What Is Basic Coffee? Read On for the Answer!

In drinking all sorts of different coffees over the past year, I have found the answer to a question I wasn't even considering: What is Basic Coffee?

Basic Coffee is that kind of coffee that tastes like, well, coffee. It doesn't matter who roasted it, it doesn't matter who markets it, or how. It doesn't matter what you put in it. It doesn't matter whether you drink it hot, room temperature, or iced. So long as the coffee flavor isn't completely drowned by milks, creamers and/or booze, Basic Coffee tastes like you think basic coffee tastes like.

I discovered Basic Coffee by accident. Like many great discoveries, I stumbled upon knowledge rather than actively sought it out. Now, I share that knowledge with you! (And for those who can't stand the suspense, Basic Coffee is that which is grown in Colombia.)

That feeling when you want Black Excitement, but all you have is Basic Coffee

 
UNKNOWN BRAND: WHOLE BEANS COLOMBIAN

A friend of mine sent me a bag of medium roast, unground Colombian coffee he got at an indie grocery store in Florida. It came a brown bag with the contents identified by someone handwriting a note on it. This was from the same source, and in the same kind of packaging, as the very excellent Tanzanian Peabody coffee I wrote about a few months ago. Needless to say, I had high hopes for this.

Since this was "just" coffee with no flavors or other fancy flourishes added, the grinding and brewing held no surprises: Just a pleasant coffee smell. The same was true as I poured the first cup. The aroma was pleasant and exactly what I would expect it to be.

I drank the first cup of this coffee, hot and black. It was a decent enough medium roast, and, as anyone who's been reading these articles for a while know, even the mild bite of this coffee was a bit much for me. So I added some sugar-free Italian Sweet Cream creamer, and I found myself enjoying the drink a lot more. The flavor was stable as the coffee cooled to room temperature, and it remained tasty.

Next, I tried it with Unsweetened Almond Milk. There were, once again, no surprises. It was coffee with Unsweetened Almond Milk. It put me in mind of late nights at work. I tried adding half a packet of Stevia to the mix, but it remained a blandly diluted coffee flavor. As it cooled to room temperature, the taste remained just as bland. Trying it with a Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk was better (with no Stevia needed), but it was the flavor of vanilla that brought the drink to life, no so much anything that the coffee had to offer. Nothing here was bad... just not something to shout from the rooftops about.

When I drank this Colombian Antigua blend over ice, the results were the same: "Yup... that's coffee. And that's coffee with stuff added."

As I finished my notes on this blend, I wondered to myself if all the flavored coffees I've been reviewing over the past year (like the many fabulous Bones Coffee offerings) had spoiled me. I didn't THINK normal coffee had been spoiled for me--after all, I didn't find Signature Select's Sun-Kissed Blonde nor Bones Coffee's Costa Rica Single Source blends unremarkable. Sure... I'd gotten into the mindset that drinking coffee had to be an "experience" (which was new), but I still understood that regular coffee is regular coffee. Or did I?

The answer began to dawn on me when I made a mistake and brewed a different pot of coffee than I had intended to. 

COFFEE BEANERY: COLOMBIAN

Shortly after my experience with the freshly ground, unimpressive Colombian coffee discussed above, I accidentally brewed a pot of the single-source Colombian blend from Coffee Beanery. My intent had been to drink and review their Michigan Cherry flavored blend (so my introduction to a new caffeine source would be something I was almost certain to love), but I grabbed the wrong package and realized my mistake too late.

It turned out to be an enlightening experience, because everything about the Colombian blend from Coffee Beanery was EXACTLY like the Colombian. There was nothing terrible about any of the results from what I mixed it with or what temperature I drank it at. This was a fine-tasting, medium roast coffee. In fact, it was pretty much spot-on what I would expect a fine-tasting medium roast coffee to be. 

Just to make sure that I could not detect any major differences in flavor between the Coffee Beanery offering and the Colombian whole beans the friend had sent me, I ground some and brewed a new pot. Again, my reaction was, "Yup. It's coffee. It's not bad, it's not great. It's just average coffee."

I couldn't even discern the difference between freshly ground coffee and pre-ground coffee that aficionados like to talk about. While it's true that Coffee Beanery claims to roast and grind in small batches, and I brewed their Colombian variety on the very same day I received the samples I ordered from them, I should have been able to detect the difference in freshness between the two? Was this confirmation of my long-time stance on snobbish talk about how freshly ground coffee is much better-tasting than pre-ground stuff is just so much psychosomatic claptrap? 

Maybe my taste buds aren't refined enough. Maybe I'm not decanting it properly. But whether it was the very freshly ground Colombian, or the pre-ground Colombian shipped to me through the mail, the tastes were identical.

The conclusion I was coming to was that Colombian coffee is "just coffee" to me... it's a flat baseline against which all other coffees are judged as either inferior or superior. I had just never been aware of this being the case. (I began my coffee-drinking ways with Gevalia Kaffe in Denmark, with what I suspect was a light-roast consisting of a blend of Colombian and other sources. All I knew was that I liked it with milk and sugar.)

I did one more test before making up my mind. For that, I turned to what's been the main go-to supplier of coffee review fodder for the past year: Bones Coffee!

BONES COFFEE COMPANY: COLOMBIA SINGLE ORIGIN

Bones Coffee's Colombia Single Origin came my via their World Tour Sample Pack. It became the third and final component to convincing me that Colombian coffee is the world's most basic coffee.

Why? Because the Colombia Single Origin blend tasted like the Coffee Beanery Colombian blend, which tasted like the no-name Colombian medium-roast beans when they were freshly ground and immediately brewed. When mixed with my standard reviewing additives of Unsweetened Almond Milk, sugar-free Italian Sweet Cream creamer--and even trying it with a few other variations, like Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk, Unsweetened Dark Chocolate Almond Milk, or black with Stevia added--the only reaction I had was, "Yum. This is tasty and completely unremarkable coffee. It's not bad, it's not amazing... it's just basic."

For a more complete evaluation of Bones' Colombia Single Origin, I refer you to the first review in this article. If I were to actually write this one up, I would be saying the exact same things.

THE OFFICIAL BASIC COFFEE

So... having consumed Colombian medium-roast coffee from three different roasteries, and with one of those three being brewed from the much-praised freshly ground beans, and having the exact same thought about all three, I have determined that coffee grown in Colombia is Basic Coffee.

If you're looking for a coffee that's relatively mild and free of any unexpected aftertastes or curious sub-flavors, this is the coffee for you. Colombian delivers the basic coffee experience with frills and no drawbacks. It's probably also the ideal foundation if you're the kind of person who likes creating their own flavored blends or other mad science experiments involving coffee.

(OR IS IT?)

I have declared Colombian coffee to be the world's Basic Coffee, and unofficial polling of followers on my social media accounts established that those who had an opinion didn't disagree with my nomination. That said, if I had begun by coffee-drinking ways with Vietnamese coffee, perhaps THAT would be "Basic Coffee" to me. We'll never know.

If you have any thoughts on what is or isn't Basic Coffee, go ahead and leave a comment below. I'd love to hear what more people think about my conclusions on this question that I don't think anyone even asked.

Juan Valdez and his burros laboring to bring the world tasty (if basic) coffee