Indeed some things are taking longer to settle in than others. Big things and little things are still popping up in the new website that need to be addressed.
In the meantime, please pardon our dust 
If you have any trouble shopping, or see areas that need improvement please let us know.
You can always reach us by email, or give us a call.
Yes, the website has been updated. As of Thanksgiving weekend 2009 we are running a new shopping cart. It should look familiar to you, although a lot of improvements have been made underneath.
There will be some house cleaning to do for a while, a lot of details to tidy up, and it’s a crazy time to relaunch the site, but it needed doing. If you find some errors in the site or you find navigation confusing PLEASE LET US KNOW.
We hope you LOVE the new functionality of the site.
We’re sorry, but your old passwords and logins will not work with the new site. It was a decision made in order to move forward. If you need some info about prior orders, just ask us.
Please create a new account and enjoy the site. When you’re logged in it does even more tricks than when you’re just browsing.
Thanks for being with us. We’re on our way to twelve years of bringing you great coffee, and the best service we can muster. It hasn’t been one second of dull yet.
Thank YOU.
Thanksgiving 2009
Roast Magazine is a high quality industry magazine for coffee professionals. What that means to YOU is that it’s not dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Its high grade information stated clearly and in depth for when information really matters. It’s by professionals for professionals. But we guarantee it to impact your daily cup too. Awesome editorial design, images, and clear writing.
This issue includes the second half of “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” about how coffee is chosen and makes it to your cup.
“A State of Flux” looks in detail at the vast changes taking place in Ethiopia’s Commodity Exchange system. What might it mean as Specialty Coffee is required to move through a commodity format?
Read about Brazil in Navigating origins! Alternative Africas in The Coffee Review:Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania
And, How the Pros use a Roast Log. Plus MUCH more
The content of this article comes from our Friends at Roast Magazine, a magazine for coffee professionals. The content was written by Jim Fadden.
SPECIAL THANKS to Ted Lingle and Joseph Rivera of the Specialty Coffee Association of America for their contributions to this article and to Gene Spiller, author of the book ‘Caffeine’.
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COFFEE MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY, excitable, anxious or able to leap tall buildings. Pick an effect and you are likely to find studies that both support and refute that effect. Although the effects of caffeine are under constant debate, there is no doubt that it is the world’s most popular drug—and, of course, the delivery vehicle of choice for many people is coffee. Short of renaming the profession of “roaster” to “dealer,” it is important for roasters to understand their contribution to the strength of their customer’s caffeine dose.
A Caffeine Consumption Conundrum
YOU ARE WORKING a double shift and have been roasting coffee late into the night. You are cranky, your boss is a jerk and you are starting to lose your ability to concentrate. Loading, monitoring and dumping the beans isn’t too challenging, but paying attention to the details when dealing with expensive beans and potential fire hazards is important. A couple of cups of coffee seems like a good idea, a little pick-me-up to get you through the night. An hour later, you feel better, you like your boss again, your tasks seem easier, and you are able to roast and plan the next day’s deliveries at the same time. Some more coffee sounds like a good idea, so you drink another half of a pot.
Fast forward another hour. The roaster is on fire, your boss is screaming at you and you can’t decide which problem to tackle first. Welcome to the world of the confounding effects of coffee and caffeine consumption.
Caffeine holds off drowsiness in two ways: by stimulating the central nervous system and by blocking the chemical process that makes you feel tired.
What happens is this: to make you sleepy, your body produces a chemical called adenosine, which binds itself to receptors in the brain and acts to slow down nerve cell activity. The reduced nerve cell activity creates the feeling of drowsiness.
Caffeine works by binding itself to the receptors, thus preventing the adenosine from doing its job. The nerve cells, instead of slowing down, now speed up. This leads to that familiar feeling of increased energy and awareness that happens when we drink coffee. This is the desired response for many people: a feeling of more energy and the ability to concentrate on non-stimulating tasks.
But if some coffee is good, isn’t more coffee better? Science tells us there is a limit where coffee actually starts to degrade performance, but that limit is difficult to predict on an individual basis. What complicates the situation from a scientific analysis point of view is the fact that humans tend to adapt to the effects of caffeine over time by producing more adenosine receptors in the brain. In habituated individuals, more caffeine is required to block the new receptors in an ongoing upward spiral.
What makes the prediction of the effects of caffeine truly confusing, however, is that they cannot be isolated from other things in our environment that stimulate us. For example, a person who has had four cups of coffee may be able to concentrate better and longer on everyday tasks, like moving sacks of beans from one room to another. The same person, however, may not be able to deal as well with increased stress, such as a roaster fire, while under the influence of caffeine. Caffeine and environmental stress tend to compound each other—a good thing when environmental stress is low, a bad thing when environmental stress is high. Once the body becomes over stimulated, it tends to shut down. This helps to explain the results of studies that show that larger doses of caffeine actually degrade performance on complex tasks, such as dealing with an irate boss.
