May 25, 2026
Percolating
Taylor.
Thanks for filling out our Better Coffee questionnaire.
I have some good news. There are many avenues you can take to have better coffee. The first thing I would recommend is buying a grinder. This will make all the difference and open up your options to try all kinds of coffees. Once coffee is roasted, it has a short shelf-life (10-ish days, in my opinion) before it tastes stale. But once it is ground, that shelf life shrinks to just minutes. Trust me on this, I’ve built my business on coffee freshness. So you should only grind your coffee right before you intend to brew it.
Now, what kind of grinder should you buy? Well, a lot of people want to start out with a blade grinder because they are inexpensive, but these really aren’t made for grinding coffee - they are spice mills. So a burr grinder is the type you need. It will allow you to grind fine for espresso and coarse for a more immersive method like a percolator (which I wouldn’t really recommend, btw).
I don’t want to go too deep for starters because simply grinding your coffee and using a percolator will make better coffee. In fact, if you like bold coffees, I’d recommend our Sumatra. It has a nice kick you’ll likely enjoy.
BUT, percolators have an inherent problem because they get too hot and running the same water over the coffee repeatedly causes over extraction, which can make your coffee taste really bitter. If you want to try something different, I’d recommend a french press. I don’t actually have one for sale at the moment, but you can find them anywhere, and they’re easy to use (coarse grind, 200º water, steep for 4 minutes and then plunge).