Coffee in the Garden

Every day across America, millions of pots of coffee and tea are brewed, and the millions of pounds of wet grounds, filters and bags thrown in the trash.  This wasteful and could be put to so much better use.

Coffee and filters can be used in the garden and farm as follows:

• Throw it in your compost: Coffee grounds are 1.45% nitrogen and contain calcium and magnesium to add some trace minerals you may not get from your other organic material.  Coffee grounds are a green material (I know coffee is brown, but same idea as grass clippings) so you should add with at least equal amounts of brown material (leaves). Coffee filters and tea bags decompose quickly, so just put it all in the compost pile.
• Add it directly to your garden:   Coffee has an average pH of 6.9 so for all intensive purposes, it is neutral. It loses most (or all) of its acidity during the brewing process.
• Fertilizer: Sometimes your plants need a little boost in the morning as well.  Simply add a couple cups of coffee grounds to a bucket of water and let it seep for 24 hours and apply to plant in the same way you would compost tea.  If you are busy/lazy you also can use it as a side dressing on top of your soil and let the rain seep it for you. That is my preferred method.
• Annoy your pests to stay out of your garden: It has been said that coffee grounds can deter cats from using your garden as their own personal commode.  There are also reports that it can deter slugs as well.  Coffee grounds may annoy ants to convince them to move their home elsewhere.

You can usually get coffee from your local coffee shop. But here is another thing to think about. Has the coffee you are using been grown organic. No chemicals used on it before, during or after the growing process. If you are trying to truly keep you garden chemical free, consider the coffee you are using in the garden and  compost pile.

There is some great information on the web about starting a compost pile in your back yard. I am amazed at how much stuff we have come up with  to put in the pile since we started our this spring. Coffee grounds has been a big boast to our pile because we are always serving coffee. When I will start to put something down the disposal, and then I remember I have a small bucket by the sink to take to the pile. We very rarely use the disposal anymore.

Bonus things to do with coffee: 

1. Put some coffee grounds down the disposal, let it sit for a little bit and then run it, the grounds will help freshen the disposal and the drain.
2. Have a musty trunk or old chest of draws, put whole bean or ground coffee in them, it will remove the smell. Give it some time, it works.
3. Place a bowl of coffee beans in the refrigerator, it will keep the smells out. This is the most important reason to NEVER, NEVER store your coffee in the refrigerator. Coffee absorbs smells and taste very easily, unless you like onion flavor and scented coffee, keep it out of the refrigerator if you intend to brew and drink it later.
4. This one is from my non-coffee drinking son. He loves the smell of fresh coffee. So we took a nylon stocking and made a sachet for him to put in his car. You can hide it under the seat or just keep it on the dash. The ideas came to him when he was delivering some fresh roasted coffee to someone he works with and when he got back into the car, the whole car smelled like fresh roasted coffee.

This is just an FYI: I made an challenge to an art friend of mine, do a painting this summer with coffee. I am providing her with some shots of espresso for the challenge. Can’t wait to see the results.

The Good, Bad & the Ugly of Blending

Our goal for a blend is a very simple goal; achieve a more complete, complex and pleasing coffee experience than can be gotten from brewing single origin alone. Blending can be fun.

When we are working on a custom blend, the first thing we do is figure out what the strengths of our coffees are and then select the ones that we think will complement one another without over powering those qualities. The second step is the process of deciding what percentage we will use of each coffee. It is a trial and error kind of thing. You have an idea of what you think will work together and then you start mixing it up a bit. One of our favorite ways to create a blend is to brew a strong pot of each of the single origins and with a teaspoon and cup measure in some of each, taste, let it cool in the cup and taste again. If we like it, we work it over to see if there is a better combination.

There are coffees that work so well together the blends have become famous, such as Mocha Java. But the one thing you need to know is everyone’s Mocha Java could taste different. It just depends on the coffee that is select from each of those regions.

We also blend because we have gotten a large group of clients that love there fresh roasted coffee all day, but don’t really want to stay up all night. So we do some very good half-caf blends. Now this takes time to perfect what to do. Because a decaffeinated coffee require more care in roasting the regular coffees, it is best to roast them separately. We like to call this a Mélange, which is a blend of coffees that have each been roasted individually. They could have been roasted to a different degree, some light, some dark or from different origins. Mélange is fun to say, so when talking about blends I make sure I work it into the conversation.

Espresso blending can be quit the art. It can be a blend of three to seven different coffees, a combination of different origins and/or roasting levels. Each one is there for a reason, not just hap hazard added. Finding the right coffees for most roasters is an ongoing endeavor. A good espresso will make a big difference in your coffee based drinks. When you find one you will know it.
I think this was a short and sweet description of the GOOD of blending.

Now we can move onto the BAD of blending. I guess the first BAD of blending would be, for just the sake of blending. From a marketing perspective a larger number of choices with cool names can be good for sales, but not so good for taste. If a roaster has purchase say 4 coffees and create as many combinations as he can come up with, that is a lot of blend choices, but not necessarily good choices. The number of blends offered isn’t important, but what you achieve from that blend sure is.

Now this is just an observation from our time in the coffee business. Many people think that all coffees are blends and they are under the assumption that a blend is better than a single origin. NOT TRUE! A blend is only as good as the carefully select coffees used to create that blend, and the skill of the roaster that created it.

I guess my second thought on the BAD of blending would have to be if you blended a coffee that was so complex with so many things going on that you would miss them because you stuck it in a blend. Don’t let anyone tell you there isn’t a coffee out there that shouldn’t be included in a blend. In my opinion they are wrong. There are some “out of this world” single origin coffees and I wish I could afford to buy all of them. To truly experience them, they should be brewed alone, but shared with another coffee lover.

