When I smell dark roast coffees in a coffee store, they always smell bold and intense. Why doesn’t my lighter roast coffee have much of an aroma? 

Ah the perennial question! Some think that lighter roast coffee cannot be too ‘intense’ or ‘bold’ in the cup if there isn’t a giant cloud of luscious coffee aroma when they open the container. There is a reasonable explanation: It has to do with where the flavor components are, especially those residing the in the oils inside the bean. Let me explain.

When a coffee bean is roasted, chemical changes take place as heat is applied. Oils are driven closer to the surface, and as they reach the magic point where the Malliard reaction takes place, the oil is oxidized and driven to the surface. That’s why espresso roasts are all dark and oily and why dark roast beans go stale quickly. In general the Malliard reaction is the watershed event in roasting that marks a difference between a) coffee material that is only partially oxidized and retains some of its sugars and origin characteristics and b) the point where the plant matrix and most of the sugars are now carbonized. The oils no longer are in the matrix but on the surface. The flavors are now carbon bittering with whatever partially-oxidized flavor is retained in the oils. Some like this bittering, but it can be spoiled by exposure to air. Stale coffee is bad coffee.

There really is a great deal of chemistry involved. Suffice it to say that Dark Roast carries all its actual coffee flavors in the oils on the surface. Beans that are less than dark roasted still have all the original sugars and oils, and they are inside the bean. They won’t smell as intense initially because they are ‘hiding’ their goodness inside. You have to grind and brew to release their flavors. Be aware that lighter roasts won’t smell as intense initially. They will grow in intensity when you grind them and reach full strength when you pour it in the cup.

So we moved. North. While it allows my husband and I to be closer to family, there is something of a challenge in re-orienting myself to being in a new place. It isn’t all the things I knew I would need to change (like, for example, the USPS location) but also the many little things that I didn’t. One of those is finding the most advantageous way for my long-time customers to buy their coffee.

I’m used to roasting and sending one or two pounds per customer at a time, and with shipping included in my pricing, it’s all pretty simple. Now that postage—even bulk—has increased so much, I find:

— Some customers from my former local area who used to buy directly want larger quantities at a time, and

— I’m still trying to develop a pricing scheme that works for both of us.

In view of these customer-driven changes, I’ll be working on a new plan. Stay tuned; contact me by email with any questions/requests; and enjoy your coffee!

s

What a strange couple of years it has been! I want to thank all my wonderful customers who have apparently been drinking even more coffee and (I hope) enjoying it even while the world seemed pretty messed up and scary. Thank you.

So, while we were away, the world changed, especially logistics. We are seeing ridiculous inflationary pressures from disruption of supply chain, labor shortages in harvesting, price-gouging for space on a container ship and all sorts of artificial (human-caused) shocks to the coffee system around the world. In addition to that, climate change and/or regular old bad weather has reduced actual and projected harvests of specialty coffee in just about every region. All this has happened while we started drinking more of the good stuff. Competition for the highest-grade coffee beans is the fiercest I’ve seen it in my 15 years doing this. As a result, prices are rising.

I wish I could say that all the premium price is going to the farmers who grow the coffee we love, but unfortunately, it isn’t. Many are under terrible pressure, and more have abandoned growing coffee in favor of other crops more tolerant of wild weather and with better profit potential. Result: Even less top-quality coffee on the market. Put frowny face here.

So all this leads to me having to raise prices to adjust to current economic reality. Bummer. I promise I will try to keep these to a minimum without sacrificing quality. Thank you for your patience.

s

Another study on whether coffee-drinking is good for you is making the rounds in the popular press, from Harvard, so it has some cred. Actually, it’s a meta-analysis and a new study that purports to include the biggest data set to date. (All the research geeks are excited now.) If you want to read it, it’s linked here: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.115.017341

I guarantee that no matter how many cups of coffee you have had, it will put you to sleep, but that’s not my observation today. I’m pointing out that this highly-touted study in a reputable research journal is practically useless for telling us if drinking coffee, specifically “3 cups a day”, is good at keeping death away. Those who aren’t medical researchers can perhaps already tell that avoiding death is probably a complex process that even complex statistics cannot fully explain, but I want to point out the most basic failures of research design here:

1) They never specify how much coffee is in a “cup.” The SCAA says it’s 5oz, most coffee chains use 8oz as the measure, and who knows how much your travel mug holds. And how much of your coffee is coffee and not milk, sugar, foam and of course, water?

2) While they apparently kept track of whether the coffee was decaf or full-caf, no measure of brew strength was specified. I can tell you my daily brew is way stronger than “church coffee.”  Does that make a difference? I’ll bet it does.

3) There was no teasing out statistics on those whose coffee-drinking also included ingesting cigarette smoke. I’d think that would muddy the statistical waters enough as to render the whole effort null.

Harvard, say it ain’t so. You can do better than this!  I’m going to have my “2nd” cup….

Enjoy!

susan