Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Where's Your Stash? A Guide to Making Home Blends


Every one has one. You know what I am talking about...the little baggy you hide in the closet, tucked away from prying eyes...your coffee stash.

It's ok, I have one. I love it despite it being relatively stale, unscientifically crafted, and improperly stored.

After I get close to running through my 1 lb bag of beans, I rush to the store and buy a new bag of something to replace my current beans. When I return home, I get impatient with finishing the rest of the beans. I grind whats left for a french press, and shovel them into a ziploc bag. After a few times, my bag tends to be a random mix of coffee.

In the picture, the darker coffee I believe is a French Roast (the place I bought it from didn't say what bean it was), and the red is the Guatamalan coffee I finished. I grinded the Guatamalan up because the Girlfriend thought it tasted horrible. Mixing it with French roast produced an interesting visual, and tasted decent for half of it being stale. Using a French Press, the coffee had a bold/dark taste mellowed by the sweet/syrupy Guatamalan.

My coffee stash planted a seed in my head about making home blends without spending oodles of money on home roasting equipment or energy from a stove or oven. While the coffee blend will be relatively stale/not so fresh because one coffee for the blend will be chilling in the closet for a few weeks while you finish other coffees bought after it.

That's a fair enough critique, but one can scoop out some beans prior to being ground and place it in an airtight container. But there is something to be said about haphazardly throwing in what you have lying around, and seeing what happens.

My question is, Do you have a coffee stash? If so, what is in it?


4 comments:

  1. I do this all the time with whole beans. Usually, I don't have enough of one bean to make a whole pot, so I through in what ever other beans are laying around. (Even the stash that's been in the roundy-thing for months)

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  2. That's awesome! I am glad, I'm not the only one. Though many people probably don't call it a stash, but it makes sound cooler, almost verboten to do. Thank you for the comment Joe.

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  3. My stash usually ends up being a combination of beans and grind sizes! Whever I 'purge' the ginder to grind a new bean or change the size setting, I just don't have the heart to throw it out. This hodge podge usually gets thrown into the drip machine for use on a rushed morning.

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  4. I am the same, I don't have the heart to throw out the coffee knowing how much effort and money is put into the whole production of coffee. Nice name with "hodge podge." Good way to put it.

    Thank you for the comment!

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