Luxury Espresso Beans

[BayPros]

I have been really enjoying my Breville Espresso Machine and want to branch out and splurge on some really high end beans for special occasions.

What are some good choices?
Maybe some rare/exotic beans?
We're talking about some luxuriously, fancy, high end beans here...
You know, the good stuff.

 

[peterjschmidt]

If you're currently sourcing your espresso beans from a reputable, experienced roaster, that's as high end/luxury as you'll get.

 

[slurp]

I really like the Koffee Kult Dark Roast for espresso. You may want to try some of those.

 

[BayPros]

I went down to my local barista and talked to the owners a bit about this topic...
They basically explained to me about Roasting (Dark, medium, light).
They compared it to sauteing onions.

If you saute them heavily they caramelize and turn into sugar, which tastes good, but you lose most of the onion flavor.
This is Dark roast, which most people like.

If you saute them a bit less, they don't fully caramelize and you retain some of the onion flavor, which most real onion lovers want to taste.
Especially when tasting different types of onions from around the world.

Light roast is retaining even more of the onion (or coffee bean) varietal flavor, but the masses don't tend to have the palate or want to taste the onion/bean so much.

That explanation, might be a bit off, but it made sense when explained this way.

So basically, they said if you really want to impress someone, then go get a decent roaster yourself.
Find a coffee bean importer and purchase some green coffee beans imported form different regions. This is where you can spend more for higher end beans (Blue Mountain, they suggested).
Then experiment with roasting and the different levels (cracks) of achieving different flavors.
Finding the perfect combo here is where you can achieve perfection, at least to your palate and taste range.

This, I guess was the answer I was looking for. Not the easy one, but probably the most accurate.
To be honest I was just looking for the fancy beans like the ones you hear about being eaten by elephants/bats/monkeys and pooped out to create a crazy good bean (probably hype only).
For you experts out there, does the above explanation ring true?

 

[expat]

Before you buy Blue Mountain and burn it up, learn to roast on some still very good, but less expensive beans. Or just learn to roast with some cheap Brazil and then go forward step-by-step. (Personal opinion - Blue Mountain is good coffee, but it ain't worth $50/kg. There's, in my mind, lots of much better coffees at far less the price. But hey, great marketing brings great profit margins!)

 

[SimoneBarista]

Hi, I used to buy some coffee from this italian artisanal roastery "Mokaflor", they have a shop online where they sell also green beans in small
batches of 250gr. My favorite one is the Santo Domingo Barahona not to expensive but very sweet and balanced.

If you want to roast it like I do with my Gene Cafe, for espresso stop it at he end of the first crack!!

Simone