Ken Fite - Coffee Hacker-A Guide to Making Better Coffee at Home

Coffee Hacker

A Guide to Making Better Coffee at Home

Ken Fite

Copyright 2014 Ken Fite

All rights reserved worldwide.

Contents

One February evening in 2007, while my wife and I spent a week with friends in Washington DC, I was introduced to fresh coffee for the first time. Alan asked if I wanted to see him roast some coffee in the kitchen. I had no idea what he was talking about coffee always came canned and ground. The contraption he created, a makeshift roaster from an old 80s West Bend Poppery II popcorn maker, and a cooling system for the hot roasted beans made out of a vacuum cleaner and a sieve, looked like more hassle than it was worth. Wait until we have some tomorrow morning he said. With an obligatory smile and nod, I really didnt give it another thought. That next morning, after freshly grinding enough beans to make 2 cups of coffee and running water over the grounds at the right temperature (whatever that meant) I had a cup of coffee that literally changed my life for the next few years. I was hooked. And, after knowing what good coffee tasted like, I knew that I could never go back.

A business is born

When I arrived back home, I bought an old popcorn maker off of eBay and 8 pounds of green (unroasted) coffee beans from SweetMarias.com. After getting through a few batches gone wrong, I taught myself to roast coffee at home without burning the beans. I got pretty good at it. I couldnt believe how much cheaper it was to roast my own coffee ($4 a pound vs. $8 a pound at the grocery store). Eventually I had an idea: I could sell roasted coffee online and use the profits, if not to build a new business, to at least fund my hobby. My coffee business was born and I ran it from my home for the next three years.

Uphill battle

As excited as I was to find a new passion in coffee and about the possibility of creating a business to share fresh coffee all over the United States, I knew it would be an uphill battle since most people think the coffee they drink is perfectly fine. They dont know theyre drinking bad coffee. The quality of coffee being made in American homes has deteriorated dramatically over the last few hundred years. When this country was founded, it was the norm for households to roast their own coffee at home over fires. They had to. There werent any ubiquitous coffee chains down the road to run to. Flash forward to today and we buy old, stale, pre-ground coffee from the store because its convenient. Its not too uncommon to find instant coffee in many homes. Everything is instant nowadays. We dont send hand-written notes anymore, we email. We dont check our email daily, we check email every other minute. Whenever we hear a ding, we pick up our phones and hit refresh to get the latest news. The news cycle went from 24 hours to instant on Twitter. Why cook dinner in a crock pot when we can microwave it in 10 minutes? I knew it would be difficult following my dream to introduce people to fresh roasted coffee. What I didnt know was how hard it would be. How could I change a microwave culture back into a crockpot culture?

I was giving a presentation to a group of 75 students on my coffee business. This was in an Entrepreneurship MBA class at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. I was trying to make the case for my business idea, which wasnt really even an idea at that point. I had been running the business for a few months already, testing it out to see if anyone would actually buy coffee online. The point of the presentation was for a select few, who had an idea, to pitch a business that they wanted to build, to garner support and recruit a team (fellow classmates) to see which ideas created excitement and which were duds. The professor warned us to not be too disappointed if we ended up with little interest in our idea, requiring us to join another team. During the presentation, I kept stressing the point of differentiation of my business model: delivering fresh coffee to homes and offices within 4 days of roasting. With some of the group, the idea of freshly roasted coffee resonated and they were on board! They got it. Obvious coffee junkies, always seeking a better cup of Joe, they understood that fresh coffee meant using fresh beans which have been roasted within just a few days and brewing it properly.

With others, though, I really wasnt feeling it. It seemed as if they werent fully understanding the business model and why anyone would go through the hassle and pressure of quickly roasting like coffee orders together only after receiving actual sales, not roasting ahead of time based on anticipated demand.

So, I thought Id check for understanding by asking the question : what does fresh coffee really mean?

I paused and waited through uncomfortable silence. With furrowed brows, the group explained that they werent understanding how the coffee they make at home every day wasnt already fresh if they just made it. They just bought their coffee from the store a few days ago. How much fresher could it be? Thats when I realized that a huge gap exists between what many think fresh coffee is and what it really means.

In fairness, I think fresh coffee really does comprise all of these viewpoints. Coffee should be bought frequently, in small batches, and drank within a few minutes of brewing. There are, however, some points of clarification that should be made to further explain what fresh coffee really is and how to enjoy the coffee you brew that much more.

Perishable good

Fresh coffee starts with the beans you use. Period. The single best way to have truly fresh coffee is to buy high quality whole beans that have been roasted within 21 days. Right after coffee roasts, it degasses for approximately 3-4 days. This is the beans natural reaction to the roasting process. During this short period of time, if the beans are used, they will taste stale and like store-bought coffee. At around day 4, the degassing stops and the beans reach their peak somewhere between days 4 and 21. Starting at around 3 weeks, beans start to decline in freshness and by week 4, they start tasting stale again. Roasted coffee will taste best if used between days 4 and 21 after being roasted. Coffee is a perishable good, like bread and bananas. Were so used to the stale taste of coffee, weve come to expect it to taste this way. Bread shouldnt be hard and moldy. Bananas shouldnt be brown and mushy. Coffee shouldnt be stale.

Roast dates

The coffee we buy in stores usually doesnt have a roast date on the packaging. What you may see are best by dates. A good rule of thumb is to subtract a year from the expiration date. That usually tells you when the coffee was roasted. If after doing the math the coffee was roasted greater than a month in the past, youll know the coffee is stale. The problem with supermarket coffee is the distribution channels the coffee has to go through get to the store. It has to be roasted and packaged, shipped to a store chains central distribution hub, then it has to be shipped to individual stores, but not until they need to restock their shelves. This lifecycle can take weeks if not months. Thats why the freshest coffee youll usually find in stores, doing the math by subtracting a year from the expiration date, is about 3 months old. Which seems reasonable, but knowing what we now know about freshness, 3 month old coffee is 2 months stale.

Pre- ground coffee

Never buy prepackaged ground coffee or grind your own in a grocery store or coffee house. Ground coffee goes stale within 30 minutes of grinding it. If you grind coffee in the store, using their complimentary grinder, its likely stale before you even get home (they dont clean their coffee grinders so youre mixing in years of old stale coffee). If you buy prepackaged ground coffee, it was stale before it even left the roaster (dont forget everywhere the beans have to travel to traverse the stores distribution channel).