How to Choose the Best Coffee Pods

To choose the best coffee pods, you must first have a good understanding of your personal coffee preferences, which involves having tasted a good variety of different espressos and knowing the basics of coffee as a raw material.

The following summary will not cover coffee aromaticity but will be limited to describing the main concepts necessary to make an informed choice, focusing more on the taste aspect, which is the most immediate and perceptible characteristic.

The coffee plants used to produce the mainly commercialized beans are Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora (better known as robusta).

Arabica beans typically give coffee a taste tending towards acidic or sweet. Regarding the espresso crema, they provide a lower volume of crema compared to robusta but with greater stability, and the bubbles that make up the crema are also finer. (2)

Robusta beans, on the contrary, give espresso a typically bitter taste. The resulting crema from extraction is more voluminous and less stable compared to arabica, with coarser bubbles. (2)

Coffee, at the beginning of its life, is a bean enclosed within a fruit called a drupe. Each drupe contains two green coffee beans inside. Depending on the processing method used to extract the beans from the fruit, different tastes will be perceptible in the cup. There are many known pulping methods, but the most commonly used are undoubtedly the natural, washed, and semi-washed methods.

The natural method gives more sweetness and bitterness in the cup but less acidity, more body, and when present, a greater sensation of astringency. (3)

The washed method, on the contrary, brings more acidity but less bitterness and sweetness, with reduced body and any astringency. (3)

Finally, the semi-natural method presents acidity, bitterness, and sweetness halfway between the two methods just seen, although these tastes are still closer to a natural method. Body and astringency are also between the two methods described above.

When choosing the best coffee pods, attention must also be paid to the places of origin of the coffees that make up the chosen blend. By knowing them, it is possible to expect certain tastes typical of the country of origin.

The last step before grinding and the subsequent creation of coffee pods is roasting. A darker roast will lead to a predominantly bitter taste in the cup, while a lighter roast will lead to a more acidic taste. (4) At this stage, the aim is usually to obtain a perfect balance between acidity, bitterness, and sweetness from the raw material.

The people coffee pods, for example, are composed of Brazil Santos (arabica – natural), Ethiopia Sidamo (arabica – washed), Colombia Supremo (arabica – washed) and India Parchment (robusta – washed) with a medium roast. This composition gives an espresso with a full body, balanced taste, and aromas of bitter cocoa, cardamom, and spices.

The Importance of the Espresso Machine

The characteristics of the coffee machine used play a fundamental role in the extraction of coffee pods. This influences the taste, crema, and in general, the consumer’s perception parameters (1). It is obvious, consequently, to derive that to obtain an excellent espresso, it is necessary on one hand to use the best coffee pods, and on the other hand to use a machine capable of bringing the desired organoleptic characteristics to the cup.

Ascaso Basic, Device Style Pd 1, Ascaso Dream and Aroma Plus Basic are the coffee machines, with different characteristics depending on the needs, that we have chosen for the best extraction of 7Gr branded coffee pods.

How to Prepare an Excellent Coffee Starting from the Best Coffee Pods

Few people know that the moment of coffee extraction is one of the crucial moments for creating the taste that will be perceived in the cup. While it’s true that with the use of coffee pods, the possibility of making a mistake in extraction is greatly reduced, it’s also true that there is less room for maneuver in modifying the quantity and type of substances that move from the ground coffee to the cup, to obtain a coffee that is pleasing to the palate.

It’s not enough to have the best coffee pods, you also need to know how to bring out the best in them.

In the extraction of coffee pods, the parameter that can be adjusted to modify the perceived taste is the brewing time (the time that elapses from when the coffee machine’s brewing button is pressed until the extraction is stopped), directly linked to the weight of the extracted espresso coffee.

The time (and related weight) of extraction to obtain a coffee that is as balanced as possible varies depending on numerous factors, including the pods and coffee machine used, water temperature, machine pressure, and so on.

For example, using the time 100% arabica coffee pods from 7Gr and the Aroma Plus Basic coffee machine with 0 filters, with 18 seconds of extraction, it’s possible to sip a balanced coffee.

