I am so glad I never got on the coffee bandwagon. I once surreptitiously added up how much my coworkers spent on coffee during a typical work week (not even including what they might have spent at home). Crazy (to me) amounts of money.
Buying a grinder, French press and bags of beans is not very expensive. Maybe $0.25 a cup depending on the quality of beans you get, plus an initial investment of ~$50 for equipment.
Spending $5 on a blended pseudo coffee drink at Starbucks is not the only option.
> Spending $5 on a blended pseudo coffee drink at Starbucks is not the only option.
The price per ounce of coffee on those drinks has got to be astronomical!
I didn't drink coffee when I first moved to New Mexico, but after trying to local piñon coffee I'm a convert--luckily, I can get a 5 lb bag of the beans at Costco for about $30!
I managed to get myself hooked on some of our local small-batch roasters. I've specifically been buying Trifecta beans lately, and while the price of $10-15/lb isn't too bad, the need to purchase pastries and one of their unique espresso drinks every time I stop by for a pound of beans certainly isn't doing my wallet any favors.
I've been debating picking up some Piñon from Costco sometime soon to save a few bucks, but have a question about that - do you find that whatever they add to the beans can gum up your grinder?
Where does one find good dark roast beans? The on-line descriptions of flavor are not very helpful. I guess what I need is a sampler: a few ounces each of a bunch of beans. Alternatively, I'll listen to advice on good dark roast beans.
Not knowing the coffee culture of your particular locale, I’ll just offer some generic suggestions:
* Try out a few local coffee shops - and I mean local artisan coffee shops, that sell hipster shit like pour-overs and espresso con pano. They tend to actually care about what they sell, rather than some other coffee shops that just sell diner-style coffee and pastries for people to grab on the way to work.
* Get to know the baristas/roaster(s)/owner(s), and try out their different coffee options. I know of several local places that offer (at least) dark and light roast drip coffee options, sometimes with several different pour-over options (my current favorite probably offers about a dozen different bean options, give or take).
* See if they sell beans or can point you in the direction of where they buy beans.
As far as I know, oily beans are what you want for a good, full-city (very dark) roast. The article you linked is definitely an opinion piece - I’ve never met a roaster who didn’t think a dark roast, or at least a very dark roast, should be roasted to “first crack”, though most are opposed to “second crack” (what Starbucks does, and it’s essentially burning the beans).
Having worked at a few cafes in my day, you’d be amazed at the profit margins on coffee. It costs pennies for the typical cafe to sell a cup of black coffee at ~$2.50.
The margins are good, but from my experience (which was a long time ago tbf), a lot more profit came from food. A small cafe isn’t doing badly to sell 200-300 coffees a day. Even if you’re selling 300 at $4, that’s only $1200 in revenue. Margins on food aren’t as good, but you’d be hoping to make 3x-4x revenue on food compared to coffee. Keeping in mind that a even a small cafe would likely be running at least a couple grand in expenses per day (with the biggest being rent and payroll).
Exactly, every hobby or indulgence has extremes. I'm happy with my ~$200 in coffee equipment and $5-10/lb coffee. But, plenty of other people spend thousands on equipment and buy $20-30+/lb coffee.
All things considered, coffee is a fairly cheap hobby. At the extreme end you’ve got espresso machines and personal roasters, of course, but for the average coffee connoisseur, excellent equipment is attainable for a few hundred dollars.
>but for the average coffee connoisseur, excellent equipment is attainable for a few hundred dollars.
I think this is generally true of most hobbies (jokingly it's what I use to define a hobby, something that you can, but don't have spend at least 1000 USD on).
To pick one I recently started on you can get started brewing beer for under 100 dollars. You can get perfectly acceptable, even excellent beer using basic equipment. Then, if you want you can go out and spend thousands of dollars on pressure transfer equipment, kegging tools, stainless steel fermenters and etc.
> Spending $5 on a blended pseudo coffee drink at Starbucks is not the only option.
That's only a fashion statement, which, like all other fashion statements, don't go for any quality or smart/educated choice but pure social signaling.
Nobody with any functional taste buds in places like Italy goes to Starbucks. Only those desperately lost and having herd mentality, similar to folks in France eating in McDonald (and there are tons of those).
/rant
Btw if kitchen hob is available, I consider Italian press (aka Moka pot) superior to French press, and more efficient in extracting flavors and potency (so also more economical in long run). Prices tend to be similar.
I'm a coffee drinker who manages to get away spending almost no money on it because coffee's free at work and I'm not picky about the taste (I don't mind instant). :) (it's coffee connoisseurs who spend a lot)
I used to be a non-coffee drinker-- and I applaud coffee-teetotalers--but in my 2nd year of grad school I discovered that a small dose of coffee (1/2 cup) made so much more productive. Because I dosed it according to my body weight, I was able to get the benefits of coffee without its downsides. There were higher order benefits too. My moods improved because I felt productive, which helped me progress academically, and it all became a virtuous cycle.
My rule today is: drink coffee, but not too much, free is better.
I agree on the free coffee front. I find coffee is one of those few products where quality mostly decreases with price. The other case of this--very similar--is generic medicine, where expired patents mean nobody is making a buck on a huge sales show to promote a crappy medicine, so you get better results if you select the cheapest alternative.
I'm using a french press with hand-grinder and the beans are roughly $30/month max. In terms of enjoyment maybe the highest ROI of the money I'm spending.
