Containing our coffee cost with 1kg of beans from Jewel Coffee

Coffee is a daily necessity because both The Wife and I are addicted to caffeine. Our preferred drink is black V60 pour over, made with freshly-roasted single-origin beans that are ground just before brewing.

After sampling widely across different country origins, varietals and processing methods from various local roasters, we’re now quite clear on the specific coffee that we enjoy. On the top of that list are naturally-processed heirloom beans from Ethiopia.

Before I started getting serious brewing our daily V60 coffee, we bought most of our beans from Mt. Whitney Coffee Roasters in Canada via the online vitamin retailer iHerb.com. It might seem strange that they also sell beans, but in many ways, coffee can be considered a health supplement.

But after drinking the good stuff, what I made using Mt. Whitney beans tasted significantly flatter with muted flavours. If I had remained blissfully unaware, there wouldn’t have been any issue. But now that I knew better, it just couldn’t cut it anymore.

And just like that, lifestyle inflation creeped in and I switched our baseline beans to those from Jewel Coffee, a local Singaporean roaster. At S$18.00 for a 250g bag, it was more expensive than the S$12.50 for Mt. Whitney.

I was able to bring it down significantly by signing up for a monthly subscription that came with a 20% discount and free local shipping. Which managed to bring my cost down to S$14.40 per bag.

Since it’s on a subscription plan, one bag of the Jewel Ethiopian automatically gets delivered every four weeks.

We go through about three to four 250g bags of coffee beans each month, and the remaining quota is filled via ad-hoc purchases from various other local roasters like Nylon, Dutch Colony, 20grams, Homeground and Tiong Hoe.

But I’ve noticed that coffee prices have been creeping up slowly but steadily across the board, and I started wondering if there was a way to effectively manage our coffee cost. Especially since it’s a necessary daily expense.

Since we’re quite happy with the taste of the Jewel Ethiopian beans, I decided to use them exclusively and contain our per-cup cost of coffee. Yes, there would be less variety, but that was not necessarily a bad thing.

While the Jewel Ethiopian is not the best that we’ve tasted, it does rank quite highly. And while there are seasonal variations in the farms they source from, the taste and quality is generally quite consistent.

Other roasters have a lot more variability in what they offer, and it takes me quite a few tries to dial in every time I get totally new beans. Jewel, on the other hand, is a consistent baseline and I know exactly how I like to brew it.

Specifically, using a dosage of 30g coffee to 500g water to yield two cups of coffee, and employing the Tetsu 4-6 “Sweet x Strong” recipe with a 3-4-0 grind setting on my 1Zpresso JX-Pro grinder and my Timemore gooseneck kettle set to 94°C.

I noticed that in addition to 250g bags, Jewel also sold the exact same coffee in larger 1kg bags at an 18% discount (i.e. S$47.20 per 1kg, after applying my 20% subscription discount).

Which would bring my cost down even further to S$11.80 per 250gm, a very compelling price point. Other local roasters can easily sell their beans at almost twice that, if not more.

So, I’ve changed my monthly Jewel subscription from one 250g bag every four weeks, to a 1kg bag instead. It’s unwieldy to pour out beans from that large bag every day, so when I receive the 1kg bag, I portion it out and pour them into four recycled 250g bags.

In addition to brewing V60 coffee, I’ve recently started making lattes and Americanos using the amazingly compact Picopresso from Wacaco. The bulk of the coffee we consume is still pour overs, but it’s nice to switch it up with espresso-based drinks, all using the same beans.

Breaking it down, our home-brewed coffee now costs S$0.76, S$1.18 and S$0.86 for each cup of V60, latte and Americano respectively. This includes consumables like filter papers (for V60s) and milk (for lattes), but excludes equipment costs that have already been incurred.

Extrapolating that into cost per month, with some assumptions on the number of cups of each type of coffee based on our consumption pattern, we’re looking at around S$60 every month for 74 cups.

That translates to around S$720 per year, which is a reasonable price to pay for a drug addiction. Yes, caffeine is de-facto a drug, and thankfully it’s a legal one.

I’m going to try and maintain this arrangement for a year, and see if we can sustain it. Once in a while, I might buy ad-hoc bags of beans from other roasters, especially if I see some really interesting ones that I want to try.

I think I have a good handle now on managing one of our necessary daily expenses, taking one step forward in the on-going fight against inflation.