If you prefer a more bitter but less full-bodied coffee, you would simply increase the brewing time (the longer the time, the greater the bitterness and the less the body perceived). Conversely, by decreasing the extraction time, you will obtain a less bitter coffee tending towards acidity but with more body (the shorter the extraction time, the greater the acidity and body but less bitterness).

The Importance of the Production Date for the Best Coffee Pods

Changes in the quality of coffee pods begin to occur from the moment of harvest and start to accentuate from the end of roasting.

These gradual changes are mainly perceived as “stale,” that is, sweet but unpleasant flavors and aromas, resulting from the loss of many volatile compounds. In addition to volatile depletion, quality losses also derive from the degradation of coffee bean lipids through lipolysis and oxidation. (5)

For the preparation of espresso and coffee pods, the grinding process is of crucial importance, that is, the process that takes coffee beans from being whole to being reduced to powder. However, grinding is also a crucial factor in the deterioration of coffee quality.

Grinding exposes a larger surface area of coffee to the air compared to keeping the bean whole, thus allowing for faster loss of volatile coffee substances and increased oxidative reactions caused by direct contact with oxygen. (5) Moreover, time leads to a strong loss of carbon dioxide (6), essential for the formation of crema in espresso.

Ground coffee beans consequently have a faster deterioration compared to whole beans, which is why pods are packaged in a protective atmosphere using an inert gas.

The use of inert gas does not stop the deterioration reactions but simply slows them down.

It should be known that coffee does not have a true expiration date but what is defined as a “minimum durability date,” that is, the date until which the product retains its specific properties under appropriate storage conditions (7). Beyond this date, the company no longer ensures the declared organoleptic and nutritional properties, although the microbiological risk after this date is irrelevant.

The minimum durability date remains valid if the product is properly stored. Otherwise, the alteration processes can be significantly accelerated and the food may become “spoiled” even much earlier than expected.

Although ground coffee in pods usually has a minimum durability date of 12-24 months from production, the loss of organoleptic properties is a gradual and constant process throughout the duration of storage.

Experiments have shown that ground coffee, stored in packages without a protective atmosphere, has an average duration of 1 month before being considered “unacceptable.” In the presence of a protective atmosphere, however, the maximum storage time detected was 6-8 months. (6) It should be emphasized that it is not easy to declare an objectively optimal shelf life when it must be indicated based on a purely organoleptic opinion (lacking a real microbiological risk beyond the minimum durability date in the case of coffee). In most studies, shelf life is indicated with a reasonable rejection risk (time within which 50% of consumers reject the food), sometimes a more prudent 25% consumer rejection has been suggested.

What is certain is that the further away from the production date of the coffee pod, the more altered the product will be when tasted.

As we have understood, to have an excellent espresso from the best coffee pods, you must be very careful about the production date.

Best Coffee Pods and Machine Cleaning

Cleaning the machine is a fundamental step to be able to obtain a good espresso starting from the best coffee pods.

Incorrect cleaning inevitably leads to a negative modification of the taste of the prepared beverage. Would you ever cook high-quality food with dirty pans? The same applies to coffee.

This video presents the cleaning methods for the coffee pod machine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1- Muñoz L. et al. (2018). Physicochemical parameters and consumer acceptance in espresso and american coffee pods.
2- Xiuju W., Loong-Tak L., Siming T., Yucheng F. , Investigation of the factors that affect the volume and stability of espresso crema. Frin (2018)
3- Yoo Mei Choi and Hye Hyun Yoon. Sensory Characteristics of Espresso Coffee According to Green Coffee Processing
4- Bhumiratana N. et al. (2019). Coffee Drinking and Emotions: Are There Key Sensory Drivers for Emotions?
5- Carolyn F. Ross et al. Effect of storage conditions on the sensory quality of ground Arabica coffee
6- Nicoli M., Calligaris, S., Manzocco, L. (2009). ShelfLife Testing of Coffee and Related Products: Uncertainties, Pitfalls, and Perspectives. Food Engineering Reviews.
7- REGULATION (EU) No 1169/2011 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 25 October 2011