Flavoring Coffee Beans

By Jeff Lund
@alaskalund


Flavored coffee always confused me. Not when you put flavoring in coffee, but when people talked about a “nutty taste” I thought, “huh?”

How is flavored coffee made?

The most basic way is adding spices to the beans still warm from the mixer or you can simply add flavoring to a bowl of beans. There is a little debate about the temperature of the beans while adding flavoring. Adding while the beans are hot will dissipate the flavor thanks to the heat say some.
But before you just go pouring your own flavoring on beans you bought, there’s plenty to know about how coffee beans are roasted, so you can then determine what kind of flavor matches best. There are 5 common roasts, varying from medium brown beans to nearly black beans that make a dark, authoritative coffee. 

The door swings both ways when it comes to flavoring. I have never experienced this, but according to MrCoffee.com, “Coffee absorbs many of the odors that fill the space around it. Many people find that storing coffee in the refrigerator gives their brew the unwanted addition of tasting like whatever else they were stored with.”

While I love salmon, I can’t imagine coffee absorbing the flavor of thawing fish would be very kind to the palate. But I don’t keep my coffee in the fridge.

Where are you supposed to store coffee? That can depend. If you are hoarding it, then it can go in the freezer, but otherwise should be shelved on a pantry shelf “away from light, heat and moisture.”

So have at it this Holiday season, or let the professionals do their job. Either way, make sure you post that Mug of the Day.

Jeff Lund is a freelance writer and high school English teacher in Ketchikan, Alaska.

His podcast The Mediocre Alaskan is available on iTunes.