What I've learned from no-bypass brewing

How the Decent evolved to make delicious espresso easier

 

Disclaimer: I’ve worked with Decent Espresso from the start, helping to plan and design the DE1. I may be biased, but everything in this post is factual.

Having a software background, John designed the DE1 to be “unfinished” and able to add new capabilities as we think of them. John expected researchers and coffee nerds to come up with “what if it did this?” ideas, and he wanted the machine to evolve with that discussion. If you buy a traditional espresso machine now, its capabilities will be identical in ten years. If you buy a DE1, its capabilities change and improve almost weekly. 

Decent Espresso users have access to the Decent Diaspora, a private online forum. The forum is always friendly and civil, and the number of incredibly intelligent people there is impressive. The community has come up with countless new ideas about espresso and has helped improve the DE1 and our understanding of how to make great espresso. Many of the espresso innovations I mention in this post would not have been possible without the Diaspora brain trust. 

In the early days, the DE1 was considered “unforgiving” by many. I didn’t mind, as the DE1’s ability to control shot parameters more than made up for its early challenges. 

The DE1 brewing Filter3

I think the machine was considered unforgiving for a few reasons: 

• Most of our profiles used a slow preinfusion flow rate, whereas everyone else, except Slayer users, was using a faster fill.  

• The Decent’s graphs allowed us to see evidence of extraction problems we had not been able to see before. 

• High quality, budget grinders were rare at the time. The Niche Zero and other new grinders changed that, and helped make it easier to pull good shots.

Since that time, we’ve learned a lot about shower screens, water distribution, and headspace above the puck, and have redesigned several parts to take advantage of what we’ve learned. Our forthcoming shower screen is incredible for both espresso and filter3. Over the past nine years the hardware has become much quieter, gained steam pressure, and become easier to control without the tablet, via the grouphead controller. The hardware improvements are impressive, but frequent software upgrades are what has set the DE1 apart from any other machine. 

During the first year I had a DE1, I created the allongé and blooming espresso profiles to improve the quality of espresso from light roasts. Allongé taught us that lighter roasts taste better with faster flow rates, and has produced some of the most fruit-forward coffee I’ve ever tasted. Blooming taught us that the extraction “ceiling” is indeed above 30% EY, and that extremely high extractions can produce beautiful flavors with the right coffees. I haven’t uttered the phrase “overextraction” since creating the blooming espresso; it proved that harsh flavors do not in fact come from high extraction levels, but from channels. Jonathan Gagné has hypothesized that channels yield astringency and bitterness not because of high extractions along channels, but because channels allow larger, astringent particles an easier path out of the coffee bed and into the cup. 

Allongé and Blooming, while quite different, share something in common: they both make espresso from light roasts less sour and bitter, and more balanced. A traditional espresso extraction removess more material from the upper layers of the puck, and at higher temperatures, than from the bottom of the puck. Allongé increases extraction and temperature at the bottom of the puck by running a large volume of water through the puck. Blooming increases extraction and temperature at the bottom of the puck via a 30-second bloom that homogenizes temperatures and extraction throughout the puck. Blooming arguably offers a more even espresso extraction than any other profile or machine can. 

We learned that the most effective preinfusion may include a shift from high flow to low flow with a modest pressure buildup. We have found a slow pressure ramp after preinfusion, similar to that of some manual levers, helps compensate for imperfect puck prep. Jonathan Gagné came up with an “adaptive” profile that holds flow rate at whatever it was at a shot’s pressure peak. In the case of a grind setting being poorly “dialed in”, the adaptive profile optimizes the flow rate for the current grind setting.

The Decent community has come up with various ‘failsafe” ideas that prevent bad shots. For example, if the grind is too fine, rather than a shot choking and being destined for the sink, one can program the DE1 to limit the pressure and maintain a reasonable flow rate. Flow profiles have some ability to “heal” channels by decreasing pump pressure when the machine senses an increase in flow rate. 

More recently, I have turned the DE1 into the world’s best single-cup filter-coffee machine. The Filter3 basket offers a “no bypass” brew with control over flow and temperature, and is one of the few single-cup brewers that offers appropriate bed depth with a 20g dose. Anyone who tasted Filter3 from the Prodigal booth at SCA Expo can vouch for its excellent, hands-free extraction quality. 

Later this year, Decent will release its beautiful new machine, the Bengle, with some impressive new features, as well as a clever new shower screen that improves water distribution and prevents water from merging into a small number of streams.

