It may take a few samplings to find the one bean that is perfect for you, but you'll know it when you taste it.
Don't buy too much. Coffee goes stale when left to sit around. What I do is buy several half-pound bags and then store them in the freezer. That way, I limit the amount of time the coffee is left at room temperature. Freezing beans is the subject of heated debate among coffee geeks, but my experience of more than a decade is that it works well as long as they're not left more than a month or so.
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The all-important grinder
ONCE you've bought the beans, you're going to need to grind them. Don't let the store do it, unless you live right next door and don't mind running over whenever you want a cup. Coffee beans lose their flavor very quickly once they are ground. Within even just a couple of hours, you'll notice a difference in taste, to say nothing of the several days it will take you to go through a whole bag of pre-ground coffee.
That's why the most vital piece of equipment any coffee lover can have is not the coffee maker itself, but the coffee grinder. A good grinder will crush the beans evenly so the pieces are of a fairly uniform size. It will also offer some flexibility as to the size of the grind.
That eliminates those little $15 blade grinders you see at the grocery store. Not only are they impossible to control, they grind unevenly -- you'll wind up with everything from gravel to dust in the same batch. And they heat up the beans while they're grinding them, which alters the flavor.
You can spend several hundred dollars for a great coffee grinder, and that might be worthwhile if you're thinking about getting into espresso (which, because it must be very finely ground is even more particular). But for brewed coffee, you can do just as well with a decent burr grinder (one that grinds the beans by crushing them between metal plates) for around $50.
That may sound expensive, but the grinder should be your biggest investment. The coffee maker itself can be pretty cheap. Though you can get them with all kinds of automatic bells and whistles, essentially almost all coffee makers work the same: Hot water is poured over ground beans and left to steep. Then the resulting liquid is filtered clear.
