The gift of burned beans
The problem is that some roasters burn their beans. By “burn” I do not mean actually set on fire, but rather they roast the beans until the point where they start to all taste the same, and they give off some oils that aren’t really great for appreciating the coffee. All coffee tastes different; all burned beans taste the same.
Good coffee is precious and finite, a tropical fruit with hundreds of volatile compounds that requires careful supply chain management from farm to table. That farm is usually thousands of miles away, if you live anywhere that knows good coffee. Burned beans mask the fact that you are, in fact, drinking low-quality coffee. But you can also burn good coffee! Places do it all the time – largely becuase most people have come to appreciate a certain set of “roasty” flavors in their coffee. Screw up any step along the supply chain, and you may as well burn your beans to mask the fact that they’re not good. Most consumers are okay with it! I am not. I cannot go back.
To know good coffee is to be forever cursed with the belief that everyone else is doing it wrong in an industry-wide sense, and to simultaneously flag with enough coffee plumage that people always want to gift you coffee. “This is from my favorite roaster in the city,” they say. “It’s from Guatemala,” they say The beans are always burned. The gift is bad. You will not have a good time with it.
If you have been gifted burned beans, you can make cold brew. This smooths out most of the flaws in the beans, and creates something that you can dump flavored syrups or creamer in with relatively little impunity. Grind coarse, throw in a Toddy, done.
The problem with burned beans is that you must grind them, but burned beans are almost always so oily that the oils will cling to every part in your grinder, ruining the next few grinds in the process. (You can always tell what roasters and coffee shops use burned beans by checking their grinders. If their hoppers have any sort of oily residue in them, they don’t clean their grinders often enough and they burn their beans.) So if you go the cold brew route, you will need to deep-clean your grinder. Or you can do what I do and walk to your local grocery store, go into the coffee section, grind the burned beans on their machinery, and go home. Their grinder is already pretty much made of burned beans, anyway, and you will not taste the difference.
What happens if you don’t have a way to make cold brew, or it’s too cold to make cold brew, or the beans are just that far gone? You compost them. Coffee makes for excellent compost. You envision the worms finding a caffeine high, somehow becoming more productive, getting a promotion.
No matter what you do with burned beans, you do not speak of them. Knowing the difference between good beans and burned beans must be held in silence. Nobody will understand. Tell others and you’re a snob – and you will still receive beans, most of which will be burned. Take the gift, thank the giver, and say nothing about the actual quality of the coffee. In the back of your head, file away which roasters burn their beans and which ones know better. And every day, learn more about how to move, and quietly set an example of what coffee can and must be.