One Coffee Shop Scent Is A Red Flag Hiding In Plain Sight

Spend a little time in a coffee shop, and odds are you’ll leave smelling like you took the whole café home with you. That rich, fragrant scent is part of the appeal and coziness that comes with a morning spent at your favorite coffee spot. It’s how you can walk into a café on the complete opposite side of the world and know that, despite cultural differences or language barriers, everyone loves a good cup of java. It’s that very scent of good, old-fashioned coffee that lets you know you’re in the right spot, because if you walk into a café and smell anything other than roasting coffee beans, you’re walking into a major red flag.

At a coffee shop, you should smell coffee beans, not sweet vanilla or fruity strawberry — just coffee. If you’re getting a waft of warm caramel that reminds you of your favorite wax warmer, odds are you’re entering a café that uses flavored coffee beans. These flavored beans are extremely fragrant because they’re sprayed with flavored oils, since it’s impossible to create pumpkin spice-flavored beans naturally. Flavored coffee beans aren’t inherently evil, but they have a multitude of downsides, the top of which is that drinkers often describe a chemical-y, artificial taste compared to regular coffee beans. They’re typically lower-quality Arabica beans, so you’re unlikely to get a good cup of coffee if the spot uses them (if you need a reminder, here are four different types of coffee beans explained).

Read more: 12 Dishes To Avoid Ordering At An Irish Pub

Coffee shops should smell like coffee, not candy

Flavored coffee beans start the same way as regular beans, but after roasting, the beans take a synthetic oil bath in the flavor of choice. Often, so much oil is added to the beans that it masks the poor quality, natural taste, even if it does make the coffee shop smell like a candy factory. “Absolute nope for me,” said one Redditor on a thread discussing the pros and cons of flavored coffee beans, “I want to drink coffee, not General Mills [sic] cereal milk.” There’s nothing wrong with a little flavor, but at the end of the day, you want the café to smell like actual coffee because it’s a good indication of high-quality beans (such as these 15 store-bought coffee brands with the highest quality beans).

There’s also a difference between artificially flavored beans and naturally flavored beans. Naturally flavored beans can be incredibly diverse without the assistance of synthetic oils if the growers tend the beans alongside real foods and shift their fermentation process, such as Fulcrum Coffee’s beans, which give off the taste of dried fruit, basil, and dark chocolate, among 14 other coffee brands with unique flavors. There are also coffee shops that use plain coffee beans for brewing, but add flavors in other unique ways, such as syrups, spices, and/or sugars. As this Redditor said, “Flavoured as in supermarket style … hard no. Flavoured as in co-fermented with fruits and other stuff … I will still buy a bag.”

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Read the original article on Tasting Table.