Male: Hello, everyone welcome back to legourmet.tv so today we’re with Derrick at the merchants of Green Coffee in Toronto and that Derrick’s going to lead us through this idea of buying green beans and roasting at home.
Derrick: Yes.
Male: So tell us a little bit about buying green beans which we’ll be looking for and what’s out there available to everybody.
Derrick: Okay, well the first of all—first part of green bean is that really not many people have seen coffee that is unroasted. This is the second most popular beverage next to top water and green beans just aren’t available in every market but you can find them, you just have to do a little looking. Of course we’re set up to make that were to make sort of easier for you to find them but essentially the green coffee beans are the seed that are inside a cherry that grows on a coffee tree.
Male: Okay.
Derrick: And that coffee tree produces approximately one pound of coffee per year and what with after the coffee seeds have been removed from the actual cherry the coffee is dried and you left with the green bean.
Male: That seems like an amazing number to me, one pound per year.
Derrick: Yes.
Male: From one tree.
Derrick: From one tree.
Male: That does not seem like a whole lot of coffee?
Derrick: No and that’s what we like to educate on is that there‘s a lot of work its done by the growers of coffee that’s not necessarily recognize by the consumer today.
Male: Okay.
Derrick: And so we like to make sure that people sort of know the numbers and they know a pound produces approximately 50 cups of coffee depending on how strong you drink it. There are 10 billion pounds of coffee grown every year so that means 10 billion trees.
Male: That’s a mind boggling numbers.
Derrick: It is. So the green bean, the green bean is simply unroasted coffee. Its green in color called the green bean. It has a very long shelf life and that’s one of the key things we like consumers to know about this that green coffee will last for up to years but roasted coffee is not necessarily going to last as long as you might believe.
Male: So you can store green coffee, does the flavor change overtime in the green coffee?
Derrick: It does and some coffees age better than others and with simple example would be Sumatra coffee which is an Indonesian coffee little heavier body. That coffee can be age for up to ten years and then sold as an age coffee.
Male: Really?
Derrick: But most of the coffee the consumers’ coming to contact with is usually between says one and two years old. Maybe three years max but essentially if stored in the right conditions coffee has a very long self life somewhere between one and ten years as green beans.
Male: As a green bean. And then what happens once you roast it?
Derrick: Well we talk about it loses that fresh flavor in such a short time and that short time is only five days.
Male: Five days.
Derrick: Five days.
Male: Five days from roasting until you’ve—
Derrick: You’ve lost the freshness. The idea of what freshness is, so it’s very, very simple. We talk about coffee being like fine wine. It gets its flavor from most region but essentially this is the same tree grown around the world in a different parts of the world that’s picking up different flavors and the way its process then handle. Then stored in ship really sort to create the sort of the finish product but the green beans there are the part that’s more like the wine and once it becomes a roasted product it kind of switches over and becomes more like fresh bread.
Male: Okay.
Derrick: And we talk about fresh bread is being fresh for only a few short days that taste of bread out of the oven really only last for a few days and some cases only hours and coffee once its roasted if really only fresh for about that same amount of time.
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