Are coffee beans or ground coffee better?
Whether you’re a connoisseur or a casual coffee drinker, whole or pre-ground beans is an important decision for your coffee experience. Hopefully, in this blog we’ll help you make that decision.
When we buy whole bean coffee, we’re buying roasted coffee beans in full. They’re still in bean form and we can’t make coffee with the whole beans. After purchase, we need to grind these beans up at home in order to use them for the brewing process.
Ground coffee is more popular than whole bean coffee, mainly because of its convenience. Ground coffee is essentially pre-ground by the roasters, so we don’t have to grind it ourselves at home, we just have to throw it in our brewer in the morning.
Expiration
Whole beans: Top of the tree when it comes to staying fresh for longer. If stored properly, they can last even longer.
Ground coffee: Spoils much quicker than beans. They can easily lose taste and aroma and develop unpleasant flavours.
Flavour
Whole beans: Jam packed with flavour
Ground coffee: Not as potent or robust as whole beans
Grind size
Whole beans: Grinding beans ourselves does give more flexibility and control, giving us more flexibility to brew a wider range of drinks.
Ground coffee: Although not as much control over the grind size, pre-ground coffee is typically very uniform and consistent in size.
Ease and accessibility
Whole beans: Grinding our own beans does take time and practice to get right as it’s a hands-on, manual process.
Ground coffee: Pre-ground coffee saves a lot of time and energy and since it’s so accessible, buying and brewing are much easier.
Price
Whole beans: More expensive due to roasters must pay more attention to the overall quality of the coffee beans that make it into the final packaging process.
Ground coffee: Tends to cost less because it is usually ground without such a heavy restriction to packaging only the highest-quality beans.
Find out more about what coffee we use in our hot drinks machines