I can’t wait for Friday, though, which will be EntreLeadership, where he’ll offer entrepreneurs (like yours truly) advice on how to run a small business debt-free with a strong emphasis on Christian principles. To say that we’re excited would be an understatement. Based on following Dave’s teachings over the past year, we are now debt-free except for the house!

What does this have to do with coffee, you ask? Well, one of many things I learned from listening to Dave on the radio is that getting a good deal shouldn’t be something that happens every once in a while. Getting a good deal on something and saving money should be the norm. I heard someone today mention that they paid almost $3 for a latte. Ridiculous!

You can pick up a pound of fresh roasted coffee beans for around $13 dollars. With a pound of coffee, you can brew coffee at home and save money by making, on average, 53 6 oz cups of coffee (or lattes). That’s $0.25 cents per cup! Compared to paying $3 – 1200% more at the ubiquitous coffee chain – you can save a substantial amount of money by brewing at home.

Many believe the answer is espresso. After all, espresso is concentrated coffee, brewed by the pressure of hot water flowing through finely-ground coffee beans. With espresso being a small, concentrated amount of coffee, it would make sense that espresso has the most caffeine. But, drip brew coffee has hot water continuously passing through coffee grounds, potentially extracting more and more of the caffeine out of the bean, so drip brew has to have more caffeine than espresso. Then again, with a french press, coffee grounds are soaked with hot water for a full infusion, steeping with full on contact for 4 minutes, so french press brewing has to extract more caffeine than both espresso and drip brew… right?

Back in ’79, Bunker and McWilliams published a paper after studying the caffeine content of common beverages. Here are their coffee-based findings (caffeine content noted in mg):
* espresso: 1 cup (1.5–2 oz, 45–60 ml) = 100 mg
* brewed: 1 cup (7 oz, 207 ml) = 80–135 mg (107.5 mg average)
* drip: 1 cup (7 oz, 207 ml) = 115–175 mg (145 mg average)

Case closed. Drip brew has the highest caffeine content and espresso the lowest. Well, in reality, it’s not that straight forward and is a little difficult to answer which brewing method has more caffeine because, I believe the answer depends on a lot of different factors…

Variety of Bean (robusta vs. arabica)
Robusta coffee beans have twice the caffeine content than arabica beans. Although arabica beans are considered to be of higher quality, robusta beans are used in many dark roast espresso blends… so, naturally, this will cause a higher caffeine content in espresso or any kind of blended (non-single origin) coffees that use robusta.

Roast level (light roast vs. dark roast)
Surprisingly, roast level impacts caffeine content. Dark roasted coffee is often associated with being “bold” and having a lot of caffeine, but that’s simply not true. The longer a coffee bean is roasted, the more the caffeine is burned off during the roast – so lighter roasts have a higher caffeine content than darker roasts. Since dark roasted coffee is generally used for making espresso, this impacts (lowers) the caffeine content.

Temperature of Water
Brew temperature is an important factor. Proper coffee extraction happens between 195-205 degrees, but most drip brewers only get up to about 190 degrees. Espresso machines usually do a good job brewing at near boiling temps. With french press coffee, you have total control over the temperature. If you want to pour boiling water (212 degrees) over your grounds, you can (but we don’t recommend it!). The point is, water temp. can vary by brewing method, and the hotter the water is, the better the extraction (to a point, please don’t exceed 205 degrees). With better extraction comes better tasting coffee, but also better caffeine extraction, too.

Amount of Ground Coffee Used
This one seems rather obvious, but I admit I didn’t really think about it until I wrote this post. The more coffee grounds you use, no matter your brewing method, the higher the caffeine content. Duh. But, it’s important to list as a variable, since some use more ground coffee than others when brewing based on taste preference.

Length of Brew Time
Another factor is the length of brew time. Generally speaking, drip brew coffee does have more caffeine than espresso. Why? Because with drip brew, hot water is continuously dripping through a bed of coffee grounds for 3 minutes. A shot of espresso is pulled in 20-30 seconds. Compared to drip brew, where coffee is in contact with hot water 6 times longer than the hot water that is in contact with coffee grounds during an espresso extraction, you can see how drip would have more caffeine. Not to mention with french press, and a recommended steep time of 4 minutes, more caffeine could potentially be extracted. It’s easy to see that, in terms of length of brew, drip brew coffee makes contact with hot water much longer than espresso does. But, if french press coffee steeps for 4 minutes, usually a minute longer than drip brew, how come french press coffee doesn’t have the highest caffeine content? The answer is the coarseness of the coffee grounds, which we speak to next.

