I drink espresso so I'm biased towards certain beans. What you drink, how you drink, and ofc what your tastes are will drastically change what you like. I can tell you, if you don't use a burr grinder it can be hard to tell the difference between most high end beans, even for filter coffee, so there is more to it than just getting the world's best beans.
As far as high end beans go there are three primary categories:
Years ago before Blue Bottle got bought arguably their best tasting beans was their decaf. I think they wanted to show to the world decaf can taste good. I guess it wasn't making money, because the first thing that changed when they got bought was the decaf switched to something not very good tasting. Since then I've been slowly going through decaf espresso beans all over the world trying to find something as good. I've found good beans, but nothing as good.
I drink espresso so I'm biased towards certain beans. What you drink, how you drink, and ofc what your tastes are will drastically change what you like. I can tell you, if you don't use a burr grinder it can be hard to tell the difference between most high end beans, even for filter coffee, so there is more to it than just getting the world's best beans.
As far as high end beans go there are three primary categories:
- nutty
- chocolatey
- fruity
Often times nutty beans will be called chocolatey, because chocolate is considered a higher grade, but there is a difference. If you want to play with it, a fun goal is to find the best beans for your setup from each category. Chocolatey beans can be fun to explore with sweet 'n condensed milk sometimes as well, just for the fun of it. Nutty beans you usually can't taste unless you're using an espresso machine. It's typically subtle. Fruity is the kind of beans you'll typically find in a high end café in an urban area and can be quite good when brewing pour over. However, they can be high in acid, but a high end fruity bean will have low acid. Those are rare and tend to be reserved for espresso.
Years ago before Blue Bottle got bought arguably their best tasting beans was their decaf. I think they wanted to show to the world decaf can taste good. I guess it wasn't making money, because the first thing that changed when they got bought was the decaf switched to something not very good tasting. Since then I've been slowly going through decaf espresso beans all over the world trying to find something as good. I've found good beans, but nothing as good.