If you brew it yourself, coffee is cheap. Too cheap in fact, as it is fueled by exploitation.
I have an espresso machine and grinder at home, about 1000€ worth. My everyday coffee is at ~15€ per kg, I dose 14g per cup (espresso double), and drink about 4 cups a day, about 1€ per day. Let's amortize the equipment for 5 years, add a bit for electricity, water, cleaning supplies, ... That's 2 € per day, for maybe Starbucks-level coffee.
For 3-4€ per day, you can buy gourmet coffee and a high end grinder and machine. The result will be better than in 99% of coffee shops.
If you just want caffeine, you can buy cheap coffee for half the price, and spend 10x less on equipment bringing the price down to less than 1 € per day.
Sure, it adds up, but is is far from crazy. On par with drinking store-bought soda or fancy water, and definitely cheaper than smoking.
I think it's hilarious that you say you're happy you are, but all the replies are telling you how you could get addicted to their drug of choice. Just let irrational be, everybody!
That's not the claim GP made. They said their coworkers spent an amount of money that seemed crazy to the GP. There's nothing to refute! Repliers don't know the coworkers. They can't refute GP's personal metrics. And we already know that some people don't think spending money on coffee is ok, because GP's co-workers are doing it every week.
Of course there is something to refute - with the provided info we can only assume that GP is referring to the co-workers spending 3-5 dollars per coffee at a coffee shop. The replies are providing an alternative to this method of consumption.
So? The GP is still allowed to think it's crazy that those people spend that amount of money. The GP is surely aware, like everyone is, that you can make food for less than you can buy premade stuff for. As are the people buying coffee at the coffee shop, who will go on spending it no matter how many people reply to his comment.
So unless people are trying to get the GP to join in their addiction (but cheaper!), there's no point in telling him all this. Nothing is being refuted.
Unless you go for the really high-end stuff, it's a few cents a day to drink a couple of cups at home in the morning.
In a seller's market for labor, free coffee makes a useful pons asinorum for potential employers, whether or not you drink it at work. (I don't.) Even in overpriced packaging methods like K-cups, it's so inexpensive in bulk that a company that cheaps out there will cheap out on more important things too. Similarly, because caffeine is a performance-enhancing drug for cognitive workers, one may reasonably question the good sense of leadership which refuses to provide it free of charge.
Used here in a more metaphorical sense, for sure. There are more precise idioms for what I intended to say, but they didn't come to mind in time, so I went with what I had.
I don't drink coffee at home. I don't make it at work. I will get it sometimes at work from the barista bar.
But when I am working from home, I will _always_ go to a coffee house to work. It is difficult to state how important that the "third place" is. I focus far better there than at home. Try it out. Even if you don't drink coffee. Get a nice peppermint tea or something.
Even if coffee shops aren't open, the advice still stands---you can (at least in the US) go out and work at a park or another outdoor spot without running into too many people.
There are various kinds of coffee. I'm using moka pot and I'm buying grinded coffee. Those are cheap enough, moka pot is around $50 and lasts few years (forever if you're careful), grinded coffee is something like $10 in my country and enough for a 2-3 weeks for me. I'm living in a third-world country but that's not my biggest spendings my a large margin. Preparing 4 cups of coffee takes around 3 minutes. That's enough for me to sustain for a half of day.
There are some people who are spending unhealthy amount of money, true, but they chose to do so. There are various options and if someone wants to spend 10x money to get 10% better taste (and even that is subjective), that's his choice, not something unavoidable.
It can be ultra cheap. Buy raw coffee beans in big bags. Their shelf life is years, and they are like a few bucks per kilogram.
Roasting at home doesn't require expensive equipment either. A manual grinder is like 20 bucks, same goes for the brewing thingy that you put on the stovetop.
Any suggestions for where to get green beans? Sweet Maria's has come up before in conversations with friends, but if there's some amazing source for them, I'd love to know!
Man, it is so much cheaper south of the border. Canadian green bean distributors seem to be quite a bit more expensive, even when factoring in the exchange rate.
Could you give a quick overview how one would roast at home? I tried baking green beans in the oven and "roasting" in a pan, both approaches went undrinkable.
We had a hand cranked one since forever in my family home. As a kid I always volunteered to grind the coffee for my parents. I don't remember it being particularly hard to crank but who knows - I indeed use an electric one nowadays.
It wasn't so much hard to crank, it just took forever to crank through all the beans for a serving. Maybe I set it too fine. 10 minutes of cranking vs 30 seconds on the electric grinder.
Now that I switched to caffeine pills I'm getting my two cups a day for 5 cents. I'm too drowsy otherwise. In fact the whole reason why I got into this mess of softcore stimulants was because I was falling asleep in class and behind the wheel of a car.
There's a comic titled The Four Vices, each pane the character is taking a day off from their vices. I guess my problem is now that I have had coffee I don't want off and I pretty fearful that I'd just find another vice instead to fill the void.
Funny, my coworker convinced our workplace to build and stock a coffee bar with an espresso machine by the exact same reasoning. Top of the line equipment and sending him to barista training still cost far less than we were all spending at our local shops each month.
$4-6 per run. They do a minimum of 3 runs a day. It cost them $12-18 a day in coffee. 5 days a week was $60-90 a week. Approximately $240-360 a month. That is a brand new car payment.
Buying coffee at coffee shops every day is for suckers. Buy your own beans, grind them at home, and brew. Costs pennies per cup - cheaper than alcohol. Water is the only drink that's cheaper.
