Our local Trader Joe's has a sample counter (like all of them I suspect) and they always have coffee for sampling. Some I do not try- Like the Winter Spice that had cloves in it (ughhh), or any other such adulterated coffee. Today they had a pot of Indian Peaberry, but the can had no other identification on it. They had a bowl of beans out as a visual sample, so I bravely ate two beans... A nice roast with no oil showing. The beans were quite delicious as was the coffee. The folks there at the sample counter all know me as I have left my business card and have spoken to them many times about their coffees. If you get to your local store try a can- I think it was was about $8 for 13 or 15 ounces of whole, roasted beans. I didn't get any as I have a store of about 25 pounds of green or more to go through yet before it turns on me... literally and figuratively..

Randy G. wrote: with no oil showing.

Which means that the beans are either too fresh to start showing oil, or so old that all the oil had evaporated. Or, possibly (they do all kinds of things to produce at grocery stores...) they've 'polished' the beans to remove the oil?
Hey, they wax the damned fruit and cucumbers! It could happen.

If I had to bet, I'd put my money on 'too old to have any oil left on them'. D'jask'em what the roast date was?

Tschibo in Germany puts a non-volatile vegetable oil/wax on their coffee, since German consumers expect their coffee to show oil.

In this case, it isn't about staleness, it's that Tschibo is too cheap to roast dark enough to get oily beans. They use an ultrafast/ultra-hot roast that incinerates the surface the bean and finishes the roast in under 3 minutes. This gets them everything a cheap coffee roaster dreams about: dark roast taste, almost no weight loss of beans during the roast, and very puffed up beans where 12 ounces looks like 16. The only minor drawback is that these roasts taste so bad that even Folger's has stopped using them.

But that was never a problem for Tschibo customers.

Funny you should mention that. I'm living in Vienna right now and I've been trying to find as many great roasters as possible. I have only spotted a few. Yesterday I was walking down the street and saw a nice presentation in a store of bulk Tschibo beans that made them look promising. Most of it was 5 Euros a lb, but a few "elite" blends were twice that and I bought those figuring they'd be the most likely to be good. The biggest alarm bell, though, were all the pod machines being sold in the store so I was a little skeptical.

We brought the beans home and made some coffee. We will not be returning to the store for coffee. Now I understand better why.

Edited to add that here the beans did not show any oil at all, so perhaps Austria and Germany are different in that respect.

Psyd wrote:Which means that the beans are either too fresh to start showing oil, or so old that all the oil had evaporated. ... If I had to bet, I'd put my money on 'too old to have any oil left on them'. D'jask'em what the roast date was?

You would lose that bet. As mentioned, I not only sampled the coffee but I ate two of the beans out of a bowl that had been opened to the air for a few hours at least. They were delicious with absolutely no hint of staleness or bitterness. If I hadn't just roasted a batch at home the day before I would have bought a can.

I have had some nice drips / presses / moka pots from Trader Joe's coffees. They definitely don't put roast dates on the cans - it's clear that they're roasted and vac-packed somewhere far away in place and time.

But I have never had anything too stale for pour over techniques. Lots of interesting central american flavors that come through there. And the Peaberry, as the OP mentioned, was pleasant. I did a few weeks of one they call "Moka Java" before I got my first espresso machine.