Coffee on the Road

  I recently took a drive with the family down to see my in-laws in Texas.  20 hours in a minivan with 3 kids, is a long 20 hours.  Requires a lot of coffee!  Sometimes people are surprised to find that I don't bring my own coffee with me on trips.  Well I do, but those are mostly gifts for family and friends.  I love coffee, and so I like to taste what others are brewing up.  It helps me refine my taste as a roaster, and you never know when you will come across something new and amazing!
  Unfortunately I didn't find anything new and amazing this time around.  With three kids. all under the age of five, you don't exactly go off the beaten path to find good coffee.  I was relegated to truck stops, and lets say, those are not the first choice for good coffee.  It seems there are a lot of Pilot stations on the way down, so I got to try all of their blends.  At the first stop I tried their Pilot Blend (or was it their House Blend?).  It was not bad, a good smooth coffee, not bitter.  I was happy I found a decent coffee, and I knew there would be a lot more of these stations along the way.
  That was the end of the good coffee.  The rest of the way down I tried their other blends, and for the most part, I had to dump them out because I couldn't drink them.  Even when I got sick and tired of trying everything else, their Pilot Blend failed me as well.
  Halfway through the trip we stopped at a hotel, they had a coffee pot in the room, and I brewed some coffee in the morning before we took off.  Hallelujah, good coffee.  It was of course in a small cup, but I was delighted to see large containers of it downstairs for their continental breakfast.  The coffee had the same blend name on it, and it was brewed in commercial brewers, so I had more confidence that I would have enough good coffee to get me started on my trip.  I was so very wrong.  I couldn't believe the difference!  The coffee for their breakfast was terrible!  It was too dark and bitter.  So I loaded the family in the car, and headed down the road, feeling defeated.
  I'm a coffee snob, of course.  I have to be, it's my job.  But I can drink and enjoy coffee at most restaurants, and I can even drink Maxwell House or Folgers if I have to.  If I have to pour out a coffee because I can can't drink it, well it's bad.  To be fair, I have to drink my coffee black, so some of this might be drinkable with cream and sugar.  If it is, I'm not the guy to review it.

Now in Amazon

Raptis Coffee is now on Amazon.com!  We have our 12oz Bourbon Pecan in 3 different varieties.
First we have 1 12oz bag for $10.55, plus 4.49 in shipping.  I know, it seems a bit much, but this is for just 1 bag, and if you ship a one pound package anywhere in the US, you are going to pay $8 to $12.
Considering that the average price you pay at a local roaster is around $20 per pound, this is not a bad deal.

Our second item is the same 12oz Bourbon Pecan, but in a three-pack.  The price is $23.38 plus $4.49 in shipping.  With shipping, you are now paying just over $9 per bag.

Our third item is our six-pack.  Again, all bourbon pecan, but now we can fit them perfectly in a USPS flat rate box.  At $39.91 plus $4.49 for shipping, you are paying just $7.40 per bag of coffee!

$7.40 per bag can give around 8 pots of coffee (or more, depends on how strong you want it).  That is about 96 cups of coffee (in a 12-cup coffee maker)

That is about 8 cents per cup of coffee.  Now compare that to your k-cups.

Howland Farmers Market

  This Saturday will be our first setup at the outdoor Howland Farmers Market.  We will be selling our 12oz bags of coffee, cups of hot coffee, and iced coffee.  We will have our regular house blend, as well as bourbon pecan.

Coffee Club?

  We are considering starting a coffee club.  Let us know what you think!  We've already had some people express interest.  What we are trying to figure out now is how to set it up.  We've seen clubs that are run badly, we want to make sure we do it right.
  We have some customers who buy the same thing month after month, so we thought we can offer a discount if you commit to buying for a certain amount of time.  We would setup a monthly shipment to your address.  You could leave it alone and get your coffee once a month, or you can change your next order anytime up until the day before it ships.
  If you decide to cancel, before your commitment is up, we would simply charge your card for the discount you received for being in the club.
  Do you guys have any thoughts?

Caffeine Can Make Hard Workers Slack Off?

  That's the reported results of a new study in the journal Nature.  There are however a couple things you should consider when reading this study.  They tested the effects of stimulants, and they first categorized the subjects on their base levels.  Some people are natural hard works, and others are natural slackers.  In this sense, slacker may not be the best term.  The test involved giving out food pellets for completing a task, and giving out more food pellets for completing a harder task.  The "slackers" did not do the extra work for more food, and the "hard workers" did.  It's a test of cost-benefit analysis.  Being a slacker meant that you didn't see the extra work as being worth the reward.
  The test showed that when administered amphetamines and caffeine, the slackers opted to do the extra work. When the hard workers were given both, they stayed hard workers, but when they were only given caffeine, they tended to become slackers.
  Does this mean that caffeine can make hard workers slack off?  No.  The basic take away from this study is that when a doctor prescribes a stimulant, it would be beneficial to consider the base-line state of the individual.
  Another way to look at it, perhaps caffeine takes away hunger?  I'm not an expert, but in this study if a subject  was less hungry, would that sway the cost-benefit analysis?  I believe this study was more about decision making than the physical effects of stimulants, or more appropriately, the effects of stimulants on decision making.
  We know caffeine can help keep you alert, so the question becomes, how does it effect the decisions you make every day?