Individual responses to caffeine also depend on a host of other factors, such as genetics and interactions with other substances like nicotine. In addition, women respond differently than men, younger people respond differently than older people, and even personality may have an impact.
Despite the contradictions in studies and effects, one thing is clear: the next time you go for that second round of coffee, it might be best to avoid irate bosses and roaster fires.
Consumption Variations
Like most substances, the influence of caffeine on the human mind and body is closely tied to the amount consumed. Variation in consumption is one cause of the conflicting results of scientific studies on the benefits or harmfulness of caffeine in coffee. Caffeine content in a five-ounce cup of coffee can range from 60–175 milligrams. If packaging laws changed tomorrow, and required labels on roasted coffee showing caffeine content, how many roasters could provide this information?
Obviously, the final caffeine content in a cup of coffee is impacted both by forces that are under control of the roaster and those that are not. At the extreme end of “not controlled by the roaster” is the case of a 27-year-old man who ingested more than a pound of ground coffee in an attempt to get “high,” which turned into a near lethal experience. In the realm of more typical consumption, brewing methods play a role, as well as the amount of coffee relative to the amount of water and the volume of milk or syrup in the cup. However, the starting content of caffeine in the beans is still impacted by choices made by the roaster.
Green Bean Selection
The biggest impact the roaster has in the final caffeine content is in the selection of green beans to be roasted. Although not typically roasted and sold as stand-alone specialty coffees, robusta is often added to espresso blends to add body and enhance the crema. It can also be used to create caffeine-boosted “high-speed” blends. Most publications refer to an average caffeine content for robusta of 2.0 percent by weight, however, according to the Research Center of the Coffee Board of India, the caffeine content of robusta varies greatly. It may contain caffeine in amounts as low as 1.16 percent to an eye-opening 4.0 percent by weight. Even given this range of concentrations, robusta on average will have much higher caffeine content than arabica. As caffeine is a natural anti-fungal, this also helps to explain robusta’s higher resistance to rot and disease.
Within the world of arabica coffees the caffeine content also varies much more than the typically quoted 1.0 percent by weight. Again, according to the Research Center of the Coffee Board of India, arabica coffee contains anywhere from .58–1.89 percent caffeine by weight. The variation in the amount of caffeine is the result of many factors that have not been fully studied. There is variation between cultivars, such as bourbon and typica. There is variation according to altitude, with beans grown at higher altitudes having higher caffeine concentrations. Generational adaptations to micro-conditions, such as higher exposure to pests and fungus, also appear to increase caffeine content. All of these variables combine to make it difficult to generalize caffeine content of arabica coffees based on the country of origin.
Where’s the Caffeine?
In the future, there may also be another choice: an arabica coffee bean that lacks caffeine altogether. There are two possibilities currently under research, neither of which comes without controversy. There has been growing interest in a bean that has naturally reduced caffeine content and was originally discovered in Ethiopia and researched in Brazil. The enormous market potential of producing naturally grown decaf beans on a mass scale with the same flavor profiles as traditional arabica cultivars has led to a battle over the ownership rights of the plant stock under research.
An even more controversial alternative involves the creation of a new type of coffee plant by genetically modifying the plant to eliminate the caffeine. Besides caffeine-laden Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora (robusta), there are several coffee varietals that are naturally caffeine-free but do not have a desirable flavor profile, such as Coffea salvatrix, Coffea eugenioides and Coffea bengalensis. All three of these varietals start with the materials necessary for caffeine, but two of the varietals (C. salvatrix and C. bengalensis) never develop caffeine and the third (C. eugenioides) develops caffeine temporarily but then breaks it down to other components. The current research is in identifying the genes in these varietals that either prevent the production of caffeine in the first place, or eliminate it after it is produced, and encode C. arabica with these genes. Because the long-term effects of human consumption of genetically modified foods have not been extensively studied, there remains much controversy over the future of genetically modified caffeine-free arabica coffee.
Roast Level
Beyond selection of the green beans, the roaster is commonly thought to control one more variable in the final caffeine content of the beans: the roast level. Popular lore has always been that the darker the roast level, the lower the caffeine content. This is not really the case, as caffeine changes very little during the roasting process. Caffeine has a very stable crystalline structure with a boiling point above 600 degrees Fahrenheit, far above roasting temperatures, which rarely exceed 470 degrees Fahrenheit. This means there is very little change to the caffeine during the roasting process. The minimal amount of caffeine lost during roasting is attributable to sublimation, which is the transition of a substance directly from its solid state to its gaseous state, as commonly occurs with dry ice. Caffeine undergoes this transition at around 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Since coffee is roasted at temperatures above 350 degrees, a minimal amount of the caffeine is lost this way during the roasting process.