Grind Level
The size of the grind makes a difference. For french press coffee, we use a coarse grind. For drip, a medium grind. Espresso, a fine grind. If you have a conical burr grinder, you may notice that you have to “dial in” the right grind to get your coffee to taste better. Maybe it’s too coarse, so you adjust the setting. Or it’s too bitter, so you adjust the setting to make it coarser. The finer you grind your coffee, the shorter the amount of time it will take to brew/extract, and if you leave all other variables the same (amount of coffee used, amount of hot water, brew length, etc.), a finer grind can mean more caffeine extraction.

Beverage Size
Sure, drip brew coffee generally has a higher caffeine content than espresso. But is that really comparing apples to apples? I mean, for drip brew, you could be using an 8 or 12 oz mug. Meanwhile, a shot of espresso could be 1.5 oz. Should we really be comparing the two the way we do? If we look at caffeine content per ounce, espresso would win. Just a thought.

What are your thoughts on coffee and caffeine? Are there any other variables you can think of that might influence caffeine content in these brewing methods? Let me know in the comments. -Ken

Return to our Coffee Library to read more coffee tips.

Every now and then we like to send a reminder about our coffee subscriptions, where you can have coffee delivered right to your door every month for 3 or 6 months.

If you find yourself forgetting to place a Weekly Roast Coffee order before running out of coffee, placing an emergency order and counting the days until your coffee shipment arrives (and rationing whatever coffee you have left to get you through – and there’s a lot of you out there, we get your emails and tweets!) then this option may be for you!

A few reasons to subscribe:
*A monthly delivery of 2 12-oz bags of fresh-roasted coffee chosen by Ken
*New coffees get snatched up quickly, we reserve new coffees for our subscribers first
*As part of this coffee club, you pay an average of $12.50 per bag (total)
*We pay shipping starting on month 2
*Moving or taking vacation soon? Just let us know, we’ll pause or reroute your delivery
*90% of customers who try this service once continuously renew their subscription
*We’ll remind you when your subscription ends so you can renew without interruption
*You’ll love this service or you can cancel and we’ll refund you any remaining months (this has never happened!)

The process is easy – just visit our coffee club page and choose 3 or 6 months. We batch roast and ship all coffee subscriptions at the same time, around the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th depending on when you sign up. And of course, should you have any questions or need additional information, feel free to ask!

coffee club

Timing is everything… and the timing of when you grind your coffee beans matters. I’ve briefly mentioned it before, but there is a huge difference in the taste of brewed coffee when you brew within 60 seconds of grinding vs. brewing coffee with beans you ground the night before while setting up the coffee machine before bed (or worse, preground coffee). Here’s why…

The thing that makes coffee taste so good are the coffee oils found inside the coffee beans. During the coffee roasting process, sugars are caramelized and oils are formed and trapped inside the bean, encapsulated and protected from the outside world for a very short period of time. These coffee oils are essentially what gives brewed coffee its great taste.

In a perfect world, these oils would just hang out inside the bean indefinitely, but there are 2 forces working against these oils: carbon dioxide and oxygen. These two goons have a special assignment: destroy the coffee oils within 10 days, and if we let them, they’ll do just that – every time.

Let’s take carbon dioxide. One result of the coffee roasting process is that carbon dioxide is emitted from a freshly roasted coffee bean for about 2 weeks. The CO2 is the result of the volatile roasting process… think of it like a Pepsi can shaken up. It takes a little while for the Pepsi to normalize and the pressure to subside. Same thing with fresh roasted coffee – the coffee bean is in a volatile state and over the course of 10 days or so, the carbon dioxide slowly pushes the trapped coffee oils hiding inside the bean out to the surface, the oils escaping through cracks and crevices found throughout the interior and surface of the bean. The cracks are too small for oxygen to enter, so the carbon dioxide does the dirty work by forcing the oils out.

Now that the coffee oils are exposed on the surface of the bean, the second force – oxygen – takes over by attacking the oils and in a very small amount of time (30-60 minutes) the oils become rancid and if the beans are used, the resulting coffee will taste very stale and bitter.

With that background, it’s easy to see how ground coffee creates so much more surface area for oxygen to come in and do its thing. And not only do you have 30-60 minutes to brew your coffee after grinding, but 80% of any carbon dioxide left inside the coffee beans dissipate into the atmosphere within 60 seconds of grinding! CO2 is the main transport mechanism for pushing out any oils inside the bean casing into the water when we brew, so we really need to do what we can (brew quickly after grinding!) to use it to our advantage to get those oils out.

Try brewing within 60 seconds of grinding your coffee beans and I bet you’ll make a better tasting cup of coffee. -Ken

Return to our Coffee Library to read more coffee tips.

This week I came across a Chris Pirillo video on a new product being made by XPress, called the XPress smartcup. The smartcup is a portable, recyclable french press, completely made of plastic. It works like a regular 3-cup french press would – add the ground coffee to the cup, pour in hot water (195-205 degrees Fahrenheit), stir after a minute, then after 3 more minutes of steeping, slowly push down on the plastic ‘T” part until it clicks and you’re ready to drink (you can see this about 4 minutes into the video linked below).

I don’t really see too many people using this in the home (but I could be wrong). I do see the value of the smartcup in coffee shops and coffee bars. Most shops use drip brew coffee machines which can limit the flavor potential of the coffee, but a handful of shops offer french press coffee to customers (small, 3-cup presses or large, 8-12 cup presses for groups).

Plastic french presses don’t really hold heat too well, though, and glass french presses are dropped far too often. For these reasons, I think individual, recyclable french press cups that customers can take with them has a lot of potential, as long as coffee shops make sure to grind the beans coarsely, use the right temperature of water and also educate customers on how to use the french press cups. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

You may not realize it, but the paper filters we use when brewing coffee in a drip-brewer or coffee dripper have a taste. A pretty disgusting taste, actually… like chewing on newspaper. Paper filters have soluble solids in them which are extracted during the brew process and this papery taste makes it into your cup. We’re so used to the taste that we don’t even notice it in our coffee anymore. But, if this filter taste was removed, we would notice the lack of paper taste in our brew, and we could get that much closer to attaining the perfect cup of coffee.

This can be done very easily! The best way, if using a drip-brew machine, is to place your filter in the coffeemaker (don’t add any coffee grounds yet!), add some water to the machine and start the brew cycle. You can use a small amount of water, about half a cup to a cup should do. The goal is to get some very hot water running through the filter to remove the paper taste. Dump the water after it cycles and start brewing your coffee like normal.

If you’re brewing with a manual pour-over dripper such as the Clever Coffee Dripper, just place the paper filter inside the dripper, place the dripper on top of your mug, and in a circular motion, pour water over the filter so that the entire thing gets wet. It doesn’t take much, and the quality of the pour matters much more than the quantity of water used. Cold water doesn’t work very well because the filter’s soluble solids (fibers, etc.), much like ground coffee beans, have a quicker extraction time the hotter the water is (that’s why french press with hot water takes 4 minutes and cold brewing takes 8-12 hours)… so, near-boiling water works best.

I typically use a coffee dripper when making coffee and when I pour hot water onto the filter, I can clearly see that the water that drips into my mug has a yellow tint and tastes very papery! Sometimes I forget to rinse the filter, especially if I’m half asleep… but, when I make a second cup, I taste a big difference when rinsing the filter. Try this for yourself. Make a cup of coffee the usual way. Then, do the rinse and make note of the yellow tint in the water. Take a small sip (gag!) and make note of what you taste. This is what cuppers (professional coffee tasters) do. They taste the good and the bad so they have experience and descriptors to use when saying why a coffee tastes good or bad. I bet if you use this rinsing technique you’ll taste a big difference in your coffee you brew at home.

One last note – in our last blog post, we discussed the importance of preheating your mug for better tasting coffee. This post ties in, as you can actually knock out both rinsing your filter and preheating your mug at the same time in most cases! The rinsed water is what would stay in your mug, keeping it hot, until you’re ready to dump it out and pour in a fresh brew. -Ken

Return to our Coffee Library to read more coffee tips.

For many years I drank coffee without preheating my mug. I’d pour in the coffee into a room temperature mug (which actually tends to be a little cold by touch at room temperature), add some cold creamer, then would be really dissatisfied at the lukewarm brew I’d start sipping. Then I’d have to compensate by sipping a little coffee out and adding more of the brew to my mug (which would only marginally bring up the brew temp.) or, worse, I’d stick my mug in the microwave to make it hotter (hey, I know this is heresy… this was a long time ago!). Just like leaving coffee sitting on a warmer for 20 or 30 minutes, microwaving coffee actually changes the physical chemistry of the brew and degrades the quality of the resulting cup.

The fact is, I didn’t really understand too much about coffee back then or know anything about optimal brew temps. or what I could do to make better tasting coffee at home. Warm coffee can taste a lot different than hot coffee, as the flavors seem to change as coffee cools. The problem was, most drip-brew coffee makers, including the one I was using at the time, can only get up to about 190 degrees Fahrenheit at best, when optimal coffee extraction really takes place between 195-205. So, the coffee wasn’t brewing at the correct temperature in the first place, and the brew wasn’t making it into my cup at a decent temperature, either.

Besides my usual rant on how you can brew coffee at a more optimal temperature by using a french press, or our favorite pour-over method, the Clever Coffee Dripper, another suggestion on how to keep your coffee hotter is to preheat your mug before brewing your coffee.

This obviously doesn’t really work too well when pouring coffee into a paper cup, but when using a ceramic or travel mug, by preheating the mug, we can prevent the dramatic heat loss that happens when pouring a fresh brew of coffee into an otherwise cold mug.

Hot water from the tap isn’t hot enough. We need boiling or near boiling water for preheating. If you’re using a pour-over dripper, you can do this by placing your dripper on top of the mug and pouring some hot water through. This not only preheats your mug, but also the dripper, which can help maintain heat while brewing. If making coffee with a regular drip-brew coffee maker, you can also run some hot water through but since the brewer itself won’t usually get past 190 degrees, it may be better to put some water in your mug from the tap and microwave it for about 1:30 or boil water using a kettle… using a microwave is probably more convenient.

Leave the hot water in the mug until you’re ready to either start your dripping if using a pour-over method, or right before pouring in the brew from your drip-brew coffeemaker. Dump the hot water right before you start, and you’ll notice that the coffee in your mug will be a lot hotter than before…  you’ll likely taste flavors you may have never picked up on previously.

And, hopefully, you’ll never consider microwaving your cup of coffee again.

Give preheating your mug a try and let me know in the comments if you can taste a difference.

Although I’m partial to making coffee in a french press or a pour over cone dripper, many people still use regular old drip coffee brewers. And that’s OK. Maybe you don’t like the amount of sediment you get in your cup from using a french press (grind coarser, ::ahem::). Maybe the thought of brewing 1 cup at a time using a cone dripper seems like too much of a hassle, especially if you need to brew more than 1 cup of coffee at a time.

Perhaps you’re just not ready to move to the next level of your coffee journey just yet. Whatever the case may be, drip brewers are still one of the most common ways of brewing coffee in most people’s homes. I’m not a big fan, since optimal coffee extraction really happens around 195-205 degrees and drip brewers can typically only get up to about 190.

Still, there’s a simple hack you can use to make your drip brewed coffee taste better by leveraging the pause and serve feature (if your brewer has one… many do!).

The pause and serve is a feature introduced back in ’86 by Mr. Coffee drip coffee brewers where, while your coffee is brewing, it allows you to sneak a quick cup before the entire brewing process is complete by stopping the dripping of coffee for up to about a minute when the carafe is removed mid-brew. After pouring yourself a cup, and replacing the carafe back on top of the warming plate, the drip begins again.

The hack is simple… the filter basket, carrying the ground coffee, gets a continual showering of hot water, but never gets fully submerged with water such as in a french press. We’re going to change that. Wait about a minute after starting the brew process and pull the carafe out of the coffee maker, not to sneak a cup, but rather to allow that filter basket to fill up with hot water. Wait a good 45 seconds, then return the carafe to the warming plate… let the brewed coffee filter in to the carafe and give it about 30 seconds to “catch up”. Repeat 2-3 more times.

By doing this, you’re in effect making that filter basket fill up with hot water so the coffee grounds can steep, fully submerged, much like a french press. I think you’ll be really surprised by the results… you should notice a bigger body and richer flavor. Give it a shot and let me know in the comments if you tried this and how the resulting coffee tasted. -Ken

Return to our Coffee Library to read more coffee tips.

The Clever Coffee Dripper is available at weeklyroast.com.

Last week, our blog post featured Cheeming Boey, an artist who draws amazing artwork on foam cups with a sharpie.

We came across an article this week about Dirceu Veiga, a Brazillian designer who creates art using coffee for ink. Click here to see Dirceu’s Web page featuring his coffee art.