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.