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!