Stay tuned, things are always evolving and improving. 

The Decent Bengle, coming soon

Prodigal QC Protocols

 
 

I’d like to share a brief overview of the quality-control protocols we use at Prodigal. I think you’ll find them interesting, and probably a little extreme. We take great pains to buy and roast the most delicious coffee we can, and admittedly, some of these efforts make us less, not more, profitable. Hopefully that will change with time if the market comes to value things like quaker sorting and buying from a roaster able to replicate flavor batch after batch. 

Note: I have not been paid, and will not be paid, by manufactureres of any of these equipment I mention in this post.

Some of our most costly QC protocols include: 

We go to great pains to purchase almost exclusively coffees processed within the past month. The limitations and costs associated with choosing only recently processed coffees, and getting them to Prodigal in a matter of days or weeks, and not months, are extreme. 

We remove quakers to improve cup quality, but is painfully expensive. So far, the market hasn’t rewarded that effort, but we sleep better at night knowing that we have a lower percentage of quakers in our bags than any other roaster. Some of the tedious “knee-jerk moral outrage” crowd online is “offended” by our intense quaker sorting. Any consumer reading that nonsense will think “I guess those roasters sell coffee with a lot of quakers,” so I welcome their complaining. We wouldn’t be a target if we weren’t doing something special. We want to raise the bar in every way we can.

For a given coffee we have a ground-coffee color-range tolerance of four points, an accepted weight-loss range of +/-0.2%, and a cup-score floor of 87.5 points. Any batch that doesn’t meet those standards goes in our heavily discounted “first batch” offering. Selling First Batch kills our margins, but it allows us to sleep well at night, and it absolutely thrills customers who can’t quite afford to pay full retail for lovely coffee. There are times when we spend a small fortune on green coffee and the arrival coffee is below 87.5 points. That can be very costly, as we have to find a way to sell that green rather than roast it and put it in a Prodigal bag.

Green Buying

Green buying is the most challenging and time-consuming part of running our roastery. We roast dozens of samples each week, often repeating a sample roast if the first attempt did not land in our desired ranges for ground color and weight loss. 

We measure the moisture content of each green sample before roasting, using the Agratronix Coffee Tester. It’s probably not the most accurate moisture meter on the market (it seems to read a bit high), but it’s consistent enough to be reliable and useful. We roast samples in the Roest L100 Plus. (Disclaimer: I have a small financial interest in Roest.) Immediately after roasting, we calculate weight loss, and measure color using the DiFluid Omni. The Omni is consistent and wastes only 3—5 grams of coffee per ground-color reading. We are currently testing a beta version of the DiFluid Omix, which has exciting potential as an all-in-one color/moisture/density/screen size/water activity meter. We have yet to test its accuracy against other devices. If the weight loss or color of a sample is not within our target range, we will immediately re-roast that coffee. We save weight loss and color data in the Roest software.  

The next morning we cup our sample roasts blindly, often with production roasts and samples from other roasters on the table. We remove quakers from each cupping bowl and for any coffee we record the percentage of quakers by weight of any coffee we are considering for purchase.

We carefully manage our water chemistry and weigh both the water and beans in the cupping bowls. We break the crust at 4:00 and begin slurping at around 13:00. We take copious notes on each coffee and score them before discussing our findings. We debate the merits of various cups. After this we reveal the coffees, take notes, and discuss further. We cup an average of 125 bowls every week.

We will often re-cup a coffee if we missed a substantial quaker and tasted its influence in a cup. We re-cup any coffees we consider potential buys, if we scored the coffee 87.5 or higher, or we think the coffee may have 87.5+ potential if we change something in our processes. We will often brew potential purchases as Filter3 to get a different impression of its flavor. 

We pass on some coffees that are 87.5. Reasons for passing can include price, funky flavors, various types of risks, and marketability. We’re not price sensitive, but we don’t accept when a supplier asks for double the price of better alternatives. While better coffees tend to cost more overall, some fantastic green is a relative bargain, and some mediocre green costs double or triple what better alternatives do. A few middlemen buy green, mark up the price fabulously, and wait to see who bites. We’ve seen a few lots offered by various middlemen at wildly different prices. Cost of production, politics, logistics hurdles, and government policies all contribute to what sometimes seems like irrational pricing. The quaint notion many people have of a farmer asking X price, and then shipping coffee directly to a roaster exists; we have and love those relationships, but they are not the norm, especially not with certain origins or larger-production lots. We try to have as many such direct relationships as we can, but the laws and logistics in some countries make such simple, direct, transparent transactions challenging or impossible. Thankfully, technology is bringing farmers and roasters closer together in many ways, and we love being able to wire money directly to farmers when possible.

Risk Management

Not a day goes by that we don’t discuss risk at the roastery. Risk can take many forms, and without good risk management, I don’t think any producer, middleman, or roastery can survive. One risk we learned about the hard way last year was the risk that sample material had been prepared to a much higher standard than the arrival coffee. This is a common practice that somehow never favors the roaster, and undermines trust, which ultimately holds down prices and inhibits productive relationships. Anything that promotes transparency, security, and trust paves the way for potentially higher prices, in any industry. Think about this: every rich country in the world is what economists call “high trust” and every poor country is “low trust.” There may be some chicken and egg in the dynamic, but no one can argue against honest, open practices that promote trust.

There are many other sources of risk to a roastery: will a coffee degrade during transit? Will coffee take far longer than expected to arrive? Will a roaster purchase too much green and watch it age, not knowing how to sell it? Will a key account go to a competitor, causing a roaster to get stuck with extra, expensive, unsellable, aging inventory and negative cash flow? Will a coffee fade prematurely or taste baggy soon? Will a coffee simply not sound appealing to customers? Will a roastery run out of cash because it has too much money tied up in green inventory and contracts? I am not in any way downplaying the risks farmer face; those are massive and almost unthinkable. But that doesn’t change the fact that many roasters and green importers have gone out of business due to being long on expensive green or receiving low-quality, unsellable green. 

We have had coffees arrive with so many quakers that we had to sort 40% of the material in order for the coffee to meet our quality standards. (The samples were somehow almost completely free of quakers.) Obviously, that was not a profitable purchase. We have had coffees we could not sell because they arrived with fade. One coffee was beloved among customers, but we began noticing fade in about 1 of 5 cups, so we reluctantly yanked it from the menu. 

In 2023, we purchased five dud coffees. None of those coffees reached our menu. Since our business model calls for an extremely high standard for green coffee, when green coffee arrives below our standard, we need to sell it to someone else. Thankfully, we’ve always found a new home for green coffee we didn’t want to keep. 

We store our green in airtight bags in a refrigerated and humidified room. We monitor green for changes in moisture content over the weeks we store the coffee. We store a very small amount of exceptional green in vacuum-sealed bags in a freezer. Cold storage temperatures retard aging and decrease a major source of risk at a roastery. 

We buy relatively modest amounts of each coffee we purchase. Not a day goes by that I don’t have Ryan Brown in my head, telling me it is better to buy too little green than too much. 

As Ryan wrote in Dear Coffee Buyer: “It takes mere days to buy a quality coffee when necessary (call your importer, ask for samples, cup them, approve the best—or the least-awful—and ship it to your roastery), but it can take up to a dozen months to roast it all. Because of this, it is much easier to correct an underbought situation than to correct an overbought situation.”

I may have taken Ryan’s admonition to an extreme, but I’d rather run out of coffee at Prodigal than ever sell something that tastes a little aged. 

So far, we have purchased very few coffees based on preship samples (PSS) or contracts for future harvests. At some point as we grow, we will have to increase our time horizon and risk tolerance. Our tiny size has allowed us to avoid that until now. New businesses are inherently risky; we were bound to make many errors in our first year, and we did. We bought bags that needed replacing. We bought an unusa

Quakers and Optical Sorting

When we started Prodigal, I took a leap of faith on an optical sorter from Alibaba. I don’t think I have to tell you the rest of that story 🤕.  After Mark spent months on Whatsapp with the manufacturer, only to realize the manufacturer didn’t really understand how to use the sorter for coffee, we gave up. The machine was simply too difficult to program. 

Immediately after that, I had the fortune of running into Kacper from Coffee Machines Sale at World of Coffee in Athens. Kacper pulled me to the CMS booth, telling me I’d like what he was about to show me, and that he was going to give me an optical sorter. I was intrigued.

Kacper demonstrated an optical sorter with a machine-learning (AI, if you will) programming system. He passed a “too dark” sample of beans in front of the sensors, pressed a few buttons, and repeated the process with samples that were “just right” and “too light.”  Let’s call it the Goldilocks program. The machine sorted the beans by color pretty well, and a few weeks later, Mark and I were the proud owners of a new optical sorter. Unlike the Alibaba seller, Kacper actually knew how to use the machine and coach us in its use. 

I know several roasters who have purchased a very expensive, popular sorter, only to have a technician spend TWO TO FIVE DAYS at their roastery programming the sorter. Let’s face it, if an expert — who spends all of his time programming sorters — requires 2–5 days to program a machine, the customer has little chance of mastering such a machine anytime soon. Kacper set us up remotely in less than two hours on Facetime.

For those new to sorting, please understand that even with a good set of foundational recipes, the user still needs to be skilled at programming the sorter for new coffees. There is no such thing as “set it and forget it” recipes if you want the sorter to remove quakers with any precision.

Kacper told me “I know if you use this machine, you’ll love it. And if you use it and love it, others will buy it.” I told him I would promise nothing, because I can’t promote something I don’t believe in; my reputation is worth a lot more than a $14,000 machine. 

Kacper was right, the machine is excellent, and he saved me from blowing $30,000 on a machine I would have found frustrating to use. I had no obligation to write this post, other than to pay a debt of gratitude to Kacper and CMS since the machine has been incredible for us. Paolo and I have since purchased a sorter (not free) for Regalia and Multimodal, and I’ve recommended the machine to several clients. 

 

Let’s discuss some details about sorting, as I think it is both more complicated and more important than most roasters realize. 

Sorting is not easy

As the examples of Alibaba and 2–5 day of initial programming show, sorting is not simple. The machine-learning system is by far the easiest I have seen. Programming a machine by showing it the actual beans to be sorted makes a heck of a lot more sense than trying to learn a complicated system of adjusting front and back cameras, red, green, and blue color settings, throughput speed, and an ultra-confusing bean-size setting I can not put into words.

What, exactly are we sorting? 

In a word, filberts*, but you may know them as quakers. The historical industry standard for a quaker is the obvious, yellowish bean that at a glance stands out in bucket of roasted coffee. If you have never brewed a cup of pure quakers, please collect some, grind them into a cupping bowl, and add that bowl to a blind cupping. You’ll know when you get to that cup🤢. You will learn a lot in that first slurp. And, I’m sorry. 

[*At Thanksgiving dinner last year, I was hand sorting quakers before brewing a pot of coffee. My friend Sharon asked me why I was removing those beans. I explained they were “quakers” and they tasted like peanuts. The next morning Sharon had forgotten the name of those beans, and when I served her coffee, she asked me if I had removed the “filberts.” 😜]

Those yellow quakers are awful. But what about all of those smoother and lighter-colored brown beans? Turns out those are quakers, too. Let’s call those pseudo-quakers for now, or filberts, if you wish.

Not sure if a bean is a pseudo-quaker? Take a potential quaker, smash it on the counter, and smell the crushed bean. If it smells like peanut, it’s a pseudo-quaker. If it smells like fruit and flowers, you just removed what was probably one of the best beans in the bucket. There is risk in over-sorting lighter-colored beans. 

In the photo below, traditional quakers are circled in white, and the red circles represent pseudo-quakers.  Please note I circled only a few representative quakers of each kind.  I did not attempt to circle all of them. 

Below: traditional quakers in green, pseudo-quakers in purple.

Two years ago I embarked on a mission with Mark to train ourselves to detect quakers. We would sort all quakers out of a sample of coffee and portion that sample into several cupping bowls. One bowl would be unsorted, one would have zero pseudo-quakers (fully sorted), and we would add one, two, or three quakers to other bowls. Then we’d scatter those bowls on a cupping table with several other coffees, taste blindly, and score. 

After a few such sessions we got pretty good at detecting pseudo-quakers. Perhaps a little too good, because we now have difficulty enjoying unsorted coffees.

What are quakers? 

Quakers are immature coffee seeds. They can be the result of subpar plant health or nutrition, or picking underripe cherry. Quakers less dense and contain less sugar, protein, and starches than mature seeds do. As a result, quakers brown slower than mature seeds during roasting. Quakers can be difficult to identify and sort in green coffee, but are more obvious after roasting. 

Producers can minimize quaker content by supplying coffee trees with adequate nutrition (starting with great soil health), picking only ripe cherry, and floating the cherries. It is far more efficient and affordable for producers to invest in preventing quakers than it is for roasters to remove quakers through sorting.

How quakers affect cup quality

How do quakers affect a cup of coffee? Have you ever described a coffee, perhaps from Brazil, as nutty? Quakers. Experienced an astringent cupping bowl? Quakers. Does a coffee have early onset of fade or baggy flavors in some cups but not all? Quakers. Quakers tend to be astringent, bitter, peanutty, and often grassy, grainy, or vegetal, depending on development level. 

