Myth 1: Anyone can roast coffee – the little roaster down the street is just as good.
In fact, professional roasting requires very extensive investments in high-tech roasters, coffee analyzers, cleaning machines, expert quality control staff and packaging machines. Only roasters who entirely understand the science of coffee roasting can treat it as an art.

Myth 2: All coffee packaging is the same. If it’s sealed, coffee will last forever.
In fact, coffee will keep its freshness in professional packaging for several months. Once opened, the coffee should be consumed very quickly. Julius Meinl flushes out any residual oxygen in all our packaging. We also put ground coffee in a vacuum to further slow down the oxidization process. Many smaller roasting operations do not have high-tech packaging facilities that create an oxygen-less atmosphere within the package which guarantees fresh coffee.

Myth 3: Beans are beans.
In fact, coffee beans must be rigorously inspected to ensure high quality. At Julius Meinl, each and every bean is inspected - not a single bean leaves our roasting plant without inspection. In previous decades, a vast team of inspectors would stand over the beans and sort them by color, size, and shape. Only beans conforming with strict quality criteria would be passed on. Today we use more sophisticated methods to guarantee unrivaled product quality. For instance, to remove every conceivable impurity we clean our coffee not once but THREE times using a variety of techniques. Each batch of coffee is supervised by the senior roast master. Only when the coffee roast is exactly perfect is the batch released to the maturity tanks. After roasting, the coffee beans pass through an analyzer that looks at each individual bean to make sure it fits our strict quality criteria. If the bean is in perfect condition, it continues on to a storage tank. If not, a puff of air separates the bean from the rest and it is ultimately discarded.

Myth 4: Coffee should be packaged as soon as it is roasted.
In fact, some of the chemical processes triggered by roasting continue after the bean has left the roaster. Roasted coffee must rest before being passed on to the packaging machines, or the beans would release chemicals inside the package which would cause oxidization and premature aging. For most blends, the resting process takes several hours and depends on the coffee variety, roast, humidity, temperature and a number of other factors.

Myth 5: Ground coffee is ground coffee.
In fact, ground coffee varies more in quality than most customers care to know. Did you know that most roasters use their ground coffee packs to dispose of sub-quality coffee and coffee peal? During the roasting process, the coffee bean sheds some layers of peal. This skin’s taste and aroma is quite similar to saw dust. As this peal accounts for around 5% of coffee weight, more and more roasters are including this wood-like substance in their ground coffee, hoping their customers never find out and won’t know the difference. Never in Meinl coffee! Even though many of our competitors include up to 30% impurities in their coffee (the legal limit), all our ground coffee is 100% pure coffee. No exceptions. We take great pride in pre-grinding our coffee for the benefit of our customers. We constantly analyze the grind to ensure the optimal coffee experience for our customers. Fluctuations in the grind can lead to either underextracted coffee, overextracted coffee, or even equipment malfunction. To ensure unrivalled quality we continuously monitor our high-tech grinders and thoroughly inspect the finished product.

Julius Meinl guarantees the finest quality in service, equipment and coffee itself.
Contact one of our specialists today for more information about our Coffee Service program.