How do they add flavors to coffee beans?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “how do they flavor coffee beans“
How do they add flavors to coffee beans?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “how do they flavor coffee beans“
I am NOT a fan of any flavored coffee. However, I am a big fan of profitability. So in the early 90’s I designed and added a flavored coffee production area to my business. The 2 ways we flavored the coffee was either a liquid/concentrate or a flavored powder depending on the process. Remember this was 1991. I will say not much has changed since I purchased my first cement mixer and plastic tubs(that fit inside the mixer) to flavor whole bean coffee. I am sure everyone is impressed reading this incredibly “Hi Tech” method of flavoring coffee. It’s true however.
First, I will say this:
The ONLY reason to ever add a flavor to a coffee bean is because that coffee bean is inherently awful to begin with (maybe mediocre at best) and needs its native flavor covered up.
NO ONE starts with truly excellent beans and adds flavors to them. Really good beans do not NEED anything added to them. They already have over 800 flavor elements (some sources put it at around 1000) in them if properly roasted—that’s roughly double the flavoring elements of good wine (at a little over 500 such flavor elements) and more than quadruple over a good whiskey.
But, that was not the question.
To add flavors to coffee beans, the producer roasts the coffee, then, in a mixing bin, adds food grade flavored oils to the beans and gives them a light coat of the flavored oil. That oil is them moved through the grounds and into your cup when you brew the coffee.
Simple.
So, you start with an inferior quality batch of beans, usually blended from a variety of “commercial grade” (that usually means “one step above throwing them out due to defects) beans from a variety of sources. You then roast them past the point where you can detect the flaws in the beans. Then you roll the beans in an artificially-flavored light oil to coat them…and sell them as a “specialty product,” at prices often higher than the better, unflavored Coffee sitting next to it on the shelf.
It is a brilliant marketing scheme.
A MUCH better way to flavor your coffee is to start with better coffee that has been properly blended and roasted to taste like pretty good coffee on its own, then add one of several good quality flavor syrups available in the market. In this way you can control the level (intensity) of the added flavor as well as have a larger selection of flavors and have flavors that taste less “chemical.”
If you buy whole beans and grind your coffee just before brewing (which you should do if freshness & flavor is a concern), adding flavors to the coffee after brewing will also prevent you from essentially ruining your grinder by grinding those flavor oil-coated beans.
To flavor beans they use a concentrated oil that has the specific flavor. It is very strong stuff, and expensive, a little goes a long way. Most good purveyors of quality beans/beverages do not offer flavored beans. Because it is capable of contaminating equipment with the flavor and almost impossible to get rid of.
In the world of coffee, it is commonly believed that those who like flavored coffee do not like coffee.
If by “they” you mean Rick Molinari of Molinari Private Reserve, and John Weever of Wild Card Roasters, then the answer is that they infuse wine into their coffee beans. Here’s the short version. The coffee beans “are soaked in a “special house made red” wine – “absorbing the wine’s nose and history” – and then dried and small-batch roasted by hand.” This Is Not a Drill: Wine-Infused Coffee Exists