Sal's beans are 84 kuai for 500 g

sorry, but considering coffee is grown in yunnan, i feel we're paying too much for it.

Full cup cafe on the third floor of wangfujin. Best coffee in any restaurant and they individually inspect each bean for quality. The managers definitely know what they are doing.

Wall Mart's 500g bag 50 rmb..

McDonald's coffee is ok, unless you get the bottom of the caraf / pot at 4 pm which was the 11 am leftovers...

has anyone tried roasting raw coffee beans at home?

@abcdabcd
I enjoy roasting at home. You can either use a small oven or can get cheap home toasters off of Taobao. It's quite a bit of fun to experiment!

thanks. where can you get raw coffee beans? how does the taste compare?

I have purchased raw coffee beans from Taobao because I wanted some from different countries and the volume I wanted was not high at all.

Regarding the taste, the rule of thumb is the fresher the better. Once you roast the coffee you will want to let it rest maybe 24 hours, but you will notice that the crema of coffee is even more pronounced within days of roasting. It's a great excitement to taste the coffee every day after you roast and not the changes.

You can probably find some more info about home roasting by googling it. Have fun and happy roasting!!!!

thanks a lot!

"sorry, but considering coffee is grown in yunnan, i feel we're paying too much for it."

Globalization has diminished this sort of logic. Most gourmet coffee is grown in developing nations (indonesia, tanzania, kenya, columbia, etc.—the only "first world" gourmet beans I can think of off the top of my head are from Kona in Hawaii), so the production costs for coffee grown in Yunnan would not necessarily be lower than elsewhere. Meanwhile, these days it's not necessarily more expensive to ship a good around the world than across a province. Indeed, shipping from Jakarta to Los Angeles on a boat may very well be cheaper than shipping from Baoshan to Kunming via a truck careening across Yunnan's mountainous landscape (not sure about this, but I wouldn't be surprised).

On another note, I believe robusta beans have gotten unfairly dragged through the mud by fancy-pants coffee shops and their fancy-pants clientele. I liken it to how after the film "Sideways" came out some Americans rushed out to buy Pinot Noir wine whilst turning their noses up at the Merlot that the main character derided—despite the fact that a good Merlot will certainly offer more pleasurable than a crap Pinot.

Arabica certainly tends to have more fruity notes, but robusta can be delightfully, um, robust, in a deep and chocolatey way.

There's a brand of Vietnamese robusta available in Kunming in a silver package that I think is quite good. I'll try to find out the brand name and post.