It’s difficult to quantify the impact of quakers on cup quality, but I’d estimate that if a cupping bowl contains one yellow quaker, the score will drop about one point. If 10—40% of a sample is pseudo-quakers (by weight), cup score will drop by 1/4—3/4 points. While the various industry scoring systems offer guidance for scoring quakers, not all quakers are created equal. Some quakers are barely noticeable in the cup, others single-handedly destroy an entire cup.   

Quakers are not necessarily all bad. After all, people are used to tasting quakery coffee, and a bit of quaker-peanut flavor in an espresso blend meant for milk drinks may work well. 

How many quakers are in coffee? 

After becoming human quaker detectors, we naturally decided to sort as many quakers as possible from our coffee. Until that time, we never quite realized how many quakers of both types were in coffee. Average top-ten coffee from a recent COE competition? 15% quakers. Typical 87-point natural Ethiopian? 40% quakers — on a good day. Average 83-point, mechanically harvested “blender” from Brazil? It would be easier to count the non-quakers. 

Last year we purchased two very expensive coffees from a well-known Colombian producer. The arrival coffees were so quaker-riddled that we had to sort and remove 40% of the coffees’ weight in order to bring the quality up to Prodigal’s standards. Needless to say, the pre-ship sample had hardly any quakers. This is a common bait-and-switch: provide a roaster with a perfectly sorted sample, hook them, and then ship an unsorted or poorly sorted version of the same coffee. It’s as if I you bought a new Toyota Corolla from me, but I deliver you a used car and tell you “but it’s still the Toyota Corolla.”

If a roaster does not use an optical sorter, the most frequent cupping note on your score sheet should literally be “peanut.”  If you’re not noting peanut more than half the time in your cuppings, it means your brain is so used to associating peanut flavor with coffee that it is filtering out the peanut.

I’m sure many readers don’t believe that. But think about this: how often do you note “bitter” in cuppings? Probably not often. Yet every cup of coffee is bitter. Remember your very first cup of coffee?  Bitter, right? So how did bitter go from the most prominent flavor you noticed to something you rarely notice? Simply put, if something is always present, your brain learns to partially ignore it.

As the bar for clean coffee gets raised over time, more roasters will sort their coffee. Once third-wave coffee drinkers get used to well-sorted coffee, serving peanut-flavored coffee will not go unnoticed. 

I challenge the reader to try the quaker-detection training mentioned above a few times of over the course of a couple of weeks. Then, buy some Prodigal and a coffee of the same origin and process from some other third-wave roaster that doesn’t sort. Cup them blindly. Look for the peanut contrast. Once you learn to see it, you cannot unsee it. 

How much should you sort? 

Heavy sorting is expensive. We fight a daily battle to decide the appropriate amount of s

How to approach brewing different coffees

Each week at Prodigal we get a few messages along the lines of “how should I brew x coffee?” These messages imply some confusion about coffee brewing. I receive many messages about roasting with a similar implication.

If you have several non-defective coffees, all roasted to similar degrees, there is no need to change anything other than the grind setting when brewing each coffee. If you spend time on internet forums, you’ll read countless posts by people who believe they need a wildly different approach to optimize different coffees.

In the days before the coffee refractometer, it was common to see baristas require 40-60 minutes to dial in a coffee each morning. For reasons I don’t understand, many baristas felt compelled to adjust dose, temperature, ratio, and shot time each day, despite always using coffee of a similar roast level, and sometimes the exact same coffee, each day. The coffee refractometer was instrumental in teaching baristas how various brewing parameters affected extraction level, and that in turn helped baristas narrow down what ranges they preferred for each parameter. (Side note: choices that increase extraction levels often tend to be better, but that doesn’t mean higher extraction levels are always better.)

With time, baristas realized one could find a reasonable temperature, dose, and ratio, set those parameters as constants, and adjust only the grind when switching coffees. Working with only one variable is infinitely easier than attempting to juggle several variables. Did such a system guarantee an endless succession of God Shots? No. But limiting the number of variables one adjusted when brewing a variety of coffees made it far easier to deliver consistently good results. 

Taste and judgement always play a critical role in producing great coffee, but without a system to deliver somewhat predictable and consistent results, it is simply too difficult to dial in a coffee efficiently. 

I recommend finding a sensible, successful foundational recipe and sticking with it for all coffees of a given roast level, adjusting only the grind when changing coffees. This applies to espresso and various types of filter brewing. Possible exceptions include Ethiopian coffees and decafs that produce exceptional amounts of fines; these may require down-dosing if you cannot grind coarse enough to prevent choked brews.

As in roasting, there are no points awarded for difficulty. Coffee is complex; choosing reasonable, fixed values for most parameters and limiting the number of variables one must adjust is the key to simplifying the process in order to yield consistently good, predictable results. 

Going back to the messages we receive at Prodigal, there is no special way to brew Prodigal coffee. Our coffees brew just as other lightly roasted, non-defective coffees do. If a roaster recommends a wide variety of approaches for its menu of light roasts, they either haven’t found fundamentally sound brewing recipes, or they are trying to mitigate unpleasant flavors. For example, one may want to grind coarser, use lower-temperature water, or target lower extraction levels to minimize certain defective flavors.

When asked, we offer some best practices for brewing. 

Good general filter brewing practices include: 

• Try to find filtered or bottled water with alkalinity (KH, or bicarbonate) of 30-50 ppm, or add minerals to distilled water to make your own. General hardness (GH) is less important, and anywhere in the range of 30-100ppm should be fine. For reference, our roastery water has 45ppm GH and 45ppm KH, but my personal preference is 30KH with modest levels of both Calcium and Magnesium.

• Use the finest grind setting that does not produce astringency with your brewer and recipe. 

• Target a TDS of 1.3—1.4%. Weaker coffee tends to lack flavor intensity, and stronger coffee tends to decrease flavor clarity and “flavor separation.” Preferences will vary; these are simply my recommendations.

• If your grinder is new, please season it with 6kg/13lbs of coffee using a grind setting finer than pourover, but much coarser than espresso. Season with smaller amounts of coffee at a time (usually 500g is okay) to prevent overheating of the motor. We sell cheap, junky grinder-seasoning beans at $3.00/lb for your convenience. 

Espresso recommendations include: 

• Use the dose for which your basket is rated (eg 18g in an 18-g basket)

• Use a 2:1 brewing ratio

• If you are a very experienced barista or use the BH AutoComb, you may enjoy longer ratios, such as 2.5:1 or 3:1

• For very light roasts, try higher flow rates, such as pulling up to a 5:1 ratio in 30 seconds. No matter the shot size or use, we recommend avoiding shot times longer than 35 seconds. 

• Experiment. Espresso is finicky, and the range of grind qualities, pressure/flow paradigms and other factors is wide. 

Please note that no one other than Lance has used >90% of the grinders currently on the market, and it is impossible to guess at the correct setting for a unique combination of coffee + brewer + ratio + recipe. The best setting depends on burr sharpness, geometry, and alignment. Even if two people use the same model of grinder, the optimal settings may differ due to those factors. It is better to target brew times (eg 4:00 for a NextLevel Pulsar made using a 17:1 ratio and 22g of coffee) than a particular setting or micron rating. 

Going forward, I recommend: 

• Find a brewer and recipe that works well for you on a regular basis. I recommend the NextLevel Pulsar, as it does a great job of promoting even extractions, and makes it difficult to ruin a brew. 

• When brewing a new coffee, begin with your foundational recipe, and adjust the grind until the brew time is in your target range. 

• If you taste anything defective, and you are confident the extraction quality was good, try a lower water temperature. 

• When in doubt about what initial grind setting to use, always begin too coarse rather than too fine. If the grind is too fine and a brew clogs, it is difficult to know how much coarser the grind should be. If the grind is too coarse and the brew is too fast, it is easier to predict how much finer to grind. 

New! Prodigal Monthly Subscription

   

I’m pleased to announce Prodigal’s new monthly subscription! Subscribers will receive discounts, access to exclusive subscriber-only coffees, and can rest easy knowing they will never miss out on a great offering.

There are several ways to join:

• Prodigal Combo, our flagship subscription, includes two different coffees each month:

• One 250-gram bag of Prodigal's fresh releases &

• One 150-gram bag of Prodigal's premium coffees

• Standard includes two 250-gram bags of Prodigal's fresh releases

• Premium includes two 150-gram bags of Prodigal's premium coffees

Prodigal's subscription offers discounted prices below our normal menu rates, plus the benefit of set-and-forget convenience. Subscribers also receive special access and discounts on rare or nano-lot coffees that we find. 

Sign up today, and never miss a delicious coffee.