A Letter to Someone Who Just Bought Their First Bag of Coffee (From Us)
You bought a bag of coffee from a small roastery, which means you now have about three weeks of decisions in front of you. This is a letter about how to make those three weeks easy.
We are not going to pretend you need a new hobby. But a bag of coffee is a thing with a short life, and a few small choices are the difference between drinking it well and wondering why it does not taste like the picture.
Here is what we would tell a friend who just ordered from us.
Do not open it yet
This is the one piece of advice people push back on, and it is the one that changes the cup the most.
Give it two to three days before you brew it. Coffee is not ready the day it comes off the roast, and the reason is chemistry — the roast leaves the coffee full of carbon dioxide and the bean needs time to let it go. We wrote about the whole thing in why we let coffee rest after roast, and it comes down to aroma and to how the water moves through the grounds.
We rest ours for three days before it ships, so by the time a bag reaches your kitchen it has already had most of that window. But it is still days off the roast, not months, and if you can wait another day or two you are working with coffee at its most forgiving.
A bag you open on day one will not be bad. It will just be a little flatter and a little sharper than the same bag on day five. We wrote about that in why your fresh bag of coffee is puffy.
Buy the size you will actually finish
We sell five sizes and they are all the same coffee. The ladder is 12 oz for $24.99, 1 lb for $29.99, 2 lb for $49.99, 5 lb for $79.99, and 12 lb for $169.99.
If you drink one cup a day, start with the 1 lb. The 12 oz bag is a good first order if you want to try before you commit, but a 12 oz bag disappears in a couple of weeks and you will not get to know the coffee. The 1 lb costs about five dollars more and roughly doubles the time you have with it.
If you already know you drink coffee every single morning, go to the 2 lb. It is the size where the price per cup starts to look sensible, and it is still a bag you can finish before it goes stale.
The 5 lb and 12 lb bags are for people who know they are in. We are not going to pretend a 12 lb bag is a casual purchase. It is also the cheapest coffee we sell per cup by a wide margin, and it ships flat, so there is no postage problem.
We have done the actual cup math in how many cups you get from a bag of coffee, and if you are still deciding, what to order first covers the three ways most people start.
Get a grinder before you get a second bag
If you do not have one, this is the single piece of equipment worth spending money on. More than a kettle, more than a scale, more than a filter.
Coffee ground in the kitchen is uneven. Some particles are powder, some are boulders, and the water pulls the powder into the cup and leaves the boulders behind. That is why kitchen-ground coffee tastes thin and a little dusty at the same time. A burr grinder fixes it, and it is the difference between a first bag that seems mediocre and one that seems like a revelation.
We wrote about picking one in how to choose a coffee grinder, and if you are not ready to buy anything yet, how to make coffee without a grinder has four ways to make a decent cup with what you already own.
If you want to spend money on one thing after the grinder, make it a scale. Every brewing recipe is a ratio, and a ratio you can repeat is worth ten ratios you are guessing at.
Pick one method and stay there for a week
The temptation, when you have good coffee for the first time, is to try the pour-over, then the French press, then the AeroPress, then the moka pot, and then to conclude that the coffee is inconsistent.
It is not inconsistent. You changed the recipe four times.
Pick the one method you already know how to do, use it for a week, and change nothing but the amount of coffee. Then, if you want to branch out, start with French press vs pour-over vs Chemex, which is the honest comparison, or with why French press still works, which covers what most people get wrong about it.
We do not gatekeep recipes. The full method for each of our coffees is on the blog, with grams and seconds, because a recipe you can repeat is the entire trick. That is why we wrote why we do not gatekeep our brew recipes.
Taste it black first
Before the milk, before the sugar, before anything. Black.
You cannot taste the edges of a coffee through a latte, and the edges are where a single origin lives. If you buy our Nicaragua, the cocoa, the floral, and the citrus are all in the edges, and a latte buries all three.
Take a sip, swallow, and then take another sip after the cup has cooled to room temperature. Most people find more in the second sip than the first. We wrote about why temperature changes what you perceive in tasting your coffee while it cools down.
If you do want milk, we are not opposed. We wrote about it in how to choose the right milk for your coffee, and honestly the right answer is whichever kind of milk you like best, because at home, the milk you like is the milk that will get you to drink the coffee.
What happens on our end
You will get a roast date on the bag. We roast on Wednesday and ship on Thursday, which means the coffee is days off the roast when it lands, and we explained the reasoning in why we ship on Thursdays and why we ship coffee the same day we roast it.
We taste every batch before it ships. Not a sample of the batch — every batch. The words on the bag are words we actually used at the table, and if a batch is off, it does not ship. We wrote about how that works in why we taste every batch before it ships.
Your coffee ships in a plain poly mailer, and we are not going to apologize for that. The reasoning is in why we still ship in plain poly mailers, and how the package is built to keep the coffee fresh in transit is in how we pack orders so the coffee stays fresh in transit.
What we will not do to you
A short list, because you should know what a small shop is like before you give it your money.
We will not put you on a subscription. There is no recurring order, no "skip if you want" and no cancellation maze. It is coming eventually and we will tell you when. Why we do not do subscriptions yet.
We will not run a sale. Not a 20%-off code, not a countdown timer, not a "last chance." We priced the coffee once and we are not going to train you to wait for a discount. Why we do not run sales.
We will not sell you decaf. Not yet, and not as a compromise. Why we do not sell decaf.
We will not ask you to buy the whole catalog. One bag, one method, two weeks. That is the whole beginner program.
If something is not right, email us
This is the part most small shops are bad at, so we are going to be specific about it.
If the coffee tastes wrong, if the bag arrived damaged, if you brewed it exactly as we said and you still do not like it, write to us. We answer our own emails — a person reads every one of them and a person writes the reply, usually within a couple of days. We explained why in why we answer our own customer emails.
Tell us what you brewed, how much coffee, how much water, how hot the water was, and how long you steeped. That is most of the diagnosis. If it is a problem with the coffee, we will replace it. If it is a problem with the recipe, we will tell you which part.
And the part we are actually proud of
A portion of every order helps support our rescue partners — ASPCA, Best Friends Animal Society, and rotating local shelters. We do not publish a number we cannot verify every month, which is why our impact page sometimes looks sparse. You can read the honest version in where your money goes in a small roastery, or see how a month of support actually works in what our monthly rescue partner support looks like.
If you want the specifics, our impact page has them.
One last thing
The bag you bought is going to taste best in the first two weeks and then start to fade. That is not a quality problem, it is what coffee does, and we wrote about it in what actually changes when coffee sits on a shelf.
So when you open the next bag, do not compare it to the last one. Compare it to the last one on day three.
And if you are still not sure where to begin, what to order first is the shortest version of this entire letter.
Welcome. Write to us.
Brew slow.
Sip slow.
— Seraphina