R&R Coffee Café: Black Forest's Premier Coffee Roaster, Café, and Bakery

The age of your beans. Simply put, fresher is better. Coffee is considered stale 14 days off the roast! On the label on the front of your bag, down in the right corner, is your coffee's "Roasted On" date. If your coffee is coming close to that 14 day date, well, we hope you like a lot of coffee!

Storage. Since we're talking about staling coffees, it only makes sense to talk about storing your coffee. Here's our rule of thumb*. If your coffee is under seven days from the roast, you can just leave it out on your counter in the sealed bag. Once you hit that seven day point, we recommend storing your coffee (still in the red bag) in the freezer. And again, when your coffee hits 14 days, we hope you're pretty much done with it!. (Each roaster out there has their own opinion on this, and you'll get a different answer from every roaster you talk to. This is our recommended method of storage.) *If you are getting your coffee preground from us, just stick the bag in the freezer immediately. You'll thank us, we promise.

The Grind Putting whole bean coffee into your coffee maker just isn't going to work well. You'll need to grind it. Ideally, you are grinding each pot to order; having us grind it is like having your banana pre-sliced at the grocery store. Convenient, yes. Fresh, nope. Now that you're grinding at home, you have to keep an eye on what kind of brewer you have. If your brewer's filter is flat-bottomed, you'll want to grind to about what you see in the picture to the left. If your brewer's filter is shaped like a cone, you'll want to grind a bit finer than in the picture. Why? Glad you asked. You are looking for the best flavor extraction. If the water is designed to be funneled through the coffee as fast as possible (as with a cone filter), you want to have the most surface area of the coffee available to the water: a finer grind. If your water is going to sit in the coffee (flat bottom filter), you don't want as much flavor extraction. A coarser grind will do.

The Dose According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, you should be using 7 grams of coffee per 5 oz cup. Whaaa? Let's put it this way: per every cup line on your coffee pot (not your cup, mind you, those small white tick marks on the pot), you want to add a heaping tablespoon of coffee. Making a 10 “cup” pot? 10 scoops. Depending on your tastes, you may think this water/coffee ratio makes too strong of a cup. If that's the case, keep the ratio the same, but add hot water to the pot to thin it to your liking. If you lower the water/coffee ratio, your coffee will taste very thin with underdeveloped flavors.

The Water Living in Black Forest affords us some of the best water that you can drink... when you are drinking water. Many hard minerals and natural chemicals are found in that water we savor so much, and those impurities can affect the quality of the cup. We recommend using purified water either bottled or by using one of those faucet purifiers. You still want a little mineral content in the water in order to react with the coffee itself, but with what's in the water now, it'll leave an off taste in your mouth. In our shop, we replace our brewer's filters every six months and recharge our espresso machine's filter every month. It does make that big of a difference.

Water Temperature In an ideal world, no coffee would be brewed at less than 195°. Well, that's pretty much impossible here in Black Forest. First, water boils at about 194°, and second, no regular consumer coffee brewer ever comes that close in temperature. The hotter the water, the more flavors you pull out of the bean. So how can you make that Mr. Coffee do more for you? Start with hot water when you fill it up. It will only boost the temp a little, but a little makes a big difference.