The truth about commercial coffee.
When you roast your own coffee, you get to see what the coffee looks like before it is roasted. And the appearance of the green coffee can tell you a lot about how it's going to taste.
This is what it should look like.
Not necessarily that color, but the beans should all be the same color and close to the same size. When you start with good consistent beans, you can roast them consistently and evenly at any roast level.
But when the coffee is picked, it is not consistent.
There are large beans, small beans, misshapen beans, insect damaged beans, light beans, dark beans (the worst), overripe beans and underripe beans. With coffee destined for specialty coffee shops or home roasters, they sort out all the undesirable beans and what do you think they do with them?
Throw them away?
NOPE guess again.
They don't throw anything away, they just mix them in with the beans going to Folgers, Maxwell House, Charbucks, etc.
The photo above was from a batch of Ethiopian Kembata that didn't get sorted properly. I called the supplier and let them have an earful and emailed that picture to them, and they were as horrified as I was. They are still trying to appease me. The last time I visited them in person (a few weeks ago) they asked me what coffee I wanted to try and gave me a bag for free.
I did not send the unsorted coffee back. Not because I wanted to drink it, but because I roast coffee for my brother in law and that coffee was perfectly suitable for him.
Why?
Because he likes dark roast. You see, this is the dirty little secret about commercial coffee and why 99.9% of it is roasted so dark - dark roast hides the defects. What they call "Medium Roast" is at the dark end of the medium roast spectrum, somewhere around Full City+ which is borderline dark.
I can't drink light or medium roasted coffee that looks like that - nobody can -
It's awful. But roast it dark and burn off all the defects and nobody is the wiser.
So, in summary, while 99.9% of people are drinking coffee that starts out looking like this:
I'm drinking coffee that starts off looking like this and paying less per pound for it than most of the 99.9%: