Having just been on vacation, I saw a lot of pre-packaged coffee packets and pods that promised “the bold coffee flavor you love.” And I tried them. They were bold, but not in the way that I love!

Really great coffee is usually bold, I’ll give you that. But I fear that many people are confusing bold with bitter. Coffee doesn’t have to be bitter to be strong!

The sad truth of mass market coffee is that sellers make their coffee exceptionally bitter to hide that fact that it doesn’t have a lot of flavor anymore. If your coffee sits on a shelf in a bag or a box for months after being roasted (even worse, after it’s ground), it’s going to lose its natural coffee flavors. It doesn’t matter if the beans that were used were of high or low quality, the oils that provide the unique tastes of the coffee bean are going to evaporate, go stale, or become rancid.

So instead of selling coffee that’s flavorless or tastes stale, the seller uses low or medium quality beans to keep their price down, then over-roasts the beans, producing essentially a charred bean. It tastes bitter because it’s burned. And that bitterness doesn’t dissipate as quickly as the flavors that come from the natural oils. When you pick up a coffee packet, sack, or pod that promises bold flavor, what they really mean is, “We roasted this coffee so much that it burned, and the burned flavor isn’t going to go away anytime soon.”

Regrettably, most people don’t know what real coffee flavor tastes like! When we look at a description of a fancy coffee bean, it has words like “fruity,” “butterscotch,” “chocolate,” “flowery.” Really? Most of us have to laugh, because we’ve never tasted coffee that tasted “flowery.” However, those flavors really do exist! It just takes care to bring them out. Great coffee is packed with strong flavors, but it isn’t bitter.

How do you get coffee that’s packed with flavor and isn’t burned and bitter? First, you need to start with a high-quality bean. That usually means one that is of a high-flavor variety: arabica. The robusta variety is important because it produces a lot of crema, the oils that make tiny bubbles and dark brown froth on top of the cup, but it doesn’t contribute as much flavor as arabica. Most really good espresso shops will use a blend of 10-30% robusta and 70-90% arabica beans.

The coffee usually needs to be grown at a high altitude to develop great flavor. 2,500 feet or higher is the usual guide. Mountains in Africa, Indonesia, Central and South America, and a few volcanic islands seem to be the places that have the right conditions. Shade (from taller trees) over the coffee bushes seems to help as well. Unroasted coffee that’s stored properly will retain its flavor for a long time: measured in months at a minimum. So while the best coffee will be in season (depending on where it is grown), it can be months after it was harvested, dried, or even shipped and it will still be fine as long as it hasn’t been roasted.

Once you have a good bean (or a mix of beans) that was grown in the right conditions, you need to roast it properly. Avoiding over-roasting! Using the vernacular of the mass market, City to Full City roasts seem to be about right. Darker roasts, like French, Italian, or Vienna char the bean and burn off too many of the oils that contribute real coffee flavor. Once you get to a French roast, it doesn’t matter where your bean came from anymore: it will taste the same as any other French-roasted bean. With the right roast, a bean will have the color of milk chocolate or dark caramel and it won’t have a lot of oil on the outside making it shiny. The very dark, shiny beans look great, but they were over-roasted and have lost or are rapidly losing their flavor.

Finally, after your bean is roasted, the clock really begins ticking. Oxygen begins to do its work on the beans. Roasted beans are filled with tiny bubbles and cracks that let in the air. The flavor-producing oils will stick around and retain their taste for weeks, but not months. After roasting, it’s best to let the beans rest for a couple of days to expel the carbon dioxide gas that was produced during roasting. After that, they should be used as soon as possible. After two weeks or so, the flavor will start to go flat. If you can find beans that were roasted very recently–within a month or two of when you plan to brew them–you’ll get a lot more flavor. Buy from a local roaster and look for a roasting date on the package. (You’ll rarely find a roasting date on a package in the supermarket. It’s too embarrassing.)

Grinding the beans accelerates the loss of flavor. Ideally, you shouldn’t grind them until just before you make your coffee! Store them unground and use the grinder just before brewing. You’ll be blown away by the smell when you grind them!

The final step in making flavorful coffee is brewing. There are two keys to extracting awesome flavor from fresh, high-quality beans. The first is achieving an even grind. You need a grinder that produces consistently sized grounds, not a variety of larger and smaller grounds. Obviously, the size of the ground determines how long it takes for the oils to be released, and you want to have it be as consistent as possible. The second key is not allowing the grounds to stay in the water too long. As soon as the water hits the beans, the oils will be released into the water. This takes just ten to twenty seconds! After that, the grounds will begin to release the charred flavors and the liquid will start getting bitter. If you allow the grounds to stay in the liquid for more than about 40 seconds, the bitterness will begin to overpower the oils.

No matter what anyone tells you, you can get great coffee flavor from most brewing methods, from the simplest pour-over method, to a french press or aeropress brew, to high-pressure espresso brewing. As long as you pay attention to where the beans came from, how they were roasted, how they were ground, and how long they were in contact with the water, the results will be similar in quality.

A few implications that should be pointed out…

1. Major coffee shops like Starbucks or Caribou or Pete’s (or even Dunkin’ Donuts) don’t usually start with super high-quality beans, but they do have one major advantage over grocery store coffee: the beans aren’t stored for very long after they’re roasted. The sheer volume of coffee produced means that your beans probably didn’t spend a lot of time in the bag after they were roasted and shipped to the coffee shop, so they have more flavor than if they’d been on a shelf for a while after being roasted.
2. If you can find a coffee shop that uses a local roaster (in the same town as the shop), or better still, one that roasts their own coffee, then you can be very sure you’re getting a fresh roast.
3. If you can buy whole beans instead of pre-ground, and save the grinding for just before you brew, you’ll have better-tasting coffee.
4. Unless you’re certain that the beans you’re buying are lightly or medium-roasted and weren’t roasted more than a month before you buy them, don’t waste your money on fancy beans. The fancy origin flavor will be gone before you brew. You might as well save your money and invest in a good grinder.
5. Of all the home-brewing equipment you can buy, the most important to the flavor of your coffee will be your grinder. It doesn’t matter if you spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on a great espresso machine if your grounds are irregular or the wrong size. A high-quality burr grinder will give you a consistent size and a great deal of control over the size, and this will greatly improve your coffee no matter how you brew it.