09/20/2026
A PSA for today. Beware of stones.
The two grey rectangular items in this dish at the end of the red arrow are stones, or small chips of concrete. This is not unusual to find in whole bean coffee. Any whole bean coffee. This is why you should always scan your coffee before it goes into your grinder as these things can really damage a grinder. These are the first rocks I've seen in my Sulawesi in probably 400 pounds of this coffee that I've roasted over the past few years. So it's rare, but it happens.
I try my best as a roaster to find these things before they make it into your bag of coffee too. But I'm human. And for that matter, even the destoning machines used by larger commercial roasters can miss things from time to time. I've had stones in coffee I've purchased from larger Alaskan roasters as well.
So consider yourself warned. Always check your coffee before dumping it into the hopper of your grinder.
The rest of the stuff pictured are quakers or other beans I consider defects that I pull out of the roasted batch. This is representative of several batches. You may also see the black charred beans near the arrow as well. Sometimes a bean or two will get stuck inside the drum of the roaster and will end up getting roasted more than once, eventually turning to charcoal and once their brittle enough to get dislodged they'll make their way out of the roaster. These too I try to cull from the batch, but imagine looking for one black bean in a dark roast of thousands of beans. I'm good, but I'm not perfect. The four blackened beans in the photo came out of over 22 pounds of coffee roasted in 9 batches.
So, if you find a blackened bean from time to time, just remove it and brew on.
