Are you sure it’s the coffee beans?

Sometimes a cup of coffee doesn’t taste right. Coffee drinkers usually blame it on the beans. Sometimes it is the beans but not always. Bad beans are not the only thing that affects the taste of coffee. Some of the other things are: 

• Water
  98% of a cup of coffee is water. Coffee brewed with chlorine or other hard chemicals will be flat and have a bitter, harsh taste. Make sure your water comes from either a high quality filter or quality bottled water. 
• Water Filter
  Your water filter will change the taste of your coffee. High quality filters take out chlorine, other chemicals, odors and algae. Low quality filters leave some chemicals and other material in the water. Dirty filters add a moldy taste to coffee. Check to make sure your filter is taking out everything that might make your coffee taste bad. 
• Temperature
  Great coffee is brewed at 200 degrees Fahrenheit . Check the water coming from your automatic drip brewer with a meat thermometer. If you use a French press or manual drip maker, bring the water to a boil and then pour it after about 30 seconds. Coffee brewed below 195 degrees tastes thin and underdeveloped. 
• Grinder
  Good coffee is brewed from evenly ground coffee beans. Unevenly ground beans will over and under extract, giving your coffee sour and acidic flavors. Using a good quality conical burr grinder will improve the flavor of your coffee.
• Coffee Oil
  Coffee beans are filled with oil. When coffee is ground and brewed the oils adhere to the machine.  If you don’t clean your brewer, grinder and coffee equipment the oils will turn rancid and give your coffee a sour or fishy taste. 
• Coffee Cup
  We serve coffee in our tasting room in ceramic cups. We found that our commercial dishwasher left a detergent film on the cups that affected the coffee taste. We now run our cups twice, once with detergent and once without. If you coffee tastes like detergent, it may be the cup. 
• Storing
  Coffee beans oxidize quickly when exposed to air. In addition, they also pick up flavors in the air e.g. onions, garlic, fuel oil etc. Ground coffee oxidizes faster than whole bean coffee, so coffee beans shouldn’t be ground until just before they are used. Whole bean and ground coffee should be stored in as close to an oxygen free environment as possible. Freezing coffee helps slow down oxidation. Oxidized coffee tastes flat with little aroma and no subtle flavors. 

If you check all of the above and your coffee still tastes bad, then you need to take a look at your beans. How long since the beans were actually on a tree? If it isn’t the current crop year, you are wasting your money. How were the beans processed? If they sat on a truck after picking for more than a few hours they may have a fermented taste. Were the beans sorted and graded?

Good coffee trees have both good and bad beans. Did the processor sort out the bad beans? How were the beans stored? If they sat in a container on a tropical pier they may taste moldy. If they were stored in burlap bags they may taste like burlap. How long since they were roasted? Fresh roasted coffee tastes fresh. Old coffee tastes old. Aging is good for wine, bad for coffee.

Hula Daddy Kona Coffee Extra Fancy received a 93.1, the third highest score ever given by Coffeecuppers.com

The excellence of this coffee must be what folks are referring to when they extole the qualities of the finest Kona coffees. It’s got it all - everything the above coffees exhibit cranked up a bit, and more subtly blended into the whole, with additional sweetness, a complex blend of fruit, floral aromas, chocolate, caramel and a touch of citrus, now reminding me a bit of bergamot. 

The coffee is as perfectly balanced as any I’ve had and lingers as a long finish to complete the experience. Full Review

Hula Daddy Kona Coffee written up in the January 2010 Hawaii Magazine

Hula Daddy Kona Coffee is familiar to HAWAII Magazine subscribers who read the January/February 2010 issue feature story “Kona in a Cup.” Owners Lee Paterson and Karen Jue’s farm in the heart of the Big Island of Hawaii’s Kona Coffee Belt has produced some of the most award-winning coffee roasts on the Island since 2002. In 2008, Hula Daddy’s “Kona Sweet”-one of several coffee varieties the company roasts-scored 97 out of 100 from industry buying guide Coffee Review. Only five other coffees worldwide have ever achieved that score. 

We’ve been longtime fans of Lee and Karen’s crisp, flavorful 100% Kona-grown Hula Daddy coffees. We’re grateful to Hula Daddy for rewarding our Reader Photo of the Week winners with such a great prize. 

Excerpt from HAWAII Magazine  January/February 2010Article:

 My first stop of the morning, Hula Daddy coffee offers … [tours, sampling and sales]. From a rocking chair on the veranda of the Hula Daddy’s retail shop, you can gaze on owners Lee Paterson and Karen Jue’s 11-acre farm, and, far downslope, the Kailua-kona coastline, all the while samping as many cups of their fabulous brewed raosts as you want…

 Spend a day tasting coffee from farms along the belt, and you”ll quickly find that all Kona coffees are not created equal. Cups of joe  I sampled were consistently good, but not alwaysas crisp and complex as Hula Daddy.’s roasts.

Hula Daddy Kona Coffee written up in the Toronto Star newspaper

These days, newcomers to the coffee business are experimenting with improved varietals of coffee plants and innovative bean processing and roasting techniques in order to take Kona coffee to new heights.”Only recently have people begun to think about crafting fine coffee,” says Miguel Meza, the roastmaster at Hula Daddy Kona Coffee. “We’re a few decades behind wine in that respect.”

Hula Daddy owners Lee and Karen Paterson bought a cow pasture near Holualoa and turned it into a coffee farm in 2002.

“After practising law for 42 years, it was time to do something new,” says Lee.

“There’s something special about growing coffee. The greatest satisfaction is when people tell me they’ve tasted our coffee and it’s the best. That makes my whole day.”

As we step into Hula Daddy’s garage-sized production room, Meza stands in front of four or five cups of coffee that have been infused for four minutes in 90C water.

One by one, he slurps, swirls and spits out the rich-brown liquid to compare the relative acidity, sweetness and flavour of each brew.

“I’m like the winemaker,” says Meza, who performs this “cupping” procedure at least once a week to control quality and test out experimental batches.

Achieving a coveted, record-setting 97 rating for Hula Daddy’s sweet natural Kona coffee in December 2008 was not a slam dunk, however.

“There are dozens of steps where you can screw up coffee,” explains the 27-year-old roastmaster, who shepherds his estate-grown beans through the many critical stages of production.  

The process begins with hand-picking the bright red coffee “cherries” one berry at a time at the peak of ripeness and then mechanically removing the outer pulp and fermenting the beans.

Fermentation gives so-called “wet-processed” coffees their characteristic bright, clear flavour.

Afterward, the beans are sun-dried and milled to remove the parchment and silver-skin layers.

Selection of the highest-grade green beans, climate-controlled storage and custom roasting at just the right temperature for the optimal amount of time help to ensure that the final product will be full-bodied and aromatic.

The proof of Meza’s long, hard labour is evident up in Hula Daddy’s tasting room where we inhale the rich aroma of fresh-brewed coffee and savour the differences among select, fancy, extra-fancy and prized peaberry Kona.

“We both like coffee, and since we started drinking Kona, we’ve fallen in love with it, so we wanted to see how it’s made,” say Theresa and John Banks, residents of Marysville, Calif., who are taking a self-guided coffee tour as they wind up their holiday on the Big Island.

The couple finds similarities between Hawaii’s Kona coffee belt and California’s Napa Valley wine country.