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.
Showing posts with label raptis coffee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label raptis coffee. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
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!
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
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.
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!
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 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!
Thursday, March 8, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
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.
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.
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