I’ve been asked that question a lot after launching my blog to a larger audience. For me this is really a passion project, I am quite fascinated with coffee for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that coffee is just so complex. There are so many factors to consider. You could take really great green coffee and mess it up during the roast. You could take great roasted coffee and mess it up during the grinding or brewing process. So many factors and so many variables make it a crazy network of interconnecting rabbit holes, and who doesn’t love a good rabbit hole?

My goal in starting this project was simple, I wanted to improve people’s coffee experience and provide them the information and resources to do so with value and convenience in mind. What I found is that every time I searched for something about coffee I was inundated with ads, two ads in between each paragraph, header ads, footer ads, sidebar ads and don’t forget the pop up asking if you want to enable notifications.

The information in those ad riddled posts were often way too basic or not what I would consider accessible to most people. I wanted to create something that was easy to read and short where it needed to be and detailed where it needed to be, if that makes any sense.

As I started really getting into coffee I was talking to friends and family about how they consumed coffee and heard a variety of answers. One theme that I saw recurring was that people who were very deliberate and thoughtful about their choices as consumers (myself included prior to this), were not at all discerning in their selection of coffee. They saw coffee as just something to be consumed in the morning for a caffeine kick. You know the people I’m talking about, they research things, they care about sustainability, they buy organic food, they know all the good restaurants and can explain to you the different varieties of wine or beer, but when it came time for coffee, they had a Keurig machine or sometimes the upgrade of a Nespresso.

Nobody I spoke to bought coffee from a local roaster or focused on specialty coffee or single origin. A few people bought Blue Bottle, Peet’s or Stumptown coffee, but that was it. When I asked most people what kind of coffee they liked, the answer 9 times out of 10 was either “medium” or “dark.” What really started this whole project was me trying to convince my wife that we were overpaying for Keurig and Nespresso, and that for less money we could be making much better coffee.

My passion project is really an outreach and information campaign to let people know that much better coffee has a low barrier to entry, especially if you’re already paying for pods. Many people are under the impression that they need to spend a thousand dollars on a super-automatic coffee machine to get better coffee, the opposite is actually true as most pros would agree the coffee from those machines is worse than what you can make with a regular espresso machine or pour over due to the lack of adjustments.

The idea I am sharing is that, any fresh, whole bean coffee, ground and brewed using any method will be better than the coffee in pods at a lower cost, now if your lifestyle or needs are such that pods are the only option, that’s fine, I just wanted to let people that better coffee is within reach for minimal investment.

The truth is that large coffee chains, like Starbucks, have conditioned us to think that super dark roasted, bitter, awful coffee is bold or strong and what coffee should taste like. For those who want a better coffee experience, I want to be a resource to get you there.

Specialty coffee is amazing, the notes and aromas that come from freshly roasted coffee is something I look forward to every morning. I usually only drink one cup of coffee a day and I look forward to the next day’s cup. Even though I test different coffee machines, I still go to my pour over most mornings and find the process therapeutic.

Let me know what kind of posts you would like to see in future posts.