I can’t wait for Friday, though, which will be EntreLeadership, where he’ll offer entrepreneurs (like yours truly) advice on how to run a small business debt-free with a strong emphasis on Christian principles. To say that we’re excited would be an understatement. Based on following Dave’s teachings over the past year, we are now debt-free except for the house!

What does this have to do with coffee, you ask? Well, one of many things I learned from listening to Dave on the radio is that getting a good deal shouldn’t be something that happens every once in a while. Getting a good deal on something and saving money should be the norm. I heard someone today mention that they paid almost $3 for a latte. Ridiculous!

You can pick up a pound of fresh roasted coffee beans for around $13 dollars. With a pound of coffee, you can brew coffee at home and save money by making, on average, 53 6 oz cups of coffee (or lattes). That’s $0.25 cents per cup! Compared to paying $3 – 1200% more at the ubiquitous coffee chain – you can save a substantial amount of money by brewing at home.

Every now and then we like to send a reminder about our coffee subscriptions, where you can have coffee delivered right to your door every month for 3 or 6 months.

If you find yourself forgetting to place a Weekly Roast Coffee order before running out of coffee, placing an emergency order and counting the days until your coffee shipment arrives (and rationing whatever coffee you have left to get you through – and there’s a lot of you out there, we get your emails and tweets!) then this option may be for you!

A few reasons to subscribe:
*A monthly delivery of 2 12-oz bags of fresh-roasted coffee chosen by Ken
*New coffees get snatched up quickly, we reserve new coffees for our subscribers first
*As part of this coffee club, you pay an average of $12.50 per bag (total)
*We pay shipping starting on month 2
*Moving or taking vacation soon? Just let us know, we’ll pause or reroute your delivery
*90% of customers who try this service once continuously renew their subscription
*We’ll remind you when your subscription ends so you can renew without interruption
*You’ll love this service or you can cancel and we’ll refund you any remaining months (this has never happened!)

The process is easy – just visit our coffee club page and choose 3 or 6 months. We batch roast and ship all coffee subscriptions at the same time, around the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th depending on when you sign up. And of course, should you have any questions or need additional information, feel free to ask!

coffee club

Growing years aren’t bad. In business, it’s important to implement the right systems to put yourself in a position to scale and expand. I’m really excited about what’s in store for Weekly Roast in 2010. Every week more customers try us out and experience the taste of fresh roasted coffee. Word of mouth was crazy for us in 2009. So many people tried us out on the recommendation of their friends. It’s always fun getting an email from new customers trying our coffee and telling us how they found out about us. We continue to meet and connect with interesting people on Twitter and Facebook.

On a personal level, my son turned 1 in October. He just started walking during Christmas, and each day since he has been taking more steps than before. He’s been saying ‘dada’ for quite a while now, but has just recently added ‘mama’, ‘hi’, ‘cheese’ and ‘ho ho ho’ (our favorite during Christmas) to his repertoire. In May, I (Ken) graduated with my MBA from UCF. In December, my wife, Melissa, also graduated from UCF, with her Masters in Accounting (good thing, she’s our accountant!). This last year of study, especially juggling priorities and with a baby, really stretched us. We’re so glad to be done!

You know, I really love what I do at Weekly Roast. I think that’s important to win in business… to be successful, you have to be passionate about what you do day in and day out, otherwise you probably won’t last too long. I hope my passion for coffee has come through in my blog posts and tweets during the past year, here’s to many more in 2010.

Lastly, a big THANK YOU for all of our retail and wholesale customers. We love reading your emails, blog posts and tweets about our coffee. While we’re excited about our continued growth, we’re so proud that about 75% of our business is repeat business. That tells me you enjoy our carefully selected coffees and appreciate what we stand for… thank you for your business and for allowing us to share our passion for coffee with you.

May God bless you in 2010!

Ken @ Weekly Roast

With others, though, I really wasn’t feeling it. It seemed as if they weren’t fully understanding our business model and why we would go through the hassle of roasting our coffee after receiving actual orders, not roasting ahead of time based on anticipated sales.

So, I thought I’d check for understanding by asking the question – what does fresh coffee really mean?

With furrowed brows, this small group explained that they weren’t understanding how the coffee they make at home every day couldn’t be fresh if they just made it! How much fresher could it be? That’s when I realized that there’s a huge gap out there between what some think fresh coffee is and what it really means and that not everybody fully understands.

In fairness, I think fresh coffee really does comprise all of these viewpoints. There are, however, some points of clarification that should be made so more people out there can understand what fresh coffee really is and enjoy the coffee they brew that much more.

What Does Fresh Coffee Really Mean?

• Fresh coffee starts with the beans you use. Period! The single best way to have truly fresh coffee is to buy high quality whole bean coffee that has been roasted within 3-4 days (but, no earlier than 3 days as the beans are degassing during this period and will brew stale-tasting coffee). Never buy prepackaged ground coffee or grind your own in a grocery store or coffee house. Ground coffee goes stale within 30 minutes of it being ground… so if you grind it in the store, it’s likely stale before you can get home. If you buy prepackaged ground coffee, it was stale before it even left the roaster (not to mention traveled through the distribution channels to get to the coffee house or grocery store!). Because of the distribution channels, and with most roasters roasting coffee based on anticipated sales, most of the coffee beans available to buy in stores and coffee houses are weeks old. Freshly roasted coffee beans are a must have for having fresh coffee.

What Isn’t Fresh Coffee?

• Some people think that scooping their own beans or bagging coffee themselves equates to fresh coffee. Coffee shops store these beans in big clear containers. This is the same concept as those clear, eye-level bins in the grocery store where you can bag your own coffee to purchase. Both tend to position the freshness of the beans by advertising them as “freshly scooped” or “freshly bagged”. When coffee is scooped or bagged doesn’t make it fresh or not fresh. The question shouldn’t be “when was my coffee scooped or bagged” but rather “when was my coffee roasted, and how much time has passed since roasting?”. Coffee goes stale after 10-14 days… the coffee being stored in these clear bins is likely weeks old (not to mention, if these bins aren’t airtight and are repeatedly opened for scooping or bagging, harmful oxygen will make the beans stale in no time).
• Some think that fresh coffee means brewing up a fresh pot. This is part of making great coffee, but if fresh coffee beans aren’t used, it doesn’t matter how fresh the brew is – it won’t taste fresh. This would be like baking a dessert but using old ingredients. Sure, it would be freshly made, but it likely won’t taste very good!
• Others think that fresh coffee means drinking a freshly made batch within a few minutes and not reheating their coffee. This is also part of making great coffee – it should never be reheated and should be consumed within 30 minutes of brewing (at the most!) but even this isn’t what fresh coffee is all about.

Although the presentation went well, I couldn’t help but wonder as I drove home, how many people in that audience I wasn’t able to connect with and didn’t truly get what we’re doing… and if my talk would in any way change the way they think about their daily cup of joe…

Return to our Coffee Library to read more coffee tips.

Through Twitter I’ve met a lot of people and seen a lot of “re-tweets” of blog posts that I felt were in fact useful and relevant to me. My favorite blogs come from Gary Vaynerchuck, a guy similar to me – in his early thirties, a wine connoisseur (except I prefer coffee), a great passion for entrepreneurship and a desire to teach others.

As I looked around the Web, trying to find someone catering to the coffee niche, answering questions about coffee and blogging about things like how to make the perfect cup, or what the differerence is between Arabica beans and Robusta beans, I couldn’t find anything with much substance. Occassionally I would find a decent blog, but it would be full of fluff, or just too short and lack substance, or miss a perfect opportunity to teach others.

That’s why we’re here. This blog will be written by me, Ken, the CEO of a start-up coffee roasting company. My goal is to blog about coffee, answer some of the questions I hear over and over again, go a little in-depth for those that want more information on things like “how is a peaberry formed?” or “how can you roast the same exact coffee to different degrees of roast and get two completely different tastes?”.

I also think there’s some value on blogging off-topic as well. As an entrepreneur running and trying to grow a small start-up company, I think blogging about some of my “lessons learned” and helpful tools and applications I find to run my business can be helpful to others out there who have also started a small company, or hope to do so, and could benefit from some direction and guidance. I’m also pretty big on productivity and finding ways to work smarter, not harder, so I expect I’ll have a few posts on that as well.

I hope you enjoy reading this blog. Please subscribe and post comments about your viewpoints and experiences. To me, this blog will only be a success if I can learn more from you than you ever could from me. Ken