Although minimal caffeine is driven off or destroyed in the roasting process, the bean undergoes major changes during roasting. This can confuse the situation because the caffeine content per weight and per volume changes—not because the caffeine changes, but because the size and the weight of the bean changes. Ironically, because the bean loses weight (mostly water) during roasting, the caffeine content by weight increases, but because the bean increases in size during the roasting, the caffeine content by volume decreases.
It is fortunate that there are no requirements to label caffeine content on packages of roasted beans. So many variables contribute to the caffeine content of a single origin at a defined roast level that it is nearly impossible to predict the content without decaffeinating the bean and measuring the amount extracted. Now take differing cultivars from multiple farms and multiple countries, throw in a little robusta for an espresso blend, and you might need to put on another pot of coffee and call an organic chemist.
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This article’s author JIM FADDEN is a mechanical engineer and frequent contributor to Roast Magazine.
He can be reached at Roast Magazine. www.roastmagazine.com
Please do look around our site at The Coffee Project – www.coffeeproject .com We are a supplier of home coffee roasting equipment, raw beans and supplies for individuals who roast coffee at home.
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Imbibe Magazine is indispensable for broadening your knowledge of our liquid culture. Great for the mixologist, home brewers, wine fanatics, tea lovers, and anyone who loves the exotic. Learn how to work with absynthe, make your own maraschino cherries from scratch, and more.
Take a look at the “Make Mine Monthly” option that we have on a number of our beans choices.
When you choose the drop down menu option to “Make Mine Monthly” then you’ve locked in that price (even a sale price!) on an unbroken flow of recurring beans orders.
So for instance, this weekend just prior to Christmas and Hanukkah has most of our beans on sale. If you choose the “Make Mine Monthly” option then you’ll get that same pricing month after month after month until you tell us to stop shipping that exact order out.
For another description of this idea see our FAQ page. But that’s a basic idea, a GREAT value to take advantage of.
The Fresh Roast coffee roaster is a GREAT value.
Why?
Because while stove top roasting is absolutely FREE, your time is worth something too. For less than a hundred bucks you’ve got one of the most highly controllable machines, plus the beans you need to get roasting right out of the box. The only other machine with as great a degree of control is the Gene Cafe. Also a great value, but a different kind of value.
Get the Fresh Roast coffee roaster for yourself, or a friend, its the easiest entry into the highest control, high satisfaction coffee roasting. They’re inexpensive, they have a super track record, and they’re easy to use. In about two tries you’re an expert. Fast, economical, and easy- for the best, freshest coffee possible. That’s value.
And here’s a great habit to get into on a daily basis; while brewing a batch of morning coffee- roast a batch too. The time frame is just about the same, eight minutes plus or minus. So no extra time in your day is used up while you’re in the kitchen anyway. What’s easier than that?
And as you know, the BEST COFFEE ON THE PLANET is really not expensive. Most of the greatest raw coffees are anywhere from 4- 6 dollars a pound, even less when you buy a bunch at once. And, green coffee doesn’t go stale. THAT’S a great value.
The Gene Cafe is a different kind of value. Its a roaster that you’ll use about once or twice a week. It roasts a lot of coffee at once, 11 ounces at a time. When you need high control, high quality, and a higher volume of roasted beans, the Gene Cafe is the way to go. Indeed its about 4 time the price of a Fresh Roast coffee roaster but its also roasting about 4 times as much, so the value is just as strong depending on your needs.
So for the best value, the highest degree of control, and the greatest simplicity- look to the Fresh Roast coffee roaster, or the Gene Cafe.
“I found your website about roasting coffee at home and how easy it is. I also found others that say it can be really difficult. I would like to try roasting at home to see what kind of results I get. Do you still offer a sample that I can try?”
Thanks for writing! …Yeah, it really is pretty easy.
Like a lot of things that require some familiarity, if you ask a rocket scientist for a description of how to fry an egg for instance, they may give you way more info than you need, they’ll want to tell you everything they know, and make it sound like… well, rocket science.
It’s not rocket science.
Home coffee roasting is as difficult or easy as you want to make it for yourself. If you can measure- exactly the same way you measure oatmeal or flour, and you can turn a dial- exactly as you turn the timer on a stove, then you can easily roast coffee too.
There are a lot of professional bakers out there, or professional chefs, and there is some arcane knowledge in most arts and crafts. But there are also a lot of everybody else who also bake or make PB&Js or cookies every day. Home coffee roasting is the very same skill set as making a batch of cookies or frying an egg. Pretty doable.
Yes, we still do the sample beans. The sample beans will be a good introduction for you. They’ll certainly take the mystery out of it. AND you’ll wind up with some coffee to drink. The sample isn’t huge but you’ll get the idea.
Home coffee roasting is easy, cheap, fun, good for the world; there’s really no downside and no barrier to giving it a try. You’ll probably want to eventually have a real home coffee roaster with a plug, but you can do it on a stovetop for free to get the concept. Its easy.
This is a first hand recollection from our friend David Borton about his travels in Guatemala, and his experiences in the region of Pampojila…
Memories Hidden in a Cup of Coffee
Pampojila, Guatemala. Memory lane. Seeing that coffee for sale took my mind rocketing back to Guatemala, Summer 1988. Pampojila, rural western Guatemala, where many of the indigenous Mayan were among the 120,000 that had been murdered by its own army. Civil war. Nothing civil about this unending 30 year war that took its own innocent people as the first casualty.
As we descended into Guatemala City, my mind raced with anxiety…
As we descended into Guatemala City, my mind raced with anxiety. We had read Love in a Fearful Land to prepare us for the 13-day visit. Henri Nouwen’s book had the area around Lake Atitlan as its setting. (Pampojila sits off to the southeast of the lake). It is the story of the toll the civil war took on the indigenous communities surrounding the lake and the murder of Father Stanley Rother by the death squads of the Guatemala army. Rother’s offense? He stood with the poor. And that village was on our itinerary…
Right about then, the noise and jolt of the wheels touching down jarred me back to the present. I began to have second thoughts about our scheduled visits to Christian base communities throughout rural western Guatemala. But it was too late. The attendant opened the safety of the our womb and we disembarked.
For about a week, we trekked over roads that our four-wheel found next to impassable. Sewing cooperatives, literacy programs, agricultural projects, stove construction with vents to prevent women’s blindness – you name it, we had seen it. Magnificient projects, funded with minimal dollars, all designed to foster collaborative efforts and raise the standard of living of community members. And in the midst of this, I saw mind-numbing numbers of young soldiers, all sporting Uzi guns wherever we walked. Our host, Jorge, told us, “…Just don’t make eye contact and keep the cameras away.”
On day eight, we headed south off the highway to Panajachel and took a ferry across Lake Atitlan, on our way to Santiago Atitlan, the village that served as the setting for Love in a Fearful Land
(http://www.henrinouwen.org/books/bibliography/view/?id=1101355054045722400 ).
Absolutely stunning scenery belied the horror and impact the 30 years of war had on these quaint indigenous villages. Just outside Panajachel a field greeted us, absolutely void of any growth, not even weeds. I asked Jorge what was wrong with the soil here. “The army poisoned it with chemicals. It will be years before it can come back.” What was that about?
Armies use all weapons available to them, including intimidation and terror. The army believed that this community (who had farmed it cooperatively, as many indigenous groups do throughout Central America) was sympathetic to the leftists who hid throught the mountaneous region to the south. Terrorize them. Poison their fields.
As we gathered in the church where Father Rother had served, Jorge took me aside. “The army has been following me since we left Panajachel. Lead the group in prayer and then ask everyone to scatter. We will meet at the ferry and catch the next boat out of town. I can lose them.” He had that look in his face that said, “…We aren’t discussing this.”
At that moment, I am sure that I offered the most bizarre prayer that had ever passed over my lips. I haven’t a clue what I said, but we all skedaddled like nobody’s business. The ferry was awaiting us, and its nasty diesel fumes never smelled so good. At the last moment short, barrel-chested Jorge came bounding aboard and off we went. Smiling.
Later that evening, in Xela, we stopped for dinner. Jorge then spilled the beans, figuratively. It seems that three nights before our arrival, at 2 a.m., three hooded men had awakened him, banging on his door. Their greeting?
“You are to quit your work among the poor – stop teaching the Indians (pejorative term) foolish ideas. Oh, and by the way, we know where your wife and children are every moment, of every day.” And with that mid-night greeting, they left as quickly as they had arrived.
But Jorge didn’t quit. That day or any day. It just wasn’t in his spirit. He died this past Spring at age 55, blind and in renal failure, still working with the poor. And it was from him that I learned love — in a fearful land. R.I.P., friend.
What’s in a cup of coffee? In this Pampojila, there are rich and very deep memories. As deep as Lake Atitlan itself.
Dave Borton
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
August 2008
http://sidewalkmystic.com