I don’t think I’m going to make a habit of writing here about what I’m learning about coffee. I think that will mostly be the subject of a new second YT channel, twitterpresence, etc.

But I am learning, fast and hard, and I want to tell you one quick thing.

When I spent that short week in Nevada a few months ago, I stumbled across a place called Mothership Coffee. The thing I loved best about it was that they had a menu of about ten different varieties of bean, and the menu was specifically designed for someone who wanted to order a pour-over.

In the course of the week I went through most all of that menu, about ten individual orders with beans from all over the coffee-growing world.

My favorite was the Peruvian.

Now I am in the very early stages of beginning to understand why it was my favorite.

First, most Peruvian coffee is grown up high at altitude, around 5000 feet it seems.

This means a denser bean–I won’t go too deep in the weeds, but for my taste that density is a good thing. It tends to mean bright clear flavors as opposed to the rich earthy ones you would typically find in lower-density, faster growing coffees farmed a couple thousand feet lower in places like Indonesia.

Dense high-altitude beans also seem to prefer being roasted lighter, and that works for what I want in more than one way. For example, light roasts also favor sharper flavors as opposed to smoother ones. And darker roasts mean more clean-up inside the roaster, because the oils in the beans come further to the surface in the late stages of long, dark roastings.

Finally, it makes perfect sense to me that I’d want to be up high, and that I would prefer that my coffee was from up high too. It’s a nice little additional symbolic piece.

I can get organic Peruvian beans in a raw green state for a little over six bucks a pound, in the ten-pound quantities I currently buy (pre-roasted) for personal use (for about $10-11 a pound). If I buy fifty pounds of the same, hoping to be able to roast and sell that much, the per-pound price is closer to five dollars.

I have a good electric starter roaster picked out too, for $500. My thinking is that spending two or three times that much doesn’t really buy me all that much, and spending eight or ten times that much for a real commercial roaster (plus the gas to fire it with) is ridiculous when I don’t even know if this enterprise is going to fly yet.

That’ll be all for now, darlings.