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.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
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.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
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.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Coffee Stain Portrait
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.
Friday, March 2, 2012
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!
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!
Thursday, March 1, 2012
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.
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.
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.
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