Coffee Anyone?

Full City Roast (Just after the Second Crack)












My wife and I like good coffee. Not vending machine coffee and not coffee that looks like ice tea. This post is not for you if you think that instant coffee is a real drink or that brewing coffee out a can is where it's at.

I looked at some alternative prices for real coffee (Hint: It doesn't come in a can!). Below is what I discovered:

1). Coffee at our local coffee shop: $18.00 per pound
2). Starbucks coffee (whole bean at Walmart): 10.60 per pound
3). Green beans for roasting at Dean's Beans (online): 5.73 per pound

Admittedly, you would have to purchase 15 lbs. of green beans to get this average price per pound. This DOES include the shipping cost per pound. B-T-W, green beans will store for a year without going bad.

OK, so you have to have a way to roast the beans. Roasting your own beans, of course, is both quite easy and enables you to 'cook' them to your specification. We have had an inexpensive home roaster for over five years. Also, you can easily roast green coffee beans in a hot air popcorn popper. We did that for everal years before buying the roaster.

The smell of fresh roasting coffee beans is an olfactory delight. The smell of Organic Green Nicaraguan Coffee roasting can really make your mouth water. I prefer the dark end of a full-city roast, myself.

Oops, I got ahead of myself!

The point is, if you like real coffee, it is much more economical to purchase green coffee beans and do the roasting yourself. You can roast it to your own specifications and save considerably. This would be the value-added side of production: Taking a product/service and adding something to it to improve its value. I.e., roasting your own coffee instead of paying someone else to do it for you. It's quite pleasurable and saves you about 45% of the cost of buying pre-roasted Starbucks coffee (which is quite good, b-t-w!).

Look for me out in my front yard over the Easter break drinking a fresh cup of coffee...I'll put on a pot for all of us (Chemex, of course! :)).