Stay Away From Badly Roasted Coffee Beans - They Can Even Be Kopi Luwak

This is a pop-up post I had to write on tasting some samples from beans that one of my friends bought during his holiday in Bali, Indonesia. I tried the famous Kopi Luwak (beans output from a civet's digestive system) several times before, both from its touristic ground packages as well as from well preserved and freshly roasted whole beans that I found in trustworthy coffee suppliers such as Algerian Coffee Shop in London. They are naturally not so cheap beans and for me what I got from Algerian Coffee Shop are among the best coffee beans I have ever tasted. 

Well, what you see from the photo are basically two samples of bad coffee. The first row is Kopi Luwak and the second row is the same beans but the fermentation process is accomplished outside. Although they both are sold with a very high price -mostly as a touristic attraction- especially Kopi Luwak beans seem to be roasted so unsuccessfully that the difference between colours of different pieces are like day and night. Some of them are almost burnt down to coal whereas some are close to a light roasted profile. Besides, there are beans who are carrying two colours together on them. I must confess that these are the worst coffee beans I have ever seen all around the world and they are dramatically among the most expensive ones (1$/1gr). The other package -even it is not as obvious as the previous one- contains similar differences in roast profile as well as an interesting unbalance between sizes and shapes of the beans - i.e. some of the pieces are not like coffee beans. 

First of all, such unbalanced profiles both in colours and shapes in a single origin coffee certainly results in an unbalanced taste as far as I have experienced myself lots of times. For the cases like in the first row, you even can not drink the extract. For the more innocent cases like in the second row, you may have a chance to hide the mistakes by some over extract filter coffee or espresso drink for an ordinary customer. If the coffee is a blend, the size differences are natural and if it is a blend after roast (rare-such in Cafe Melange) the colour differences are natural too. But the colour should be consistent in a single bean. 

Therefore, what I am trying to say, stay away from such beans and do not buy coffee just as a victim of a touristic attraction or a commercial act. Try to sample and taste or at least see and smell. If you see things like those in this photo or smell an obvious papery taste, do not care what the coffee type is.