Plastic Free Coffee

Hello and welcome to Strange Bird Coffee! Am I doing this right? 

I’m not sure how to write a good blog post and I have been thinking about this way too long trying to write the perfect words to convey the idea of what Strange Bird Coffee is and what I want it to be. I want to make sure you see it exactly how I intended it, but that is impossible. It is just another small specialty coffee roasting company, specializing in high quality coffee, roasted to perfection. Small batch, perfect extraction, hyper local, best friends with the farmers, like family with the importers/exporters, etc. Look at my beans mama! They are in a box!

There is so much more to Strange Bird Coffee than high quality, delicious coffee. It will take time to get this idea across and to show you that this is more of an experiment than a classic coffee company looking to scale and be the next Ahab. Your favorite pop band just came out with a sludge metal concept album (cue Seven Angels). The first notable way Strange Bird Coffee is differentiating itself as a brand is quite simple: roasted coffee beans in a 100% home compostable box. The box is designed to fall apart and disintegrate. I haven’t done any research or development on how long it will take the box to fully disappear, but it is just cardboard with no plastic coatings or anything like that. Printed with water based soy ink. Designed to hold your beans for a few weeks and be composted. Hey even if it makes it to the garbage dump, it will fall apart. I did store the roasted coffee beans in the box for a couple of months and it seemed the cardboard did not impart any flavor whatsoever. If it does, please let me know. There isn’t anything I can do about it at this point, but it would be good to know my coffee tastes like cardboard. If it does in fact end up tasting like cardboard, well, that will be a bummer. Just transfer it to a glass jar or cool metal tin I guess. 

All I did was put beans in a box. It seems so simple and really that is what this is all about. Keeping it simple. Going back to a time before everything we eat was packaged in some sort of plastic container to ensure a long shelf life. It seems we are learning that that long shelf life might be putting microplastics into our body. Forever chemicals stored in our fat stores, possibly causing all sorts of health problems. I’m old enough to remember going to the grocery store and seeing dried legumes and coffee beans stored in big bins in the produce aisle. You would scoop what you needed into a paper bag on an old hanging chain scale. Public health must have shifted somewhere along the way (big plastic lobbyists etc I can only assume). 

Okay, so Strange Bird Coffee is an online, direct to customer specialty coffee company, a wannabe influence on the coffee industry, a mildly sarcastic pseudo innovator of sorts with a desire to start some new conversations and bring a very specific voice to an already crowded market at a very strange and uncertain time in American (world) history. With the twist being a simple cardboard box. 

We will see. Time will tell. If you have read this far, thank you. Please consider paying attention and if it makes sense, buying a box or two.

I appreciate you. I look forward to connecting with you soon.

-Stephen