Flavored Coffee

What are Flavored Coffees?

Today, coffee comes in many flavors: Irish crème, hazelnut, southern pecan, chocolate. All of these flavored coffees can be bought as whole beans at any local grocery store or coffee specialty store. The most popular coffee flavors have roots in tradition. Rather than being something newly invented for modern taste buds, they are variations on older themes.

Some might think that the addition of flavor to coffee is a recent invention . In fact, it dates back to when coffee began to be drunk as a beverage. The Arabs used to add spices to coffee while they brewed it. And Europeans of the seventeenth century, in their love of all things chocolate, combined chocolate with coffee.

 There are long traditions of adding alcohol to coffee. This notion led to the most popular of coffee flavors: hazelnut. The association of hazelnut with coffee came about from the mixing of Frangelico, a traditional Italian hazelnut-flavored liqueur, with coffee. Irish coffee, the mixing of Irish whiskey with coffee, is most likely where Irish crème comes from.

The Chemistry of Flavored Coffees

Rather than adding flavors to coffee, coffee flavors are actually added to the bean itself. The result is a much stronger flavor.

Modern chemistry makes this possible. The process, however, is quite complicated to a non-chemist. Coffee companies work with chemists who specially make flavors that will “stick” well to coffee. Most “natural” flavors that are used in soda and other flavored drinks are too weak to stay with coffee. A chemist must, therefore, make a flavor that is strong enough to stay on a coffee bean.

The Flavored Coffee Controversy: The Selling Aspect

Some coffee roasters refuse to make coffee with flavored beans for a variety of reasons, including:

bad taste,
stronger smell than regular coffee, and
ruining the grinders at the store.

The popularity of flavorful coffee, however, makes it impossible for most producers not to sell  it. Large chain grocery stores simply demand it.

The Flavored Coffee Controversy: The Drinking Aspect

Serious coffee drinkers are a little torn over the taste of flavored coffee. Adding flavor to coffee beans produces a slight metallic aftertaste. Some can tell quite easily, while others can barely distinguish it. What a good flavored coffee gives you in immediate taste, it takes away in aftertaste. To some people it’s a fair trade-off. Some people like the added flavors of coffee, others don’t, and for those caught in the middle, there are always flavored creams.