For scores of people, a successful day begins with a delicious cup of coffee.
How coffee is preferred and prepared varies from person to person, of course, with an abundance of options available.
Some prefer the beverage hot during the colder months and iced through warmer months, while others desire an iced brew throughout the year.
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Certain coffee consumers adopt the option of black coffee so that they can really enjoy all the natural aromas of the bean, while others crave additional pops of flavor, such as french vanilla, hazelnut, caramel or mocha in their cup of Joe.
However you enjoy your coffee, the beans used to brew your beverage went a long way before reaching your cup.
“Bachelor” alum Ben Higgins is co-owner of Generous Coffee. The specialty-grade coffee company donates 100% of its proceeds to nonprofits. (Leon Bennett/WireImage)
After his stint on “The Bachelor,” Ben Higgins was on the hunt for his next adventure, and he landed on Generous Coffee after seeing firsthand how coffee is harvested at a farm in Honduras.
The company — he serves as its co-owner — donates 100% of its profits to nonprofits that fight injustice happening domestically and internationally.
Fox News Digital spoke with Higgins and Generous head coffee roaster Joel Squires about all things coffee — and the detailed process it takes to achieve the perfect cup.
- It all starts with a seed
- Here’s how the roasting process works
- What about caffeine?
- Tips for the perfect cup
- Baking with beans
1. It all starts with a seed
Coffee beans go through a long and tedious process before they’re eventually brewed in your home or at your local café.
This lengthy process commences with a single bean that is picked by hand.
“A lot of people don’t think about coffee this way. It’s a crop,” Squires, head coffee roaster at Generous Coffee, which is based in Warsaw, Indiana, told Fox News Digital.
“So weather, where it’s grown, everything like that has an effect on how the coffee will come out year to year.”
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“Just like apples, you have beans that are different sizes, they’re different colors, they naturally have different flavor profiles to them,” Squires continued.
“Beyond that, there are different ways to process the coffee. Coffee itself is a seed to a cherry. So, depending on how the fruit is removed from the seed can impact the flavor of the coffees that you get,” the roaster added.
Coffee beans go a long way before being brewed for a morning cup. (Atomo Coffee/Handout via REUTERS)
2. Here’s how the roasting process works
The roasting process of coffee beans is a quick but complex one that involves different sources of heat and types of energy.
“With coffee, you have to manage the heat from the airflow. You have a bunch of kinetic energy being built by the tumbling process within the roaster and then your flame that’s underneath it as well. So really, you’re cooking with three different types of energy at once, direct convection and kinetic,” Squires said.
“You’re taking a product that’s room temperature. If it’s stored properly, it should be around 70 degrees, and your finished product is coming out at anywhere from 405 degrees to 430 for us. Some roasters go even further than that. But you’re doing that all within a 12-minute process. So it’s just very quick, and small changes can make a big difference on it,” Squires further elaborated.
3. What about caffeine?
When it comes to the amount of caffeine in a cup of Joe, there really isn’t too much in the roasting process that is going to have an impact.
Rather, it’s the type of coffee, Robusta or Arabica, that will have the greatest impact on caffeine content.
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“Arabica is going to be more of your specialty coffees and Arabica tends to be grown at a higher altitude. Robusta’s kind of a low-elevation coffee plant. Caffeine is an insecticide in the plant, so the lower the elevation, the chances are that it’s going to have a bit higher caffeine content,” Squires said.
Joel Squires, head roaster for Generous Coffee, based in Indiana, shared with Fox News Digital that Robusta beans have a higher caffeine content than Arabica. (iStock)
“The Robusta actually has quite a bit more than Arabica beans would. But beyond that, there’s not going to be a whole lot of difference bean to bean caffeine content wise. Really, there’s nothing that you can do in the roasting process that will change the caffeine content when it comes out of the roaster either,” Squires said.
“People in the U.S. especially love that really dark, really kind of bitter — that punch-in-the-face kind of flavor — and people in the U.S. oftentimes relate the darker of the coffee’s to the more caffeine,” Higgins said.
“That’s not true at all. You can get a really beautiful, perfect cup of coffee that’s light roasted, so you can taste the origins of the beans. You can taste the intricacies of where these beans are grown. You can get a full flavor profile from a light roasted coffee,” he continued.
4. Tips for the perfect cup
Achieving what would be a considered a perfect cup of coffee is going to differ depending on one’s preferences.
That said, there are important contributing factors to reaching a flavorful cup, and it really all begins with where the beans are coming from and how they are being roasted.
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“I think when you look at a perfect cup of coffee, you really got to go to the beginning, and you got to find a roaster who does not over burn the coffee,” Higgins said.
“You want to taste the beans that these producers picked by their own hands and carried up a mountainside, dried out in their front yards. That’s, I think, the perfect cup of coffee,” noted Higgins.
Achieving a perfect cup of coffee has a lot to do with how the beans were processed. (iStock)
You’ll also want to make sure you are getting specialty-grade coffee, which is the highest quality of coffee available.
5. Baking with beans
While coffee is traditionally enjoyed in beverage form, there are several other ways to incorporate those strong flavors into your daily life.
One of those is through baking.
Higgins said he enjoys sprinkling powered coffee grounds on Greek yogurt and also uses grounds as an ingredient in goods like muffins and cakes.
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The “Bachelor” alum’s biggest tip for baking with coffee is to make sure it’s ground as much as possible for the best result.
He also shared the importance of pairing grounds with other flavors that compliment the coffee aroma.
“Coffee obviously has a very unique flavor, and so one thing I would do when I bake with coffee grounds is to make sure it’s grounded as an espresso grind. So a very fine grind. You want it to be really ground, almost like a powdered form,” Higgins said.
Coffee grounds can be an interesting and select ingredient in baked goods such as muffins and cakes. (iStock)
“Coffee and chocolate, they go together really well — and when you get that all in one bite, it’s a beautiful explosion of flavor,” he added.
When it comes to coffee, trying new ideas and experimenting with new flavors beyond the classic cup can be fun.
There are many different recipes that can incorporate touches of coffee flavor — and become favorites for years to come.
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