Who doesn’t know how to make coffee? Whether you’re interested in brewing the best tasting cup or you just need a stimulant in your system as soon as possible in the morning, most of us figure out how to make drinkable coffee at home. Most of us have also wondered at some point why the same coffee we make at home tastes better when we eat out or at a friend’s house. Or we wonder why whatever we’ve been doing for the last few years suddenly doesn’t do it for us anymore.

Many of us at Coffee Bean Direct are foodies and pretty talented cooks — if you ask any of us we’d be happy to tell you just how talented. That’s why potlucks turn into cook-offs which turn into marathons of indigestion. Today’s chili cook-off is an especially happy occasion since Sandy put last year’s event on hold indefinitely and we all had to suffer through the storm bloat-free. The chili was delicious, of course.

Also noteworthy was the collection crockpots, some museum-worthy.

The winning chili belonged to this beauty.

The talent behind the winning dish is chef John, was kind enough to share his recipe using our Dark Sulawesi coffee. Here’s the quick and dirty version:

Cook 2lbs of chopped onions in bacon fat over low heat until translucent, remove from heat.

Brown 2lbs of meat (the winning batch was a ground pork and bison mix) and deglaze the pan with 1/2 pot of brewed Dark Sulawesi Kalossi.

Throw everything in a crock pot, add 2lbs of Anasazi beans (soaked overnight), 4 pints of dark beer, chili powder, molasses, salt, and sliced Szechuan chili peppers (feel free to get creative with the quantities).

Cook on high 4-6 hours.

Fall is official and our seasonal flavors are full of cinnamon, maple, pumpkin, and other things that are wonderful to cook with. My personal favorite is Pumpkin Chai, a beautiful blend of black, green, and herbal teas flavored with chai spices, caramel, and pumpkin. It smells so good I decided to find a way to eat it.

There are many ways to infuse foods with tea flavor, and I would like to try all of them. At the moment I’m too busy for a recipe that requires more than a few steps, so I decided to give a simple syrup recipe a try, inspired by the title. It is stupidly simple, and the end result is delicious and versatile. Here’s what you do:

1. Brew a cup of strong tea. I used three teaspoons of the Pumpkin Chai in one cup of boiling water and let it steep for about five minutes.
2. Strain the leaves and bring the tea to a boil in a small sauce pot.
3. While the tea is boiling, add a cup of sugar and stir constantly for about two minutes.
   
4. Let the mixture cool completely. Store in a container with a tight lid (a canning jar works great).

At room temperature the syrup will last about a week before it begins to crystallize. Refrigeration will extend the shelf life to about a month, probably longer, but chances are it won’t sit uneaten for that long.

What can you do with tea-infused simple syrup? Bake with it, poach with it, add it to an adult beverage, or drizzle it on whatever you want. I’m already planning a million variations on this theme.

Feeling under-challenged by simple syrup, I decided to keep going and make sundae sauce, adapting this recipe for wet walnuts, my favorite. I brought a half-and-half mixture of the simple syrup and maple syrup to a boil, along with the vanilla extract and pinch of salt. Then I stirred in chopped walnuts and let it cook for a few minutes. That’s all. Warm, on vanilla ice cream, it is mind-blowing. Warm, on pancakes, also mind-blowing. Cold, right out of the jar with a spoon, mind-blowing.

Have you tried cooking with tea? We’d love some recipe suggestions!

There’s something new and exciting happening here at Coffee Bean Direct: a new sister site, greencoffees.com. Perhaps you’ve noticed the new tab at the top of our home-page, or the link on the menu. Or our newsletter announcement and Facebook posts. Or perhaps you’re ignoring all that because what is green coffee anyway? Who is it for? Why would I bother with roasting at home? There are many reasons to give roasting a try and many, very accessible, ways to do it — see our DIY Guide for more on that. But first, we know there’s some confusion out there about green coffee, so let’s clear up a few misperceptions:

Green coffee is unripe coffee

Green can mean a lot of things, but in this context “green” refers to the color of the raw bean before roasting. Unlike a banana, green coffee is not unripe, just uncooked and bursting with potential. Raw coffee is greenish gray, yellow, or brown, and is covered with papery “chaff,” or skin. This burns off during the roasting process, as moisture is lost and sugars caramelize, producing the coffee color we know and love.

Clockwise from top left: Decaf Colombian, Sulawesi Kalossi, Indian Monsooned Malabar, and Sumatra Mandheling.

Green coffee is like green tea, with a delicious flavor all its own

We sell green coffee for roasting, not for consumption as-is. Unroasted beans are hard as a rock. Literally. If you’re familiar with the Moh’s scale of mineral hardness, it’s about a 5, somewhere between Apatite and Feldspar (we did the test, because you asked). Pulverization might be possible, but your home grinder is not up to that task, and neither is ours. Even if you were somehow able to brew it, it would probably taste horrendously bitter. Roasting lowers acidity, releases aromatic compounds responsible for deliciousness, and is an all-around wonderful thing.

