Even with the best grinder and coffeemaker in the world, you simply cannot make good coffee with shitty beans.
If you’re already hanging out at great coffee shops, getting access to the good stuff seems like it shouldn’t be that hard. You give them a painfully large percentage of your disposable income, and they exchange it for a mind-blowing product, right? Well, maybe. Even at the coolest café in town, you need to know what to look for, or you could still end up with a bag of really expensive compost.
And even once you secure the goods, you might still wind up with shitty coffee if you don’t know how to take care of it. So let’s break down where to shop, what to look for once you’re there, and how to proceed once you get home.
Where’s the Bean?
In this post-Amazon Prime world, spending more than five minutes shopping for anything seems like a ludicrous hassle. But if you want to get your hands on the best beans around, you’re going to have to do some research and possibly even—gasp—leave the house. Assuming you found a sufficiently trendy third-wave coffee shop back, you already know of at least one trendy third-wave roaster: whatever they’re using. And certainly, that brand would seem like a pretty good option for your first batch. But that café might not be the optimal place to buy them—as you’ll see, baristas don’t often make the best retailers. So here are your best options for finding great coffee, in order of (my) preference for them.
ROASTER-RUN COFFEE SHOPS
There are actually two types of trendy third-wave coffee shops—the ones that are run by coffee roasters and the ones that aren’t. The former is basically your best-case scenario as a buyer—these guys will have the freshest product and give great recommendations on what to buy and how to prepare it, and you may even be buying from the person who roasted the coffee himself. They will also often sell their product in smaller quantities than you will find elsewhere, which is really handy if you’re just buying for yourself.
NON-ROASTING COFFEE SHOPS
Cafés that aren’t part of a roasting business—i.e., they buy their beans in from a roaster—might offer a similar experience, but they are less of a sure thing. They will almost certainly sell whole beans from whichever roaster(s) they use as well. However, their staff might be less knowledgeable about the product, they will probably only retail larger volumes, and what they have in stock won’t necessarily be that fresh—I’ve been to plenty of otherwise first-rate cafés and found some seriously dusty bags on their shelves. This is potentially still an excellent option, just be diligent and check the roast date (see later in this chapter) for how long they’ve been sitting around.
