Coffee for a restaurant - how to choose it? This is a question that everyone faces at the beginning when they open a bar and want to offer the best to their customers. Coffee for a restaurant it must be carefully chosen because it represents the basic flavor that will keep customers coming back to the bar. It is not only important that the barista knows how to prepare coffee, but also that it is of good quality, tasty and properly roasted. This article tells you how to choose from thousands of options before you choose something blindly and risk losing valuable customers. Start with the best because your customers deserve it.
What are the key factors when choosing coffee for catering establishments?
The best coffee for a restaurant is the one that is selected according to the following criteria:
- coffee is a fruit and must always be fresh,
- coffee should be freshly roasted, as it loses its aroma and taste over time, like all plants,
- coffee flavor profile – each coffee has its own flavor profile,
- coffee blend or unique coffee - which one to choose,
- coffee production process - washed or natural coffee,
- find the right roastery and cafe that will suit your needs and taste,
- choose coffee that is grown ethically and sustainably.
Fresh coffee is the best coffee
The best coffee for a restaurant, for sure fresh coffee, which the supplier and grower regularly sends to the roaster. If you buy pre-roasted and ground coffee in a store, it will be extremely difficult to find out how old the coffee is, when it was roasted and when it was ground. There is no such information on the packaging. Coffee connoisseurs claim that over the centuries it has been proven that the best coffee is the one that is freshly roasted and ground on the fly. Tests have shown that coffee that is freshly roasted and ground is best within the first fourteen days, up to a maximum of three weeks. So it is recommended that you should use the ground coffee within three weeks. The same applies to flour, for example. Otherwise, you risk customers not liking the coffee.
But how will you know that the coffee is fresh and freshly roasted? The only way is to know the coffee importer. He will tell you which coffee he imported, when he got it and when he roasted it. But it is best to grind it yourself. Roasters usually do not grind high-quality coffee, because if they are baristas, which they usually are, they know that only freshly roasted and ground coffee has the best taste and gives the best flavor profile that a certain coffee is capable of. This kind of coffee is certainly the best coffee for catering establishments.
Our company allows us to roast and send your coffee once a week or by agreement, so that it is always freshly roasted, because we roast it every Saturday.
How to choose a coffee flavor profile for your customers, colleagues or yourself
The dilemma often arises whether to choose one coffee profile or coffee blend for use in a cafe, restaurant or business and at home. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, and it is best to choose according to your own taste and, of course, to try the coffee at the provider first. Coffee for a restaurant is often ordered as a specific flavor for a certain restaurant, so that the roaster makes you a coffee blend that has a special taste and is specific only to your restaurant.
Blended coffee for restaurants consists of several coffee profiles, which is done for you by an experienced expert in our company and ensures you a complex and balanced coffee taste.
Single origin coffee is from a single known geographic location, such as a farm or estate. This allows the coffee lover to appreciate the special shade of coffee provided by a particular farm. So if you drink black coffee, you will more easily detect and enjoy this subtlety of flavor without the milk masking it.
However, even just one type of coffee can work well with milk, and the coffee blend can also be black coffee.
Wet or naturally processed coffee, which is better?
When choosing coffee for a catering establishment, you will often come across a label on how the coffee is processed. This is usually referred to as the “wet process” or “natural process”. These two factors make the same type of coffee taste different.
Washed or 'wet processed' coffees remove the outer covering of the coffee cherry and place it in fermentation vessels. After fermentation, it is washed and dried. The result is often coffee with excellent clarity of flavor, while also having a bright, complex acidity. This is a very popular method with producers as the fermentation process is controlled and leads to fewer errors.
Natural coffee, on the other hand, has been dried in such a way that the cherry still remains on the bean and parchment throughout the drying process, which allows the pulp and sugar to be transferred to the coffee bean - the seed. The result is often a "fruit bomb" with a spectacular aroma and wine-like coffee profiles.
These are two of the more common coffee processing methods available, but there are many others.
Find the right coffee to suit your needs
It is not always easy to choose the right roasted coffee at your favorite coffee shop or roastery, as there is a lot of information available. The fastest and best solution is to consult with our expert, who will advise you which coffee is the best for a restaurant. Of course, he will ask you a lot of questions to find out exactly what suits you. He will then prepare some coffee samples for you to try and, based on this, decide on the profile of the coffee you will have in your cafe, restaurant or business and, of course, at home. Another solution is to attend ours a course in testing and recognizing coffee profiles.
Choose ethically and sustainably grown coffee
When buying coffee, many consumers want to make a conscious decision about what they will buy and from whom. Increasingly, your customers will want information about who produced the coffee they drink in your cafe and whether or not everyone in the coffee chain has been paid fairly for their work. Terms like sustainable and ethical are often used to describe coffee production, but what do they actually mean?
True sustainability means mutual growth and success throughout the supply chain. The Mariposa company provides guaranteed purchases of ethically sourced and traceable coffee. We pay fair prices directly to the farmers or producers of our coffee. That is why the price of such coffee is slightly higher than normal. In addition, we encourage the sale of coffee without packaging or with returnable packaging, thereby relieving the burden on our environment.
It's not just farmers who benefit from more ethical and sustainable coffee supply chains. Better wages and fairer treatment mean that producers can produce higher quality coffee. This means a better cup of coffee for the coffee lover, showing that everyone in the supply chain benefits. Mariposa coffee is certainly an excellent coffee for a restaurant. We invite you to try it out.