Home roasting requires something like this in my basement

Like coffee brewing, coffee roasting equipment ranges from simple to high-tech. Fancy gadgets don’t necessarily produce a better end result — every method has its fans. Coffee beans have been roasted in a skillet, baking sheet, Dutch oven, popcorn popper, on a grill, etc. Heat and agitation are the main requirements. Chances are you already have what you need in your kitchen to give it a try.

Roasting is for coffee snobs

Roasting is for people who like fresh coffee. It’s easy to be a coffee lover without knowing much about what you’re drinking — many blends have names that reveal little about their ingredients (Breakfast Blend, Evening Fantasy, etc.). Home roasting is a great way to start exploring and discovering what you like. Flavor is partly the product of geography, and experimenting with single-origin coffees is a great place to begin. Starting with unroasted coffee allows you to experience how flavor develops as the roast progresses. You’ll gain an understanding of how each variable affects flavor, and how to produce the cup you want.

I don’t drink enough coffee to roast at home

If you can’t accommodate 50-lb burlap sacks in your kitchen, you should know that we also sell green coffee in 1-lb, 5-lb, and 25-lb bags. Unroasted coffee is less expensive per pound than roasted, and it has a shelf life of more than a year, as opposed to roasted coffee which, stored well, loses flavor after a few months. If you have the space for a larger bag, you can take advantage of bulk savings without worrying about your stockpile going to waste. Roast only what you need. Chances are, your home set-up will only be able to accommodate small batches anyway.

Coffee Bean Direct offers an abundance of affordable, fresh-roasted, coffee. The hard work of discovering the best blends and roast levels for each bean has already been done. I can’t improve upon perfection.

Perhaps once you’ve failed miserably at home roasting, you will forever appreciate just how amazing our roasted coffee is. But that’s not our objective. When it comes to roasting and blending, we know that what we offer is just the beginning. Like Liz, who keeps our office tremblingly productive with countless pots of coffee each day, you can get as creative as you want with blends like Yenya Rican (Yemen, Kenya, and Costa Rican) or Papua Guatzil (Papua New Guinea, Guatemalan, and Brazil). Some are hits, some are misses, but our palates are never bored and we’re wide awake.

New to roasting? Send us your questions or success stories!

We’re not afraid to be ourselves at CBD, and that often means being nerds.  Tea guy Anthony is one of our biggest nerds and the blog entry below is proof.  It’s Anthony’s version of the origin of Coffee Bean Direct… told as if CBD was a superhero story.  Think Spiderman or the Avengers, but our super powers are roasting great coffee and our archenemies are high prices instead of super villains.  Like all epic superhero stories it contains a little embellishing – and is just flat out silly at times – but it is actually a great way to learn the history of CBD.

Flashback to 1998: One Andrew Esserman decides he is tired of marketing other people’s companies. He quits it all to start his own gourmet coffee and tea business despite having a wife and kids to provide for (okay, so his family supported him but it sounds more daring this way). Fed up with watching evil coffee villains trick cafes into leasing equipment only to be enslaved, forced to forever buy their overpriced, stale coffee, Esserman sought to change the coffee world for the better. Selling coffee and tea from his basement and renting time on other people’s roasters, Andrew built a business based on the principles of giving everyone a fair price while maintaining quality and freshness. No contracts, no minimums, and no dirty tricks.

Flash forward to 2004: Every Batman needs a Robin and Andrew finds his in Gregg Shefler. Now with his own coffee roaster and warehouse space in Jackson, NJ, Andrew hires young Gregg. Self-described as “THE WORST BEAN PACKER OF ALL TIME,” Gregg was apparently so bad working in the warehouse that Andrew had to find something else for him to do. A true genius at recognizing the potential in even the strangest of individuals, Andrew continued to work with Gregg and together they came up with the idea of selling coffee on the internet.

And Thus Coffee Bean Direct was born. The goal was to keep the same standards of quality and fairness but build a site that made ordering quick and easy, allowing anyone—home drinkers, cafes or large businesses—to buy gourmet coffee at wholesale prices. Andrew and Gregg had to teach themselves how to build a website, market online, charge credit cards electronically, and fulfill online orders. Like all superhero stories, the journey was long and arduous but worth it in the end.

Back to the present, a.k.a., 2012: Now with a not-so-secret secret warehouse in beautiful Hunterdon County, NJ, Andrew and Gregg have assembled a team of over 30 heroes to battle against stale, over-priced coffee and tea. We offer more than 100 varieties of coffee, the vast majority of which are roasted within 24 hours of being shipped out to you. Continuing the pattern of innovation, we have developed products never-before-seen like smoked coffee, maple bacon flavored coffee, and green tea spiked with Mombasa pepper.

Using mostly their gloved hands, superb might, and unrivaled willpower, these heroes are able to fulfill orders big and small—from 1-lb to thousands, from tiny boxes to trucks full of pallets.

We made a mock trailer for CBD The Movie based on this origin story.  Check it out here: