Grinding to a halt
August 27, 2016
Today we decided that we would no longer grind coffee before sending it out. This has not been an easy decision for us because it’s never easy or intuitive to do something that may annoy, inconvenience or alienate our customers. So, we thought it might be helpful to share our thinking on why we decided to take this step.
Establishing grind sizes based on different brew methods is guesswork at best. Of course, we can send out the coffee ground to the same size that we have used in the roastery to make an Aeropress and call it ‘Ground for Aeropress’ but this feels disingenuous. We know that grind size is just one amongst many variables when brewing coffee. We send coffee to every part of the UK and most of Europe too. We know that everyone follows different recipes and uses different water, so having the ability to change the grind size is one thing you really want to retain control over if you want to make better brews. All we can say for sure is that the coffee we grind for Aeropress will make a good Aeropress in our roastery, using our recipe, for maybe a minute or two after it was ground.
The main issue though, the deal breaker, is that the coffee will be stale when it arrives with our customers and this is unavoidable. In fact, it will be stale before it even leaves the roastery. This feels wrong and it goes against our whole philosophy. Looking back now, it seems odd that we ever offered this service at all.
Of course, there may be customers that are inconvenienced by this change and for that we are sorry - but for us, months can go by where we don't get a single order for ground coffee so hopefully no-one will really notice. To those that may be affected, we hope that after reading this you understand our reasoning and decide to buy a grinder so that you can improve your chances of enjoying our coffee even more in the future.