On the News

Check us out this Friday morning on the WFMJ morning show between 5 and 7 am! We are showing our product and promoting the 'Our Valley Cooks" event on Saturday! Stop by and see us at the show, there will be lots of wonderful vendors attending and a lot of delicious food to try!

Raptis Roaster

  We are building a coffee roaster.  We're not re-building a used one.  We're not taking old parts to make a new one.  We are building a coffee roaster from scratch.  This is a new beast of a roaster, a kind that has never been tried before.
  Roasting coffee is pretty simple, you take green coffee, add heat, and that's it.  Yes, there is more too it than that, but that is the basic idea.  You can roast coffee with a ceramic pot on your stove.  (don't stop stirring, and open a window, you will get a lot of smoke).  There are two main types of coffee roasters, the first, and oldest is the drum roaster.  This is simply a large rotating drum that turns the coffee as heat is applied.  There are many different types, some have a sold drum, others have perforation to let air flow through the beans.  Some use different types of heat, they can heat the air, or they can use radiant heat from the flame very close to the beans.
  We use the second type, a fluid bed roaster.  This basically uses a very high airflow to make the beans circulate in the roasting chamber.  The beans are heated by hot air.  There are some advantages to using this type.

• No tipping.  Tipping occurs when the green bean is sitting too long against a hot metal surface.  This causes one little tip of the bean to burn.  This adds a slight burnt flavor to the final cup of coffee.
• No chafe buildup.  Chafe is a very light coating to the bean that falls off during the roast.  Its from the inner part of the bean, and cannot come off before the roast.  Using high air flow, the chafe comes off, and is imminently blown off the bean and into our chafe collector.  With some types of drum roasters this chafe can get stuck on the metal drum and burn, eventually turning into a thick black tar.  This also effects the final cup of coffee.
• Very clean cup.  Fluid bed roasters are known for producing a very clean cup of coffee.  Green beans can become dusty, (something I am most unfortunately, allergic to).  Our roaster blows all of that, and any other particles off of the coffee.
• Precise control.  We monitor the temperature of the coffee and the hot air flowing into it.  We are able to control this with high accuracy so that we produce the same results roast after roast.

  We are very happy with our fluid bed roaster.  We do however have an idea on how to add more control to the roast.  We are designing a completely new roasting method, different from the two listed above.
  We have been building this for over a year now, I can't go into the specifics yet, but we did our first test today.  We are not finished yet, and still have a lot to do, but we have some very promising results!  I will keep this blog updated on our progress, I can't wait until I'm allowed to post pictures!

The Flavors of Summer

  Today we are starting our march to summer by methodically taste testing every one of our flavored coffees to find the ones best suited for iced coffee.  Last year we found that bourbon pecan made an insanely good iced drink.
  We are starting with 3, Maple Walnut, English Toffee, and Coco-Mochanut.
  In the first test with  Maple Walnut, the smooth maple flavor comes through very nice, this makes for a good combo with milk and ice.  
  We have to let our taste buds rest and reset before we move past Maple Walnut.  I will post more updates as we test them.
  We are using a very mild Peru as the base for our taste testing, and we are trying the coffee hot, mostly because we don't have an ice machine here :-(  After we narrow it down, we will start tasting them cold.

Coffee prices

  In the last two days the price of coffee has come down quite a bit!  When we buy our coffee, the price is based on the futures market on www.theice.com.  The last few years have been a crazy ride, with the prices going up and down a great deal in just one day.  The prices went up really high, just as they have in the past, the difference is that when this happened in 1997, the price spiked and came right back down again.  This time the price has gone up and stayed there.  Now it seems to be on it's way down.
  Does this translate into lower end prices on our coffee?  Most likely.
  First issue is when we buy our coffee.  The price of green might come down 10 cents in one day, but I buy 40,000 lbs at a time, so I don't order it every day.  For this reason, we evaluate our prices every quarter.
  Second issue is how much we are currently charging.  When the price was going up, we tried really hard to keep our prices low, that meant making less on the coffee we produced.  We have raised our prices a little over the past year, but not as much as the market has gone up.
  So if the market continues to go down, yes we will reduce our prices.

Gift Cards

Raptis Coffee now offers gift cards!
If you go to our website, you can find them here: Gift Certificates
We currently have $10, $25, $50, and $75 cards.  If you want to see another amount, just drop us a line here: Contact Us

We made this option available due to popular request.  We have so many items and so many options that it can be hard to know what a coffee lover wants.  I you know how particular people can be about their coffee!

The certificates never expire.  When you add one to your cart, you will be asked who it is for and for their email address.  You can fill it for who you are buying for, or you can send it to yourself.  Once it is approved you will receive an email with an image like the one above.  It will have a code in the white box.  You can give that person the image with the code, or simply the code.  When you are buying from our cart, during checkout you simply put in the code where it asks for a coupon code.

When you purchase the gift card, if you choose the "Cash on Delivery" option for payment, the gift card will not be issued until payment has been made, so you would have to come down to our factory in Warren Ohio to pay for it.  Otherwise you can put it on our credit card, or you can pay with paypal.

Coffee Stain Portrait

  This has made the rounds recently, an artist made that portrait using coffee cup stains.  You can see how she did it here.  It's a really cool and creative project, and it must smell fantastic!
  Raptis Coffee offers coffee bean portraits, with a slightly different medium.  We use green coffee on a canvas for ours, you can see some examples here.  I'll post more on that another day.  For now, head over to Hong Yi's website and check out her other creations.

Coffee Can Help Reduce Cancer Risk (****MAYBE)

  I just read an article from The Huffington Post about coffee reducing the risk of certain types of cancer.  It looks like it is on a few specific cancers, and the ingredient that helps is caffeine, so this does not count for decaf.
  Now this was a research paper presented at the American Association for Cancer Research, but the article in the Huffington post doesn't link to the research.  I did a search on the AACR website, but have not yet been able to find it.  Perhaps it is still under peer review.  When you see an article about a health study, it is always good to look at the research.  I'm going to take this article with a grain of salt, we don't know the sample size, and a few other factors that tell us something about how much we can trust the article.
  This article tells me a bit more about The Huffington Post that it does about the study for coffee, you should always link to the research source, or explain why it isn't available!

Coffee Study Shows Health Benefits of Coffee

  In a report from Fox News, a long term study of more than 40,000 people showed that regular coffee consumption does not increase the risk of any chronic illness, and in fact makes the coffee drinker 23% less likely to develop Type II diabetes.
  I personally drink a lot of coffee, kinda have to in my profession.  It's nice to know that I'm not causing damage, and it seems to me that there are a lot of studies out there that show healthy benefits of regular coffee consumption.
  This is just one study, and I plan to regularly look into more, and I intend to honestly look at both sides.

K-Cups

Gizmodo.com is no fan of K-Cups and I tend to agree.
K-Cups Not Only Make Bad Coffee, They Make Bad Environments
The convenience they offer is nothing to laugh at.  These machines brew coffee fast, and they take away much of the consumer's prep time.  Instead of scoping coffee into a basket, which you must later empty out, you simply throw a k-cup into the machine, and toss it out after.
My first problem with them is that I can't make them.  Green Mountain owns the patents, so it's not that I can't make them, it's that I'm not allowed.  All of the k-cups you buy are made by Green Mountain in one way or another.
Second, I'm just not a fan of the coffee.  I'll drink it, but to me it tastes like cheap coffee from a vending machine.  Some of the problem is in how fast it brews, the hot water does not have time to extract the flavor like it does in a normal drip brewer.  This, I believe, comes down to the user.  Most people are ok with the taste, but really want the speed, so for them this is a good deal.  But you won't be seeing Raptis Coffee in a k-cup anytime soon.
As the article above mentions, there is a big problem with waste.  I'm not going to go into that one, but the last problem I have is the price.  Here is another article from gizmodo showing that when you buy a K-Cup, you are paying about $50 per pound!  Is that really worth the speed?
If you buy just 1lb of the most expensive coffee I currently offer on the website, and paid for shipping on just that one pound, which currently is our Brazil Bob-O-Link coffee, you would still be less than half of the price of a k-cup (per lb, or per cup, however you want to look at it).
These are all the things I think about when customer's as us if we carry k-cups.

Tasting Ethiopian Yirgacheffe

I just brewed up some Ethiopian Yirgacheffe at a medium roast.  This was from a new batch of beans we just received.  I've very happy with how it cups.  I'll try to get it up on the website tomorrow.  

February Coupons

  It's almost the end of February, which brings us to the close of our 10% off coupon.  This was the first time we have offered something like this, and I am very happy with the way it turned out.  There were a few hiccups along the way, I found that since a customer could only use the code once, in order to use it at all you had to be logged in to the site.  Before that we had no place for our customer to log in until they were checking out.  I've added a log in bar at the top of the page, so now a customer can easily apply the discount, as well as look at their order history.
  Once we figured that out, and people started ordering, we found that our current invoicing system didn't display the discount code, or allow it to be applied.  So after a few more hours of programming, our software now makes it easy to apply coupon codes and discounts.
  I've done a lot of work to the website this month, and I hope it shows.