Why Craft Coffee?

The staple brands just aren't doing it anymore. Today we will be discussing what has brought on a huge shift to craft coffee, and why you have likely made the move to smaller coffee roasting companies (like your's truly).

Imagine that you drink 2 cups of coffee a day, every day. That is over 7,000 cups of coffee per decade. Why would you drink that much of something you don't like?

Put another way- there are things we will do every single day of our lives. It is important to make sure they are something we want to do everyday. Do you want to enjoy your coffee every single day?

Coffee roasting, like many industries, has fallen pray to a rampant desire to maximize production and leverage psychological marketing tactics, instead of investing in excellent products. They rely on acquiring very cheap raw beans that get roasted to maximize uniformity rather than taste. Often, additive flavorings are used to make up for the quality. These flavorings will not be real ingredients, but lab-made synthetic flavorings that are allowed to be called "natural flavors."

But once you get a taste of real coffee - that is, responsibly-farmed, quality green coffee roasted to bring out its good flavor - it is hard to return to the old brands.

It is possible that once upon a time, the big coffee brands prided themselves on excellent coffee. But CEOs come and go, new owners with different profit-priorities step in, and changes are made. Who knows what the original Folger's owner and roaster would think if he had a cup of Folgers today?

This is not unique to coffee, but every industry has moved like this. Big brands get established and immediately move to inferior quality in efforts to maximize profit. Then, they hide behind additional ingredients. For example, look how almost no major soda company uses real sugar, or real flavors. Everything has become synthetic. Look at how fast food saturates everything in cheap seed oils and MSG. What would a fast-food burger taste like without MSG? Would it taste like a backyard grilled burger? Probably not.

So what is a discerning consumer to do? Thank God for craft coffee. 

Craft coffee roasters make an effort to acquire the highest quality beans and roasts for their customer. And this leads to higher upfront costs for the craft roaster. The roaster often pays more for their green beans, pound for pound, than it costs to buy a bag of bad store-brand coffee. The profit margins are probably similar for both.

It is up to the customer to select for quality products.

At Coffeyville Coffee Company, we make the choice easy. As America's Heart of Coffee, we are the standard for craft coffee. We buy the highest quality green coffees from unique farms and co-ops around the world, and roast those beans individually in small batches to highlight unique flavors. We then combine roasts into blends that showcase powerful flavor combinations. Every step of the way, we take seriously our role as the first choice for craft coffee.