Here at Buy Organic Coffee we routinely promote coffee from Colombia. We do this because Colombian coffee has excellent aroma and flavor. Colombian coffee purchased at a local grocery store in cities like Manizales are essentially gourmet coffees as regular coffee prices. It is of note that when people in Colombia order tinto (the common name for coffee here) they ask for it black, with milk, or sugar. You never hear anyone asking for anything fancier than a cappuccino and certainly don’t hear a lot of people asking for flavored coffee. By way of contrast in the USA fully a third of coffee drinkers drink flavored coffee. When you are adding flavor to your coffee are you covering up the original taste or providing taste to stale coffee that is well past its shelf life. If you are adding flavor to your coffee what are the best choices?
Complementing Coffee’s Natural Taste
If you want to mask the bitterness of your coffee there are several flavor choices including peach, banana, orange, strawberry, and raspberry. Flavors that are commonly used to complement coffee’s natural taste include chocolate, coconut, hazelnut, vanilla, almond, and caramel. In each of these cases your best option will depend on if you are drinking a dark, medium, or light roast. The goal should be to enhance the natural flavor of great coffee and not cover it up.
A Favored Coffee Courtesy of Starbucks
Providing Taste to Tasteless Coffee
A strange thing happened to the world of coffee shops over the years. Peet’s and then Starbucks and the rest brought us very high quality coffee every time. Then they started adding flavors and it has gotten to the point where Starbucks offers as many as 170,000 different flavor, coffee, sweetener, combinations. While it may make sense to add lots of sweetener and or flavor to old, tasteless coffee, why would a person want to ruin a perfectly good cup of coffee by overpowering the natural taste.
Sweet Caffeine Drinks
If a person simply wants to consume caffeine in order to wake up in the morning and keep going later in the day, coffee is generally the easiest and most available choice. An 8 ounce cup of Starbucks coffee contains as much as 180 milligrams of caffeine. Tea contains at most 48 milligrams of caffeine. A diet coke contains 46 milligrams of caffeine. While 8 ounces of Red Bull contains 84 milligrams of caffeine you get 200 milligrams in sixteen ounces of Celsius Original. The popularity of bottled soft drinks with caffeine attests to the desire for folks to get a caffeine kick in a sugary drink. A substantial portion of coffee drinkers fit into this category. For these folks it does not really matter if they are getting high quality coffee or coffee that was warehoused for years before being shipped to the roaster and then sat on the shelf again for months or years before being purchased and consumed.
Flavors That Enhance the Taste of Great Coffee
If your goal is getting the taste and aroma of great coffee your approach to coffee flavoring should be different than if you want sweetness, caffeine and are not interested in the original coffee taste and flavor. If you are covering up poor taste to make up for absent taste and flavor. If you are covering up poor taste to making up for absent taste in your coffee it does not matter what flavors you use or how much you use. If you want to preserve and enhance great coffee flavor then you need to use a light touch when added flavoring and should try to use flavors like hazelnut, chocolate, or vanilla and adjust to taste. In all cases you will want to start with the best coffee for Colombia.