What would be the UGLY of blending? I am telling you this does happens. All of the coffee from a region is purchased by a large roaster all mixed together; it doesn’t matter what quality or defect is in the bean. It could have been processed wrong by the farmer, have molds, been a bad crop, handled badly coming into the US, allowing it to pick up some very nasty taste along the way, but then it is all roasted into one blend. Now that is scary. What is in your cup????

I just thought of another UGLY, you could call this the Lie Blend. They call it by a well known name such as Kona Blend or Jamaican Blue Mountain Blend. Since there are no regulations out there telling you what percentage of a coffee needs to be in a blend to use that coffee as the enticer, you might think it is mostly the enticer coffee that is in the blend, but it could be 5% for all you know. Check the price, there is the tell.

I was reading some stuff on blending the other day and came across another reason to blend. It is an old-crop/new-crop blend. Right a first I thought, well that is a way to hide the fact that you have a bag of old flat coffee sitting in your shop. So I read on, the author said, “you can obtain a fuller, more balanced version of the particular coffee’s taste than could be obtained by roasting either new or old-crop alone. I still need to think on this one. Our goal is to use up a coffee before it becomes old-crop. So it is not an experiment we have done to see what we think.

Blending or Single Origin coffees, it is still a raging battle between the Coffee Purist and the Blend Enthusiast. However what really matters is it a good fresh roasted coffee bean that has been handled and processed well? What is in your cup?

I know the picture is cheesy, couldn't help myself. Click on the picture, do you recognize it, is your age showing?

Exciting Coffee News

Well, it is exciting news for us. Indy Magazine just did a feature article on Midwest Coffee Company. It is in the Green Living section of the May/June issue. "Real Smooth Roaster" was written by Tina Jesson of Carmel. We have been told that 30,000 copies have already been distributed and that there will be a second printing. Look for the magazine all over the Indy area, welcome centers, hotels, stores, etc. It is a magazine about all thing Indiana. It is a beautifully done magazine. Very classy looking. We are proud to be a part of this issue. Alan Applebaum has done a great job.

How Fresh Is Your Coffee

To truly talk about fresh coffee we need to start at the beginning.

Green Coffee Bean Freshness
Fresh really begins all the way back to the day it is harvested from the coffee trees and how quickly the farmer gets it to market. The quicker it is sold at the auction, put on a ship to the US, unloaded, moved into a truck, delivered to a storage warehouse and sold to a roaster, the fresher the green coffee will be.

Roaster to Your House
TIME! Oh' so important for your roasted bean. There is a whole science experiment that could go with this part of it. How long does it take for your roasted coffee to degas? DEGAS? What? Yes, coffee beans do have gas. But you do want to be near them when they degas, unlike uncle Fred. It takes about 15 days for the degassing to be complete. It's all downhill from there. Deterioration starts, wonderful flavor is lost and aroma will start to diminish over time. If you pre-grind your coffee it will happen even quicker. So drink your coffee in the first 15 days and you will not have to worry about that. Now this is a problem I have with the big companies out there. They tell you that they vacuum seal your coffee to hold in the freshness. What a load of S****! (stuff) If you vacuum seal coffee before it is done degassing the bag expands and could even pop. So if it is in a brick, it must have been done degassing before it was even put in the package.

So what am I telling you here? Buy a 15 day supply, fresh from the roaster, take it straight home and put it into an air tight glass container. (Like a Ball Jar, but don't crank it down too tight.) Enjoy all the ever changing pleasant flavors that happen in the first 15 days, and then order your next batch and start all over again. Try a different origin or blend to mix things up a bit. Don’t get caught in a coffee rut, there are hundreds of origins out there just waiting for you to bring them home. Midwest Coffee Company has 15 to chose from and they are all grown and produced 100% chemical free.

Storage is a major element in freshness. The amount of oxygen exposure your beans have will speed up the deterioration process. Light and temperature also play a part in freshness. We are constantly asked about storing coffee in the refrigerator or freezer. EEET, wrong. No fridg, no freezer. Put in an airtight glass, stainless steel, ceramic, or an old coffee or cookie tin. Put it in your pantry. Cool, dark, airtight. Perfect. Ah! I feel better. I can tell you stories about ice crystals and onions and Jell-O and your coffee if you want, just let me know.

Now the last part of this FRESH story is all about BREWING and drinking your coffee.Grind it, brew it, and drink it. Don’t let it sit on the burner; put the leftover straight into a pre-warmed carafe or drink it all. Now in a perfect world we would all do this. Right? But some of us have to get up early and don’t function very well until we have had that first cup of coffee. Okay then, go ahead and grind it the night before, put it in your brewer with the timer set for way too early, and since it is not a perfect world and if your coffee has only been roasted for a few days, you may not notice that it sat in the coffee pot all night. But don’t forget to close the top on the brewer, the cat may lick it. You don't really know what they do when the lights go out. It could be a real cat party.

What to brew in? There are so many wonderful choices and they are all good in there their own way. All methods will bring out something different in you fresh roasted coffee. I use several different methods and I am willing to experiment with others. Do you have a suggested method or a serious preference? Let me know. I will try it.

This is just some extra information that we can’t really do anything about, but it can affect the quality and flavor of you fresh coffee. Things like, how long it sits on a hot ship, on the dock and in the truck, or how about a cold dock and freezing in a truck on route to the warehouse, all of these things affect the moisture content of the green coffee. These are elements that are out of the roaster's control. Several green brokers are working on storage and shipping solutions for the future of our precious coffee beans.