Is My Coffee Too Fresh?

Welcome to the first in our new series: Infrequently Asked Questions. This is not an issue that comes up given the general lack of availability of freshly roasted beans in the current market, but coffee needs at least 24 hours and more usually 48 hours rest after roasting to lose the “grassiness” caused by the off-gassing of CO2. Most coffee takes somewhere between three to five days to peak in flavor, although that can vary quite a bit. Some beans, especially if dark roasted, can peak within a couple of days of roasting, while light roasted coffee may take up to a week. Of course, none of this is really relevant in a marketplace where coffee usually sits on the shelf for weeks, or gasp months, before making it into consumers hands.

Roasting as a Spectator Sport

It seems like a lot of people who come into Qualia for the first time have never seen unroasted coffee before, much less observed the roasting process itself. While many people peek in the back to admire the machinery, watching the actual roasting process is a lot like watching laundry dry. However, I had an unusually interested onlooker during today’s roasting session.

Peeping Mantis

I hope he was preying for a good roast.

The Long View

DC contractors recently cut back the tree in front of Qualia revealing a pretty stunning view of the National Cathedral.

The National Cathedral is well over 2 miles from the shop.

Drink and Ride

Is there a more natural combination than coffee and bicycles? Well, maybe, but they still go damn well together.

For the past couple of Saturday’s, Qualia has been host to a free bicycle maintenance and repair clinic sponsored by the Bike House, a Petworth-based bicycle coop. Here are some pictures from this past weekend.

When It Rains…

Qualia is featured in a column in the August issue of Washingtonian. Unfortunately, the magazine doesn’t have the column on-line, so I will have to paraphrase it for you: We Rock!

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Less Is More

There is a rather pervasive myth about coffee, namely that the darker the roast the stronger the brew. The truth is that there are two different and sometimes competing flavors, one inherent to the bean and the other a product of the roasting process. From a roaster’s perspective, I want to taste the coffee, not the roast. Much of what makes coffee interesting to me is in fact the complexity of the coffee, some or much of which gets lost the darker you roast and delicate flavor oils are broken down by excessive heat.

I strongly suspect that the myth of the dark roast is driven more by market realities than consumer taste. While light roasts have a lot of flavor within the first couple of weeks of roasting, the flavor oils are delicate and begin to oxidize outside the window of time, rendering the beans largely tasteless. By comparison, the burnt outside of dark roasted beans have a much more enduring, if less interesting, flavor that outlasts light roast coffees. Since most roasters can’t get their coffee beans on the shelves, much less put them in consumers hands, within a week or two of roasting, it doesn’t make much sense to sell light roasted coffees that are only really good for a couple of weeks. So, instead they sell dark roasted or artificially flavored coffees, both of which don’t reflect the beans natural depth and complexity.

Hello Sun

It may be awhile before our hearing returns, but Qualia’s staff survived our first Caribbean Festival, a parade along Georgia Avenue that includes a stream of flat bed trucks loaded with oversized sound systems turned up to 11. It’s actually a very lively event with deep cultural roots and exotic fanfare. Here are some pictures from in front of the shop.

A Fresh Experiment

A couple of folks from the Washingtonian Magazine stopped by this morning for an informal coffee tasting. I wanted to impress upon them the true meaning of freshness. So last night, I ran a little experiment. I ground three batches of the same bean an hour apart, so that I had one coffee brewed from just ground beans, one with beans that had been ground an hour previous and another 2 hours previous.

Three cups of Kenyan, fresh ground, one hour old, and two hours old.

I was a little disappointed that I could not tell much of a difference between the three cups. Luckily, just then my girlfriend stopped by the shop. Unaware that the cups were all the same coffee, I asked her to try them and tell me what she thought. She identified a distinct brightness in the fresh ground cup, a creaminess in the one hour cup and thought the third tasted relatively flat.

I decided to go ahead and test it out on my visitors this morning. Interestingly, the one who was a seasoned coffee drinker had a hard time telling much difference between the cups while the other, not a big coffee drinker, noticed more differences. The result was a mixed bag, but I hope that I got my point across, namely that the flavor of coffee is dynamic and noticeably affected by its freshness.

The Qualia Chorus

Qualia Coffee is now listed on google maps, yelp and and menupages. Feel free to add your, uhhmm, rave reviews…

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