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

Sunday Coffee Klatch with Tanzanian Peaberry

A friend and former coworker who's been enjoying my coffee reviews sent me a couple of bags of unground beans that were a total mystery to me: Tanzanian Peaberry!

But I ground it, I drank it, and here's my review of it!

TANZANIAN PEABERRY

As mentioned above, this drink was even more of a mystery than the Mystery Blend from Bones Coffee that I reviewed a few weeks back. I had no idea what to expect from it.

Looking at the beans, I assume this is a blonde or light roast. Given that this was not one of the many flavored coffees I've been drinking over the past several months, the only aroma that I got from the beans or the ground coffee, whether in the grinder, in the basket of my drip coffee maker, or from the pot as the coffee brewed, was... well, coffee.

But what ended up in my cup was so surprising that this might has well have been a flavored blend. 

I put this Tanzanian Peaberry blend through my now-standard steps of my review process, starting with drinking it black. This was an amazingly smooth coffee that seemed like might have been a flavored blend but isn't. The coffee flavor is there, but it's mellow and sweet, almost as if sweetener of some sort had added. There's also a lemony note that put me in mind of lemon cake. I liked this coffee so much black that I drank half a cup before I added anything to it.

Since this coffee already had a natural sweetness to it, I first tried adding Unsweetened Almond Milk. It blended nicely with the existing flavors. The sugar-free Italian Sweet Cream creamer seemed initially to make this drink too sweet, but when I tried another cup with my usual amount dialed back to just a dash, it worked as well as the Unsweetened Almond Milk. 

At room temperature, this coffee was best with the sugar-free Italian Sweet Cream creamer (when it was just a dash). It also works extremely well when iced, whether with the almond milk or the creamer, or just black. I think I actually prefer it when iced, but I'll have to try a few more pots before I can completely make up my mind, since I thought it was tasty in all modes. (Fortunately, I was gifted with an entire 12-oz. bag of beans, so I have plenty to "work" with!) 

So... what IS Tanzanian Peaberry Coffee?

If you're an unrefined clod like me who just likes to drink the magic bean juice whether it's from a blend made by a boutique roastery, from a bag off the shelf at a grocery store, or from the vending machine down the hall at work, you probably had no idea there even was such as thing as Tanzanian Peaberry coffee was before seeing this post. 

Well, as I discovered by doing a little half-assed research via the Google Machine, coffee is among Tanzania's top ten exports (along with precious metals and cashew nuts, another two of my favorite things). What coffee snobs generally think of as "Tanzanian coffee" is mostly grown on the lower slopes of Mount Meru and Mount Kilimanjaro, and it's considered inferior to the better-known other African export, Kenyan coffee. (I will have to order another bag of Kenyan coffee before I run out of my Tanzanian Peaberry so I can compare the two...)

As for the "peaberry", a coffee plant's fruit usually contains two beans, each of which is flat on one side and rounded on the other, basically forming two halves. However, in about 5% of fruits, there is only a single, round bean, and these are called peaberries. These malformed beans are typically sorted out and used in specially designated roasts, such as the flavor of the week here at Shades of Gray HQ, Tanzanian Peaberry. Since peaberries are rarer than the regular coffee beans, roasters can (and do) charge extra for coffee made exclusively from peaberries. Depending on who you ask, peaberry-based coffee is superior in taste to the regular stuff--some swear this this to be case while others are just as adamant that any perceived differences in taste are just marketing-induced delusions.

 What is the truth about Peaberry coffee? Is it tastier or just more expensive? I have no idea. All I know is that the Tanzanian Peaberry coffee I drank was GREAT, and I'll be grinding and drinking more of it in short order... with thanks to the generous friend who sent the bag o' beans my way!

Bones Coffee Mystery Flavor (Bone-us Review!)

I was running low on Bones Coffee flavors to write about, so I ordered a few more 4-oz. sample packs and another bag of their fantastic Costa Rica Medium Roast. They were running a special where the order was not only 20% off, but they would also throw in an extra sample pack of a "Mystery Flavor".

 

"She was as mysterious as the flavor of the coffee in her cup..."

(Bones has reportedly done this before, but since I only first became aware of them earlier this year, it's a new experience for me! But if it turns out I got the flavor of the Mystery Flavor correct, I will have to stop pouring coffee and begin decanting it instead.)

I already have reviews written to post on every Sunday through the end of February, but I am writing this special Bone-us review, so I can get it out there before Bones Coffee announces what the Mystery Flavor actually is, so we can all see if I was right or wrong when the time comes! (There will still be a coffee review tomorrow--the first review of Christmas-themed flavored coffees!)

BONES COFFEE COMPANY: MYSTERY FLAVOR

I approached the Mystery Flavor blend in the same way I do all the coffees I drink for review purposes: I brewed two pots from the sample pack, and I drank cups hot, room temperature, and over ice, with Unsweetened Almond Milk or sugar-free Italian Sweet Cream creamer added. I went in with no preconceived notions, other than there would be some sort of wonder-flavor here. Or, at least something other than just coffee.

When I opened the package, I could smell chocolate... and maybe something else. Cherries maybe? As the coffee brewed, it became clear that this was not one of those blends with an aroma so strong that it made it all the way from the kitchen to my office. A faint aroma of chocolate wafted from the pot, and from the mug as I poured the coffee, but it was only noticeable because I was looking for it.

Taste-wise, this is also one of Bones' more subtle flavors. The chocolate flavor is there, but it's only slightly stronger than the chocolate flavor of a grocery store flavored blend I'll be posting a review of a couple months from now (Signature Select Double-Dutch Chocolate Light Roast), although the chocolate aroma from the Bones coffee grounds was stronger as it brewed. In fact, when I sniffed the coffee in my mug, the strongest scent seemed to be that of cherries... but when I drank it, I tasted coffee with chocolate and a slightly fruity additional flavor that remained beyond my ability to make out clearly. I still think it's cherry, but I can't say for sure.

When I added sugar-free Italian Sweet Cream creamer to the mug, the chocolate and coffee flavors remained, but the fruit/cherry taste seemed to disappear. Interestingly, when I tried the blend with Unsweetened Almond Milk added, the fruity flavor remained and even seemed a bit enhanced: I am almost certain that it's cherry. 

At this point, I broke with my usual protocol and tried drinking the coffee with Unsweetened Almond Milk and Stevia added, just to see what would happen with the blend's mix of flavors. Other than liking it better without the addition of the sweetener--it became too sweet for me--not much changed flavor-wise.

When I drank the Mystery Flavor cold and over ice, it tasted like... well, it tasted like a solid, medium-roast coffee. When I drank it without anything but the ice cubes added, it just a cup of good coffee, with a very faint hint of something salty and sweet. That saltiness has been present in other Bones blends when tried cold, but here it was so faint so as to be barely noticable. When I tried the blend with first sugar-free Italian Sweet Cream creamer, and then with Unsweetened Almond Milk, the salty undertones vanished, and what I found myself drinking tasted not unlike the iced coffee I sometimes get at the Jack-in-the-Box drive-thru. (And this is not a dig at this Mystery Flavor blend... I like the iced coffee I get at Jack-in-the-Box.)

In the final analysis, I have to say that this is blend that works best hot or at room temperature, since over ice it just tastes like iced coffee with some type of sweetener added. It's a blend with subtle flavors that I recommend... even if I end up being wrong when I say that the Mystery Flavor is Chocolate-covered Cherries.

Mystery and Morning Coffee ...

UPDATE (1/10/2022)

Bone Coffee Company has revealed what this mystery flavor is: Pumpkin Pecan Praline. I was waaaay off. It must be time to trade the tastebuds in for a new set!