Flavored Coffee

Have you ever entered a fancy cafe to be surrounded by groups of well-dressed coffee drinkers raving about the great taste of an espresso or a Turkish coffee while mocking the simple tastes of an instant coffee?  These people are true coffee lovers and appreciate everything about the flavor of gourmet coffee beans.  They're the type of people that chide people for adding sugar or cream to their coffee as they view this as a perversion.  More importantly, they're the type of people that you need to ignore if all that you want is to sit down and enjoy a nice cup of flavored coffee in peace.

While a lot of these articles regarding coffee are designed to appease the needs of intense coffee lovers, you should never forget that coffee is just a drink.  It is designed to taste good and make you feel something after you had drank it.  Therefore, if you don't like drinking an espresso, just don't drink one to impress those around you.  Order a vanilla hazelnut coffee instead and enjoy the great taste of flavored coffee!

The idea of adding some extra flavor to coffee is almost as old as coffee itself!  The Arabs added spices like cinnamon to their coffees while in other parts of the Middle East, coffee drinkers added such things as: cardamom, clove, nutmeg, black pepper, allspice, and ground nuts to their coffee for that extra something.  As coffee experimentation continued throughout the centuries, other things were added to the coffee for extra flavor.  Things such as citrus peels, spirits, and chocolate were just some of the more popular coffee flavoring supplements.

It still happens today.  Go to any coffee shop in America and wait for 10 minutes and you'll see one of the latest methods of coffee flavoring.  That's because coffee was introduced in the Western world with its flavoring of cream and sugar.  The addition of these items has become so commonplace that we almost forget that these are examples of coffee flavoring.

However, we are witnessing the evolution of coffee flavoring.  While previous coffee flavoring relied on the addition of natural products, today flavored coffee utilizes chemical solvents that mimic natural flavorings.  The reason behind this is that this process allows for flavored coffee to be properly tweaked to satisfy the taste buds of coffee lovers everywhere.  Additionally, it is now possible to add these chemical solvents during the important coffee bean roasting process, which creates a more consistent flavor.  The way that flavored coffees acquire their flavor is by adding chemical solvents that mimic natural flavorings to the whole coffee bean while the coffee bean is still warm from roasting.

The most popular type of flavoring groups that are added to coffee beans fall under these categories:

• Vanilla-based flavors
• Chocolate-based flavors
• Fruit-based flavors
• Spice-based flavors