despite the recent and well-publicized flood of top-tier microbrews in our local market. Perhaps it just boils down to price. Some people just don't want to spend much money on beer or coffee, even if it's something they do everyday, something that they do simply for the enjoyment of it (or to maintain a certain blood-alcohol or blood-caffeine level). Sometimes being a missionary for the Cult of Good Stuff is a tough and lonely road. And since this is a knitting blog, I should mention that the Cult of Good Stuff also preaches against squeaky scratchy acrylic yarns, except those which are PINK.